Sources: An Anthology of Contemporary Materials Useful for Preserving Personal Sanity While Braving the Technological Wilderness

by Theodore Roszak

Anthology, Technology, Sociology

Genres: Social Commentary, History, Psychology

Mass Market Paperback

Published September 1, 1972

About the author

Theodore Roszak was Professor Emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay. He is best known for his 1969 text, The Making of a Counter Culture.

Roszak first came to public prominence in 1969, with the publication of his The Making of a Counter Culture[5] which chronicled and gave explanation to the European and North American counterculture of the 1960s. He is generally credited with the first use of the term "counterculture".

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rec. by: The smell of old paperbacks, and of old ideas
Rec. for: Commensalists and communards

The Revolutionary is on stage, on fire, preaching to the crowd about the happy days ahead:
"Come the Revolution, everyone will have strawberries and cream!"

A little guy up front, possibly trapped there by the press of other bodies, unexpectedly raises his hand:
"But—but I don't like strawberries and cream."

The Revolutionary stops mid-speech. He glares and points at the man who had dared to interrupt him, and thunders,
"Come the Revolution, everyone will have strawberries and cream—and like them!"

I can't remember where I first ran across that joke. It's certainly not in this book, and it wasn't in James Simon Kunen's classic The Strawberry Statement either—that one's title refers to an altogether different bowl of strawberries. But that bombastic Revolutionary (and the lone audience member who questioned him) are figures who came to my mind more than once, while reading the late techno-curmudgeon Theodore Roszak's anthology Sources: An Anthology of Contemporary Materials Useful for Preserving Personal Sanity While Braving the Technological Wilderness... a book full of revolutionary fervor, about how we will—we must—all come to like strawberries and cream.

Even though the cream might have curdled, after more than fifty years...

*

Originally published in 1972, Sources is... a commonplace book for hippies, kind of. I bought my own first copy of Sources 'way back in the 1900s, but never read it. Then, more than twenty years later, I bought a second copy, having utterly forgotten that I had the first (I seem to be prone to that, with Roszak's work), and... stalled out very early (during Roszak's Introduction, actually) for quite awhile, before finally getting disgusted with myself enough to finish reading it at last.

I almost decided not to review it at all. You see, despite my oft-repeated reverence for The Sixties™, the pieces Roszak included in this anthology now seem mostly overbroad, fatuous, unnecessarily sexist, and/or just plain wrong—not even tempests in a teapot, for they've smashed the pot and are now just splashing in the puddle that remains. But I still, occasionally, found glimmers and nuggets, here and there, that felt worth sifting for.

I am going to focus mostly on those nuggets, rather than on the many parts I didn't like, in this review.

Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By "they" I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness.
—p.5, from Thomas Merton, "Rain and the Rhinoceros" (1965)

"Dream Exploration among the Senoi" (as described by Kilton Stewart on pp.20-39, undated) also seems worthy of consideration—in sharp contrast to the pernicious cult-fodder of Meher Baba's "Undoing the Ego" (1955), immediately thereafter.

We convince ourselves we don't like cats at all.
They, more than the dogs, are too openly sensuous. Do you know what they overtly do when they come and sit on your stomach at night? Do you know the rhythm they have, how with their paws they innocently knead your stomach and dare purr at the same time and rub themselves, their whole selves, against you, indecently as love and sensuality itself...
Yes, should we give in to one, should we dare give into one, and love just one little animal, we should be undone for every dog and cat approaching us, we should be utterly undone for every human being approaching us...
—pp.135-136, from Kay Johnson's essay "Proximity" (1961)

It seems to me that this is an important distinction to have drawn—and not just in terms of various flavors of socialism. After all, one should begin as one means to go on...

It may be contended that the Marxist objective is not essentially different in constitution; but at this point a yawning chasm opens out before us which can only be bridged by that special form of Marxist utopics, a chasm between, on the one side, the transformation to be consummated sometime in the future—no one knows how long after the final victory of the Revolution—and, on the other, the road to the Revolution and beyond it, which road is characterized by a far-reaching centralization that permits no individual features and no individual initiative. Uniformity as a means is to change miraculously into multiplicity as an end; compulsion into freedom. As against this the "utopian" or non-Marxist socialist desires a means commensurate with his ends; he refuses to believe that in our reliance on the future "leap" we have to do now the direct opposite of what we are striving for; he believes rather that we must create here and now the space now possible for the thing for which we are striving, so that it may come to fulfilment then; he does not believe in the post-revolutionary leap, but he does believe in revolutionary continuity. To put it more precisely: he believes in a continuity within which revolution is only the accomplishment, the setting free and extension of a reality that has already grown to its true possibilities.
—p.199, from Martin Buber, "The Organic Commonwealth" (1949)

Wherever we live or whatever we spend in this country has been stolen, is not truly ours, and if that is the case how can any individual life be whole and pure—or free? There are few black faces at the festivals or in the mountains, and the connections between whites and blacks, or private lives and the public good, are still too tangled in my mind for me to make clear. Those words scrawled on the wall behind me—truth, purity, nonviolence, poverty, nonpossession—are noble goals, but though there are many among the young willing to pursue them, many, despite their clothes and hair, do not—and those seem to be eccentric versions of their parents. Only a blind man or a fool would be untroubled by that, and I have no hope or illusion of cleaning it up here, it is simply that one cannot let it go unsaid...
—p.306, from Peter Marin, "The Free People" (1969)

Even while Sources was being compiled, it seems, all too many of the utopian dreams Roszak admired were foundering. Patsy Richardson's brief and heartfelt elegy "No More Freefolk" (1970) on pp.308-311 stands in sharp contrast to the optimism expressed elsewhere in Roszak's anthology—and as such Richardson's essay seems much more relevant today than most of its companions.

I don't think it's any accident that this is also one of the few works by women to appear in this book, either.

I have a son and a daughter myself, so this part of Wendell Berry's poem hit hard:

There is no government so worthy as your son who fishes with you in silence beside the forest pool.
There is no national glory so comely as your daughter whose hands have learned a music and go their own way on the keys.
There is no national glory so comely as my daughter who dances and sings and is the brightness of my house.
There is no government so worthy as my son who laughs, as he comes up the path from the river in the evening, for joy.
—p.315, from Wendell Berry, "To a Siberian Woodsman" (1968)

Roszak himself could not resist inserting his own observations (and even a poem or two), either. This is one bit of his that I think has retained its bite:

Our bad magicians are the technical elites and those who employ them to intimidate by way of expertise. The artificiality of the industrial environment strengthens their hand against us. For how can we now do without them?
—p.420, from Theodore Roszak's introduction to Section V., "Transcendence"

Heh... okay, one final note: I'm not sure whether to be offended or grateful—or maybe just amused—that, despite its length (pp.468-483), Dane Rudhyar's astrological apologia "The Zodiac as a Dynamic Process" (1970) doesn't even mention us Pisces...

*

I didn't have the heart to go through Roszak's concluding "Survival Kit" in detail, with its litany of post office boxes and five-dollar annual subscription rates, to see which if any of the resources he recommended back then have survived to the present day. It's been a half-century and more, after all, and most human institutions don't last that long. As a snapshot of its time, though, as a high-contrast monochrome print from a long-faded fluorescent era, Sources does still contain some worthwhile perspectives, if read with a critical and skeptical eye.

But that just like, uh, my opinion, man...

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Edited by "The Making of a Counter Culture" author, Theodore Roszak, this is a collection of essays from writers as varied as Kenneth Rexroth, Herbert Marcuse and Meher Baba, confronting the political and social climate of the early 1970s, appealing to a wholistic/humanistic radical social consciousness. Those among us who haven't yet lost hope in the (at least occassional) wisdom and activism of the 1960s counter-cultists will find a well-organised collection of seriously considered social activist and consciousness raising texts. We need more books like this in our libraries, public and otherwise.

[Chick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptional collection of articles and investigations about the ways personal wellness intersects with societal norms, published nearly 5o years ago. A must-read.

[Adrian Colesberry · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this collection of stories derived from communes in America while writing The Perfect Freedom of Strangers, my unfinished, possibly never-to-be finished novel. The image in this book that I'll never forget is a woman in a vegetarian commune giving birth and then cooking and eating her child's placenta. It was the first meat she'd eaten for years. I'm sure there are other interesting things in the book. I thought so at the time, but the volume of that one story has drowned out the rest.