Total Loss Farm: A Year in the Life. Raymond Mungo

a first-hand account of a decisive moment when the intense idealism of the anti-war movement scattered. At its best the book achieves a genuine poignancy. The young bruised idealists have a brutal comedown (“a colossal bummer”) while Nixon and the establishment rule the land. The desire to change the world gets downgraded to just trying to change yourself, and even that was difficult. It is moving to see how much Mungo and so many others were willing to put on the line, and how reluctant they were to give up their dream of a New Age.

      The communes of the 70s are often characterized as failures, but only because their ambition was so large. We feel the success of their legacy all through Mungo’s book, and how prescient they were about the environment, local and organic food, consumer culture and the dangers to the American future that lay in the unfettered power and influence of corporate entities.

      Raymond Mungo’s books are essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the young people who came of age during the Vietnam War era, that deeply influential and idealistic generation. Despite Mungo’s insistence that we must erase the past (1970 is Year Zero) and to begin anew (which is an American perfectionist’s conceit, or a young radical’s required disposition), we must remember and understand the past, particularly the beautiful, scarcely documented moments of subversive joy that have occurred over and over in the history of these United States.

      Dana Spiotta

      INVOCATION:

      A Simple Song of the Life

      Walking in Ireland with pack on my shoulders, Verandah and Sainte Helene by my side, I stooped to notice a beetle unhappily turned on its back, tiny legs thrashing the air for an impossible foothold. Put down the pack and, using a stray piece of hay, turned the little fellow aright and watched him walk away.

      Just then decided I’d had enough and laid me down to die. “Fucking Ireland anyway, how do we get into these scenes?” Lived in mad commune in Scotland where sexual tension was enough to crack the ice around the Faeroe Islands. Honking seals and wild irritable swans and round-and-round sun cycle twenty-one hours a day. Helene saying, “I want to be nozzing” (she from Paris & bumming with us) “because nozzing is everyzing.”

      Unending warm sunshine made it impossible to die. Lying in the grass shading my eyes and dreaming of friends gone from me in the last year, and victims of war and uptightness all over the planet, and finally dreaming my own death: no easy slumber in Ireland green for this kid, but an explosion (source unknown) which sends my body in a million pieces flying all over the atmosphere.

      “We who are living now,” I dreamed, “are living the end of the movie.”

      Suddenly realized what comes after the end of the movie: the Life. Get out of your vinyl armchair and walk out into the street, leaving the flick behind, meet a stranger or two, fall in love, chase butterflies up to the orchard, father and mother your children, keep up your compost heap, feel the wind in your eyes. The Life is whatever you think it is. How it goes on and on!

      The Life is a dream, the Life is a joke. Sometimes the joke’s on us. The Life is a vision that came to me on the North wind. There’s no use my wanting to be “nozzing,” ’cause it ain’t gonna happen. For better or worse, I’m here—so are you—so we might as well enjoy us.

      After some years of lying still in the grass, I woke to the news that a stranger named Andy had offered us a ride to the Giant’s Causeway—a series of stone steps leading from the Atlantic to the hills of the Antrim Coast. As we were going where the wind tilts, we accepted. Another adventure began on that wild causeway, and the little world of young Andy swallowed us up for a while. Till we moved on to the next place, and the next. If you want to survive, you gotta keep moving.

      This book is a record of some of our moves, physical and spiritual. For every narrative, maxim, and realization in it, there are a million left out. Fortunately, the Life has been coming on so fast and strong that there’s no time to record it all. We’ve absorbed our initial violent reaction against the society of our fathers, and are off on newer and more constructive adventures. In short, we are learning how to be alive again.

      I am indebted to people all over the mother planet for assistance in creating this book: to just about everybody, I suppose. I hope this amuses you and eases your passage of time on the planet: if it doesn’t, if it depresses you or makes you angry, I hope you will throw it away. World’s got enough problems without me.

      And, for Christ’s sake, don’t listen to all them. What do they know, anyway? Listen to your heart and goodwill, and feel your body, and you’ll soon figure out what your natural and sacred role in this insane pageant really is. And where to go next.