The Thumbnail Book Reviews

by John Q McDonald --- 3 January 2009

Be Not Content

a Subterranean Journal

by William J. Craddock

We tend to look back at the 1960s and figure, more or less, that it all began during the Summer of Love in 1967. That's when the whole hippie counterculture reached its peak. Oddly enough, though, the Death of the Hippie was celebrated by the Diggers in the Haight-Ashbury at that time. To the really in-crowd, the acid eaters of the early 60s, the folks who were tuned in before it became the hip thing to do, the Summer of Love was the end of everything. A lot went on in the cultural transition from the Beat Generation to the Hippie Generation through those hipster early sixties. This remarkable novel is a record of that time. Abel Egregore drops a manuscript by the crash pad of some friends. One of them, starting on an acid trip that morning, sits down and reads the story. It is Abel's memoir, and it starts out with Abel as a young man, a college student who rides with a biker club in San Jose, California. He gets deeper into the bike scene and toys with joining the Hell's Angels, but is suddenly turned off of the violence after the death of one biker and his own first experiment with LSD. Soon, he has dropped out of college and is drifting between friends, up and down the California landscape from San Francisco to Big Sur, experimenting with ever larger doses of acid in search of the ultimate breakthrough into the great Void beyond all existence. By this path, they hope to bring down the Establishment and bring a new enlightenment to their generation. But, as one character points out, despite all their efforts, the bullshit machine keeps grinding on, perpetuating the vacuous, plastic, warmongering and brutal culture that is the American way. The overarching theme is voiced by another, pointing out that Timothy Leary's mantra is missing a few steps, steps which get played out in Abel Egregore's manuscript: Tune in, Turn on, Drop out, Freak out, Fuck up, and Crawl back. This is Abel's tale. The acid takes over. The breakthrough into the Void is incredibly difficult, a kind of Buddhist destruction of the Ego to which the Ego will never agree. It is a spiritual goal that can be attained through LSD, or it can be an ultimate insanity. Others would seek it through less chemically determined means. Abel finds himself going nuts in the midst of friends who have variously collapsed along the way, through insanity, jail, suicide, and even returning to play the cultural game. The remarkable thing about this book is its honesty and foresight. It looks at the acid culture with the critical eye of a serious participant in the experiment. He sees its faults and excesses. He ultimately sees that its realizations are individual and limited. Can we reach the Void without fundamentally dying along the way, either mentally or physically? Can this experience ever change the rest of the world? Ultimately, the world did change, for the better, but in subtle ways. We are still suffering from a brutal, warmongering, plastic, television obsessed culture (in many ways much more so). A brief window into another way of being was opened, but proved far more difficult to realize than many people thought at the time. Abel's journey is just beginning. His manuscript becomes a snack for one freaked acid head. Its message is vague. Craddock (who died in Santa Cruz in 2004) clearly speaks from experience. This 1970 novel certainly sounds autobiographical and has an immediacy and vibrancy that make it a shame it has been out of print all these many years.

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