At the micro level

At the micro level life in the counter scheme is gritty. The next meal is uncertain. The scene’ is shifting and formless, fragmented, without unity or cohesion. There are solitaries in insanitary attics, and groups constituting communal households. Social action groups concerned with purely local problems shade into activist groups with wider political aims; writers for alternative magazines may be marketing health foods and involved with community music or theatre groups. But the mystics stand apart from the rest and are isolated from each other.