天国之翼: 从禅悟到硅谷：部落的聚集

原作者：
来源From Satori to Silicon Valley: THE GATHERING OF THE TRIBES
译者幻龙炎

In these days of instant nostalgia, current events pass from journalism into folklore before they have had a decent chance to become history. This is certainly true of the period we call 'the sixties.' The American counter culture that flourished during that period -- from the late fifties to the mid-seventies -- has already been assigned a canonical image in television dramatizations and the history texts now being used in our high schools and colleges. It surfaces there in the latter chapters, where the narrative, having swept like a stormy surf across the story of Vietnam and Watergate, begins to ebb sullenly away toward the Carter and Reagan years. The usual depiction is that of high-spirited young people, ungroomed, unkempt, and uncouth, disporting themselves in the open air -- a park, a field, a forest. Their straggly hair streams free or is banded back Indian style. Their clothes are patched, befringed, and beaded -- a motley of backwoods dishevelment and barbaric splendor. Often they are loaded with backpacks, bedrolls, stash bags that lend the aura of transiency: people on the road far from home, ready to crash anywhere for the night -- in the woods, under the stairs, in the back of the van. Mendicant citizens of the world, pausing to sing or play as they make their way to Berkeley or Boulder, Cambridge or Katmandu, North Beach or the North Woods. Sometimes, more soberly, they flourish signs: 'Make Love not War,' 'End the Bombing Now,' 'Give Peace a Chance.'

在一个无时无刻不怀旧的年代，新鲜出炉的新闻事件在有可能成为历史之前，先会化身为民间传奇。这对于我们所说的“六十年代”来说尤其正确。那一时期──自五十年代末期起至七十年代中期──弥散于美利坚的反文化已经成为了电视节目经常演绎的经典图像，并且进入了我们高中和大学的历史教材中。它总是出现在末尾的几章，当课文如狂暴的潮水般地记述完越战和水门事件后，便绷着脸向着卡特和里根执政的年代退潮而去。通常的说法是，心高气傲、不修边幅、蓬头垢面的年轻人，在露天的公园、草地或是森林中嬉戏。他们蓬乱的头发或散乱，或如印第安人那般被束在脑后。他们的衣服打着补丁，缀着流苏还有串珠──混杂着原始的杂乱和粗放的华美。

Were there ever such people -- really? Yes and no. Every social movement leaves behind recollections at once insightful and misleading. The study of history would be lost without them. The stereotypic Abolitionist, Robber Baron, Progressive Reformer, New Dealer is as good a place as any to begin understanding the past, but each of these inherited images needs critical adjusting. Also remember that stereotypes in their own right tell us much about social hopes, fantasies, and fears. And each has its history.

这些人真的存在么？存在，又不存在。每一场社会运动都会在其身后同时留下富于洞见的和令人误解的社会记忆。没有了这些记忆，对历史的研究将无处可去。形象刻板的废奴主义者，19世纪被称作“强盗男爵”的商人和银行家，1890年到1920年美国进步时代的改革者们，还有罗斯福新政，都是理解历史的绝好起点，但这每一个被刻板塑造出的形象都需要批判的修正。同时要记住，这些刻板的形象本身，同样向我们展示着社会记忆中的希望、幻想和恐惧。而每一个形象，又都有其自身的历史。

For some years now (since about half way through the seventies) I have had the oppressive sense of an embarrassed reluctance on all sides to recall the role that was once played in our society by the people whom the media named beatniks, hippies, flower children. When their period in history is mentioned, many hasten to attach a snide disclaimer, a wised-up dismissal. We peer back in time through decades of fickle journalism, national self-doubt, and social backlash, wondering if the dissenting politics of the sixties might simply have been another media fiction. Certainly in recent years, the only flesh and blood examples of the countercultural image I have come across have been the barely surviving casualties of the era that still haunt downtown Berkeley, panhandling for spare change. Their sad squalor is evidence of nothing braver or more inspiring than being bummed out and overaged.

（自70年代中）这么多年以来，我一直尴尬地试图避免回忆那些被媒体称作“垮掉的一代”、嬉皮士、花之子等等名号的人在社会中曾扮演的角色。当他们所处的那一段历史被提起时，很多人都会立刻附上鄙夷的论断，或是故作聪明的批评。当我们透过若干年代以来嬗变的新闻、全民族的自我反省和社会对抗回望那个年代时，不禁怀疑六十年代的异议政治是否仅仅是另一个媒体虚构出的故事。当然了，近年来我所接触到的都是一些勉强熬过那个年代的“反文化”人物，他们至今仍然游荡在伯克利的城中心，向路人乞讨零钱度日。他们那可怜的住所，不过是他们被放逐和被淘汰的证据，而不是什么勇敢或励志的经历。

Yet, with a little effort and some candor, I can remember the happier originals of these faded caricatures as they once enlivened the streets of the Haight-Ashbury and Telegraph Avenue. In its time, their persona of ragged independence -- or some reasonable facsimile thereof -- was a proud and prominent emblem of cultural disaffiliation blossoming in the streets of every major city, on the campus of every minor college and high school. It was a stance that claimed to have broken irrevocably with the urban-industrial culture that ruled the world then, and more so now. The style purported to be 'natural,' 'organic,' a principled rejection of well-behaved, antiseptic, upwardly mobile middle-class habits in favor of a return to folk origins and lost traditions. A bit of the Bohemian rebel, a bit of the noble savage. Those who assumed the full dissenting identity of the time spoke of themselves as 'freaks' and assembled in hastily improvised and ephemeral 'tribes' where simple and funky living was the rule. At the Morning Star Ranch in Marin, the residents called their way of life 'voluntary primitivism,' a design for living that transcended both excessive affluence and minimal hygiene.

但只需要努力一点坦率一点，我便能记起这些已经慢慢消逝的形象的不那么可怜的缘起，正是他们，曾经令旧金山Haight-Ashbury一带的街道和伯克利校园南沿的电报大街生气勃勃。在那个年代，他们粗犷独立的人格──还有一些尚算合理的模仿者──曾经是独立文化的骄傲而又显明的标志，在每一个大城市的街上、每一个小学院和高中的校园里盛放。他们摆出与那时统驭着世界而如今更盛的工业化城市文化彻底决裂的姿态。他们的风格，据称是“自然的”，“有机的”，原则上拒绝那种循规蹈矩、讲究卫生、追求上进的中产阶级习气，崇尚回归已经逝去了的民间传统。带着一点波希米亚式的反叛，还有一点贵族气的粗暴。那时自认是彻底的异议人士的人自称为“怪胎”，并且聚居在草草搭起来的临时“部落”里，在那里，简单而邋遢是他们的生活准则。在Marin的晨星牧场，那里的居民管他们的生活方式叫做“自觉的原始主义”，一种超越了过度富裕，也超越了最低卫生条件的生活设计。

For some, the search for a postindustrial alternative led out of the cities to rural communes, few of which were destined to survive. But even in the cities, one could find 'collectives' where the ethos was that of urban cave-dwellers, camping out indoors. In Berkeley in the late sixties, when my wife and I were looking for a house to rent, we had occasion to inspect a number of these domestic experiments -- or what was left in their wake after the resident tribe had decamped without paying the rent. Musty houses in a state of advanced disrepair where the inhabitants had once pitched tents in the living room or spent the night in sleeping bags. In the kitchens, pantries were filled with stale brown rice and active vermin; in the refrigerators, one might find several months' supply of spoiled groceries and well-sprouted soy cakes. In these quarters, one sensed that organic foods were a sort of talisman, sufficiently potent in their very presence to repeal the germ theory of disease. Also there were the signs of many animals once in residence and still haunting the premises -- unleashed, unhousebroken, very likely unfed. In the Haight-Ashbury and the East Bay, there was a cult of the 'organic dog' -- the larger, the less washed and tamed, the better. For a period, there were neighborhoods in Berkeley and San Francisco that took on the look and the fragrance of barnyards or hunting camps.

对于某些人来说，寻找一种替代后工业时代生活的努力，将他们引出了城市，进入乡间的公社，而那些公社多数都解体了。但即便是在城市里，人们也能找到城市穴居人一般的“集体”，在室内过着野营般的生活。六十年代末期在伯克利，我和我的妻子在寻找出租屋时曾经考察过几处这样的生活实验──又或者，那只是他们在没付清房租前便搬走时留下的东西。房子多半破败不堪，长满霉菌，里面的住客都曾在客厅里搭起帐篷，或是在睡袋里过夜。厨房里则是陈年的糙米，还有四处活动的害虫；冰箱里或许可以找到已经变质的够吃几个月的杂货，还有长满了毛的豆饼。在这些地方，有机食品的概念似乎成为他们的护身符，似乎这个概念本身便能击败有关疾病的细菌理论，保证他们吃了没事。另外，住地里会有很多动物居住的痕迹，有些仍在里面游荡──没有绳子栓着，没有经过驯化，而且很有可能饿着肚子没人喂养。在Haight-Ashbury和East Bay，有一群信仰所谓“有机狗”的教众──个头越大，清洁越少，训练越少便越好。有一段时期，伯克利和旧金山的某些街区都沾上了农场和狩猎场的样貌和气息。

The people who lived through these episodes, once at war with the parental generation of their day, have themselves become the parents of the students I now teach. They did not vanish in a puff of smoke but have lived on as part of the eighty-million strong baby boom generation to find jobs, raise families, run for office, play the market. Some of them, mainly women, now show up in my classes as 'older students,' often returning to take up the education they dropped out of twenty-some years ago. Now in their forties or fifties with easily another thirty years of longevity ahead of them, these aging boomers sometimes seek me out during office hours to lament how difficult it is for them to raise their kids in this era of crack cocaine and AIDS. Dare they be as permissive as their parents once were when Dr. Spock was the domestic gospel? Looking back, they, like me, are left with many questions, not least of all how we got from the heady idealism of the counter culture to Reaganomics and the Moral Majority, Nine Inch Nails and the dot.com feeding frenzy.

经历过那个时代的人，在结束了同父母一辈的人的争吵后，已经成为了如今我的学生的父母。他们不会像一团烟雾般噗的一声消失，而是同八百万“婴儿潮一代”一样，寻找工作，养育家庭，竞选公职，操弄经济市场。他们中的某些人，主要是女性，现在会以“高龄学生”的身份出现在我的课堂里，补起他们二十多年前丢下的课程。现在四五十岁的他们，应该不难再余三十年的寿命。他们会在答疑时间找到我，痛陈在一个毒品和艾滋病泛滥的年代养育小孩是多么困难的一件事。他们的父母所处的年代，反对体罚的Spock医生成为了民众的福音教士，现如今，他们还敢如此放纵孩子吗？回望过去，他们，同我一样，有着很多疑问，不知道我们是如何从反文化那令人头脑发热的理想主义，走向了所谓“里根经济学”，和倡导保守派基督教观念的“Moral Majority”，还有工业摇滚乐队“九寸钉”，和疯狂的.com泡沫。