She is the Angel of Change
Striding forward, trampling the status quo. She has one hand in condemnation, and one hand raised in blessing. She stares aloof into the unknown. We are not her focus or her compassion. She is not for us. She is the harbinger of the unexpected, the unpredictable, the collapse of the established order and the rebirth of that which is new.
Angel Descending (full view)
She was created at a time of great change and expectation. It was a time of discovery and hope. The last days of hippiedom were flourishing in Topanga Canyon. Yet she was born on the eve of its destruction.
Two things destroyed the kingdom of hippiedom: Charles Manson and our own ineptitude on that journey of self discovery.
After all, the journey was never intended to be pleasurable; it was never intended to be fun. It was intended to be filled with awe. But most of us were too frightened by the lack of structure and boundaries. We were without a guideline. We were given a proliferation of mind-altering chemicals and no operation’s manual.
Of course one could have looked inside oneself for the manual but most of us did not trust our own nature.
Angel Descending (detail: lower right)
I created The Angel of Change in pencil, white acrylic paint and acrylic varnish painted over art cardboard. When it was completed in 1968. For lack of better space, we hung her above the low stone altar at the end of the narrow living room in that tiny two-story cabin we rented on Highvale Trail. While it blocked the upstairs entrance to the cabin, it was, itself, a doorway, which towered over us in that tiny room.
She had one frequent visitor, Charlie Manson.
For weeks on our way to and from our work at the University of California we drove past the black and white Movieland bus parked along side of Highway 27. Every few days it was parked further up the road.
We met the Manson family early one morning with a knock on our door. Several of the girls had come by looking for towels and extra sheets. One of the girls was giving birth. We gave them what we could find and several days later one of the young men and two girls came by to thank us.
It was April and we were getting ready for the Renaissance Faire. We were making handmade tapered candles on a candle wheel in the downstairs room and I was up stairs carving on several wood blocks for a series of wood cuts I wanted to sell at the Faire.
The girls were fascinated by the candle wheel and one by one the members of the family came to visit us. My first impression of the family was that they appeared to be alike in their mannerisms. All the girls talked alike and all the young men acted the same. So when Charlie Manson finally made his appearance, it was a bit of a let down. The men were actually reflection of him but since they had come to visit first it was confusing as to who was a reflection of whom. Charlie Manson seemed like an after thought until we realized he was the thought.
Charlie Manson would sit for long hours in front of The Angel of Change. He kept trying to convince me to come and live on his commune.
“Give this all up and just be,” he would say. Like that was going to work on a workaholic with a deadline. The opening of the Faire was only two weeks away. The wood chips kept flying.
But I did consider his invitation. The man I was living with and I were having difficulties with our relationship and it was a tempting thought to run off and join a commune. But I sensed that Charlie and I would have a falling out very soon and then where would I be.
During the next year the Manson family visited most of the hippie enclaves in the Canyon. But we did not see him again and we soon forgot about him.
Big changes had come into our lives. The owner of our rented cabin sold the land in a scheme to make Highvale Trail the entrance to the state park. That plan never materialized but we were forced to move out and the cabin was torn down. While we were breaking up and going our separate ways we moved into another house with three other people. It was a loose gathering of people, who found themselves together under one roof. The house was like an airport with everyone taking off in different directions in their lives.
Angel Descending (detail: lower left)
One day in late July and we were all sitting on the roof of the garage sunning ourselves in the nude. When a train of police cars and unmarked cars with men in white shirts and clip boards drove up Old Canyon Road.
Naively we thought they were coming to bust us for being on the roof in the nude. But they drove on up the street. Later we learned about the Gary Hinman murder. He was tortured in a house two doors from us and we never sensed something in the dead of night. We never heard the man screaming for his life. For two days! Nothing!
Where were we? Twittering with our flowers and our marijuana as the shock wave from those murders committed by the Manson family rolled across the country blowing us apart forever.
How could that happen? How could one person with such a terrible vision take us down? The answer is in the other half of the equation, our ineptitude. Manson came at a time when we were the most vulnerable. All our social values were being questioned and examined and we were left with a blank slate. What came out of
that was a hippier-than-thou-ness with everything from the length of our hair to what we ate and wore and how we talked. With the exception of the religious right we were the most judgmental of our peers.
So along came Manson with a simple formula for getting whatever he needed. It went something like this:
“What a beautiful ring you are wearing. Give it to me”.
If you said no, you were not hip enough to give up a worldly possession.
If you said yes you lost the ring.
While we were all floundering along the way, Manson came along with his way. And it was easy for a certain kind of person to follow him. But what was his way, so horrific and so fragile? Nothing to hold it together but the power of his personality and the lunacy of his delusion. Destroying society by murdering some people to start a race war that would bring on the end times!
Taking down society is not that far-fetched. After all we just came out of 16 days of another take down by a handful of equally deluded Republicans and while no one was murdered in the overthrow of the government, a lot of hidden suffering took place that will never be mention by the news media.
During the time we knew Manson he never mentioned his ideas about a race war. He was just another hippie passing through, sitting beneath an Angel of Change in that tiny cabin in the canyon.
Angel Descending (upper half)
The Tenabrae Cafe 