Letter from Slim Wolfe
Modern life – December 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
Missing spontaneity
Editors:
Amidst all the spectacular tragedies filling the news there’s a less-noticed event which may be the ugliest hallmark of the new millennium: the rapid strangulation of human spontaneity. I’m guessing that’s an old Greek word and if I listen to the sound, it evokes a splatter of paint from a wet brush — which is not too far from the meaning.
Japanese culture, as well as Greek and other traditions, had a special place for the spontaneous brush-stroke or warble of the voice, believing them to be gifts from the gods or something of the sort. We’ve heard tales of the heroine who spontaneously ran off with her true love rather than marry the evil merchant, and we’ve heard of large sums of money spent on stamps or coins which were spontaneously printed askew. Most of us enjoy moments of jazz and Dixieland when two musicians play together ad-lib.
But the value of the ad-lib has been superseded in most facets of our lives by the value of control. The artist’s human movement in putting down an indelible stroke of the brush has been replaced by the erasable technology of the computer; the farmer who loves the land in its spontaneous condition is losing out to the corporation dealing out pre-emptive strikes with herbicides and monster equipment; and true heartfelt love has been overtaken by lust pre-manufactured in our minds by advertising campaigns for underwear, shaving cream, and trucks mounted semi-erect in dealership lots.
Thus this season finds me mourning the slow demise of spontaneity at my local hot springs, which was once a favorite place to relax and socialize. Every year the owners seem to brew up a new batch of cold water to throw on the freedom which prevailed there for many years, and every year the numbers of people who enjoyed a self-sufficient excursion to enjoy that freedom and the hot water dwindled, while the numbers of people clinging to their city-born fears and conveniences grew.
I’m sure older hikers, fishers, and hunters have seen the same sort of change: that shot of cold water which takes the fun out of it all, more like a blend of ambition, money, fear, laziness, progress, and insurance regulations, adding up to dehumanization — or in the case of our Forest Service, big government.
The climax of this arrangement is now taking form: the hot springs has gone non-profit in order to acquire more land in the name of a land trust, whose aims are as yet ill-defined and in my opinion dubious. A gaggle of entrepreneurs who have always been boosters of growth and business now want to stop growth when it erupts on their downhill slope where it may mar the image of emptiness. And the largely urban flock of patrons, who have come to thrill their cameras with that illusion of vacant space, have been solicited for support.
It’s hard to predict how those acres might have developed, spontaneously, without this pre-emptive real-estate strike, but the neighborhood trend seems to include a respectable number of straw-balers and other green-thinking folks as well as small-scale hobby- horsers with their less attractive modern boxy structures. And after much thought I can’t go along with preventing a handful of potentially self-reliant buyers from getting their bit of space by putting that space in the hands of a group of ostensible nature-lovers who have also shown an inordinate love for organization, control, gadgetry, and construction technology. Under other circumstances I can see, however, that a land-trust might prove a useful tool.
The more our affluent culture conditions us to require more and more goods and services, the more and more we will come to fear and destroy that last bit of spontaneity which connects us to our natural universe (in which we should find joy). I’m spending what used to be my hot springs time making guerrilla-art T-shirts and other stuff with hand-drawn silk screens. I like to think I’m recapturing some of the spontaneous feel of the ’60s. Inquire by calling 719-539-4114. And no, there’s no downloading involved.
Slim Wolfe
Villa Grove
