Pilgrimage to Woodstock

When Things Are More than Things

Image: theburningplatform.com

It was eerie. I had never been there before. Yet, the slope of the hill, the spot where the stage had been, it all seemed to be a part of me as if I knew it, connecting with me somewhere deep down. Joni Mitchell famously wrote, “We are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” And here I was standing in that actual garden, seeing it in winter, the crops metaphorically plowed under to nurture the soil which might once again bear sustenance for us. But my feet were non-metaphorically on that soil. I was standing right there. Unlike then, the New York State Throughway wasn’t closed, man, but the trip was deeply meaningful.

In the Reagan 80s, when we grew up, it was a time when greed, for lack of a better word, was good, when it was hip to be square, when the hippies had transformed into yuppies trading in “I Almost Cut My Hair,” for I definitely cut my taxes. Woodstock held a magical place in the imagination for many of us. Too young to experience the Summer of Love, the values it espoused—freedom, equality, diversity, open-mindedness, and peacefulness—still resonated.

The weird thing about values, though, is that they are abstract. All of them are nouns, and “nouns are persons, places, or things” we were taught in elementary school grammar classes. But what kind of things are they? Plato said that they were a special kind of thing, which he called a Form, and they exist as entities unto themselves in a special realm that only the philosopher can look into with his mind's eye. His famous allegory of the cave in his masterwork The Republic taught us the process by which we could free our minds from their shackles and, through hard work, train to see the world as it really is.

But standing on what had once been Max Yasgur’s farm, what I saw was material, remaining completely in this world, the universe of things. Yet it was so much more. The moral imagination was able to take a mere thing and make it into something transcendent. The very point of that spot was not to see it or anything else as it is but rather to imagine what it could be. I looked at the present, channeling the past, for the purpose of trying to bring into being a future. It was, as Sly and the Family Stone sang on that spot, a “feeling that should make you move,” and that notion of “movement” was both the physical gyrations needed to dance to the music but also the deeper sense of being a part of a movement that sought collectively to make the world a better place, especially for the most vulnerable on it.

When Things Are More Than Things

In Europe, all old cathedrals had to have a relic. It might be the skull of an executed saint or a piece of fabric reputed to have touched Jesus. The object connected the building's materiality —the stone and mortar—with the Divine, allowing it to be more than just a thing. The spirit was thereby induced into the space itself.

Similarly, Muslims are commanded to undertake the Hajj, a pilgrimage to Mecca. By placing your feet where the Prophet himself had walked, the physical connection creates a spiritual bond. You can read the Koran daily, memorize large passages, and study the interpretations of wise theologians through the centuries. Still, none of that is the same as the magic of physical contact with the place itself.

Even in contemporary life, we get this sense. For generations, teens have sought autographs. Possessing the signature of someone famous—fame being the modern-day equivalence of righteousness—means that you are holding an object that the famous person held, and that creates a connection. There is a reason why, after touching it, the smitten adolescent declares that they will never wash that hand again. They don’t want to lose the transcendental magic of the physical.

In doing an oral history interview with the widow of the philosopher Hans Reichenbach, she took me into his study, pulled a book off the shelf, and handed it to me, asking if I knew what it was. Opening to a random page, I saw penciled-in comments in the margin in handwriting that I absolutely recognized. Reichenbach had been a student and later a colleague of Albert Einstein who commented on the proofs of Reichenbach’s first book on the foundations of relativity. We all knew the story, but in my hand was that volume. This was the storied uncorrected proof of The Theory of Relativity and A Priori Knowledge. It was a thing of legend. It never occurred to me that it actually still existed, and yet here it was in my hand. My first thought was horror that I was handling this without gloves and leaving the oils from my hand on this sacred artifact of philosophy. But now, the fact that I was not wearing gloves is special. Einstein held his hand under the spine of that book precisely where mine rested. I had experienced the magic of a relic, a thing that was more than a thing.

Pilgrim’s Promise

Image: edm.com

But the experience of the proofs was unexpectedly thrust upon me. The experience is different when it is sought when one is on a pilgrimage. There is something important about the seeking, the effort, and the preparation to confront the thing that is more than a thing. Again, Joni Mitchell wrote, “I came upon a child of God; he was walking along the road.” That person was going to camp on the land in an effort to free his soul.

Today, if we want something, it is delivered to us, be it a book, a meal, or even a car. Our location is not just where we are but, in a sense, who we are. We are where we live and where we come from.

But the pilgrimage begins with alienation. There is a part of us, something lacking that needs to be made whole, and that which fills the hole is neither where we are nor can be brought to us. We must go to it. We must know where it is, and we must go there for its sake and for ours. At the start of the pilgrimage, there is a gap between two separate things—the pilgrim and the destination.

It is an odd relationship to know what it is without truly knowing it. It is a thing of imagination, of legend, an abstraction that you know in one sense is a thing, is a place, is material. But its meaning is conceptual. Its value is spiritual. These are non-physical properties, yet we yearn for direct contact with the material for the sake of the relationship.

And so we go to seek it. We travel. It may be hard, there may be complications, but we overcome them for the sake of being in the presence of that which is sought.

Inevitably, it is worth it in the end. Even if the destination is objectively unimpressive, even if it is something that we would have overlooked or walked past in day-to-day life, making it the goal of the pilgrimage endows the otherwise mundane with value beyond its mere physical incarnation. We see it, and there is an overwhelming emotion that can only be expressed in the mundane: “Oh my goodness, that is really it,” a sentence whose banality is belied by the lived experience.

And so it was, standing at the bottom of the hill in Bethel, New York, looking at the spot where so many got so wet in the summer rain that magical weekend. On the one hand, the values that drove me there would have remained a part of my moral make-up if we had gotten a flat tire and were unable to make it. Yet, they were further implanted within me by being there.

When you experience the end of the pilgrimage, the confrontation with the physical that is more than the physical, it does change you. That hole is filled and while the thing remains for other pilgrims once your time with it is over, it is no longer a relationship between two things, it is now internal to you, to your memory, to your life. By making the trek to the thing beyond itself, you too move beyond yourself, you experience a fulfillment that feels like a part of you has returned. It was, as Janis Joplin sang there, a piece of my heart.