Tension's the Thing, Man

Growing up as a kid in the 1960's it was hard to miss the hippie movement. The peace and love message epitomised a counter-culture ironically incapable by its very nature of fomenting organised revolution. But the message was shocking to my parents' generation as it threatened social order - it was as if hippies carried some virus that would infect us all. I remember how news of some new mode of behaviour would generate a kind of confused tension. My parent's disdain for the Beatles' long-hair-and-drugs departure was a classic example - and as for that Yoko Ono! The lads from Liverpool hadn't exactly become hippies, but it was pretty close; the influences were clear. By the 70's the word hippie was already an established term of derision - like the character Shaggy in the contemporary children's TV animation series Scooby-Doo, hippies were seen as spineless, cowardly drop-outs, unable to concentrate on anything other than their own appetites. And as a child of that era, you absorb the mainstream. Hippies were not hip, they were silly, and the America which spawned them would surely carry on invincibly towards it's technological destiny - which was somewhere beyond the moon, chasing the democratic/imperialist fantasies of Star Trek's Space Federation.

But the churn and violence of new ideas demonstrating against superpowers or orthdox ideologies in the late 60's - civil rights and anti-Vietnam in the US; student radicalism in Paris; the Prague Spring seeking its own path in the shadow of the USSR - utimately saw the establishment survive only through the use of force. However, this reaffirmation of old order was undermined by the failures of the 1970's: America was humbled and humiliated by defeat in Vietnam; the Space Race between capitalist and communist rivals proved a pointless and expensive cul-de-sac; Soviet power could only be maintained through oppression; and the social contract in Britain seemed on the brink of collapse as industrial strife brought power cuts, economic decline and the spectre of fiscal bankruptcy. It seems to me that in that uncertain decade - before the earthbound New Materialism of the 80's kicked in - some radical, maybe even hippie'ish, ideas were reached out for and smuggled into wider society.

Long hair (for men), jeans and t-shirts are perhaps the most enduring gifts from that era; so ubiquitous now that it's hard to think when they might have once been symbols of rebellion. But the sixties dismantled swathes of social rigidity in western societies. And just as technology was about to go into overdrive, mysticism from the East was explored as an alternative to the frantic, automated rat-race. Nothing seemed to sum this up more than contrast between sun-soaked, sensual California and the wealth and squalor of New York city. The striking thing is the hippies retreat (or was it an advance?) towards something timeless - nature; spirituality. It was a great - albeit unstructured - challenge to the ordered, top down societies of Europe, North America, and the Western Pacific. But there was only going to be one winner. The convulsions of the 60's seemed to lead on to uncertainties in the 70's, but under Reagan and Thatcher global capitalism took hold in the 80's and a frantic cycle of consumption and material luxury was unleashed.

Which left me as a teenager in the 1970's - torn between the technoligical promise of the BBC's Tomorrow's World programme and the ecological wonder and concerns of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. And the thing that strikes me now is that the legacy of hippies (it's odd, but I still find it hard to really embrace the hippie movement), was that they reintroduced a Dionysian spirit in the face of Apollonian dominance. In other words they adopted a sensual, spontaneous, emotional, tree-hugging attitude to the world in reaction to the rational, technological, ordered, industrialised society squashing them down. Cousteau's crew played out this conflict, and it's probably no coincidence that this tension was also the key dynamic running through so many of the relationships between the characters in the hugely popular late-60's TV show Star Trek - particularly between intuitive, gung-ho Capt Kirk and his emotionless, logic-obsessed 1st Officer Spock.

Science-fiction was the perfect millieu in which to explore the contradictions of the human spirit in a technological setting - no surprise that I'm something of a sci-fi fan. And, looking back, that Dionysian vs. Apollonian struggle was present all through my school years - on the one hand there was a new sensuality, a hedonism, an absence of censure - and on the other there was a received order, structures, obligations. Creativity was the bridge for me, and it's the same today. Technology provides the means to explore the world - to find truths, facts and proofs. Creativity is a way of applying them or reconciling them, or maybe even criticising them, in terms of human experience.

Tomorrow's World and Jacques Cousteau, though, were never really that far apart - in fact Cousteau's services to ecology were entirely facilitated by advanced technology - not least the aqualung (which, incidentally, he invented). And I'm sure that Tomorrow's World was one of the first places I heard the idea that the cost of progress might be global ecological damage. What seems essential - from a human point of view - is to maintain a healthy tension between opposing forces. Hippiedom points to a kind of free-love druggy anarchy - indutrialisation to a restricted, alienated conformity. Tension is a way to keep all points of view active.

Tension is a concept I've long regarded as good. It was first articulated as a positive by an art-school lecturer who was describing elements in a painting composition whose contrasts played off each other. I remember that moment really clearly because the idea of tension as good chimed with something I already felt but hadn't been able to articulate.

So, this is tension as in tight, taught, strong - not tension as in something bad's about to happen. You need opposing forces to pull something into balance. Which is more like the Classical view of Dionysus and Apollo; they are complementary - both are needed for completeness.

One thing I regularly find in creative work is the playing out of opposing ideas. What I mean by this is that I may think of two or more ways of doing something and may hold these ideas simultaneaously even though they might be totally conflicting. Each pulls against the other, and something of both will exist in a finished work. One might dominate, or they might achieve a balance but the presence of the one is essential in strengthening the other. Their oppossing forces pull the whole taught - strong. Of course, sometimes the tension will be too great and the pull will snap any connection apart. So - and I think this is the vital bit - the process is a constant renegotiation.

The 60's feels like a time when, societally, that balance had shifted towards the state. Perhaps a democratic disappointment percolated through after the euphoria at the end of the second world war had given way to New Orders of state and corporate control. The rebellions of the sixties - the cultural rebellions and the actual rebellions on the streets, look like they had to happen - the line needed to be pulled back towards one poll, and the hippies were a vivid, peace-loving tug in that direction.

Leaving the 70's and entering my 20's I thought that if I could acquire skill the tension of trying to achieve a piece of work would be banished.

It's never happened.

I've come to realise that tension is the thing - maybe in all things. The need and ability to renegotiate tension is a vital practice. It's probably what gets me up in the morning. Not as a worry. Not as a chore. But as a way of being.

Er. Did anyone say hippie?

GJ
MAY.2009

Illustrations from top: American Hippies; Hanna Barbera's Shaggy from Scooby-Doo; Soviet tanks occupy Prague, 1968; Raymond Baxter and James Burke in BBC TV's Tomorrow's World; Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner in Star Trek, 1968; Jacques Cousteau.