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Fall of Love: An Editorial by Doniphan Blair
'The Death of Hippie' parade put on by The Diggers in October 1967. photo: Kaitlyn Thibodeau
JUST AS THE SUMMER OF LOVE TURNED
50 this year, on the fall equinox, September 22nd, we entered the fiftieth anniversary of the Fall of Love—both seasonally and metaphorically, not to mention the standard simile of falling in love.
Actually, The Diggers announced the Fall of Love on October 6th, 1967, with their “Death of the Hippie: Birth of Free” performance. Masked pallbearers carried a coffin marked “Hippie: Son of Media” and filled with beads, shards of hair and flowers down Haight Street, followed by a parade of silent mourners.
The fact that the Summer of Love became a disaster of media exposure, overpopulation, drug abuse and sexually-transmitted disease was not covered much in the dozens of tribute shows, movies and performances. This is understandable. The end of innocence, the death of the dream is sad, sorrowful, Biblical even—so why dwell on it?
While summer is fun and expansive, in the fall we harvest. We return to school and try to learn from our experiences. One of the toughest subjects of study is love. While some loves claim to be eternal, practically speaking, all entities that live eventually die. Even with “true lover" someone must go first, absent a double suicide, leaving the other bereft.
If we study one fall, however, we prepare for others.
Our fall harvest festival, Halloween, is characterized by its translation of death, ghosts and evil witches into a children’s party with candy and dress up. The Mexican Day of the Dead, which comes two days after the Celtic All Hallowed Eve, brings in the element of raucous humor.
Our first fall, in the Western tradition, is from the Garden of Eden, sometimes referred to as the “Fall of Man,” with women supposedly blamed for “original sin.”
Despite the literalism of religious fanatics, this story is obviously a parable about how we evolved abstract thought. After obtaining consciousness from “the tree of knowledge,” we moved beyond animal instincts and were automatically “sent forth from the Garden of Eden.”
One of the Bible’s most dramatic stories, it includes four fully-formed characters: Eve, The Snake, God and, to a lesser degree, Adam. In point of fact, woman is the hero, since she decided to seek knowledge, without which there would be no language, writers or readers, not to mention god, which is a metaphor for nature and the universe but also consciousness.
Indeed, the 24 short verses of Genesis’ third chapter are nothing less than a history of the invention of language, agriculture and civilization, in metaphor, of course. And how did Woman achieve this? She communicated with The Snake, which you don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to see symbolizes the penis—meaning she became self-aware of her own reproductive process.
That she disobeyed God and conned Adam is simply the narrative twist needed to seduce people raised in fertility religions. In this manner, their matriarchal history was acknowledged while providing the drama and reasoning to switch to a single, male god.
After tens of millennia of polytheism, monotheism was a radical, new concept. It unifies competing factions under one abstract entity; it makes men more responsible for their spiritual lives and children; and it shifts spiritual practice from physical sculptures and rituals to ideas and morality—some of which we could've used in the '60s and should've woken up to after the Fall of the Summer of Love.
The first image from Doniphan Blair's 'The Fall of Love' litho series, November, 2017. photo: D. Blair
Bottom line: you can’t have a female monotheism, since female gods inevitably birth another god, and you can’t start a patriarchy with a female hero, although Adam is hardly that great, given he follows Eve slavishly, blames her cravenly and, for his intellectual laziness, is subjected to eternal labor in the fields.
Woman, meanwhile, is only condemned to an "enmity" between her and The Snake (ie the end of innocent sex), "sorrow" when bringing forth children (due to their big heads—ie consciousness) and "desire" for her husband (only the human animal can mate 365 days a year).
As difficult as it was to leave the simple life of hunter-gathers living in little villages with local deities, this multileveled narrative inspired and guided our evolution. Yes, Woman took the fall, as it were, but only on the most simplistic level, while the actual Bible shows that she was an integral part of our intellectual advance—indeed, she invented language.
As Genesis 21-23 notes, and fundamentalists would do well to re-read: “[T]he Lord God [made Adam and Eve] coats of skins, and clothed them. And the Lord God said, ‘Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:’ Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.”
I have witnessed many falls over the years: the annihilation of the Haight in 1971, the end of European Civilization in the Holocaust, which I became cognizant of in 1983, the collapse of my communal family a couple of years later, the cratering of my career in 2010, and now the horror of the Age of Trump.
While many say we should ignore such setbacks and maintain an ever-positive outlook, is it honest? Is it knowledge building? Is it the shaman’s way?
Or is it by accepting and learning from both positive and negative experience—that life includes death, that love involves falling and loss, that paradise can lead to be kicked out—we learn, improve and evolve?
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .Posted on Oct 24, 2017 - 08:54 PM