God is complete but we are not because at best we are only a part of God's eternal glory. I have always understood life to be a journey whether I've found myself directly focusing upon that aspect of my being or not at any particular given time or not. In recent years I've often found myself reminising about how my imagination intensely fueled how I viewed and responded to this world in my childhood and teenage years - and correspondingly, how all that affects not only me, but all of us even now.
For example, I always liked that really trippy part in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey where astronaut David Bowman flies through time, space and dimension like a conscious tab of LSD streaking along an eternally psychedelic lightning bolt. Sometime in the 1970's when I was around the age of 10 or 12, it was cause for great alarm when it became known to me that Fairborn Twin Cinemas in Fariborn, Ohio would be presenting Big Screen showings of this famous science-fiction classic. Without having seen the movie it was already my number one all-time favorite; destined to be a promotion, a graduation or a rite of passage.
This passionate opinion was based solely upon a few photographs from the movie I'd seen, especially from the soundtrack album that my parents had given to me (at my request.) In fact, this was the very first vinyl record I had ever owned. From that album, the song Also Spake Zarathustra was verifying for me that something very important was going on. Another cut from the album, Atmospheres (which is the music for that really trippy section in the movie,) now seems like a precursor to Deep Purple's twenty minute saga called Space Truckin', the version acknowledged here taken live from the popular Made In Japan LP. This freaked me out in the best of ways (as Ian Gillan from Deep Purple excellently sang the role of Jesus in the rock opera Jesus Christ Super Star): there Jesus was standing at the microphone, literally screaming his way through this heavy diatribe about a rock and roll space trip through the solar system - then when news of 2001 coming to Fairborn hit my ears, I forced my parents to take me to what I knew would be THE motion picture event of my childhood. I now thought I was the coolest kid in the sixth grade only because I'd seen this movie.
Now transformed, I could all the more excitedly appreciate my (entirely casual) studies in astronomy because I had seen 2001: A Space Odyssey on the Big Screen. Even though it was science fiction, I was now some sort of an authority on what was really going on - which were a bunch of nice, pretty, colorful lights that I had no way of understanding! It was all just so much fun, that's all. In 1977, Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out and I went nuts again, my mind reeling endless possibilites. Somewhere else in the 1970's, I saw and loved the classic pop culture documentary called Chariots of the Gods as I was just too young and hyper at the time to digest the actual reading of the bestselling book. I saw Star Wars on the Big Silver Screen during its initial theatrical run and it was very encouraging, even inspiring. While the setting of the film occurs as science fiction, it's really a western; which brings me to Star Trek, one of my favorite TV shows. I say "one" of my favorite shows because no show on television excited me more than Dark Shadows (since I've always been such a hopeless romantic.) I say "western" because the original working title of Star Trek was Wagon Train to the Stars. Of course, the number one television attraction I ever saw in my life was anything connected with NASA. The most exciting moments of all were the Apollo Missions; and in particular watching Neil Armstrong take that first step onto the surface of the moon, LIVE as it happened. Later on, I thought the moon buggy was hysterical! On one family vacation in Florida, we actually got to tour NASA and then soon thereafter watch Apollo 15 blast off from Cape Kennedy on July 26, 1971. It was spectacular. It's no secret now that in the 1960's and early 1970's, people all across America got very drunk on Tang and went space happy; and it was all very interesting and very compelling.
All that makes me sometimes wonder about the timing of my birth; and it occurs to me that I saw the 1960's as a real flower child. For me, those crucial first five years when the infant mind absorbs all first time impressions in life were spent watching and absorbing the 1960's. This important stage of development literally shaped the foundations of the character I would later develop into. I was born in 1964. I saw everything that happened in over half of the 1960's literally from a child's perspective, and then spent my teenage years in the 1970's almost exactly like the setting of the 1993 movie, Dazed and Confused. Back then, the good stuff I'm talking about is the long hair, good sex, the fringe, the boots, the beads, the T-shirts, black lights, strobe lights, rock and roll, NASA, drinking Tang and wearing cheap jewelry. The bad stuff I'm taking about is hard drugs, depressing sex, violence, war, racism, riots, crime, the gas shortage, the paper shortage and drinking Tab - and I have to admit - all in all what I saw was confusing and it sometimes upset me.
I remember some of the shifting balances that were weighing out how I veiwed my childhood as I was growing up. No one remembers every detail, but in the 1960's and early 70's, I felt really good about Woodstock and really bad about the Vietnam war. I loved our first color TV but didn't like what it revealed to me about Charles Manson and the Manson Family. I loved the general innocence in the stories of the Broadway musicals I was brought up on, and yet I felt really bad about what happened at the Altamont Speedway when the Rolling Stones had hired the Hell's Angels as bodyguards for the stage and everything broke down into murderous chaos. Other bands were there that night to perform (12/6/69), including [The] Jefferson Airplane. Later in life I saw filmed footage of the event. Grace Slick was up there on stage looking exactly like . . . Alice in Wonderland to me right there in the midst of all this violence - and I just didn't want her to get hurt. I was six or seven or eight (who knows?) years old when I first saw that footage of her standing there, the camera shot from behind looking out past her and into the front of the stage and all that danger. She seemed so nice . . . and I just didn't want her to get hurt. Plenty of people got hurt that night and at least one person died (at the hands of the Hell's Angels); but she didn't get beat up and that's what mattered to me. It was upsetting. Put simply, I didn't like what I was seeing in this world, and I knew at an early age there had to be a better way.
The 1960's were a fast-moving time in America. The whole idea of the family unit as living in a self-contained environment was rapidly taking on new forms. All across the public playing board, the traditional values of family, home and order were being vastly challenged by new ideas and new ways of thinking - and also new ways of expressing those new ideas and new ways of thinking. We want to remember that in the 1960's half of the popluation in the United States was under the age of twenty five. In all practical terms at that time, America was young. The hippies believed they could change the world for the better. They were young, strong and bold enough to accomodate a genuine passion in such broad ambition. They weren't wrong in believing that change for the better could occur on a mass scale; and regardless of how their utopian visions of earthly paradise are interpreted by the fearful or by the skeptics, as long as their spirit thrives in the scope of what is truly beneficial, then this world will be a better place because of them.
Some people will argue against that line of thinking claiming that was then and this is now. Indeed. I am no stranger to the laundry list of all the many psychological horrors that go along with classic mid-life crisis: nerves, self-doubt, paranoia, the realization of and worsening symptoms of irreversible age, etc. This world gives itself over to an accomodation of life and yet the course of life demands that the innocence of this world be lost lest the purpose or meaning of life not be realized. Life would be "incomplete" unless realized. (And realization of self-awareness alone is not enough to satisfy because realization is not attainment.) Perhaps we should consider that by design, conscious life should be realized if benefit is to be derived from the living of it. is that not self-evident? Does not the inner witness confirm for us that any meanig we attach to life can only come from how we characterize what we experience through the living of it? Not merely by what we experience, but how we view or understand what we experience in life sets the guidelines for what determines observation, opinion, character, definition, reference or sets of values. Yes, that was then and this is now; but in the course of all things as they unfold, every single one of us moves through life in the image of God (Genesis 1:26) which [in this case] is to say, with the fabric of universal free will to move through. We're all getting a little older as each day slips into the shadows of the night; but while circumstances may change, fundamentals do not - and so whether then or now people still want to know who am I, where am I, where have I been and where am I going . . .
