ABSTRACT
The disjuncture between utopian idealism and conservative practice continually thwarts progress. Like the Mayfly which may live only a few hours, reproduce and then die, the creative underground erupts from its torpor sowing seeds for the next counterpublic window. It survives for the rest of the year as an aquatic underwater nymph preparing for its short-lived reappearance. But the creative window is nonlinear, neither as orderly or timely as the Mayfly which is determined by its biological cycle. This idea tallies to
some extent with Herbert Marcuse’s conception of counterculture as a virus carried in the atmosphere, not unlike anticontagionist medical thinking of the nineteenth century whereby illness was carried in atmospheric miasmas. Presently, the conditions for counterculture may appear unrealistic and anachronistic, but it would be foolhardy to write it off in an unstable world of virtual miasmas which may operate to radically realign culture.
