January 1985

The Whole

Message

Laser hologram in white light

Rainbow hologram in white light

by H. JOHN CAULFIELD

Dennis Gabor developed holography in 1947 to improve the electron microscope, which views and photographs objects with a probing beam of electrons. The lenses needed to focus such a beam were then so poor that Gabor set out to create a way to take pictures without lenses.

Holography works with any waves-electron, sound, or light.

To appreciate holography with light, recall how a camera works.

Suppose your picture is being taken. The camera film records the intensity pattern of light scattered from your face. But if there is no lens, that pattern of scattered light is uniform and without details. By contrast, the proper lens set at the proper distance between you and the film casts a sharp image of your face onto the film. Thus a lens focuses light patterns to match the shape of the objects that scatter them.

Gabor's problem was with accuracy of focus of his lenses.

Blurred information seemed to be lost completely, but if the direction as well as intensity of the light could be recorded, resharpening might be possible. "Why not," he reasoned, "take

Two Greek words halos (whole) and gramma (a letter) were combined to give the modern world a new word, "hologram," or "the whole message." The word was invented by the Hungarian-born British Nobel laureate Dr. Dennis Gabor, who also invented the technique of holography which has been used to create the cover of this issue.

a bad electron picture, but one which contains the whole of the information, and correct it by optical means?"

The complete light pattern represented by this combined information about direction and intensity is called a wave front.

When such a wave front strikes a glass photographic plate or film without an intervening lens, it creates no picture. But intersect it at the plate or film with a second set of light rays-a reference beam-and the wave front can be recorded and later reconstructed by the proper illumination. Viewing it from the correct angle, we can use the restored wave front to form-with no lens other than that in our eye-an image in its original depth and detail, exactly as if a real wave front from a real object, scene, or person were just then reaching our eyes. Every holog,am therefore has a m.emory. [Holograms and the images they produce have some fascinating properties besides dramatic three-dimensional realism. For example, any fragment of a hologram can regenerate the entire image even if the fragment is extremely small. Since no image-forming device, such as a lens, is used, each point on the subject sends its reflected light waves to each portion of the plate. The reconstruction process regenerates these recorded waves, each portion of the hologram contributing to the entire image. This property, as well as others, can best be understood by regarding the hologram as a window, although it is indeed a strange window, that generates its own scene.]

A hologram is created by the intersecting beams of a laser.

Light emanating from a laser (center, far left) is split to create an object beam and a reference beam. Spread by lenses, the object beam is reflected by a mirror to the model of the eagle (top, left) that appears on our cover. Light waves from the eagle are reflected toward photographic film.

Simultaneousry the reference beam is also spread and proceeds directly toward the film without striking the eagle. Like waves converging on a beach, the two beams interfere with each other to create new wave patterns. Where the troughs and crests of the two waves reinforce each other, a stronger wave is created-constructive interference. Where the troughs and crests are out of phase, they tend to cancel each other out-destructive interference.

The resulting waves, or interference patterns, striking the film plate expose the photographic emulsion. Light waves from every spot on the eagle, such as its wingtip, indicated by a triangle, interact with the reference beam and are recorded everywhere on the film.

Hence, when the film is developed, the interference pattern-now a hologram-becomes a permanent, threedimensional record of the infinitely complex light waves that reflected from the eagle.

Illuminated by laser light (bottom, left), the hologram diffracts, or bends, the light to re-create the original waves. As the light waves spread out, viewers in different locations perceive the waves exactly as they came from the eagle and see it in three dimensions. The eagle appears to be suspended in space in its original location.

The bald eagle you see on the cover began as a tiny

sculpture (above, left) produced by. Eidetic Images, Inc., in Elmsford, New York. Eidetic, a subsidiary of the American Bank Note Company of New York City, used the eagle to construct the hologram.

The first step in a typical production sequence is the making of a laser transmission hologram. This type of hologram is viewable only¡by laser light and requires further refinement for viewing by ordinary, or white, light.

Passing through a hologram, laser light bends in a single direction (1, refer to diagram, left) because it consists of a single wavelength. White light, made up of many wavelengths, bends at many angles (2). A hologram contains many views of the eagle (3), each visible from a particular angle when the hologram is viewed with laser light. If white light is the illuminating source, each color is bent at a different angle, and many different views arrive at the eye as a colored blur (4). The solution, discovered

by Dr. Stephen Benton in 1968, is to reduce the number of views.

Holograms have both horizontal and vertical parallax. That is, they offer changing 3-D views when seen from side to side or up and down. To reduce the vertical information, the eagle hologram is masked (5), leaving a horizontal slit through which a laser constructs a second, or rainbow, hologram .in the image plane (6). This allows viewing with a variety of light sources. The slit deletes the angles providing vertical information. The rainbow hologram therefore has only horizontal parallax, permitting 3-D views from side to side and a many-colored spectrum of clear identical images as a viewer's head moves up and down (7).

To mass-produce rainbow holograms after exposure by the laser (8), the hologram's special emulsion, called photoresi$t. is developed (9), rendering the interference pattern as a series of ultrafine ridges. By electrolysis (10), particles of nickel are deposited on the ridges to make a mold. The nickel mold (11) impresses the interference pattern into plastic, and a thin aluminum coating is applied. Functioning like a mirror, the coating reflects white-light waves through the interference pattern to create the changing image of the bald eagle model.

Such a process was repeated 82,000 times to create the hologram on this issue of SPAN, the first magazine in India to reproduce a hologram on its cover. It is best viewed in direct sunlight or light from a single artificial source. Though the sculptured eagle looks to its left, the cover hologram image faces right for heraldic tradition.

What good is a 3-D image? As Benjamin Franklin chided scoffers at the time of the first manned-balloon flight, "What good is a newborn baby?" Though still in infancy, the art and science of holography promise significant advances in modern technology. X-ray holography will enable researchers to record a three-dimensional view of human cells and viruses; computer graphics combined with holography can provide threedimensional models from two-dimensional information; in theory all the material in the U.S. Library of Congress could be stored in a hologram the size of a sugar cube. These are only a few virtual certainties. There is one more: We have not yet seen the whole message of holography!

0

In the course of my duties I naturally meet many American visitors to India. So often they comment on the extraordinary hospitality that Indians have shown them during their stay here. Over the years-twenty-five, to be exacF-lndians have shown the same warmth and hospitality toward SPAN magazine.

SPAN has been a guest in this country that has been taken into thousands of Indian homes. There, through words and pictures, it talks of the United States, its people and its diverse countryside. It brings news of what Americans are doing in science and the arts and it gives details about projects that Americans and Indians have engaged in-to our mutual benefit. On occasion the magazine will also try to give some insight into what American officials think about the world and especially about the relationship with our fellow democracy, India.

The response from Indian readers has been far more than simply polite. It has been warm and generous. Hundreds of readers have sent suggestions about what they would like SPAN to cover. As with any friend, they have not hesitated to be critical at times and these constructive suggestions have certainly helped to make SPAN a better magazine, an even more welcome guest.

In my many travels arou,nd India, I have been pleased by the comments about SPAN I have heard, and I feel it performs well the function embodied in its name-a bridge or span leading to better understanding between our peoples.

I hope that SPAN as a link with the United States for many Indians will continue to be welcomed as an informative and sometimes entertaining friend for a long time to come. The magazine has weathered its youth and adolescence and I trust will not become stodgy. I know that everyone connected with SPAN appreciates the warmth and loyalty that so many Indian readers have demonstrated and counts on their continuing willingness to tell us, as friends, their candid views of the magazine.

January was named after Janus, the two-faced god of the ancient Romans, who looked back at the past and forward to the future at the same time. That's what we have done in this issue of SPAN as we celebrate our Silver Jubilee, 25 years of pUblication.

The American bald eagle who practically flies off our anniversary cover reflects the advances in magazine technology since SPAN was begun.

Although the basic techniques for holographic photography were developed more than 25 years ago, until recently it was highly impractical for magazine use.

On this special occasion we are presenting some of the flavor of SPAN through the years.

Our editors sPent several pleasurable months going through the issues in the archives, seeking articles and graphics that are representative of the excellent work of Indian and American artists and writers who have appeared in our pages.

This project served to emphasize the continuity and tradition of the magazine.

Helping to choose the material were staff members who have been mainstays of SPAN since its inception, notably Krishan Gabrani, assistant managing editor; Nand Katyal, art director; and Avinash Pasricha, photo editor.

Other old friends of SPAN have also joined in the celebration.

Mario Miranda, the Daumier of Bombay, sent us a birthday card (page 5) that recalls the many marvelous drawings he has done for SPAN. The multitalented artist Gopi Gajwani, whose light touch brightened our pages for more than a dozen years, contributed a special -On the Lighter Side(page 31).

As a gift of appreciation to readers, we have included a map of the United States which was extremely popular with subscribers when offered at book fairs a few years ago.

SPAN strives for timeliness and we felt that the issue should not be devoted entirely to the past, so we also present articles on subjects of current concern.

On page 40, a reporter gives a preview of the objectives of America's newly reelected President, Ronald Reagan, for his second ter~, based on interviews with his top advisers.

The article on page 14 examines the work of a group of black women writers who have brought a new vitality to current American literature.

Combining the'new and the old is critic Walter Kerr's appraisal of what has been happening in the world of American films (page 34). We thought it appropriate at the time of the international film festival in New Delhi this month to include Kerr's provocative thesis that film directors have become so preoccupied with talk that they've forgotten how to use the camera effectively.

We've been gratified to receive a number of letters from readers recently, suggesting articles from past issues for inclusion during our jubilee year and congratulating us on the magazine's longevity.

We will try to spread the celebration throughout our issues this year to merit the confidence you've expressed.

As a fitting start to this new year, we would like to reprint the message U.S. President Ronald Reagan sent to Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi upon the election victory of Mr. Gandhi and his political party: -I wish to extend my warm congratulations to you on your party's impressive election victory.

The widespread popular support you received is a fitting response to the wise and steady leadership you have provided India over the past two difficult months.

The recent free and vigorous elections in both our countries have reaffirmed our shared commitment to democratic institutions and traditions.

I look forward to working with you to strengthen the already close ties between our countries.

With best .wishes, sincerely, Ronald Reagan.-

On the occasion of SPAN's Silver Jubilee we have republished in this issue a number of articles, artworks and photographs that have appeared in SPAN in previ'Ous years.

Reproduced on this page is the introduction that the first Editor of SPAN, Edward, E. Post, wrote for the first issue (November 1960) to explain the ideals that inspired the founding of the magazine.

Our legends span the past and present, threading the countless efforts of our ancient purposes with all our new ....

Words are a span from the thoughts of a man to another man and another man and another .... The image caught by camera or brush spans from eye to eye, joining the sight of many men in a common experience ....

1

Our aspirations span from the urgent here and now into the irifinite possibilities of approaching generations ....

This magazine is o.fJered as a span from America to India ... from man to man, reaching across seas and centuries, reaching from old histories and new beginnings into the horizons of tomorrow ... a span of words and images to link our common hopes, our common pleasures and delights, our common goals and values.

It is our hope that SPAN may help to bridge the distances between our lands with mutual understanding, appreciation, and respect.

January

1985

SPAN Reflections on the Birth of a Nation

by Nayantara Sahgal

10 Gold in the North

by Dom Moraes

Celebrating Self-Discovery

by Claudia Tate

Poetry and History

by Archibald MacLeish

22 25 Years of SPAN: Space

Leaves of Grass on the Kerala Coast

by Kamala Das

24a SPAN Supplement-U.S.

Map

26 25 Years of SPAN: The March of Ideas

28

Heroic Struggle of Margaret Sanger

by Florence Gorfinkle

31 On the Lighter Side

32

The Artistry of Lillian Gish

by Kevin Brownlow

Silence Speaks Volumes

by Walter Kerr

Ronald Reagan's Second-Term Agenda

by Peter W. Bernstein

44 25 Years of SPAN: The Arts

45 Mind and Matter

by Maya Pines

Publisher Editor

James A. McGinley Mal Oettinger

Managing Editor

Himadri Dhanda

Assistant Managing Editor

Krishan Gabrani

Senior Editor

Aruna Dasgupta

Copy Editor

Nirmal Sharma

Editorial Assistant Photo Editor

Rocque Fernandes Avinash Pasricha

Photographs: Front cover-courtesy The American Bank Note Company. Inside front cover, left-Pierre Mion; right-Charles O'Rear, Khanna. 5-Mario both Š National Geographic Society. 2-R.N. Miranda. 8-painting

by Biren De. 9-Pramod Mathur. 10-11 bottom-M. Ram Harith. 19-Bell Labs. 20-Avinash Pasricha.

22-painting by Robert-McCall. 23-NASA except center by Avinash Pasricha. 25-Homi Jal. 26-27 top row-courtesy of Virginia Slims; Avinash Pasricha; Barry Blackman; Ruth Orkin, from Kodak World's Fair Exhibit; bottom-Black Star. 35 left-Movie Star News; 35 right, 36-Culver Pictures. 41-Carol Hightower. 44 (clockwise from top right)-Henry Groskinsky, Ufe; Nancy Rica Schiff; Will Brown; courtesy Paramount Pictures.

Published by the United States Information Service, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government. Printed by Raj Kumar Wadhwa at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana.

Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged, except when copyrighted. For permission write to the Editor. Price of magazine, one year's subscription (12 issues) Rs.25; single copy, Rs. 4. For change of address send an old address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address to Circulation Manager, SPAN magazine, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg. New Delhi 110001. See change of address form on page 44b.

Front cover: The American bald eagle flies out in all its colorful three-dimensional glory from within the Indian setting of our cover's frame. Holography -the technique used to create the cover hologramis a new tool for the technological age. See page 1. cover: A cover for every year of SPAN's quarter century. More glimpses from old issues of SPAN are presented throughout this issue.

Back

America won its independence at a time when the world was seething with new ideas. This review of historian Henry Steele Commager's book Jefferson, Nationalism and the Enlightenment, discusses how the United States was influenced by these ideas and what it contributed to them.

Reflections on the Birth of a Nation "We can no longer say there is nothing new under the sun ..

For this whole chapter in the history of man is new," Jefferson wrote exultantly to the British scientist Joseph Priestley soon after his inauguration to the Presidency. He was referring to the making of a nation ,unlike any nation before. Yet the material for this "chapter" had taken Europe more than a hundred years to assemble, spawning the most intense inquiry and eager curiosity since the Athenians had speculated about the nature of being in the 5th century before Christ.

The Europeans who got this intellectual ferment going by their investigation of natural phenomena and their attack on religious, social, political and economic institutions that were unjust, or had outlived their usefulness, believed there was a great deal that was "new under the sun." For a start, the whole universe, certainly their way of looking at it. In 1687 Sir Isaac Newton had published his Principia Mathematica. The universe, he said, was governed by simple natural laws. If these were understood and obeyed, the society of man could be improved, even transformed. There were few ills that could not be put right and no dark mysteries whose answers were the monopoly of the church or state or any other established authority. From the stars and planets to life on earth, understanding was within man's grasp, and through it, remedy.

From this proposition flowed a tremendous optimism and far-reaching consequences. The development of physics helped to weaken superstition and made a startling difference to religious belief. Franklin's lightning rod, for instance, did not only protect buildings. It put an end to the fear of lightning as an agency of divine wrath. People became less frightened of natural phenomena altogether. Christianity still flourished but it was not the Christianity of tradition. It was religion combined with the latest findings in science. There was a God but he was part of nature and, like all else, subject to the laws of nature.

New fertilizing ideas were planted in every field of investigation and finally they burst into revolution on both sides of the Atlantic. For by that time men had become convinced that they did indeed have what the philosophers of the Enlightenment called natural rights-the right to life, to liberty, to happinessthat governments existed to protect these, and that any government violating them deserved to be changed or overc thrown. And so the American "chapter" came to be written, and to add its own unique form and flavor to the Enlightenment inheritance. Henry Steele Commager's book of seven essays, Jefferson, Nationalism and the Enlightenment (New York; George Braziller; 1975; 196 pages), discusses what Americans, and particularly Jefferson, made of this slice of their history.

The leaders of the Revolution were, after the fashion of their time, eminently reasonable men, but just plain reason

might not have lifted them to the heights they rose to, reduced philosophic propositions to humane and practical reality, or inspired the language Vifenow associate with the essence of the democratic faith. It was reason fired by enthusiasm, lit by a kind of rapture. It seems to have had the quality of revelation.

Obviously the facts had been there all the time, but mankind had only just seen them. Tom Paine was speaking of Americans when he said: "We see with other eyes; we hear with other ears; we think with other thoughts than those we formerly used." But he also spoke for the age he lived in. This was the vision not only of intellectuals but of bankers and businessmen, preachers and writers and gentlemen farmers, even the divine-right rulers of the time. It was part of the common attitude too as people gradually began to believe in the natural rather than the supernatural. If it acquired a characteristically American flavor, it was because America became its laboratory and testing ground.

Jefferson was very much a man of the Enlightenment, a cosmopolite who was as much at home in Paris as in Virginia; patrician owner of a 1,100-hectare plantation who called himself "a husbandman." His interests, each deeply cultivated, ranged over architecture, agriculture, sociology, politics, music and education. His own education had been both in the natural sciences and the classics, and he read Greek and Latin, French and Italian with ease. Perhaps nothing so clearly separates the national leader of any country today from that era as this extraordinary versatility and sweep of accomplishment, taken so much for granted and carried so lightly by men who found time while they were directing affairs of state to practice the violin and collect the vocabularies of 50 American Indian languages, both of which Jefferson did.

His commitment to the ideals of the Enlightenment, to freedom and reason, was total and unflagging, and this is the side of him the essays reveal. Commager writes: "What he said at the dawn of his career in Philadelphia and in Virginia, he said at high noon as Secretary of State and Vice President and President, and in retirement at Monticello as the evening shadows fell. The faith he declared, the convictions he professed, the hopes he nourished, lived on as ardently in the quarter century after his election to the Presidency as in the quarter century before."

This strong shining consistency somehow lacks drama, and it is surprising how little drama there is, once the fighting is done, about the world's first government born out of revolution, and the steps it hacks in tradition and the established order to build an entirely new society. The author of the phrase, "We hold these truths to be self-evident," takes the lead in a long career at the heart of political power in converting "these truths" into American laws and institutions backed by the political machinery to safeguard them, and living to a ripe old age, along with many of his colleagues, to see that they work. The building goes /

up with astonishing smoothness, for there is no debate about fundamentals, and great achievements-some of them still theories in the Old World-slip unremarked like well-finished bricks into their niches. The powers of the church and state are quietly separated, establishing the mind's freedom from authority of any kind. Inheritance laws are reformed. Popular education, not even thought of by European philosophers, becomes a concern. As early as 1779 Jefferson launches his own crusade to "diffuse knowledge more generally through the mass of the people," for he has already seen that this, and no law, will be the real guardian of democracy. Starting with elementary education, he goes on to found the Library of Congress and the University of Virginia, which bears his personal stamp from start to finish, from its charter to the design of its buildings and grounds, and finally the choice of its professors, students and curriculum.

But the ideas that build America are not all inherited from Europe. There are American inventions too. The Constitutional Convention, the first in history, is set up and draws up the first written constitution. The checks and balances and judicial review it -provides for solve "at one stroke, as it were, those problems of government that had perplexed statesmen and philosophers since Pericles." America gives birth to the political party "that grows from the people up, not the Crown down, the party that eschews ideology and addresses itself to the task of winning office and running the government, the party that is, above all, national, not regional, denominational or personal."

And the right to happiness is written into many state constitutions. Happiness is the religion of the Enlightenment, the glad refrain that runs through its philosophy, its poetry, its science, but America sees it as a legal right and as time goes on interprets it in terms of milk and meat and the common welfare.

Jefferson is much more than a political genius. His forceful, elegant prose fills a 300-page reply to questions put to him on America by the Secretary to -the French Minister in Philadelphia. Notes on Virginia is a typical Enlightenment tract, almost an encyclopedia, with a mass of detailed information covering crops, laws, the Indian tribes, the weather, finances and the animal wealth of the continent. This is in any case an epoch of compulsive writers, if we are to judge by the formidable amount of writing produced by Europeans over two or three generations. They took to the pen as men go to war, with a supreme disregard for their own safety in a political and social climate that sent printers and writers to the galleys and broke dissenters on the wheel. Diderot spent 20 years compiling the 17-volume Encyclopedia that became the manifesto of the Enlightenment, with contributions from distinguished mathematicians, physicists, astronomers, social scientists and philosophers. Gibbon wrote his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Adam Smith authored the 18th-century classic on political economy, The Wealth of Nations; Voltaire, literary arbiter of the Enlightenment, who loathed stupidity as much as tyranny, churned out a flood of fiction, drama, criticism and commentary from the age of 17 until he died at 84, most of his satire expended on l'infame-"the infamous thing," i.e., ecclesiastical Christianity. Tracts, brochures, books, revolutionary and sometimes heretical for the times, were poured out

by Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans. It took a poet, Alexander Pope, to sum up their message in his "Essay on Man": Know then Thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.

What is more, these learned tomes were read and discussed in an atmosphere of excitement and discovery. (Gibbon's first edition of 1,000 copies sold out in two weeks.) Their language

was polished, ornamental and classical in its symmetry and allusions, for the Enlightenment was enchanted with its classical heritage and talked about it as if it were yesterday. In a way it was, because the 18th-century outlook was more akin to 5th-century Greece than to almost anything in between. It was at this time, too, that the English novel arose, full of long descriptive passages which influenced the style of Rousseau and Goethe. The American Revolution made its contribution to the literature of the Enlightenment more through its political writings than any other. It would have been less of an emotional experience for the world had it not been expressed in language that appealed to abiding universal values: "When in the course of human events ... "; "Posterity will triumph in that day's transaction"; "Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the good can repair ... "; "We are destined to be a barrier against the return of ignorance and barbarism."

Jefferson's Notes on Virginia reflected the style and solid substance of Enlightenment writings. They combined facts and statistics with vivid romantic description, all of it overlaid with a fierce national pride: "It is impossible for the emotions arising from the sublime to be felt beyond what they are here; so beautiful an arch, so elevated, so light, and springing as it were up to heaven. The rapture of the spectator is indescribable." In fact it was practically a "self-evident" truth that everything in America was better than in Europe, whether it was the scenery, the climate, wildlife or human society. "Let us weigh the European and the American bear," writes Commager, "the first a mere 153 pounds, the second 410 pounds. In Europe the beaver grew to a maximum of 18 pounds, in America to over 40 .... Or contemplate the American bison of almost 2,000 pounds, or the bullock, of over 2,500 pounds, or the hog. Why Jefferson himself had seen one that weighed a thousand pounds!" All this earnest weighing and measuring became necessary when European authorities, including the celebrated French zoologist Comte de Buffon, belittled America's animal kingdom. Proof positive had to be provided. General John Sullivan even led a "midwinter expedition into the Maine wilderness to track down a bull moose whose majestic size would ... forever silence all aspersions on nature in America. It was successful, too."

The love affair with America was by no means Jefferson's alone. Abigail Adams, wife of the second U.S. President, wrote to her sister: "Do you know that European birds have not half the melody of ours? Nor is their fruit half so sweet, nor their manners half so pure, nor their people half so virtuous ....

Keep this to yourself." But obviously it could not be kept to oneself, and self-congratulation bubbled over into every nook and corner of the New World's life, even the newly adopted decimal system, of which its founder Erastus Root wrote: "Let them [the British] have their own way, and us ours. Their mode is suited to the genius of their government-for it seems to be the policy of tyrants to keep their accounts in as intricate and perplexing a method as possible .... But Republican money ought to be simple, and adapted to the meanest capacity .... " The "song of songs" to America's beauty and virtue was Crevec¡oeur's. A Frenchman settled in frontier New York, his Letters from an American Farmer described the sheer bliss of living in the wilderness, yet in freedom and abundance. And in Europe Voltaire led the chorus of admiration. For the Enlightenment philosophers the real test of civilization was happiness in freedom, and America had it, the "Golden Age of which men talked so much and which. has probably never existed anywhere but in Pennsylvania." Voltaire was partial to Pennsylvania for it was the home of the incomparable Franklin,

>

but he admired Connecticut and Virginia too.

What makes this effervescence so unexpected is that it had so little relation to the situation around it. America had a population of under three million in a vast territory. Roads were poor where they existed at all, communication was meager, life was hard, and there was no common government.

Class lines were rigid and it was, by and large, a brutal age.

There were public floggings and executions and savage fighting on the frontiers-and most settlements were frontiers. In Europe, too, the paradox existed, of dreams against an often grim reality, with a continuing fight for survival of another kind.

The philosophers were helpless against the power and whims of kings and priests, the Inquisition, the law, even the universities.

When the rulers known as "enlightened" saw how alarming it was to have philosophy translated into actual conditions, they lost no time in exiling, imprisoning, torturing or hanging their reformers. By the time Jefferson became President, a backlash of reaction was sweeping Europe with reformers everywhere in prison or disgrace, and even the French Revolution had degenerated into a terror.

It was at this point that America and Europe so definitely parted ways in terms of action, and not only because the Utopian dreams of European thinkers were up against longestablished tyrannies, ~while the Americans had no ancient backlog to clear to make way for the new and the just.

Commager makes another point as crucial. No fate, after all, had ordained that America would and must establish genuine freedom of opinion and safeguard its practice. The new nation might easily have become a replica of the Old World with its landed aristocracy, its many-layered society of privilege, its various institutions. But it did not. It went its own way. And Commager believes the "explanation is not to be found in the simplicity of the problems but in the sophistication, the sagacity, the creative intelligence of those who wrestled with them." The nation's political structure and its priorities were acts of deliberate, choice. I missed in this account the other men whose wisdom and sound sense saw to it that America would develop in its own way and no other. It struck me, too, that here was a whole process that was supremely educated in its values, without the terrible traumas of excess that have beset other revolutions.

But if it did not produce excess, it produced contradictions as terrible. The remarkable leadership that had declared "all men are created equal" did not include 530,000 black slaves in this grand pronouncement. Slaves cost about ÂŁ40 each and were in great demand. A thousand at a time were employed on tobacco, rice and indigo plantations in the South. Patrick Henry, demanding liberty or death, would have been horrified at the idea that freedom might be for blacks, too. There were antislavery leaders, Jefferson among them. Himself a slaveowner, he had written prophetically in the Notes: "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever'; that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events .... " Slavery went against the beliefs of the Enlightenment. The Encyclopedia clearly stated: "There is not a single one of these hapless souls who does not have the right to be declared free, since he has never lost his freedom .... " Yet it took years to abolish the slave trade and in America Jefferson's efforts to Facing page: This portrait of Thomas Jefferson by noted artist Biren De was specially commissioned for SPAN's July 1976 issue commemorating America's Bicentennial.

prohibit it in the new western domain failed. Even his condemnation of "this execrable commerce" in the Declaration of Independence was struck out. He regarded this as his personal failure. Commager calls it "the most conspicuous failure of American democracy ... the most conspicuous failure of the American Enlightenment."

But there was another-the destructive encounter with the American Indian. He was the common enemy who had the misfortune to become a cementing force for American nationalism. It was a sign of progress and national achievement to kill him or turn him off his land. It did not disturb the white man's conscience as slavery did. And this routine extermination could coexist with a typically Enlightenment pride in the primitive and the glorification of the Indian in literature. "All Americans could engage in Indian wars, at least imaginatively; all too could share in the romantic idealization of the Indian, once he was out of the way." This, surely, is the profounder and more coldblooded of the two tragedies that bedevil American democracy; the Indian massacres and the assault of the white man's civilization on Indian ethnicity must remain scars on the soul.

The past that Commager re-creates poses its own question.

What happened to it? What has happened, he demands, to such Enlightenment concepts as the rule of law and reason during America's "Watergate affair?"

We know now, of course, the final result of the Watergate. public hearings-the indictments of many of the conspirators, the resignation of President Nixon under threat of impeachment. We know that America finally did purge itself of the men and issues that constituted "Watergate." But before that purging was completed, Commager wrote the introduction to this book at the height of the Watergate hearings in July 1974.

He asks, almost in a voice of despair: "How did we get from Independence Hall to Watergate, from Yorktown to Vietnam, from [George] Washington to Nixon? .. How did we get from Tom Paine's proud boast: 'But where is the King of America? ... Know that in America the law is King' to the official lawlessness of our own time? How did we get from Jefferson's great assertion of faith in his First Inaugural Address-'If there be any among us who would wish to destroy this union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion can be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it' -to the use of surveillance, wiretapping, security checks, censorship, and agents provocateurs?"

As events subsequently proved, however, Commager need not have despaired. The traditions and institutions of the Founding Fathers were not destroyed by Watergate. America met the test. Far from shaking the moral foundations of the republic, Watergate even vindicated and confirmed the rule of law and inexorability of its just processes in modern times. It is only the free society, whatever its excesses, that can find its way to civilized answers.

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Nayantara Sahgal's new novel, Plans for Departure, is due to be published early this year by W. W. Norton. Her other published books include From Fear Set Free, Prison and Chocolate Cake and A Situation in New Delhi.

She has been a writer-in-residence, visiting scholar and a fellow at a number of American universities. Now based in Dehra Dun, shi writes regularly for major Indian newspapers.

When I first drove into Rajasthan, it was May. Summer lay coiled like a snake in the dry beds of the rivers, from time to time flicking an idle and searing tongue of wind across the dusty land. The peacocks rustled and flaunted in barren fields. The camels by the roadside chewed sourly at the sparse leaves on the bushes. The landscape was khaki, like the map ofa war. Only the village women, in their ocher or red headclothS and skirts, stippled it with color. They swayed in line down the thorny paths, water pots balanced on their heads, toward shrunken and evaporated wells. The lidless yellow eye of summer, poised overhead, observed all this.

But in Udaipur there were blue lakes, and at night the heavy leaves of the trees

Gold inthe North

rustled by my window. A luxu'ry hotel sat comfortably on an island in the middle of a lake. I drank cold beer there, lulling my eye with water. Small emerald parakeets whirred by, squeaking and whistling like children, dipping down in flashes to drink. "Even here, there is not enough water," a friend said, sitting at dusk on the terrace of the hotel. "To the north, there is none at all. You have seen how dry the country is around Udaipur: but that is nothing compared to the north."

Some 300 kilometers to the north, I knew, the Thar Desert waited, like a legend or a threat, to become real.

It became more real as I neared it, driving up toward Jodhpur, in the endless scraggy herds of cattle and livestock, the ragged trains of camels, hustled south down the burning roads by gaunt, hardy men. After the herds came carts with a few household possessions, and patient

watchful women whose children wailed in the hot wind. "They are going down beyond Udaipur, looking for pasture for their herds. There is none where they come from. They come from the north."

They came in slow compulsive waves, like refugees fleeing from an explosion or an occupation: an explosion of the summer sun, an occupation by the summer sand.

The massive fort of Jodhpur looked down from its hill at the new city which had sprawled out around the old one. The desert lay beyond the city. It crouched there like a lion, and was the color of one, its rippled tawny pelt flea-specked here and there with small clumps of scrub. A gritty wind blew out of it, little rivers of sand eddied briefly down the pavements, then were snatched back into the air and flung like a challenge to the south. At the edge of the city, herds of camels twined their long

Writerand poet Dom Moraes' published books include My Son's Father (an autobiography) and Answered by Flutes: Reflections from Madhya Pradesh (a travelogue commissioned by the state government). He has also written a book on Bombay for Time-Life's The Great City Series.

necks around stunted trees, as though they were snakes. Then there were no more trees. Tall whirlwinds of sand marched down toward us from the horizon.

The desert enclosed us for the next 10, days. There was a glare and dazzle on the skyline at dawn, then the ferocious eye of summer opened for a long look at its domain. For the next 12 hours it scowled down at the sand. We closed our eyes, visualized shadow and water, narrowed them open once more to the parch and scald of the desert wind. The shifting wind caused the dunes constantly to collapse and reform, or drifted them lazily out as bulwarks across the road. The car had to stop at frequent intervals, so that we could clear the heaped sand away, or because one of the tires, his'sing on the burning surface of the tarmac, had exploded.

During these prolonged and sweaty intervals by the roadside, we were passed, sometimes, by the ghostly herds of livestock movin~ south. Under thorn trees, in pools of shadow, by remote railway halts,

the beehive huts of the small abandoned villages stood. Each was isolated from the other: few still contained life. Each had its mud tanks and wells, laboriously and carefully built, for the collection of rain water, the only liquid in all those thirsty miles. With the stored water the villagers kept patches of bajra and tit alive, and fed the cattle, their main source of livelihood.

But for seven years now the rains had failed, and all the wells were dry.

The villagers who remained had indomitable faces. This was their land, they said, and they would not leave it. But even they had been defeated, their belief eroded by the sun. They seemed the survivors of a shipwreck, stranded beyond reach of human hand. There was nothing at their feet but the desert, empty except for vultures, scorpions, the occasional foraging antelope: nothing on the horizon but the same desert, silent except for the sift of wind in

the dunes. The villages were impermanent, and even Jaisalmer, with its temples and tombs and forts, a hushed island of stone in the endless tawny waves of sand, seemed locked in a dream of defeat.

In the dunes by the road, on one of our forced halts, I came upon a pile of dry and unidentifiable bones, with a lonely and heraldic vulture perched upon them. The vulture had the gloomy, raddled look which I associate with the patriarch Noah.

It belonged where it was, a desert patriarch. It did not know or care about dreams or destinations or the founding of a human city in the desert. It knew and had inherited the desert. Perched there upon bones in its own country, it became suddenly terrible and symbolic. But it had heard our approach and, like Noah, seemed suddenly to be possessed by an idea. It spread its immense and reeking wings, exclaimed laconically, Ark! and flew away.

Noah would have found peace of mind in the Thar Desert. Nobody there has any fear of a flood. Once upon a time, however, the sea waves chanted their psalms where the sand now is. In that empty, lunar landscape, the memory of those waves endures in the shape of frail white seashells, marooned in the sand millions of yeats back by the receding tide. Recent archeological .discoveries have revealed that when the tide had finally receded, the Rajasthan plain was watered by a broad, slow river, the Saraswati, and a prosperous culture flourished there. Then changing weather baked the Saraswati dry, turned the prosperous plain to desert, and dedicated it to the bald and ironic vulture.

The relics of the sea include the salt and bitter soil. This, and the unpredictable nature of the rains, on which the population depends for its supply of water , have led for centuries to conditions in which drought and famine are commonplaces of existence. The rainfall, even at best, is meager, between 10 and 25 centimeters annually. If it fails, as it usually does, and the wells are dry, the people have to carry water, in leather flasks and on camelback, from the nearest source, sometimes 30 or 50 kilometers away. If there is no source nearby, they emigrate in search of one, or stay on to fight it out, and in the process possibly die.

Under the dun skin ofthe desert, 60 to 90 meters down, pockets of moisture sleep

darkly in the sand and dream of the time when they were part of a river. Very occasionally a tubewell, the salvation of so many arid areas of India, has been sunk to them from the sunlight, but the liquid that rises is cloudy and brackish, fit neither for human consumption nor for the nurture of crops. The desert could only recover from its stupor of sun and sand if it were fed by canals. But the barrens of the western Thar comprise some eight million hectares, and the construction of canals to feed them is an immense and expensive task.

A beginning was made in 1958 when construction of the Rajasthan Canal * was started by the state government. The water intake for the canal is the Harike barrage, just below the confluence of the Beas and Sutlej rivers. But without storage of the monsoon flood waters of the Beas, there would be little or no water for the canal during the long dry season. To ensure an adequate year-round supply of water to the canal is an important function of the enormous Beas Project, a many-sided water-utilization and hydroelectric development scheme. Commitments were made in 1960 by the World Bank and ~he U.S. Government to provide financing for the devdopment of the Beas River and in 1963 a team of U.S. experts 'surveyed the area. Based largely on the team's recommendation, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the World Bank in 1966 released loans which now total $47 million for the Beas Project.

Moving like a missionary across the charred sands of the Thar, the canal brings a human hand and a human eye into the kingdom of the vulture. The planners at their blueprints estimate that by 1988 two million people will be settled in the area to which they have conducted water. Blueprints are all very well, say the critics, but the Thar is untamable: you can lead water to a desert, but you can't make the desert drink. The answer to that lies in the very north of the Thar, north of Jaisalmer, north even of Bikaner, in the Ganganagar district of Rajasthan, once desolation incarnate. There, 40 years ago, a king brought water to the desert, and the desert, obediently, drank.

Bikaner is a city of wide spaces and white houses, presided over by an imposing if inhospitable 15th-century fort.

Camels sneer and mutter at one in the * Now renamed Indira Canal in honor of the late

Prime Minister.

bazaar and the desert sand wafts in on the wind. The city has squatted in the desert for several centuries, the saturnine capital of a poor and backward state. In 1880, however, a new heir to the throne was born. Seven years later his father died, and Ganga Singh became Maharaja of Bikaner. The state was administered by a council until in 1898 Ganga Singh, corning of age, assumed full powers.

He was confronted, at once, by a crisis.

In 1899 the rains failed, and there was famine.

It was a terrible famine. Even in Bikaner, where such events are not infrequent, it is still spoken of with an awed catch in the breath. Of the 800,000 people who lived in the state before the famine, it was discovered afterward that 300,000 had disappeared. Some could have emigrated, but the bulk were presumed dead. The young

"Moving like a missionary across the charred sands of the Thar, the canal brings a human hand and a human eye into the kingdom of the vulture." king took horrified stock of the situation.

He decided that there was only one way to prevent a recurrence of such disasters in the waterless desolation north of his capital. This was to build a canal in the north, to ensure a supply of water for the people there, if, as was highly probable, the rains were once more to fail.

There were immediate difficulties. Rajasthan was not a riparian state, and the canal would have to be fed from beyond the border. There were objections from the rulers whose river Ganga Singh sought to divert. The cost of the venture, for a poor state like Bikaner, was prohibitive. But the-canal was the apple'of Ganga Singh's eye. He improved the finances of the state, he overcame objections, he floated loans. Eventually, in 1927, the Gang Canal was opened. Starting at Ferozepur head, it brought the Sutlej waters 134 -kilometers south to Shivpuri, in a waste of dunes and drifts in the northern Thar. A few disbelieving villagers rode in on camelback, to watch the arrival of the water.

It was October, more than 40 years

after the opening of this canal, when I drove back into Rajasthan. The monsoon was more or less over. In Jaisalmer it had scarcely even occurred. The desert was as blank and pitiless as ever. There were heaps of bones amidst the dunes. The vultures circled in the hot, whitish sky, scanning the sand for provender. The mud wells had a little water in them: brightly clad, beautiful village women dipped it out with earthenware vessels, cherishing the wet pots in their arms like children. Turbaned men on camels rode by, rifles in their hands: water feuds are frequent in the northern Thar, and are often settled by arms. The same sun burnt from the same sky.

Then, across the burning and shifting waste of dunes, a green haze of trees appeared on the rim of the sky. As we came closer, we saw that it was no mirage. The trees were real trees, the shadow they cast real shadow. Suddenly we were out of the desert and under the trees. On either side of the road, rich fields of sugarcane and cotton lisped in the mild wind. The glaucous eyes of a buffalo stared from a deep brown pool, where it lay submerged like a misshapen fish. Harnessed to a pulley, a camel tramped sullenly around a well: the water wheel creaked, turning: the lifted liquid dripped and flashed from the spokes, changing to rainbows in the sun.

At Shivpuri head the feeder canal ended its long trip from Ferozepur. The lazy brown water lapped around the piers.

Two diStributor channels forked away from the head, slow arrows that vanished into a distance of fields and trees. The blue flowers on the banks nodded patronizingly to each other. Gaudy butterflies fluttered above the surface of the water.

Presently a jeep full of peasants bumped slowly up to the canal at which their fathers had peered from camelback. They knelt at the bank, reaching down to touch the living water, to take it in their hands and smell and taste it, as if even now, after 40 years, they could not believe it was there.

Ganganagar is a few kilometers away from Shivpuri. Forty years back only a clump of beehive huts, inhabited by nomadic cultivators and herdsmen, stood where it now stands. Today it is a thriving and prosperous town, with several colleges and schools, cinemas and shops.

Tractors are parked around its streets:

transistors wail from every window'.

"Everybody in the area has a transistor," a local farmer told me. "Even the laborers have wristwatches and bicycles.

The children are sent ;.) school, because there is enough money to send them. We are prosperous: people come here to make money. Before the canal, a few hundred people lived in Ganganagar district. No~ there are more than a million."

The colleges, the schools, the cinemas, the shops, the tractors and the new prosperity: all these have come with the canal, they float on water. The Gang Canal irrigates some 300,000 hectares in the district, and there are 40 tubewells in operation. Some of the most prosperous farms in India are to be found here.

Yet traditional Rajasthan coexists with the tubewell. The chowkidar at the local dak bungalow was followed everywhere by a pet sheep: and shortly after we arrived, I heard music in the dusk, looked out of my window and saw a lonely white-clad walker on the moonlit road, playing a flute as he stared toward the distant stars.

Nandaram stood on the banks of the canal. The green trees rustled above. his head, the brown water rustled past his feet. The bajra fields stretched out behind him in the sun, mile upon lush mile, till they reached the horizon. "I have lived here," he said, "all my life." He is nearly 70 now, a hard bitten lean man whose face has seen a lot of time and weather.

He looked out beyond the water and said, "I was not yet 30 when the canal came. Where all the fields are now, there was nothing. There was only sand, sand and a few bushes."

He touched the water briefly with his eyes. "Our crops never came to much. A little til, a little bajra ... but we could eat it, and feed our cattle off the waste. Still, every alternate year the rains failed.

Then we would take our cattle and drive them up into Bahawalpur state [now in Pakistan], where there was water. People used to disappear on those trips. When we came back from Bahawalpur, they were not here. We never knew if they had settled somewhere else or if they had died in the desert. But many died in the desert." His eyes filmed over, thinking back to that remote time. "Could we have imagined then, saheb, that this place would ever be as it is now? How could we have imagined it? All our lives we had

known nothing but hardship and the sand."

Nandaram and his three sons are among the 175 laborers employed on the Maharaja of Bikaner's farm outside Ganganagar. His eldest son, Ramkumar, is 28, a stalwart young man with a sunny smile. "It was a little more sandy than this, when I was a child. But nothing like what my father describes. This greenery, you know, I'm accustomed to it: I can't imagine that this was ever a desert." He cannot imagine the. hardships of life before the canal either, for he has never known hardship. Most farm laborers in the area earn between Rs. 100 and Rs. 300 per month: they have free accommodation; their children attend the farm school; they grow their own vegetables; own their own cattle; and most of them have money in the bank.

Everywhere in the Maharaja's farm one heard the lulling syllables of water. It splashed and lapped from the canal and the tubewell, into the green, heavy fields,crumbling brown dikes of earth, slipping between stems. It fertilized orchards as well as fields. Guavas and grapefruit, oranges and sweet limes, peaches and , pears: they all flourished on the farm, and a cupboardful of silver cups won at various national agricultural shows testified to their quality. Grain and vegetables and cotton flourished too. At the nearby Lyallpur Farm there was the same proliferation of water, and their apricots and peaches had won national awards. It seemed incredible that only a few kilometers away the yellow scorpions clicked their claws between the dunes.

These two are model farms: but nearly all the farms in the area are prosperous.

What has already happened at Ganganagar is an index to what could happen in the western Thar. The desert could be made not merely habitable, but prosperous. As the concrete snake of the canal crawls further south, the wealthy state that once flourished by the banks of the vanished Saraswati could return.

Water rules our lives, like love. The unborn child crouches for nine months in a sac of water. Grown, he plunges into water, no alien element. He encloses it between stone walls and forces it to turn wheels and illuminate. cities. He coaxes it to leap through fountains for his aesthetic pleasure. But he remains its servant. No man can live without water, as no man can live without love.

0

Celebrating Self- Discovery They write primarily for themselves, as a means of understanding their experiences and observations, !=J,ndas a means of discovering deeply hidden truths about themselves as well as others.

Until very recently black women writers found themselves on the peripheries of two literary traditions-American, which was white, and Afro-American, which was male. Yet, over the course of 200 years, from poet Phillis Wheatley in the 18th century onward, black women writers have established their own tradition, practically without notice from either literary establishment. But in the 1980s, to their surprise, they find themselves moving from obscurity into the spotlight.

By 1983 many of the black female authors I had read were well-known literary figures. Writers who were traditionally absent from the literary section of prominent newspapers were now present-Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and The Heart of a Woman; Gwendolyn Brooks' A Street in Bronze ville; Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Tar Baby; the poetry and short stories of Alice Walker, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for The Color Purple; and Gloria Naylor, whose The Women of Brewster Place won the American Book Award for best first novel. [See page 16 for an article on Gloria Naylor.]

In fact, book critics across the United States are busy trying to account for the rising tide of women's work, both black and white. Among them, Le Ann Schreiber of The New York Times stated recently that women writers are witnessing "a newfound sense of legitimacy ... writing by women about women is no longer seen as a distaff literature." These women writers are "blessed with an awareness that they have a huge, uncharted territory to explore-their own experience -and an avid audience for whatever they discover."

Her assessment reminded me of a notion I've had for some time about white women writers. Many of them seemed to measure just how much "women's stuff" to put in their work, so they wouldn't be prevented from joining the literary mainstream. They knew that if they spent too much time writing about women in a male-oriented society, they would be cast off into little ideological puddles.

Black women writers, on' the other hand, knew they had little choice in deciding their marketplace. The decision already had been made for them. The literary establishment already had labeled their work, and critics repeatedly opined, "This is interesting, but is it literature?"

There seemed to be so little possibility for joining the literary mainstream that black women writers took special pleasure in ignoring the critics altogether. As a result, they directed their sights onto a frontier of their own choosing, proclaiming their freedom to select their own subjects.

A survey of the work of contemporary black women writers reveals a preponderance of certain themes, many of which are found in American literature in general, and in Afro-American literature in particular, while some others seem to be unique to women's writing. The quest theme, for example, concerns the character's attempt, first, to define a meaningful identity, independent of conventional expectations and prejudices; second, to sustain one's self-dignity in a world of growing alienation, absurdity and moral decay; and third, to nurture individual self-esteem in a hostile social climate.

The main character selection is obvious. By and large, black women writers choose black heroines for their work. Like their real life counterparts, these heroines fight social injustice, but the black heroine

Alice Walker: "One must assume responsibility for the quality of one's life."

seldom elects to be alienated, an outsider or a lone adventurer in her quest for self-affirmation.

She does not go off alone to plot her destiny as do the conventional heroes of black male writers like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes and Claude Brown. On the contrary, the heroine's odyssey occurs right in her own backyard and even in her own home. Usually, she is tied down to her children and, thus, to a particular place. Or she is ensconced in her community, dependent on friends and relatives for strength during hard times and for amusement during times of celebration. The most memorable black heroes, on the other hand, are not generally encumbered with the weight of family or friends; these heroes .determine their

Toni Cade Bambara: "I write to stay in touch with me, and not to let much slip by me. "

Š Audre Lorde: For all those who say "I am and you cannot wipe me out."

destinies by traveling light.

Since the black heroine's quest frequently takes place at home, there is little adventure in the story. Nothing exciting seems to happen. But the focus is not on describing external events-what happened-but on dramatizing character motivation, explaining how and why an incident occurred. The reader's responsibility is to bring this focus clearly into view and to interpret its meaning, especially since the writers refuse to make judgment. They place that duty squarely on the shoulders of their readers.

Novelist Toni Morrison [see SPAN January 1980], for example, does not tell us what happens at the end of Song of Solomon; she depicts a reincarnated .myth for us to figure out. When poet

Toni Morrison: "No one had written them yet, so I wrote them."

Gwendolyn Brooks: "There is so much I have to say to them."

Gwendolyn Brooks describes the search turmoil and change in American for a missing black girl in a low-income society-because "there is so much I urban housing project in In The Mecca, have to say to them." Brooks was the she does not lecture her readers about first black to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize social responsibility. Instead, she de(in 1950). scribes the poverty and hopelessness of With the publication of The Women of the people living in the Mecca apartment Brewster Place, Gloria Naylor explains building. her sense of completeness: "The writing Black women writers write primarily for symbolized me finally taking hold of themselves, as a means of understanding , myself and attempting to take my destiny their experiences and observations: and in my own hands. All the other things as a means of discovering deeply hidden came." truths about themselves as well as Audre Lorde, author of several volumes others. For example, Toni Cade Bambara, of poetry and prose, among them The New author of Gorilla, My Love; The Sea Birds York Head Shop, The Black Unicorn and Are Still Alive; and The Salt Eaters says in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Black Women Writers at Work: "First and insists:" I write for myself. When I say foremost, I write for myself. Writing has myself, I mean not only the Audre who been for a long time my major tool for inhabits my body, but all those feisty, self-instruction and self-development.

I incorrigible black women writers who run off at the mouth a lot. I've a penchant insist on standing up and saying, 'I am for flamboyant performance. I exaggerate and you cannot wipe me out.' I write for to the point of hysteria. I cannot always be those women for whom a voice has not trusted with my mouth open. But when I yet existed, or whose voices have been sit down with the notebooks, I am absosilenced." These responses are reprelutely serious about what I see, sense sentative and they call attention to the fact and know. I write to stay in touch with me, that many black women writers write and not to let much slip by me. I write as a primarily for themselves. But despite their way to stay on center. I need the discisingular concern for this very special pline writing affords and demands. I do audience, they do, of course, hope for not wish to be useless or dangerous, so lone in its traditional form. They just do not write." write for it.

Toni Morrison, author of The Bluest As we survey the work of black writers Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon and Tar in general, we find that they fit into a Baby, explains: "I wrote Sula and The celebratory tradition. Time and time again Bluest Eye because they were books I these writers affirm black dignity and had wanted to read. No one had written survival by celebrating their characters' them yet, so I wrote them. My audience is victories in maintaining their self-esteem. always the people in the book I'm writing By and large, black women writers fall at the time. I don't think of an external into the same tradition with one marked audience." distinction. They give particular attention Gwendolyn Brooks has been addressto those who fall in racial battles, insisting ing her poetry more explicitly to .fellow that their fight, though unsuccessful, is blacks since the 1960s-a decade of valiant and therefore merits artistic atten-

tion. Black women writers have this distinctive voice in Afro-American literature. Pecola in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, DeWitt Williams in Gwendolyn Brooks' A Street in Bronze ville, Eva in Gayl Jones' Eva's Man and Beau Willie in Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Consider Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, all remind us that for every victor there is the vanquished, who is too easily forgotten.

Black women writers also acknowledge their characters' defeat-not for the purpose of generating either a sense of inferiority or the appearance of chronic victimization in their readers, but to ensure that the readers learn to appreciate both the circumstances leading to each character's fate and society's complicity in it. Moreover, black women writers habi-

tually insist that black people assume ultimate responsibility for their behavior, declaring that racism does not diminish the responsibility to nurture one's dignity and strengthen one's self-esteem. Fulfillment of this responsibility is in direct proportion to whether one protects or victimizes one's family and friends.

Alice Walker is most adamant about this kind of responsibility in her first novel The Third Life of Grange Copeland. At the novel's conclusion she has her protagonist Grange murder his own son as a means of preventing him from destroying Grange's granddaughter's life. In Walker's fictive world, one must assume responsibility for the quality of one's life, and one must deserve to live.

Another dominant issue in the work of practically every black woman writer is

the heroine's effort to nurture her selfesteem in a society where her womanhood is often not respected and where she is not rewarded, but often punished, for her efforts. Her condition has been symbolically -described as standing on a figurative pedestal that removes her from the contamination of mundane human activity. Such a social position was enviable to those who were denied access .to it, and young black women, especially, felt cheated because they were not regarded as feminine by their men, and were SUbsequently prevented from standing on the pedestal.

Black women writers have their heroines suffer with notions of femininity.

They long to be white, and they even have aspirations of climbing up and standing on the pedestal, until they real-

~TheDream Concretized'

Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.

The soul that knows it not, knows no release From little things.

and suffering. Clearly she is more than a gifted crafter of phrases and clauses, more even than a perceptive observer of humanity. One wonders who she is, and whether she ever knew any of the women of Brewster Place.

"Most writers feel about their characters that they are composites-they're everyone you know and no one you know," Naylor says. "You have to articulate through your own experiences, but you find that your characters have a way of taking on a life of their own."

There were, in fact, few if any similarities between ~Jaylor's environment and that of which she wrote. Brewster Place is a dilapidated street, a ghetto, and Naylor grew up in a middle-class, racially mixed section of New York's Queens. But, as she points out, the setting hardly matters .

"The women of Brewster Place were bigger than life, certainly they overshadowed that street and what that street represented. I was coming into my own as a woman during the time I wrote it."

Naylor says she began work on the book with an almost-prayerful thought in mind: "If I get to write only one book, dear God, let it be a book all about my reflections."

She is satisfied that she accomplished that. "What I wanted to capture was the human spirit in a very specific set of circumstances," she explains. "Now people write me letters, men and women from the rainbow of ethnicities, and they all say, 'I've known these women.' What they have known are human beings who have endured."

Naylor herself has endured, probably more than she chooses to confide. Fol- . lowing her high school graduation, she spent seven years with Jehovah's Wit-

Gloria Naylor's characters pay the price, but only sometimes find peace. If one is female and black and poor, as are the women in Naylor's American Book Award-winning first novel, The Women of Brewster Place, seldom is courage alone sufficient.

Was it so wrong that he seemed to need her constant support? Had he not been trained to expect it? And he had been trying so hard those last two weeks; she couldn't let him down now. She would go home and make him a special dinnercreamed chicken and rice-he always loved that. ... ... .She let the water run in the sink longer than necessary and dropped her knife and set the pots on the stove with a fraction of extra force. She made as much noise as she could to ward off the stillness of the upstairs bedroom that kept trying to creep into her kitchen, carrying empty drawers and closets. a vacant space where a suitcase had lain, missing toothpaste.

-From The Women of Brewster Place

Besides being black, female and poor, the seven diverse protagonists of The Women of Brewster Place also share one other vital element: none of them is a quitter. Naylor's book, ultimately, is eloquent testimony to her belief in the resilience of the human spirit.

Gloria Naylor has just finished her term as George Washington University's 1983-84 writer-in-residence. She is only 34 years old, yet her characters convey a lifetime-several lifetimes-of striving Reprinted Washington

with permission University.

from

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ize at the end of their fictive journeys that life up there is prescriptive, confining, and very destructive.

Ultimately the black heroines accept, affirm and celebrate their own definitions of womanhood by appreciating the freedom resulting from not being confined to someone else's expectations. They no longer yearn to be white; instead, they see their own singular beauty, as they dare to map out their lives. They become subjects, not objects for another's ambitions, designing roads to destinies of their own choosing.

Perhaps the most significant characteristic in black women's writing is the black heroine's insistence that she must understand and accept her strengths as well as her weaknesses; must learn to love herself before she can fully nurture her self-

esteem and define a meaningful identity that every woman-and likewise every responsible for fostering her for herself; must learn to love herself man-is own emotional development by defining before she can love another.

Sometimes the heroine's love for her- her identity, preserving her dignity, and self is misunderstood and viewed as charting her destiny. Predictably, this purely selfish. After all, we have all been newly found self is easy to love.

Discovering how and daring to love conditioned to believe that women are herself causes the heroine to experience supposed to take care of others; everyone comes before she does. But to base a startling awakening that is comparable to spiritual salvation, and in many ways is one's self-esteem on self-sacrifice, whether it be caring for one's mate, precisely that. Her awareness is, as NtDchildren, or family, and not to care for zake Shange insists in the finale of For one's own emotional well-being is a Colored Girls, like finding aspects of godliness in oneself and passionately celebratself-destructive proposition. Black women ing the discovery.

0 writers dramatize this time and time again in their work, but in doing so they are not advocating that women live in isolation or About the Author: Claudia Tate, who teaches among themselves-in short, without American literature at Howard University lin men, as some of their critics have sugWashington, D.C., is editor of Black Women Writers at Work. gested. What they are saying, though, is

nesses, including time as a door-to-door missionary in North Carolina and Florida.

"In a sense it was a period of escapism," she says. "But also I was doing something I believed in."

Later Naylor enrolled in Brooklyn College, where she quickly became conscious that her previous education had lacked an important element. "What I realized was missing was the literature that reflected me," Naylor says, "me meaning my femaleness and my blackness. In high school I'd had your average education in the classics-I'd read English writers, white men and women; and when you read American literature in high school in those years, you basically read the output of middle-class white males. A very good output, but still sort of a myopic view of what this society is composed of and what was coming out of this country in the way of writing."

At Brooklyn College, she says, "There was an African Studies Department and we studied black literature-which meant we studied the classic black males-and there was a Women's Studies Department, which meant studying white women. I took both, hoping that by running back ahd forth across that campus I'd get a picture of me." [Naylor points out, however, that Brooklyn's and many other schools' curricula have been changed since that time.]

The picture of herself that Gloria Naylor sought began to come into focus through a creative writing course at the college, in which she was introduced to the works of black women writers. "It was reading Toni Morrison and realizing that she was a black woman that gave me the impetus to try to write prose myself,"

explains author Gloria Naylor.

Naylor took six years to complete her BA in English at Brooklyn, because she was working to support herself and at the same time writing The Women of Brewster Place. The novel's completion and Naylor's college graduation occurred almost simultaneously. She then went to Yale, where she earned a master's degree in Afro-American studies. While there, the published novel was delivered to her. It was, she says, "A wild feeling; there it was-the dream concretized."

But she had already begun work on Linden Hills, a novel [now published] about a black, middle-class, professional neighborhood.

Another first is on Naylor's horizon.

She has a contract with public television to write a TV screenplay of The Women of Brewster Place. "Another weird story!"

Naylor laughs at the recollection. "At first I thought it was another nutty call-I do get them. A young man in Hollywood, Christopher Sands, called me and wanted the novel for TV. He loved it-and he is a white male. He told me the story of how he got interested in it. It seems his mother had seen the book in the public library and picked it out because she liked the cover! After she read it she mailed him a copy with a note that said, 'Chris, if you make anything, make this.'

"At first, when he said Hollywood, all my prejudices came out and I said, 'Look, thank you very much, but I'm very conscious of what Hollywood does with the image of blacks.' It took him about a year, but finally he convinced me that he wouldn't do some sort of slick thing wi~h it. He truly wanted to have it produced for television in a place where it wouldn't get

messed up." Naylor will write the two-hour screenplay. She is enthusiastic about the project, feeling that "It'll be fascinating to see it in another medium, and it will reach countless thousands more people than the book has."

What kinds of pressures are created by - all this success? "I'd be less than human if there weren't some pressure," Naylor admits. "But when you sit down to write, those things have to be just swept aside, because your true reality is that the former work is dead for you."

That process of "sitting down to write," the actual writing itself, is the part of her life that Naylor finds most satisfying.

"That's it," she says emphatically.

"Doing the work. I can't forget that or let it change now because of success."

Has she changed already, in any way?

Naylor thinks not; she alludes to earlier changes in her life, changes connected to the learning, growing and maturing process that led to the novel and the blossoming career. "It was the time in my life when I finally decided to take my destiny into my own hands and do something, as opposed to being a person who was always reacting. I finally acted," Naylor says. "I said, 'Well, I have this dream. Maybe, just maybe, I can really bring it to fruition.' I stopped playing at writing. I just decided I was going to sit down and write. After a person does that, she can't go back to being the person she was before. Ever. But it's frightening to begin. It's your own trans!ormation." 0 About the Author: Sandy Pinkus is the editor of gwTimes magazine and manager of publications at the George Washington University, Washington, D. C.

AGRICULTURAL AGGREGATION SANSKRIT SYSTEMS MATHEMATICAL MASTERPIECE

India and the United States will soon have a fund to finance joint research and development projects for new products.

U.S. Ambassador Harry G. Barnes, Jr., told the ninth annual meeting of the IndoU.S. Joint Business Council in New Delhi recently that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India (ICICI) are negotiating a fund "to provide seed money for U.S. and Indian firms interested in jointly researching and developing new products."

Referring to bilateral trade relations, the Ambassador noted that "the United States is still India's largest trading partner. IndoU.S. trade in 1983 amounted to over $4,000 million, 30 percent higher than the previous year." He said he expects the 1984 bilateral trade figures to register an increase of mory than 10 percent and, as was the case in 1983, the balance would be in India's favor.

American direct investments in India, Barnes noted, have been growing steadily and are around $500 million. For the fourth year in a row, he pointed out, the United· States had the largest number of collaboration agreements approved by the Government of India.

In his keynote address to the Council's meeting, Romesh Bhandari, Secretary in the Indian Ministry of External Affairs, explained the rationale behind India's "selective" trade policy. He said that India wanted technology that could be absorbed and reproduced here rather than systems that would make India perpetually dependent.

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Divi soorya sahasrasya bhavedhyugapaduddhita Yadi bhah sadhrashi sa syadbhasasthasya mahatmanaha.

If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky that would be like the splendour of the Mighty One!

Sanskrit has entered the computer age. At the sixth World Sanskrit Conference, recently held at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Sanskrit scholars and computer experts reported that they had successfully developed word-processing programs in Sanskrit, making it possible for researchers allover the world to create computer printouts in

the language. Using several computer programs, scholars can compose and print documents in either Roman letters or the ancient Sanskrit script.

"We are indeed very excited about this new development," said Peter Gaeffke, a University of Pennsylvania professor of modern Indian literature and a Sanskrit scholar. It was Gaeffke's personal commitment to

In his address, Orville Freeman, chairman of the U.S. delegation, said that nine new U.S. companies are represented in this year's meeting, in response to India's request that more American firms dealing with high technology and agrobusiness be included.

Freeman also pointed out that a number of initiatives have been taken by his country to promote U.S. investments in India and to reduce the threat of protectionist legislation passing the U.S. Congress. Toallay misgivings that the United States was not inclined to pass on high technology to India, he said that the ban on transfer of high technology does not apply to India. However, he added, there are sensitive areas with a military bearing where American technology is not allowed to be transferred to any country.

Chairman of the Indian delegation Dr. Bharat Ram underscored the need to collaborate in the areas of telecommunications, petrochemicals, electronics and agriculture.

Ramakrishna Bajaj, president of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, also emphasized the need for more bilateral collaborations. "With the marked improvement in the investment climate [in India]," he said, "the prospects of industrial expansion in the future are quite bright." In the Seventh Five-Year Plan, he added, "The private sector will have a major share, that is, 53 percent of the total investment."

Sanskrit and his untiring efforts that made it possible for the conference to be held in the United States for the first time.

"Sanskrit is an ancient language, a veritable treasure trove of Indian thought and philosophy. Throughout history dedicated Indian scholars laboriously copied manuscripts which has made it possible for many priceless Sanskrit works to survive. And now with the computer, the legacy of Sanskrit will be preserved forever."

The conference, which also delved into a variety of subjects ranging from Vedic studies to

an examination of Hinduism and Buddhism, to women in ancient India, was attended by some 300 Sanskrit scholars from 17 nations. The 'countries represented were Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Great Britain, India, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, the United States, West Germany and Yugoslavia. (From India came nine official delegates and more than 130 scholars.).

Atthe end of the conference, Gaeffke thanked the Government of India and its diplomatic missions in New York and

28-year-old Indian mathematician working with AT&T's Bell Labs in the United States has made headlines in newspapers and caused a considerable stir in the mathematical and industrial worlds for his' 'startling breakthrough" in the solving of systems of equations that are too complex even for the most advanced computers.

He is Narendra Karmarkar, and his discovery is a new "linear programming" algorithm-a step-by-step procedure that permits computers to solve complex problems faster than ever before.

Until recently, linear programming, a decision making tool, has been found adequate in solving countless day-to-day problems in science, business, industry and government. But today's problems are becoming too complex, often with thousands of interacting variables subject to thousands of constraints.

For example, how does a company determine the best way to deliver goods from its warehouses to its stores? The variables are the number of units of the product that should

Washington for their support.

He added, "We are greatly honored to hold this conference at the University of Pennsylvania, which has one of the best Sanskrit research and study programs, and houses the largest collection of Sanskrit manuscripts in the United States, dating from the birth of the language some 3,000 years ago."

Most of the university collection is the gift of the late W. Norman Brown, an internationally renowned Sanskrit scholar, who taught Sanskritfor 40 years at the University of Pennsylvania before his death.

be sent from each warehouse to each store, and the solution determines what these numbers are. To be feasible, a solution must meet certain constraints: It must fulfill the demand for the product at each store and not exceed the availability of the product at each warehouse. There is a known transportation cost between each warehouse and each store, and the final solutionthe optimal solution-sends the products in such a way that the total transportation cost is minimized.

Though minimizing cost is a typical objective in linear programming problems, other equally important objectives could be to minimize time or waste or (in the case of a communications network, for example) to maximize the flow of information.

The algorithms currently in use in linear programming are all based on the Simplex method, devised some 40 years ago by George Dantzig of Stanford University. "The Simplex method is fine for problems with a few thousand variabies," says Dr. Karmarkar, who was born in Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh, and was raised in Pune, Maharashtra.

"But above 16 or 20 thousand, it runs out of steam." Talking about his algorithm, he says: "I have tested the algorithm on many problems, and I'm quite convinced it will work well."

Until Karmarkar's discovery, mathematicians and computer scientists have wrestled for years in search of a better system-a polynomial-time algorithm, whose speed would be a polynomial function of problem size rather than an exponential function as with the Simplex method. A polynomial-

time algorithm would offer more than speed for the sake of speed. It could greatly extend the power of linear programming to whole new areas of application, including control problems like those encountered in space applications and robotics.

How did Karmarkar think of it? "I think it was a series of revelations or clicks in my mind.

It was a flash of ideas. And then I used maths to work out the ideas."

Karmarkar's colleagues and friends say that he is gifted with "higher dimensional intuition" -the ability to imagine geometric forms of many dimensions, Karmarkar'describes his algorithm in geometric terms, explaining first that "feasible solutions to a linear programming problem form a polygon in multidimensional space."

Instead of trying to envision multidimensional space, he says, think of a large, irregular geodetic dome. Each vertex here represents a solution, and one of them is the optimal solution. The job of the algorithm is to find that optimal vertex.

The Simplex method moves mathematically from vertex to vertex, in a systematic way that enables it to eliminate groups of vertices without visiting them.

The ellipsoid method (developed in 1979 but found unsatisfactory) surrounds the entire structure mathematically with a series of ellipsoids that ultimately close in on the opti: mal solution.

However, Karmarkar's system works from the interior and transforms the structure so that a selected interior point becomes the center. A new point is then located in the direction that will further minimize-or maximize-the objective, and

another transformation brings that point into center.

The transformation of the structure-a process that Karmarkar calls "normalization"is the key to the success of the method. "There is a long history of algorithms that worked from the interior of the structure," he notes, "but they were unsuccessful because they omitted this essential step of normalization. " The kind of mathematical thinking Karmarkar uses in his work began in childhood, and was influenced by his father and uncle, both of whom are mathematicians. "I was always very good at maths, even before I went to school. It comes to me naturally," says Karmarkar. No wonder, he received India's National Science Talent Award in 1972 for mathematics.

As the top student of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, where he majored in electrical engineering, Karmarkar received the President of India medal in 1978.

Karmarkar earned his master's degree from the California Institute of Technology in 1979, and his doctorate in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1982.

He has been working with Bell Labs for almost a year now.

As mathematicians and computer scientists the world over further test and evaluate the efficacy of Karmarkar's algorithm, he has secured a place for himself in mathematical history.

Commenting on Karmarkar's discovery, Ronald L. Graham, director of mathematical sciences at Bell Labs, said, "Science has its moments of great progress, and this may well be one of them." And Arno Penzias, vice-president (research) of AT&T Bell Labs, said, "We use the word 'breakthrough' so often that we're without a suitable word when something like this happens. This is indeed a breakthrough."

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rom a chronically deficit country, India today is a net exporter of foodgrains-thanks to the Green Revolution. Some of the stimulation for this revolution came in the Fifties when India embarked on an ambitious program of modernization of its agriculture by setting up agricultural universities around . the country. Helping in this process were a number of American Land-Grant UniversitiBs, which provided officers and professional staff for consultation and technical assistance in the. creation and initial development of these institutions.

In November 1984, a team including representatives of the six universities that aided the initial development of Indian agricultural universities visited this country. Representing the American universities were Dr. John R. Campbell, Dean, University of Illinois which supported the G.B. Pant University of Agriculture and Technology at Pantnagar (the first agricultural university in In.dia) and the Jawaharlal Nehru Krishi Vishwa Vidyalaya at Jabalpur; Dr. John Dunbar, Dean, Kansas State University, which assisted the Andhra Pradesh Agriculture University at Hyderabad; Dr. Francille Firebaugh, Provost, Ohio State University, which helped the Punjab Agricultural University at Ludhiana, and the Haryana Agricultural University at Hissar (Ohio State University has also provided limited assistance to the National Dairy Research Institute in Karnal, Haryana); Dr. O. Glen Hall, Dean, University of Tennessee, which assisted the University of Ar,ricultural Sciences at Ban- . galore. and also provided consultation concerning the creation of the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University at Coimbatore; Dr. W. Wayne Hinish, Associate Director, Penn State University, which supported the Mahatma Phule Krishi Vidyalaya at Rahuri, Maharashtra; and Dr. Rog~r Mitchell, Dean, University of Missouri, which provided support to the Orissa University of Agriculture and Technology at Bhubaneshwar.

The delegation was led by Dr. E.T. York, Jr., Chairman of the Board for International Food and Agriculture Development. According to him, India's remarkable progress in agriculture has been indeed an inspiration to the rest of the developing world for self-sufficiency in food production. "We came with high expectations," said Dr. York, "but were impressed beyond our expectations at the progress India has made in the field. In 1955 no one could have believed that India would become a net food exporter within 30 years ....

It's been a marvelous visit. The professionalism that has come into agricultural research, the training through extension programs that is being imparted to farmers-it is all quite splendid."

Members of the delegation were guests of the Government of India, and the main purpose of their visit was to "renew old relationships." This they certainly did. Dr. Campbell was "thrilled" at the warm reception former students gave the delegation. "We were swamped by the warmth," he said, and remarked that many of the 340 former Indian students who studied atthe University of Illinois are "today in senior positions .in agricultural institutions and in the Government of India." Everyone was deeply "impressed with the Indian faculty commitment to provide food for India." And Dr. Firebaugh felt that "developments in agricultural research were very exciting, especially the openness that Indian researchers exhibited about their stren.gths and weaknesses."

During their 12 days in India, the team met officials and professional staff of 7 agricultural universities, 10 central agricultural research institutes and senior officials of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research. "They were good meetings," said Dr. York. "We talked of new types of linkages, new steps that might be taken for reinvolvement of Indian and American institutions in joint research programs."

However, he thought that it was too early to make any assessment of the success of their mission as more reciprocal visits were required from both sides to hammer some kind of programs into shape. Generally what was needed was to develop dialogue about new areas in the fields of technology and professional development.

Dr. York was also of the opinion that American and Indian agricultural scientists should start interaction by exchanging information on their efforts of how best to solve the world's food problem.

India has done some primary research that may be complementary with the work of other scientists, especially in the area of tropical and semitropical plants. A greater exchange of ideas and technology would speed up the process of final implementation of the research effort and be translated into more food for India, and even for the whole world.

India could also playa significant role in cataloging the expertise in the different sectors of agriculture and where it is available. This information may be used to supplement The Register of International Resources, which is being developed in the United States and is intended to act as an interface and a reference source of international talent for global agricultural development.

Perhaps India's contribution to this Register could be coordinated with the Land-Grant Colleges and Universities Program.

"The American Land-Grant Universities," said Dr. York, "are like any other universities or institutions, except that they are expected to lay a special emphasis on training in agriculture and related field technologies." This group of U.S. institutions was established under the first Morrill Act (1862), by which federal lands were donated to the several states. Proceeds of the sales of this land were to be used in the state as a perpetual fund, the in- . terest from which was to be appropriated for the "support of at least one college where the leading object shall be ... to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanical arts."

Today 40 percent of the funds for the Land-Grant institutions come from the state governments, 30 percent from the Federal Government, and only 10 percent from tuition and other fees paid by students. The remaining 20 percent is derived from private gifts, endowment earnings and miscellaneous sources. 0

Poetry and History Poetry, despite the almost magical powers of the greatest poets, is a human labor, and what humanity most desperately needs is not the creation of new worlds but the re-creation, in terms of human comprehension, of the world we have, and it is to this task that all the arts are committed ....

The Creation, we are informed by the Christian Bible, was accomplished in seven days with Sunday off, but the re-creation will never be accomplished because it is always to be accomplished anew for each new generation of living men. To hold the vast, whirling, humming, buzzing, boggling confusion of the Greek world still long enough to see it is not to hold the vast, whirling, humming, buzzing, boggling confusion of our world still. New charms are necessary-new spells, new artifices. Whether they know it or not, the young men forgather in Paris in one generation, in San Francisco in another, because the world goes round, the light changes, and the old jugs will not carry living water. New jugs must be devised which the generation past will reject as monstrosities and the generation to come will, when it arrives, reject for other reasons: as banalities and bores.

But the essential point is that this labor does not differ in kind from the continuing labor of generations of journalists and historians who also face a new and turning world and who must also find new ways to speak of it. The materials of poetry, whatever the miracles accomplished with them, are gathered where the materials of history, present and past, are gathered, in what Keats called the arable field of events. Poetry transforms these materials by a faculty the use of which is discouraged in journalism, the faculty of imagination, but the product of the metamorphosis is not an opposite thing from the product of the process known in journalism as reporting. It is not what our grandfathers used to say it was: a "fancy" as opposed to the sober "facts" of practical men .... The constructions of the imagination are not fancies and never were.

The re-creations of the imagination do correspond to the experience of the real physical world. Poetry may take liberties with the materials of that experience which history and journalism are not free to take. It may translate them into unexpected and even improbable forms. But it neither will nor can disguise their origins in experience, for the moment it did so it would cease to be an art. It would become a sorcery, a magic.

Those Grecian centaurs, half man, half horse, those Oriental mother goddesses all arms and breasts-these derive from nature. It is only the arrangement of the parts which is unnatural! The parts themselves-the horse, the man, the arms, the breasts-have been discovered in the world the senses know. Even what we call "abstraction" in the art of our own day is not new creation in the sense in which the world of Genesis is new. Vision reduced to line, balance, color, proportion is still vision and still belongs in a world in which line, balance, color, and proportion exist.

Indeed, this dependence of poetry, of all art, on human experience of the actual world is only made the more obvious by the attempts of art, which have been frequent in our time, to

escape from the actual world. Poems, for example, which derive from the subconscious mind as the poems of the early Surrealists did, or purported to do, are still poems of experience and still poems composed by a process of selection from among the moments of experience. The only difference is that the selecting sieve is set up somewhere outside the conscious mind.

But the poem does not become, in consequence, a parentless, pristine creation. On the contrary, it is even more obviously and immediately derived from the common human reality than a poem made, as the Greeks made poems, under the selective direction of a conscious intelligence. The proof lies in the experiments of those contemporary psychiatrists who have attempted to work their way back through completed poems to their roots in experience. They have made very little of the poems of, say, John Donne, but they have had a harvest home with the works of the Surrealists.

A Surrealist poem is a direct recording of the experiencing mind on the tape of speech, and all that need be done to make one's way to the unhappy childhood or the illicit love is to play the recording back. John Donne is another matter. The conscious act of art is there to make a mechanical playback impossibl~.

But one need not go to Surrealists or their successors to make the point. The most apparently fanciful of all familiar poems will testify, if you will truly read them, that their fancies are no less substantial, no less true, no less real-at least no less authenticated by experience-than the most substantial facts ....

I am not -suggesting that the facts of journalism are insubstantial. I am merely suggesting that there is no such difference between the facts of journalism and the fancies of poetry as we assume when we turn them into each other's opposites. You can prove it to yourself in either way: by reading poems or by reading newspapers. What do you remember about the recent revolution in a Middle East country-in some ways the most important news story of that year? What I remember is the account of the assassination of the old Premier, the most powerful man in the valley of the two rivers, who was shot in the dress of an old woman. Why do I remember that?

Because the fact becomes something more than fact in that telling. Because I understand something of the man-and of those who killed him. Because the political event becomes a human event and casts a shadow far beyond the valley, far beyond the desert, far beyond the Middle East. It is only when the scattered and illegible fragments in which we pick up our experience of the world are recomposed in such a way that they make sense as human experience that great journalism can result. And the same thing is true in the same words of poetry.

What poetry composes of its fragments is more lasting than what journalism composes. It is larger. It goes deeper. It is more meaningful. It has beauty. But it is not contrary in kind. Poetry and journalism-to put it in more inclusive terms, poetry and history-are not opposites and cannot be opposites, and the notion that they are is a delusion.

0 About the Author: Archibald MacLeish, who died at ag(! 90 in 1982, was a statesman, poet, dramatist and a much decorated soldier. He was an Assistant Secretary of State (1944-45), a founder member of UNESCO, and published 40 books of poetry, prose and drama. He won two Pulitzer Prizes for poetry and one for drama.

LEAVES OF GRASS ON THE KERALA COAST In this memoir, a famous Indian poet describes how as a young girl in the lush green Malabar countryside, she chanced upon Walt Whitman's book of Poems, Leaves of Grass.

"Afterward,," she says, "there was ~o poet to influence me so greatly."

When I was a child, growing up in my ancestral home in South Malabar, I was fond of stealing into my granduncle's II study while he took his afternoon siesta in his bedroom above our gatehouse. My granduncle, NaJapat Narayana Menon, was at that time a poet admired by the intellectuals of the state. He had in his formative years dabbled in theosophy. Later, becoming a Sanskrit scholar, he studied the Hindu scriptures and kept a private journal into which he poured forth his . discoveries. Soon after he completed his last book, his magnum opus, Arshagnyanam (The Wisdom of the Orient), he died of a heart attack, lying on his soft opulent bed in the narrow room over the gatehouse from which one could hear the sea at high tide hour. , Every afternoon as a child I went into his study which was merely a grilled balcony shaded by the branches of the mango trees that grew around it. In the bookcases made out of rude yellow wood were the books that made me breathless with excitement: the old Sanskrit ones which I could not at that time understand, with their stylized illustrations; and the manuscripts on palm leaves tied up with red string, which were supposed to contain the esoteric texts of the mantras which healed, bewitched or killed their victims. On the lower shelves were stacked Anatole France, Turgenev, Nietzsche and Maurice Maeterlinck. Among this group I chanced one day to come upon a book of poems by Walt Whitman, a first edition, with the poet's face as a frontispiece. The bearded face reminded me of the Christian God in my schoolbook of catechism, who stood behind some clouds gesturing angrily to Adam and Eve to get out of the Garden of Eden. And Eve, to escape the terrible glare of His eyes, stood hiding her face on her mate's shoulders. I stared at Walt Whitman's face for a long time before I began to read his poetry. If I had spent all my childhood in a city and gone only to city schools where the school marms taught the children to recite the nursery rpymes, cutely gesticulating, I would not have had the sheer ecstasy of reading geniuses like Maeterlinck or Whitman. From nursery rhymes I would have graduated to Hans Christian Andersen I and the Brothers .Grimm. But .~t my gra~duncle:s place, living I as part of a matnarchal, matnlIneal society, I npened fast on adult diet. The first poem that caught my fancy was one which

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narrated the sad story of an Alabama bird who had lost his mate. Seated in the nest where their light green eggs lay, the bird began to cry, calling out to his mate, begging all to be quiet, even the husky sea, because he believed that his she-bird was responding to his call, so faint that he must be still be still to listen .... Singing uselessly uselessly all the night. If I did weep then for the bird, I was later comforted by the poet who said and 1 will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death.

I believe that all of us have a couple of parents at the beginning of our lives giving flesh and form, but that our real parents are chosen by us after we grow old enough to make such a choice. My father working in a British-owned automobile firm in Calcutta seemed at that time far more distant than Walt Whitman who' spoke to me answering all the unasked questions lurking in my mind. I went into his poetry as one enters a new continent, with expectation and always a little out of breath. I learnt then about the good people whose drink was always water and whose blood was clean and clear. It hinted at a purity which I could not then comprehend, but I knew that it was necessary to be pure. When he talked of the forenoon purple of the hills I looked out of the grill and saw my green estate, my palms, my mango trees and the deeper green that hid the sea from me. All the riches of the world which I was to see later were poured into my mind. The illuminated face of the mother of many children, a murmuring fateful giant voice out of the earth and sky, voice of a mighty dying tree in the redwood forests, dense, the summer growth, innocent and disdainful above the strata of sour dead, the curious sense of body and identity and the eternal star beyond. the camp fires of a traveling army .... I looked at mothers in a strange new light and they seemed like goddesses. I looked at the tall trees that brought forth their fragrant blossoms in spring and began to worry about their death. I learnt that ~ars are only light troop movements on the gigantic face of our world, and that they cannot even bruise the eternal loveliness of the universe. Whitman said: Behold, 1 do not give lectures or a little charity When I give, 1 give myself 1 am large, I contain multitudes, 1 sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world ....

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A good man was large. He contained multitudes. I felt at times that the poet from the far-off country was looking down with hypnotic eyes from the sky above our red-tiled house.

Consider you who peruse me whether I may not in unknown ways be looking upon you You furnish your parts towards eternity Great or small you furnish your parts towards¡ the soul.

He had a wide sweep. He wanted like Atlas to hold up the world. But the growing knowledge of the world humbled him. a I see now that life cannot exhibit all to me, as the day cannot, I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited after death.

When my father came on leave and thought aloud that I had become a villager, I did not fret about his reproach. Walt Whitman sustained my pride.

A great city is that which has the greatest men and wor,wn If it be a few ragged huts it is still the greatest city in the whole world.

I adored my granduncle, not only because he was the best looking man of the locality but because he was famous and caused the best intellectuals of the state to gravitate toward him. Writers came in droves to be our house guests for weeks.

They were enthralled by my granduncle's wit and brilliance.

When he found himself alone he worked on his books, seated in his easy chair, with a writing board placed across it. Above his head was a crude punkhah, a fan made out of a single plank of wood covered with red frilly calico which a servant, hidden behind a pillar, worked, tugging its long string with his toes.

Next to my granduncle's chair was a dictionary on an iron stand and a low table burdened with books of reference. At his feet was a hookah, a hubble-bubble, which my beautiful grandaunt filled with care. When my granduncle sucked at it the sweet aroma of tobacco and rosewater filled even the distant rooms-of the zenana. The visiting writers did not speak much in our house. They were awed by his presence. The grandeur of his . mind made them speechless so that if they talked at all they stuttered like imbeciles.

One day while he was trimming the branches of his white roses, he turned toward me in surprise when I recited a poem that I had written about roses. Who taught you to write poetry in English, he asked me. Walt Whitman, I said. Then washing his hands and wiping them clean, he took the gray book out of

his shelf and presented it to me. I feel a sob rising in my throat when I recollect that morning, his pink finger tips and the weight of the book laid across my hands. My granduncle had acknowledged me as a poet. It was a great moment in my life.

Then I began to fill my notebook with poems which I showed my granduncle who clapped his hands and laughed happily.

Afterward there was no poet to influence me so greatly.

Probably Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol" did impress me but not the others who were fashionable in my early youth. I tried not to read much, for I wanted to evolve my own style before knowing of others. When I was made the poetry editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India, my utter ignorance of the current meters. made my friends anxious for me. But I come from a family of poets. Like an infant recognizing its mother by pure instinct, I recognize poetry when I read it. I sense it immediately. I cannot perhaps give reasons for my choice. I do not worry about the architectural novelties of the poem that I am to judge. I expect a certain discipline certainly, a certain integrity of thought. If craftsmanship counted much, I would not have loved Walt Whitman's earlier poems which were loose-knit like the shuffling walk of a tramp. But the discipline of a great mind showed through it, lighting up for his descendants the only lovely path that writers must tread-that of purity. Ralph Waldo Emerson called him the greatest literary figure of his time. But poetry is timeless. Release him from the framework of time, make him deathless, although he cried once: I am a man who sauntering along without fully stopping, turns A casual look upon you and then averts his face Leaving it to you to prove and define it Expecting the main things from you ....

That averted face, that casual look, was enough to cause a disturbance that must last a lifetime. With him I exult in being alive physically, in being able to see the world as he saw it possessing the good of the earth and sun, exulting in my identity received by my body, exulting in the fact that I do not crave for riches safe and palling nor the tame enjoyment ....

Whitman released American poetry from the clutches of the British tradition and made it native and pure. And as poetry has no special country of its own, no caste, no community, it moved me to tears when I first read it at my home in South Malabar.

0

Kamala Das has won several awards including the Asian Poetry Prize from the P. E. N. Centre, Manila, the Kerala Sahitya Akademi A ward and the Chimanlal A ward for Fearless Journalism. She has published 14 books in Malayalam (under the pseudonym Madhavi Kutty) and four in English-Summer in Calcutta, The Descendants, The Old Playhouse and My Story. Her poems have been translated

into Swedish by Ostem Sjostrand. She also writes for magazines and newspapers.~She was considered for the Nobel Prize last year.

A MARCH

OF IDEAS

Leafing through the past issues of SPAN one sees some of the major social changes that have taken place in our lives in just a quarter of a century.

I. Women's Liberation. As that ad (SPAN October ]974) says, "You've come a long way, baby." The figures victories aren't evident only in employment (more women lawyers. engineers, scientists) but also in attitudes-of both men and women. Perhaps feminism's major achievement has been.motivating women to do what they want to do, not what others expect them to do.

2. Water wonder.

When SPAN first used this photograph of an Indian farmer diverting water from a rivulet to his; field in June 1966, India was a food importer, unable to feed its millions without foreign aid. When the picture was repeated in May 1979, India's remarkable Green Revolution had changed all that. India's several multipurpose river projects, some built with American cooperation, helped bring about the revolution.

3. Saving the environment.

Environmental consciousness has grown, producing regulations, legislation, protests and safety measures. However, the caption of this picture in SPAN's May 1971 issue is still starkly true: "Deafened by the shriek of technology, man now faces the realization that his scientific achievements often undermine the very environment he is trying to improve."

4. Life. The child in this award-winning photograph

by Ruth Orkin, published in SPAN in February 1965, is an adult today. Thanks to the increasing importance of health care and to medical discoveries and inventions, child mortality has decreased in both India and America.

Life expectancy has increased.

The stress now is on improving the quality of life.

5. Civil Rights. In August 1963 about 200,000 people rallied in Washington to support civil rights legislation. The marchers, both blacks and whites, heard Martin Luther King Jr., declare, "[ have a dream .... " Less than a year later (in June 1964), the U.S. Congress passed the Civil Rights Bill, banning discrimination in voting, jobs, public accommodations and other fields.

Heroic Struggle of Margaret Sanger If it had not been for Margaret Sanger's untiring efforts and perseverance, her vision and faith, her courage and sacrifices, the concept of family planning might not have become reality.

Sixty-eight years have passed since that eventful day, October 16, 1916, when Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States.

The establishment of the Brownsville Clinic in a crowded section of Brooklyn, New York, became a focal point in her long and persistent crusade to help save the lives of millions of women throughout the world.

If it had not been for Margaret Sanger's untiring efforts, her vision and faith, the legal right to plan a family to safeguard the health of mothers might not have been possible today in many nations.

At a time when vast areas of the United States were unpopulated, Sanger prophesied the dangers of an unlimited population and the economic and social problems that it would generate. She emphasized the dire predictions of Thomas Robert Malthus, English economist who, in 1798, had published his views in An Essay on the Principle of Population.

But her main concern was an immediate one: to alleviate the plight of women who, because of economic and physical reasons, begged to know "the secret" of limiting the size of their families. She faced many obstacles-fear, lack of understanding and prejudice-in her struggle to revise a law that banned the dissemination of birth control information. Her compassionate defiance of convention even led to her arrest on October 26, 1916, 10 days after she opened the Brownsville Clinic. She served 30 days in the prison workhouse.

"I believed then, and do today," Sanger wrote in her autobiography, My Fight for Birth Control, "that the opening of those doors to the mothers of Brownsville was an act of social significance in the lives of American women."

The achievements of Margaret Sanger, who was 83 at the time of her death in September 1966, command the respect

and appreciation of the world. This gallant lady lived to see her philosophy become part of the planning of governments, scientists and international organizations.

The force that shaped Sanger's work was the misery she observed working as a nurse among indigent, large families. "I resolved," she said, "that women should have some knowledge of their own bodies, some knowledge of contraception .... You ask me how I could face all the persecution, the martyrdom, the opposition. I'll tell you how: I knew I was right. It was as simple as that, I knew I was right."

Although Margaret Sanger's interest in birth control-a term she coinedstemmed from her nursing career, circumstances of her childhood influenced her crusade. Born in Cprning, New York, she was the sixth of 11 children of Michael and Ann Higgins. She recalled that there were always debts and household bills, an,d a mother who grew more frail year by year. Mrs. Higgins, aged prematurely by childbearing and tuberculosis, died when she was 48. Michael Higgins died when he was in his 80s.

"I can never look back on my childhood with joy," said Sanger. "We often get together, my brothers and sisters and I, and laugh about things that happened then, but I never desire to live it over again. It was a hard childhood, which compelled one to face the realities of life before one's time .... " But red-headed Margaret developed from her father an independence of thinking and determination which was to color her life. Michael Higgins loved to preach, to argue, to thunder his opposition to all dogma. His own small library was one of the best in the town, and he demanded the privilege of books for all, through free libraries. He.supported the right of full individual liberty for women as well as men and defended the campaign for woman suffrage.

"The one thing I've been able to give you is a free mind," he said to his children. "Use it well and give something back to your generation."

Margaret Sanger adhered to this advice; her achievements benefited not only her generation, but will benefit generations to follow.

Young Margaret's education began in the

schools of Corning; later, she attended Claverack College in New York State. Her two older sisters helped with her college expenses, and she supplemented these funds by washing dishes and waiting on tables. Her natural ability to lead and organize was apparent during her college years, characteristics which were to dominate her campaign for birth control.

After a short term of teaching, Margaret was called home to nurse her dying mother.

She later began training as a nurse at the White Plains Hospital in New York, and then did graduate nursing work at the Manhattan Eye and Ear Hospital. There, the stage was set for her career and the cause that she was to found and develop.

Meanwhile, Margaret met her future husband, William Sanger, an architect, and was married on August 18, 1902. She had three children, two sons, and a daughterwho died in childhood. Her sons, Stuart and Grant, became physicians. The Sangers were later divorced and she married J. Noah Slee, an oil company executive, in 1922. (She retained the name Sanger because of its identification with her campaign.

At a time of social ferment, when the feminist cause was on the move, Margaret Sanger became restless. She decided to follow a nursing career, and became aware of the desperate situation of many of her women patients with large families and low incomes. "No woman," she wrote, "can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will orwill not bea mother." In her fight to obtain this freedom, her main adversary was the restrictive Comstock law, under which information on birth control, sex and venereal disease were all labeled obscene.

When Sanger began her crusade, her problem was a basic one-finding information on contraceptives.

For months she researched libraries; she called on doctors and pharmacists, but they avoided her questions. She refused to accept defeat.

Finally, a friend suggested a solution: travel to France where, traditionally, women had for generations passed on information about family limitation practices. In 1913, Sanger embarked on her important mission, accompanied by her husband and children. Later, armed with her newly acquired information, she returned to the United States to strike a firm blow against the Comstock law.

She published a magazine, The Woman Rebel, in which she used the phrase "birth control" for the first time. Because she could not publish contraceptive information, she wrote a message denouncing the law prohibiting it. The magazine was banned from the mails within a month. Sanger was warned that if she continued publication, she faced a possible five-year prison term and a $5,500 fine.

But Margaret Sanger was defiant. She continued publishing the magazine, which drew an overwhelming audience.

She wrote a pamphlet, Family Limitation, and after a search, located a courageous individual who printed 100,000 copies of it. (The pamphlet was later translated into 13 languages, 10 million copies were printed, and thousands more were copied so that the information could be passed from hand to hand.) Sanger was indicted but the charge against her was eventually dismissed. She had won the first battle in her campaign for birth control. And, for the first time, the subject became a topic for discussion in the press.

"It was as though I was born to this," she said later. "I could no more stop than I could change the color of my eyes."

Meanwhile, Sanger traveled to Europe again to obtain more information. It was during these years that she saw the complete picture, that the fight for birth control involved not only the needs of individuals, but the health and economic status of nations.

She visited the Netherlands where the world's first birth control clinic had been established by Dr. Aletta Jacobs in 1878.

She conferred with Dr. Johannes Rutgers about birth control techniques and spent days studying statistics on birth and death rates and infant mortality.

"The facts were illuminating and the conclusions revealing," wrote Sanger. "I glowed with fresh enthusiasm as this data proved that a controlled and directed birth rate was as beneficial as I had conceived it might be."

Following her trip to the Netherlands, Sanger opened the Brownsville Clinic in 1916. She was determined that women in the United States would be instructed in birth control techniques, and she was equally determined to test the law which prohibited that instruction.

Unable to find a doctor who would head the clinic, she operated it with the help of her sister, Ethel Byrne, also a registered nurse, and another woman, Fania Mindel.

Ten days following the opening of the clinic, Margaret Sanger and her sister wen!arrested for "maintaining a public

Margaret Sanger (above) opened the first American birth control . clinic in October 1916 in Brooklyn, New York (right)-and was arrested 10 days laterfor "maintaining a public nuisance. " She ultimately won legal and public opinion to her side. Women overcame their hesitation and started visiting birth control centers. Below, the waiting room of a 1921 clinic.

nuisance" and sentenced to 30 days in The court decision, issued in January jail. Ethel Byrne gained nationwide sym1918, was a major victory. Now Margaret pathy by going on a hunger strike in Sanger wanted to deliver her message to prison which led to her eventual release. women everywhere. Invitations to lecture Sanger served her full 30-day sentence came from all corners of the globe. Her rather than obey a law she considered travels took her to Europe, then to unjust.

Japan, Korea, China, and to India iil "It is no exaggeration," recalled San1935. She toured 18 cities in India and ger, "to call this period in the birth held dozens of conferences with city ofcontrol movement the most stirring up to ficials, medical societies and social workthat time, perhaps the most stirring of all ers. "Always," wrote Lawrence Lader in times. For it was the only period in which his book The Margaret Sanger Story, "she we had experienced jail terms, hunger made birth control not just an instrument strikes .... It was the first time that there of science, but a flame of hope." were any number of widespread demonAt home in the United States, Sanger strations in our behalf. ... " found that one phase of the battle was The arrest laid the groundwork for court won, but that there were many others left rulings which gave one section of the Comto conquer. Physicians were slow to take stock law a more favorable interpretation-¡ advantage of the court decision and . several groups denounced it. But the a physician could now give contraceptive advice to a married woman "for the prevenmovement continued to grow and the tion and cure of disease." number of Sanger's supporters increased.

"I was besieged with letters and mes.sages," she said, "requesting me to speak at clubs, to debate in halls and to write for magazines."

In 1921, Sanger organized the first American Birth Control Conference in New York, which was attended by leading physicians, scientists and supporters from many walks of life. Following the conference, she established the American Birth Control League, outlining these goals: "To build up public opinion so that women should demand instruction from doctors; to assemble the findings of scientists; to remove hampering federal statutes; and to cooperate with similar bodies in studying population problems, food supplies and world peace." The League, later disbanded, eventually led to the formation of the Planned Parenthood "Federation of America, Incorporated. The Federation was later merged with the World Population Emergency Campaign and called Planned Parenthood-World Population.

Another important milestone in the birth control movement was the opening

by Sanger of a Bureau of Clinical Research in 1923 in New York City, now called the Margaret Sanger Research Bureau. She started it as an experimental bureau designed to demonstrate the practicability of birth control clinics in all of America's cities and towns. She wanted it to become a social force and prove itself as a health center. Actually, it was the first permanent birth control clinic in the United States, fashioned after the shortlived Brownsville Clinic.

During her last visit to India in 1959, Margaret Sanger met Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. She sent photographs of herself and Nehru to her granddaughters, asking them "to be sure to hold these forever. "

Using the New York City ~linic as a model, birth control clinics began to spring up throughout the United States.

The second clinic was established in Chicago, Illinois. By 1930 there were 55 birth control clinics in 23 cities in 12 states.

Margaret Sanger's dream was being realized. The opening of this chain of clinics was a testament to her unswerving devotion to a cause. Recalling the opposition and the work involved, she said that those first years "remain in my memory as ones of smiles and tears, of heartaches and anxieties."

All this is a far cry from the present time, when thousands of birth control clinics have been established throughout the world. Today, because of their similar aims, governments of many nations are cooperating in promoting planned parenthood. Along with the United Nations, private organizations, foundations and individuals, leaders of many countries are devoting increased attention to the population problem. India's Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, during her visit to the United States in April 1965, asserted that population control is "at the core" of her people's "hopes and 'plans for a better India."

Since Sanger's struggle, there has been tremendous progress in the development of new contraceptive methods. Two of these, the oral pill and the Intra-Uterine Contraceptive Device (IUCD) represent significant advances in birth control.

Margaret Sanger lived to see a constantly increasing number of planned parenthood centers established'throughout the United States. Today, the use of contraceptives is legal in all of the 50 ,states of America and many provide family planning services.

In the field of information concerning

population control, much has been accomplished in the United States and other countries.

Census-taking, compiling vital statistics, projecting future population trends and analyzing the interrelationship between future trends and economic and social development, are all contributing to the education of the public and serving as a basis for developing programs of action. There has been considerable research on family planning techniques to determine those which are acceptable and effective in different economic, social, cultural and religious environments.

The existence of such active programs is a tribute to Margaret Sanger's pioneering efforts. In addition, she won many awards and honorary degrees for her significant achievements. In 1931, she received the American Women's Award for "integrity, vision and valor," and in 1936 she was given the Town Hall Award of Honor for "conspicuous contribution to the enlargement and enrichment of life." The Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation honored her for being "foremost in teaching families wise planning in birth control and being a leader in influencing nations toward balanced popula tion. " Margaret Sanger has been called "Humanist of the Year," "Woman of the Century," and was named in 1965 to the Women's Hall of Fame as one of the 20 outstanding women of 'the 20th century.

At a testimonial dinner in 1965 which Sanger was unfortunately not able to attend, Mrs. B.K. Nehru, wife of India's Ambassador to the United States, paid tribute to the great humanitarian. She was a rebel, said Mrs. Nehru, who went to jail to win freedom for women because she believed in the unjustness of unwanted large families. "America is fortunate to have this little woman who has assured a healthy life to all mothers," Mrs. Nehru added.

Margaret Sanger's work is done and others have now to meet the challenge in continuing the great movement that she founded. "Her name will be held in honor in distant ages when the sounding exploits of soldiers and statesmen have faded to thin echoes," columnist Max Freedman wrote in a tribute to the great lady.

"Of her it can be said without paradox, that children yet unborn will call her blessed and keep her name sweet, for because of Margaret Sanger, they will be born with a more decent chance in life."

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ON THE LIGHTER SIDE STI<L PBMCU ADFHJI

ONE MORE CARTOON fOR

JANUARY

PLEASE

ISSUE

./

EDITOR

SPAN

The Artistry of

Lillian Gish Her career almost spans our century. The star of silent classics like Orphans of the Storm (1921, right, holding her sister Dorothy Gish) andThe Wind (1928, center), Lillian Gish still enriches films with her presence as she did in The Night of the Hunter (1955, far right).

Lillian Gish made her first appearance on the stage in 1901 at the age of five-as Baby Lillian-acted in her first film in 1912, and her latest film was released a few months ago. Lillian Gish is no ordinary actress; by common consent, she is one of the greatest of this century. Her performances exist in films that have been subjected to scrutiny again and again. The verdict is always the same: Lillian Gish is astonishing.

Meeting her is an exhilarating experience, for her enthusiasm is undimmed.

She has the ability to convey her memories as though relating them for the first time. To see that face-the most celebrated of the entire silent era, and so little changed-and to hear references to "Mr. Griffith" and "Mary Pickford" is to know you are at the heart of film history.

She was discovered, if that is the right word, by DW. Griffith. She credits him with giving her the finest education in the craft of film the!: anyone could receive.

He created much of that craft himself, making up the rules as he went along.

She calls him "the Father of Film." And the pictures they made together read like a roll call of the classics of the cinema: The Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), Hearts of the World (1918), Broken Blossoms (1919), Way Down East (1920), Orphans of the Storm (1921).

The films she made immediately after she left Griffith, when she had her choice of director, story and cast, include more classics, such as La Boheme (1926), The Scarlet Letter (1926), and The Wind (1928). In a later chapter of her career, Abridged with permission from American Film. This article appeared in (he March 1984 issue. Š 1984 by (he American Film , ~(~te.

J.F. Kennedy Center. Washington. D.C. 20566.

she played in Duel in the Sun (1946), The Night of the Hunter (1955), Orders to Kill (1958) and A Wedding (1978).

"We used to laugh about films in the early days," she says. "We used to call them flickers. Mr. Griffith said, 'Don't you ever let me hear you use that word again.

The film and its power are predicted in the Bible. There's to be a universal language making all men understand each other.

We are taking the first baby steps in a power that could bring abOut the millennium. Remember that when you stand in front of the camera.' " It was this ideal, this integrity, that made compromise so difficult for both of them. The seriousness with which Lillian Gish took her work was undermined at MGM in 1927 when it was suggested that a scandal might improve her performance at the box office. "You are way up there on a pedestal and nobody cares," said the producers. "If you were knocked off the pedestal, everyone would care."

Lillian Gish realized she would be expected to give a performance offscreen as well as on. "I'm sorry," she said, "I just don't have that much vitality." Shortly afterward, she returned to her first love, the theater, and the cinema lost her for the better part of a decade.

What the film producers failed to comprehend was how much value for money she gave them, for she was part of an older tradition. Griffith had imbued his players with the discipline and dedication of the 19th century theater, and Lillian Gish carried these qualities to unprecedented lengths.

The qualities for which Lillian Gish is famous were exemplified in D.W. Griffith's production of Way Down East. The

picture was based on an old theatrical melodrama so lurid that when she read the play, she could hardly keep from laughing. It tells of Anna Moore, a country girl who visits the city and is seduced by a wealthy playboy by means of a mock marriage. Abandoned and destitute, she gives birth to a baby that dies soon afterward. She wanders the countryside and finds a haven at a farm. But when her secret is discovered, she is turned out of the house. Staggering through a snowstorm, she collapses on the ice as it starts to break up, and is carried toward certain death over the falls, The farmer's son, who loves her, races to the rescue, leaping from floe to floe and grasping her a split second before disaster.

Griffith transformed this material into superb entertainment, and by her presence Lillian Gish gave the story a conviction and a poignancy no other actress could have provided.

Lillian Gish came into pictures by accident. In 1912, she and her sister Dorothy, visited the Biograph Studios in New York because they heard 'that their friend Gladys Smith was working there.

(Gladys Smith had changed her name to Mary Pickford.) In the lobby, the sisters met a hawk-faced young man who asked them if they could act. "I thought his name was Mr. Biograph. He seemed to be the owner of the place. Dorothy said, 'Sir, we are of the legitimate theater.'" "'Well,' he said, 'I don't mean reading lines, I mean, can you act?' We didn't know what he meant. He said, 'Come upstairs.' We went up there, where all the actors were waiting and he rehearsed a story about two girls who are trapped by burglars, and the burglars are shooting at

them. We watched the other actors to see what they were doing and we were smart enough to take our cues from them.

Finally, at the climax, the man took a .22 revolver out of his pocket and started shooting at the ceiling and chasing us around the studio. We thought we were in a madhouse."

The young director was OW. Griffjth, and the film became An Unseen Enemy, the first of many one- and two-reelers to feature Lillian Gish. Thus her career began before the advent of the feature film. It was Griffith who helped to pioneer the feature film in the United States-and it was his epic The Birth of a Nation (1915) that ensured its survival.

In the film Hearts of the World (1918), she gives a heartrending performance as a shell-shocked girl who wanders the battlefield in search of her lover, carrying her wedding dress. The film established her uncanny ability to portray terror and hysteria, and it established, too, the warmth and poignancy she could bring to love scenes.

But Hearts of the World paled by comparison with the next major production of the Gish-Griffith partnership.

Broken Blossoms (1919) had none of the usual Griffith trademarks-no cast of thousands, no epic sets. It was based on a story by Thomas Burke about the love of a Chinese man for a 12-year-old girl. At first, Lillian Gish fought against playing the role. She offered to work with a child of the right age, but felt she couldn't possibly play the part herself. Griffith insisted that only she could handle the emotional scenes. How right he was.

Lillian Gish played the child (changed to a 15-.year-old) with conviction.

,

It is hard-for mostfilmgoers these days to see silent films. But in London in 1983, we staged a tribute to Lillian Gish as part of the Thames Silents film program.

David Gill and composer Carl Davis were determined to present a silent film in a West End theater with a live orchestra, just as it would have been shown in the¡ 1920s. The event was highly approphate, for no one has championed the cause of silent film with orchestral accompaniment more energetically than Lillian Gish. We were very anxious that she should make a personal appearance at the event, but, aware of her hectic schedule, we were doubtful whether she would have the energy to travel to London. We underestimated her. Above all, Lillian Gish is a trouper. She said she would come, and come she did.

Given one day in which to rest, she then plunged into a schedule that exhausted everyone but her. When she arrived for a lecture at the National Film Theatre, she was mobbed. The theater was packed and she delighted the audience with her enthusiastic recall and her humor.

During the next few days, she embarked on a nonstop series of interviews for radio, television and the newspapers. The films, Broken Blossoms and The Wind, were shown in a West End theater called the Dominion, built in 1929.

Charlie Chaplin premiered City Lights there. The 1920s decor is still intact, and, more important, there's still a pit for the orchestra.

I was very pessimistic about the size of the audience. I recalled seeing The Wind many years ago at the National Film Theatre with seven people. But our tribute

averaged more than a thousand people at each of the four performances.

The first night, Broken Blossoms was attended by some of the most famous names in the English theater. Lillian Gish introduced the film and supplied some of the background. She also explained the importance of the music. Carl Davis had arranged the original Louis Gottschalk score of 1919 (the Gish character's theme, White Blossom, was composed

by OW. Griffith himself). The audience watched the beautiful tinted print with rapt attention. The occasion was unmarred by those titters that so often wreck showings of silent films. One could feel the emotion, and the applause afterward was tremendous. "I have been going to the cinema for 50 years," said one man, "but this was my greatest evening."

I hope he was there the following evening, for it was even more impressive.

In her introduction, Lillian Gish left no doubt that The Wind was physically the most uncomfortable picture she had ever made. "I can stand cold," she explained, "but not heat." The exteriors were photographed in the Mojave Desert, near Bakersfield, California, where it was seldom under 48.4 degrees C. "I remember having to fix my makeup and I went to the car and I left part of the skin of my hand on the door handle. It was like picking up a red-hot poker. To create the windstorm, they used eight airplane engines blowing sand, smoke and sawdust at me."

MGM/UA allowed us to provide a new score for The Wind. Carl Davis and arrangers Colin and David Matthews created a storm sequence of earsplitting volume. As one critic said, it was as though they had brought the hurricane into the theater. The effect of the film and the music pulverized the audience. Lillian Gish said it was the most exciting presentation of The Wind she had seen in years.

Lillian Gish received a standing ovation, and days later people were still talking of her astonishing performance in the film. "It was the film event of the year," said George Perry of the Sunday Times.

When we think of Lillian Gish, we think of her striding onto the stage of the Dominion to receive the acclamation of an audience that, thanks to her,' has rediscovered its faith in the cinema. 0 About the Author: Kevin Brownlow is a filmmaker and film historian. His books include The Parade's Gone By and "Napoleon": Abel Gance's Silent Classic.

Silence Speaks Volumes Film was most intensely film when the pictures had to do all, or nearly all, of the work because there was neither speech nor realistic sound to go with it.

Have you been wondering what it is that's missing from the movies lately? I think I have a clue.

A little more than a year ago I took a plane to Jamaica and then, after eight days of midwinter hiding out on the sands, took another plane back to New York. It just so happened that the in-flight movie on both trips was The Verdict, starring Paul Newman and directed by Sidney Lumet. And it just so happened that I'd already seen it. .

So I didn't ask for earphones, planning to read the trip away. Alas, even if nothing is occupying your ear, that projected image has a way of side-tracking your eye-it's the cutting that does it, the constant and violent alterations of lightand both times I 'vvound up wat~hing far more of the film than I'd planned to. Not because it was riveting without its voice.

It wasn't. But because in addition to its initial bid for attention, it was presenting me with a problem. Hearing nothing and being able only to see, I was watching shot after shot waiting for one that would give me a degree of visual satisfaction, visual pleasure. There were none.

I don't mean to suggest that Lumet had failed to keep his actors on the move or to provide them with a plausible world through which to move. Characters hurried along corridors, paused by carved newel posts, climbed and descended staircases, passed in and out of courtrooms and bars and whatnot.

But I gradually realized that everything they were doing might have been done just as well in other hallways, rooms, bars. Their relationship to their visual envIronment was arbitrary, irrelevant-as though actors and director were obliged to make use of whatever stairwells in whatever official-looking buildings chanced to be available that day.

And, worse, their relationship to the spaces in which they moved could afford to be arbitrary and irrelevant for the

simple reason that everything of importance to the film was contained in its dialogue, nothing in its visual texture. I was looking at a motion picture, but the essential thing about any motion picture-the moving image-had no real function to perform. The actors' words told the story; the actors' words revealed character. The picture was left with little to do. I finally realized, with some alarm, that I was watching a film made up of images that were not in themselves expressive.

How dumb, I thought. And how long has this been going on? I wondered.

Jogging my memory a bit and trusting to instant recap, I was surprised to remember how often I'd concentrated on listening rather than looking when I',d needed a clue to the unfolding narrative, how rarely-of late-I'd felt mysteries of behavior instantly resolved by a gesture, a glance, a thing done in a space that lent the deed special weight.

In the theater, you must liste,n if you want to be let in on a play's secrets. In a film, information should be available on something closer to a 50-50 basis. Is it, right now? I begin to doubt it. Doubting, I am pushed further back in memory to a time when film was new and so was I, a time when film was-you might saymost like itself. Film was most intensely film when the picture had to do all, or nearly all, of the work, because there was neither speech nor realistic sound to go with it. Film was silent, bathed in space by orchestral or organ accompaniment.

Words were available to it through descriptive titles or dialogue captions, but these were visually intrusive and-in the better examples of filmmaking-kept to a minimum.

If Buster Keaton" wanted to make a joke about the best way to laun.ch a rowboat that was stowed on the open deck of a seagoing yacht, he didn't try to tell us about it. Keaton used very few captions; Chaplin, fewer. Instead, he quietly did it

for us, let us see for ourselves. So we watched him bash holes in the hull of the yacht, the[1 climb into the rowboat on deck and wait patiently. In short order, the yacht would obligingly sink, permitting the rowboat to flow free with an enchanted ease. Silent-film comedy acquired its uniqueness-a blending of fantastic idea with realistic means-from the gift of silence.

Serious film suffered somewhat from the absence of the spoken word, but it could, in the right hands, turn silence to advantage, too. An intimate, troubled relationship is put through a series of incredibly swift emotional transitions by visual means alone in King Vidor's The Big Parade (1925). John Gilbert is an American doughboy Billeted in a French village during World War I. Renee Adoree is a girl who lives in the village. The two have fallen in love, courtesy of some of the most adroitly conceived and charmingly executed getting-acquainted scenes in the history of film. Halfway through the film, and just before Gilbert's unit is about to be called up for action, Gilbert receives a letter from his fiancee in America.

We see the letter and discover that the girl back home is fearful that he is forgetting her.

She has sent a photograph. He stares at it, trying hard to bring her to life from it.

His concern is genuine, his concE;)ntration intense, as he drops onto the edge of a farm wagon in an open courtyard to think things through. He stretches out in the wagon, staring up at the sky, worriedly tapping the photograph's edge against his teeth.

Crossing through the -courtyard, Renee Adoree notices his putteed legs dangling from the cart, lightly calls to him in passing. (Of course, we hear nothing, now or ever, nothing but music.) There is no response. Playfully, she searches for a stone and throws it at the cart. Still no response. Chatting casually, and scarcely

Silent films like The Big Parade (right), featuring Renee Adoree and John Gilbert, made effective use of the visual image to convey a series of shifting emotions. Today many filmmakers have abandoned visual subtlety and rarely allow silence to speak. An exception was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The bicycle scene (above) with Katharine Ross and Paul Newman was one of its delightful silent passages.

expecting a reply, she moves to the cart, sits astride one of its handles, tightens the straps of his puttees. (We see her, and his knees; the knees become a silence in themselves.) She shakes his knees to get some sort of response from him, jumps up, stamps her feet, claps her hands for attention like a mother with an absent-minded child.

We see his face, as she finally brings herself to focus on it. It is abstracted, unhappy. Is something the matter? He responds with a quick, impatient shake of the head. No, no, nothing is wrong. Well, then, she will cheer him up. Snuggling in beside him, she tries to do just that, but, almost at once, sees the photograph. At first glance, it is merely interesting. It can be anyone, can't it? Who? Before she can finish asking, she has guessed the answer, all of it. He confirms it with a curt nod, miserably, angry with himself. She is at once suppressing her own emotion, face turned away.

With this, he brushes reason aside and, in a burst of passion, fiercely insists that he loves her. She turns to him, smiling.

See? No tears. See? No hurt feelings.

Happens all the time. Soldiers, girls-a philosophical shrug of her shoulders.¡ Surely he didn't suppose she was romantically involved. She is up, brushing off her work clothes, freeing him with a fond and maternal understanding, darting away through the courtyard gate. Halfway down a hillside, she slips behind a tree to cry. He is still seated on the cart, trying to

force himself toward clarity, when the might be elderly, only their purchase was bugle call that will separate them sounds. recent-while the outside world, the world that moved, either vanished or The scene, shifting its emotional ground every few seconds, covers a .turned into static paint.

Struggling to cope with the new, direcsizable amount of psychological territpry.

It runs for exactly three minutes and eight tors seemed to forget everything they'd once learned about filmmaking as a craft. seconds, and it uses no dialogue captions at all. The moving image on the Even the few visual effects that were screen, supported only by a musical attempted were now bungled. score, is doing all of the work, telling In an early Paramount talkie, The Hole the story and characterizing its people in the Wall (1929), two fine new performclearly, affectingly, and with incredible ers from the Broadway stage, Claudette economy.

Colbert and Edward G. Robinson, were Silent film was not being visually invenintroduced to sound film. But when it tive just for the fun of it. It was being came time, for a fleeting moment, for the visually inventive because it had to be. actors to stop talking so that we could see The audience came to see pictures. If it an elevated train plunge from its tracks to had wanted to read books, it could have the street below, we found ourselves done that at home. The visual image was unexpectedly looking at an obvious toy simply silent film's stock in trade. train, at the tackiest miniature work ParaThen film stumbled into its first massive mount can ever have permitted itself. identity crisis. Suddenly, along about Skilled technicians were at hand on the 1928, audiences that had sternly resisted lot. They'd done this sort of thing a the idea of sound for nearly 30 years thousand times before. Why couldn't they changed their minds. They now wanted do it well now? Apparently, because sound and nothing but sound. For a year visuals no longer mattered much in this or more, nothing but sound was approxradically altered world. imately what they got. In the studios, the Gradually, sanity and a sense of the terrifying presence of the fixed micronature of film returned; a new balance phone, the ghostly look of the crippled was struck. Legend has it that Lionel camera sealed away in a soundproof Barrymore, then directing as well as booth, and the desperate need for someacting, got so sick of the microphone'sthing that could be given the actors to and the acto'rs' -enforced paralysis that say, turned motion pictures immobile and he sent for a long fishing pole, tied a mike blind. Rigid actors in plainly miked in- to the end of it, and followed his players teriors sat on sofas and recited lines from around with it so that they could enjoy recently purchased plays-the plays some physical and visual freedom.

Legend also has it that 17 other directors had the same inspired idea on the same happy day, but no matter. The audience began to have something to look at once again. Hearing would perforce share the screen with seeing.

In the long years that followed, directors-most particularly directors who had grown up with silent filmworked hard to take advantage of both their opportunities. Film could now be brilliant on two levels at once: sight and sound. The aural and the visual might be fused, one reinforcing the other.

In John Ford's The Informer (1935), the actor Wallace Ford is attempting to elude arrest by climbing through a rear secondstory window in his home. He is spotted, and, as he dangles helplessly from the window ledge, he is shot. It is still chilling to watch-and to listen to-the slow scrape of his fingernails as he loses firm hold of the stone ledge and begins to slip to the street. The harshness of the moment is more than doubled by being simultaneously seen and heard. presence did not make her hypnotic, her Nor was it necessary to go into the streets looking for suspenseful move- 'silence would. ment. The director William Wyler, for Once, when we hear of a plan to marry Birdie's worthless son to Bette Davis' instance, more often worked with interiors than exteriors, and seldom with daughter (Teresa Wright) in order to keep physically violent material. But the cat- the money in the family, we see Birdie rise in alarm. But she does not speak, and-mouse game his camera plays with the character of Birdie in The Little Faxes she waits.

(1941) is stunning. Birdie, in the person As the conference breaks up and the Hubbards prepare to go to their respecof Patricia Collinge, is the timid aristocrat tive homes, Birdie manages to steal a few who has married, most unhappily, into the hushed seconds in which to speak warnrapaciously on-the-make Hubbard family. ingly to Teresa Wright. While she is still At the moment the Hubbards (Bette Davis, the portly Charles Dingle, the begging the girl never to think of marrying angrily ineffectual Carl Benton Reid) are her own son, she-and we-are suddenly aware that beyond the curve of a exulting over having just finagled a wonderfully profitable business deal, then drape that covers the foyer entrance, wrangling over how the proceeds are to Birdie's husband is darkly present, overhearing. be split. Birdie dares venture a small This truncated image-we see no request of her own. She is sharply simore than his trousers from the knees lenced, sent-like a disobedient schoolchild-to sit in a corner by herself.. down and the hat he holds in his handis a great deal more frightening than the The corner is far from us but within man's whole plain figure could ever have camera view, as though we were at the center of a diamond and she at its apex. been. Wyler is intensely interested in Close to us, looming infinitely larger, are what his actors are saying; he is just as the actors playing the Hubbards. They interested in what they are not saying, in move across the camera and across each what the camera is saying' for them. other, constantly. Because these domiOver the years, there has been a nant people do move so much and loom somewhat increasing resort to the values of silent film itself, and not merely as so large, they often blot out Birdie entirehbmmage to a dead form. Sometimes the ly. But she is never not there. 'We catch her again and again, beneath arched abandonment of sound in favor of the arms and flared elbows, staring straight swift visuals permitted by silence has ahead, silent but not quite defeated. If this provided film with an agreeable sort of now-you-see-her-now-you-don't kind of shorthand.

Gestures and glances said it afl for Frances Dee and Leslie Howard in this scene from the 1934 talking version of Of Human Bondage.

In Broadway Danny Rose last year, Woody Allen bypasses the reconciliation with Mia Farrow that we, know perfectly well is coming by playing it out on the sidewalk before a storefront. Since he places his camera across the street, we are able to see but not hear the admittedly unnecessary words. Precisely the same device was used as Leslie Howard and Frances Dee reached an understanding in Of Human Bondage (1934).

In fact, director George Roy Hill is so enamored of the advantages of occasional silence that he is willing to go all the way back, dispensing with the narrator's voice on the soundtrack in favor of music alone, or nearly alone.

We might have guessed at it, I now suppose, when we were enjoying ourselves at Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). That film contains three extended silent passages. These occur only when things are going well, however, temporarily, for Butch, Sundance and The Girl.

The first, in which Paul Newman stunts giddily on a bicycle while luring Katharine . Ross into joining him, begins with a sung accompaniment ("Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head"), then forgets about lyrics as it opens into a brassy circus blare.

The second, an impressionistic

think it may have been the fourth or fifth account of the time Newman, Ross and tau rant. Having. estabtished locale, we time I saw the film that I tumbled to what Robert Redford spend in New York, uses jump to a much ctoserftwo-shot: the two leaning against a fence, the two sitting at was delighting me. The shot is a longmusic alone. tables. Thereafter we simply alternate shot and it is pure metaphor, though it The third supplies "ba-ba" syllables was meant to reach the audience only that do not turn into words as part of the head-shots, or close-ups. Her face, his face, her face, and so on. The formula can subliminally, I think.

Latin American musical urgency beneath be varied in many ways, but it isn't, not a longish stretch of plot. That stretch We've been trailing Paul Newman for often. I have just snapped on the televitwo hours as he hustles pool crosscovers a good bit of territory: an excepcountry, blows his dream of beating tionally cordial invasion of a bank; a sion set to recheck Dallas, a television heavyweight with relatively elaborate setMinnesota Fats (J.ackie Gleason), allows descent into the vaults, which are opened a feral manager (George C. Scott) to take and looted; a getaway chase with Bolivian tings. I stumbled instantly into 18 successive close-ups. him over, sacrifices the girl he loves police lashing their horses in a swirling Nothing wrong with that for television. (piper Laurie) to his obsession. At the fury; the trio enjoying themselves beclimax, he succeeds in whipping Fats and neath disguising sombreros; another A small screen wants a large face, or you in taking his revenge on the manager. At bank raid, another chase, further dis- won't have the pleasure of recognizing it; last freed of his drive and his guilt, he besides, faces are interesting. Applied to guises; a festive evening in a fashionable leaves the poolroom, brushing past the restaurant, with our thieves flushed with a larger-than-Iife motion-picture screen, however, the technique makes the filmed camera. victory, eager to toast their success.

A silent, somewhat stunned grouping Should anything alarming interrupt the image at once monotonous and conremains, briefly still. There is a sudden festivities-as it does before dinner is stricted.

Monotonous because, in a moving strong beat in the musical underscoring. over-Pal:Jl Newman's worried voice On it, Gleason rises from his seat and leaps back onto the soundtrack again. picture, those heads aren't moving; the camera is merely jumping back and forth immediately moves straight ahead, Scott The contrast is interesting in itself. between them. The ping-pong rhythm is shifts from his observer's position on the But 14 years have elapsed betweefl sidelines and goes to lounge against a Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and tedious in itself. And using too many close-ups in a motion picture robs the stair rail, three thugs move with casual Paul Newman in The Verdict, and while medium of its flexibility, its freedom to purpose to disappear in the half-light Newman looks about the same, film doesn't. Something odd has happened to show people tangling with every sort of while a cleaning man mingles with them. and emerges pushing a broom. An attenthe long and frequently highly successful ,environment.

Constricted because no use is being . dant brings Gleason his jacket from a effort to restore a decent balance bemade of motion-picture film's capacity to coat rack. tween sight and sound in motion pictures. recoid depth and remain in focus. A When I finally caught it, I yelped-and I That struggle, it would seem, is being director trained in television might not realize I may have been a bJt slow on the scrapped. Motion pictures still boast biguptake. Over and over again during the budget spectacles, of course, though I even think to try it on film.

The motion-picture industry today is film, the standard triangular rack had honestly don't find much visual subtlety not only intensely conscious of television, been slapped down on the table's felt in computerized space wars and comicknowing that its ultimate salvation probsurface to be filled with balls. Each time, book pastiches. Most films, however, tend to resemble The Verdict. They are ably lies in a television sale; it is also once the rack was removed, one or more intensely in competition with televianother player had lined up his cue to full of talk and brown furniture. sion than it has ever been before.

There Is there any obvious reason for this? "break" the triangle of balls. With the have been several recent instances of break, the balls moved unpredictably (to Possibly. It's always difficult to nail down made-for-television films me) here and there across the table. a change while it's still in process, but low-budget, And in the film's final image, I had been nearly outdrawing high-rental motionthere is one development of recent years looking at something else. I had been that we'd best keep in mind. Since the picture films newly released to the netcollapse of the studio system and its works. Before too long, everything may looking at a "break" of people: Gleason be made for television, God help us all. to the edge of the right side pocket, Scott disappearance as a training ground, more I profoundly hope, and trust, that film to the rail near the far right corner pocket, than half of the new film directors have will not run into a new identity crisis of this the goons one after the other into the far come from television. It is not surprising sort. I selfishly hope, and selfishly trust, left pocket, two slow-moving handymen to find them bringing their habits along, that I'll continue to be able to relish a kind returning from the rail toward the table's even to find some using the large screen of visual poetry that's given me great center. The "break"-there is no clicking as though it were the small one. pleasure down the years. The poetry of a sound, only a musical alert-is a silent The two screens aren't interchangefilm is almost always visual rather than summing up, a visual echo, of the game able. In spite of the "vision" that is such verbal, and I don't mean more shots of we've been playing and the story we've an emphatic part of its name, television isn't a visual medium in the sense that sun shimmering on autumn water. I mean, been telling. among other things, the last shot in And it's good-looking.

0 film is. It is a talk medium, with faces.

Robert Rossen's The Hustler (1961), a Most of the time the faces must be large, shot that becomes-once it's been About the Author: Walter Kerr, a former large enough to blot out virtually everyestablished-a mere background for the drama critic of The New York Times, is a thing around them. A basic pattern quickclosing credits. ly emerges. There is a long shot in which winner of the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. His I'd always particularly liked the shot, books include The Silent Clowns, a study of a not-quite-recognizable couple are seen without quite being able to say why. I comics in presound films. strolling along a path or entering a res-

Landmarks ofa Rich Relationship Although SPAN as a link between the United Sates and India is only 25 years old, relations between the two countries span more than two centuries.

The most important early link between India and the United States was trade and commerce. To deal with the increasing demands of bilateral trade, President George Washington appointed Benjamin Joy in 1792 to be consul at Calcutta and other ports and places in India.

By 1850, at least one U.S. ship arrived in Bombay every¡ month. One ship, George, made 21 round trips between Salem, Massachusetts, and Calcutta. The main exports from the United States to India were tobacco, naval stores, copper, pitch, rosin, pine boards and, unbelievably, ice. India in turn exported wool, oil-seeds, hides, medicinal drugs, sandalwood, silk, cotton, tea, sugar, spices, indigo, ivory and saltpetre. Among other treasures that American sailors brought back with them were artworks and Sanskrit books.

These books, which reached America at a time when the country was witnessing an intellectual ferment, profoundly influenced some of the leading American thinkers of the time. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) read English translations of the Bhagavad Gita, Vishnu Purana, Kathopanishad and the Code of Manu, and his works reflected Indian influence. For example, his poem "Brahma," published in 1856, is reminiscent of the Kathopanishad: , .

If t~e red sl~yer ,thm~s ~e ~I~YS, Or If the slain think e IS sam, They know not well the subtle ,ways I keep, and pass, and turn again.

The last century also saw many American missionaries visiting India. The roster cf distinguished names includes: Isabella Thoburn, who founded a school for girls in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, in 1870, which eventually grew into Lucknow Women's College (renamed Isabella Thoburn College after her death); Clara Swain, who set up the first women's hospital in India in Bareilly in 1874; Ida Scudder, founder of first women's medical college in India in 1918-the Christian Medical Hospital and College in Vellore, Tamil Nadu; William Wanless, who arrived in India in 1889 and founded a hospital, a leper asylum and a medical school in Miraj, Maharashtra; and Mary Reed, who came to India in 1884 and set up a leper colony in the foothills of the Himalayas.

Other Americans, who have carved out a niche for them in India, include Margaret Sanger, Samuel Evans Stokes and Welthy Fisher. Sanger, who crusaded for birth control in America when the subject was taboo, came to India in 1935 at the invitation of the All-India Women's Conference to help introduce family planning in India. She was greeted upon arrival by a note from Mahatma Gandhi: "Do, by all means, come whenever you can. And you shall stay with me, if you would not mind what must appear to be our extreme simplicity; we have no masters and no servants here .... " Stokes was 22 when he arrived in India in 1904, and soon began working in a leper colony in the Simla Hills. An admirer of the Mahatma, he was sentenced to six months' imprisonment for justifying the boycott of British goods in 1921. He adopted the Indian name of Satyanand, married a Rajput girl and stayed on for the rest of his life in Kotgarh, where he became the Johnny Appleseed of India. Convinced that the region was fit for growing apples, he

Another American who drank deep of the Indian philosophy was Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862).

In his monumental book Walden he writes: "In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny and trivia!."

The list of other American luminaries well versed in the writings of the Indian sages is a myriad of historic names: Herman Melville (1819-1891), who used his somewhat rudimentary knowledge of Indian philosophy in his classic novel Moby Dick; Walt Whitman (1819-1892), whose Leaves of Grass Emerson described as a blending of the Gita and the New York Herald; Nobel lau,reate T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), whose biographer Philip R. Headings wrote: "No serious student of Eliot's poetry can afford to ignore his early and continued interest in the Bhagavad Gita"; and philosopher George Santayana (1863-1952), who said: "I follow the Indians in their Brahman spirit, in its essence .. ,."

While several Americans were discovering India through books, many others traveled thousands of miles to see the country for themselves. Among the early Americans to visit India were Bayard Taylor in 1853, as a correspondent of the New York Tribune, and Mark Twain, the legendary author of Huckleberry Finn, in 1896. India is, Mark Twain said after his return, "the only foreign land I ever daydream about or deeply long to see again,."

distributed appleseeds free to local peasants. Today, Kotgarh is synonymous with apples and the Stokes. Welthy Fisher came to India in 1920. When her husband the Right Reverend Frederick Fisher, whom she met in India, died in 1938, she decided to stay on on the advice of Gandhi "the man I 'follow," and founded Saksharata Niketan-Literacy Village-on the outskirts of Lucknow.

Among Indians who had enormous effect on America was Swami Vivekananda, who visited the United States to attend the World Parliament of Religions in 1893 at Chicago. He lectured across the country and founded the American Vedanta Society. Since the swami's visit, other Indian philosophers and religious leaders have influenced, and continue to influence, American spiritual thought. Among them have been Parmahansa Yogananda (1893-1950), whose Autobiography of a Yogi has gone into several editions in the United States, J. Krishnamurthi and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. (Margaret Wilson, the eldest daughter of President Woodrow Wilson, was so profoundly influenced by Indian philosophy that she spent her last five years in Pondicherry.)

America also beckoned Rabindranath Tagore; he first visited in 1912,. and again in 1916 and 1920. Ezra Pound was so fascinated by Tagore's poetry that he persuaded Harriet Monroe to publish six poems from his Gitanjali, before it won him the Nobel Prize, in her prestigious Poetry magazine.

It is appropriate to note two courageous, strong-willed Indian women-Anandibai Joshi and Pandita Ramabai Saraswati-who visited the United States in the last quarter of the 19th century for higher studies. Joshi came to Philadelphia

This article was written by Michelle States and India

1776-1976,

Mingo, based largely on material from MY

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by the Embassy

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of India, Washington.

book The United

in 1883 to study medicine at the Medical College of Pennsylvarealized that there were some things I cared about passionately. nia. After earning her degree-possibly the first Indian woman One of them was independence for India .... " to get a degree-she returned to India to become in charge of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took a personal inwomen's ward at Kolhapur Hpspital in Maharashtra. Pandita terest in India's struggle for independence. He first discussed Ramabai, whom German philosopher and Indologist Max the subject with Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1941. Upon Mueller said was the "truly heroic Hindu lady, in appearance failure of the Cripps mission, an irate President wrote: "The small, delicate and timid, but in reality strong and bold as a feeling is almost universally held that the the deadlock has been lioness," became one of the first Indian women to establish caused by the unwillingness of the British Government to widows' homes and girls' schools in western India. concede to the Indians the right of self-government. ... " He India and the United States have also benefited from each also sent two of his personal representatives-Col. Louis other's arts and artists. Long before Uday Shankar introduced Johnson and Ambassador William Phillips-to New Delhi to Indian dance to Americans, Ruth St. Denis, an American dancer help the Indian case for freedom. of the 1920s, incorporated Indian dance forms and traditions In his address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress during into her own work after seeing an Indian nautch dance at the his 1949 state visit to the United States, Prime Minister Hippodrome in Coney Island. Her dances, like "Raqha" and Jawaharlal Nehru paid rich tributes to the Founding Fathers of "Lakme," brought the mysticism of India to her audiences. Ever the American Republic. Quoting from the Preamble of India's since, American and Indian artists-Yehudi Menuhin, Ravi Constftution, he said: "You will recognize in these words that I Shankar, Mahalia Jackson, Ali Akbar Khan, Zubin Mehta, have quoted, an echo of the great voices of the founders of your Indrani Rahman, Balasaraswathi, Duke Ellington and hosts of great Republic." others-have regaled audiences in the two countries.

Since India's independence in 1947, the two countries have One person who probably did more than anyone else to collaborated in many fields to mutual benefit. During his visit to interpret India to the United States, was Ananda Coomara- . India in December 1949, President Dwight Eisenhower said: swamy of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Through his prolific "Whatever strengthens India, my people are convinced, strengarticles, monographs and books, he did yeoman service to thens us." He ordered massive shipments of foodgrains to explain the spiritual base of Indian art and culture to the western India to help her tide over food shortages in the mid-1950s. The mind. Satyajit Ray has brought a more realistic appreciation of proceeds from the sale of these foodgrains were invested in India to the United States through his films.

India's economic development in myriad fields-agriculture, During India's struggle for freedom, Indian patriots came to irrigation, hydroelectric projects, rural electrification, family the United States to win sympathy and support for the Indian planning and industry. cause. Lala Har Dayal, a native of Delhi who arrived in 1911, In the area of bilateral educational and cultural exchanges, taught briefly at Standford and soon founded the Ghadar one of the most important milestones came on February 2, Movement to free India from the British YQke. Jwala Singh, a 1950, when Prime Minister Nehru and U.S. Ambassador Loy wealthy Indian immigrant farmer in California, known there as Henderson signed an agreement establishing the U.S. Educathe "Potato King," actively supported the Movement. J.J. tional FoundaUon in India under the Fulbright Act. To date the Singh, who immigrated to the United States in 1926, founded Foundation has helped more than 7,000 Indian and American the India League of America, and enlisted the support of such artists, scholars, educationists and students to pursue research prominent Americans as Albert Einstein, Henry Luce and Louis and higher studies in the two countries.

Fischer. Dalip Singh Saund, who came to the United States in Another important milestone came in 1974 with the estab1920 and rose to become a member of the U.S. Congress, lishment of the Indo-U.S. Joint Commission under whose aegis canvassed for the country of his birth. Prafulla Chandra Mukerji, the two countries have collaborated on a large number of the 'dean'of the Indian immigrants, founded Friends for India projects in agriculture, science and technology, education and Society in 1915. Gobindram Watumull, a resident of Honolulu culture and business. (Last year the Indo-U.S. Subcommission since 1917, became an active member of, and financially on Culture and Education sponsored the Festival of the United supported, the Committee for India's Freedom. (He set up the States in India. This year it is organizing the Festival of India in Watumull Foundation for promoting better understanding be- the United States, which will be one of the most ambitious tween India and the United States through award of schocultural events of all time to be held in the country.) larships to Indian students studying in the United States and In the area of commerce, the United States still remains travel grants to both Indians and Americans.)

India's biggest trading partner, and to help India in its export Among the Indian leaders who visited America in the efforts it imports many Indian goods free of duty under the Thirties and the Forties to enlist its support were Lala Lajpat Generalized System of Preferences. U.S. direct investments in Rai, Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Sarojini Naidu, Vithalbhai India have also been growing steadily in recent years-today Patel, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, 8yed they stand at more than $500 million. American companies Hussain and M.N. Roy. head the list of foreign firms collaborating with Indian Americans firmly supported the Indian cause. Newspapers businesses in their bid to make the country self-sufficient and and magazines prominently printed Mahatma Gandhi's civil self-reliant in sophisticated technology. disobedience movement of the 1930s, which was in turn However, perhaps the most important link between the two inspired by Thoreau's essay on Civil Disobedience, and countries are some 500,000 Indians living in the United States, compared his Dandi March against salt tax with the Boston Tea many of whom, like Nobel laureates Har Gobind Khorana and S. Party. (Time magazine chose the Mahatma as its Man of the Chandrasekhar, have not only made a name for themselves but Year for 1931.) The Rev. John Hayne Holmes, an American brought fame to America as well as India. Addressing the Indian disciple of Gandhi, devoted his entire life pleading for India's community during her 1982 U.S. visit, Prime Minister Indira independence. A spate of books on India appeared, two of the Gandhi said: "We in India are proud of the contributions Indians most persuasive being The Case for India by William James have made, wherever they have been .... We expect the Indians Durant and Voiceless India by Gertrude Emerson. Louis Fischer who are here to get on with their jobs and do their jobs well, visited India in 1942, and on his return argued the Indian case bringing credit to our country and also to build bridges of in speeches, articles and books. friendship, of cooperation and understanding between these Congressman Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn declared, "I two great countries."

0

39

Ronald Reagan's Second -Term Agenda

Cuts in spending, tax reforms, arms control talks with the Soviets-these will be the President's top priorities in his second term according to his advisers, who made these predictions while anticipating his landslide victory.

Ronald Reagan thinks he's batting .800. His first four years have seen inflation tamed, income tax rates lowered, domestic spending programs cut, and the largest peacetime military buildup in American history launched. He admits to striking out only on his promise to balance the budget. "That's pretty good hitting in any league I know about," he says. So what can the septuagenarian slugger do the next time he's up at bat?

Quite a lot. The President's top policymakers predict that in his second term there will be another firecracker opener, reminiscent of 1981. The top items on the Reagan agenda for the first 100 days: more cuts in domestic spending, a crusade for tax simplification and a start toward an arms reduction agreement with the Soviet Union. Based on nearly 40 interviews with present and former Administration officials, congressionalleaders and the President's closest advisers, here's what the re-elected Reaganites would be likely to propose: Spending cuts. Spending cuts will be at the top of the President's list, especially after his landslide victory that he can claim as a mandate to push his program through the U.S. Congress. Reagan still talks with missionary zeal about shrinking government, though his resolve to get the job done has often flagged. "Our biggest failure," David A. Stockman, Reagan's budget director, told Fortune magazine early last year, "was that we didn't create a much bigger and better package of spending cuts in the beginning. We should have gone after the big boulders-the social insurance programs."

A second Reagan Administration would not want to make the same mistake twice. It would try to lump most spendingcontrol proposals into one comprehensive package and get Congress to pass it quickly. It's clear where the Reaganites would wield the budgetary ax, though they didn't want to advertise their plans in an election year. Says one OMB [Office of Management and Budget] staffer: "We have been going through the budget for three years now. We know what the options are."

One prime target: farm price supports. Under the 1981 farm bill, which expires in 1985, federal payments to farmers multiplied like boll weevils in a cotton field, going from about $4,000 million in 1981 to over $19,000 million-almost as much as total farm income. The 1981 bill provided that price support payments would rise year by year to cover expected increases in farmers' costs. But their costs have gone up only by about half as much as was predicted when the bill was passed.

Stockman now argues that payments should be frozen at current levels. A price support freeze and the abolition of subsidies for honey and other products, Stockman figures, could reduce the cost of agricultural and rural programs to about $12,000 million per year in constant 1984 dollars by the end of the decade.

Other areas singled out for big cuts include aid for middle-class college students, veterans' health benefits, and military and government pensions. The so-called means-tested entitlement programs, such as food stamps and Aid to Families with Dependent Children, would probably not be Cl,lt further.

Says John Weicher of the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank: "They've gone about as far as they are going to go on low-income benefit programs."

The "middle class" entitlements-those that one doesn't have to be poor to get-will come under fire. Reagan will try not to grapple again with Social Security. However, he may be tempted by a deficit-reduction scheme being discussed on Capitol Hill. It would link reductions in cost-of-living adjustments on Social Security benefits-a goal favored by many conservatives and resisted by liberal Democrats-to tax indexation. Tax indexing, scheduled to take effect in 1985, allows tax brackets to change with inflation so that taxpayers aren't

pushed into higher brackets except by increases in real income.

To boost revenues, many Democrats favor scaling back indexation, allowing some bracket creep. President Reagan has said that tax indexation is nonnegotiable, but he might bend in order to get a handle on increases in Social Security benefits.

There almost certainly will be a showdown over Medicare, which covers medical costs for 30 million elderly and disabled people. Like Social Security before it, Medicare faces a serious money squeeze. It cost $64,000 million last fiscal year, and by one estimate there will be a cumulative shortage of $250,000 million by 1995 in the Medicare trust fund. Both Democrats and Republicans agree that Medicare needs treatment.

The Reagan prescription: getting participants to pay higher Medicare premiums, reimbursing doctors at lower rates and' tightening eligibility requirements. He would also restructure benefits to make patients pay more in early stages of hospitalization, while gaining protection from long-term medical costs.

To help control health care costs, the Reagan Administration would' cap medical insurance benefits that individuals can receive tax-free from employers. Congress hasn't shown much interest in schemes that increase beneficiaries' costs, but it might clamp down further on doctors' reimbursements.

Taxes. As he did during the campaign, President Reagan would continue to push in his second term for tax simplification and reform while steadfastly refusing to raise income tax rates.

But one way or another, taxes are going to rise. Acknowledging this, business lobbyists have reluctantly begun to fall in behind a value-added tax (VAT), which is levied on the value added to a product at each stage of manufacture and distribution. Reagan, however, will eschew proposals for a VAT or any other consumption or national sales tax, seeing it as political dynamite that Congress wouldn't get near.

On the President's instructions, the Treasury Department began a study of tax reform in January 1984. Reagan would probably endorse one of its options. The most likely choice: a "flat tax with bumps," a proposal that lowers marginal tax rates and broadens the tax base by getting rid of many deductions (The "bumps" are steps in the tax rate.) President Reagan will also champion increased deductions that encourage savings and investment, such as expanded individual retirement accounts for spouses who do not work.

Just how hard and how long Reagan pushes his tax simplification crusade will depend on what happens to the economy and to the mood of Congress. "It would appear that both parties are in favor of some tax simplification," says retiring Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker Jr., "but every time I see people get beyond that general statement of principle and start examining the details, they always run into something that causes them a big problem."

Most likely, tax reform will become a mask for raising taxes.

Under this scenario, Reagan would go along with higher taxes to shrink the deficit as the price of moving a step or two in the direction of tax simplification.

The revenue potential in tax reform is astonishing, even without higher personal income tax rates, which Reagan has vowed to oppose. Two prominent tax reform proposals-the Bradley-Gephardt Fair Tax and the Kemp-Kasten Fast Tax ("fair and simple tax")-would eliminate most deductions in return for lower marginal tax rates. As currently structured, both

.

proposals would be, in Washington jargon, "revenue neutral"meaning that the U.S. Treasury would neither gain nor lose revenue if they were enacted.

But either proposal could easily be restructured to become a revenue raiser. Bradley-Gephardt would set tax rates at 14 percent, 26 percent, or 30 percent, depending on income. But suppose the tax rates were increased to 19 percent, 34 percent and 40 percent. According to calculations by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, that version of the Fair Tax would raise roughly $150,000 million a year more than the Treasury now takes in.

As long as marginal rates decline, the President would be satisfied to see total revenues rise. Says one Administration insider: "The President would allow revenues to be raised if he could keep the high ground on taxes." Indeed, that has been Reagan's past pattern. He likes to say that he "gave back to the people" $5,700 million in tax reductions or rebates while he was governor of California. But he also presided over three major tax increases-including one of $1,000 million, the

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compelling item on the President's agenda than achieving an equitable, verifiable reduction in nuclear weapons."

largest in California's history. As President he has cut federal income taxes, but as the Urban Institute pointed out in a controversial assessment of the Reagan record, personal tax burdens actually rose because of payroll and local tax increases.

Foreign policy. In his first term Reagan emphasized building up U.S. military strength rather than talking with the Soviet Union. In the Administration's view, the United States has now established that it cannot be pushed around. Besides, a nuclear freeze has emerged as a political issue that Reagan would be pleased to defuse, and U.S. allies are eager to see an easing of U.S.-Soviet tensions. Says Robert C. McFarlane, the President's national security adviser, "There is no more compelling item on the President's agenda than achieving an equitable, verifiable reduction in nuclear weapons.".

Reagan genuinely wants a meeting with the Soviet leaders.

An overture early last year never came to anything, and he is the first U.S. President in more than 40 years not to have had a summit meeting with a Soviet leader. Senior Administration officials insist that after the election the Russians, who walked out of the strategic and intermediate-range nuclear arms talks last year, will come to the negotiating table. These officials say that Reagan would put forward serious arms control proposals.

One possibility: an agreement similar to the one President Gerald Ford achieved at Vladivostok in 1974, setting broad goals for nuclear arms control. Just as Richard Nixon was able to open the door to China, these officials argue, Reagan will be

,

able to strike a deal with the Russians. "Nobody will ever be able to accuse Ronald Reagan of selling out to the Russians," says James A. Baker III, White House chief of staff.

To reach an agreement, Reagan would have to wrestle not only with intransigent Russians but also with a powerful faction in his own foreign policy bureaucracy. During the first term, some Defense Department officials vigorously argued against an arms control agreement on the grounds that such agreements are not verifiable and would give the Russians the upper hand in increasing their nuclear arsenal. One senior Administration official admits that Defense "paralyzed" the negotiating process. That could occur again, but this official argues that Reagan's interest in negotiations will fence off Defense hard-liners in a second Administration.

Once past the firecracker stage-the push for spending cuts, tax simplification and an arms agreement with the Soviet Union-a Reagan second term might in many ways be a replay of the first. Major issues on which few sweeping initiatives seem likely: Defense spending. In a second term the clarion call for more defense dollars would be muted. But Reagan would not try to cut defense spending, either. The Administration's argument is that defense spending as a percentage of the gross national product (6.5 percent in fiscal 1984) is no more than has been customary in the post-World War II period. The money would be used for weapons systems Congress has already approved, such as the B-1 bomber and the Trident nuclear submarine, and for further improvement of military readiness, which declined during the 1970s. The budget would provide about $25,000 million toward the Star Wars defense system to deflect nuclear attacks.

Deregulation. The regulatory agenda for a second term is considerably more modest than it was in the first. Reagan got off to a flashy start in 1981, issuing an executive order requiring the Office of Management and Budget to evaluate~osts and benefits of every new regulation. But he failed to put across most other items on his regulatory agenda. For example, scandals at the Environmental Protection Agency and controversy generated by former Interior Secretary James G. Watt doomed plans to amend the Clean Air and Clean Water acts.

The Reaganites seem to have all but gi.ven up on rewriting environmental regulations. About the most they aspire to in the regulatory line is abolishing the Interstate Commerce Commission, which they maintain is no longer needed since the trucking industry has been largely deregulated. Otherwise, says James C. Miller III, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, "the President is just going to let the glue dry on deregulation."

Balanced budget. In Reagan's second term there would be talk about balancing the budget, but not a lot of progress toward the goal. Even if all the domestic spending cuts proposed by the Administration were enacted, without major tax increases the deficit would be only marginally smaller. One Administration official blandly asserts, "We can certainly tolerate deficits of $100,000 million as far as the eye can see."

There will, however, be the usual declarations of support for a balanced budget amendment. Only two more states have to approve the idea before a constitutional convention of all the states would be convened. But even if that convention were held in 1985, proponents concede, it would be at least six years

before the amendment could become the law of the land. The Administration will also continue to plead for the line-item veto, which would enable a President to strike down specific spending measures without vetoing an entire bill. The line-item veto would apply only to about half of the federal budget-and does not stand a chance in Congress.

To push through the items on his agenda, Reagan will have to move quickly-at least that's the unanimous counsel he will be getting from his closest advisers. David Stockman is pushing for another fast start and so is Richard G. Darman, the brash White House aide who has emerged as one of the Administration's canniest strategists. Their argument is largely political.

The Republicans will be at the zenith of power in 1985, before nervous Congressmen start fretting about getting re-elected in 1986. Besides, if history is any guide, the party that occupies the White House will get crushed in the midterm elections. In all but 3 of the 31 midterm elections since 1862, the President's party has lost strength in Congress. Says presidential counselor Edwin Meese III, "I think you have six to nine months in which some of the strategic efforts have to be introduced. We'll be fast off the mark."

The Administration's 1981 policy victories were largely made possible by a clever tactical maneuver. The gambit then was to use "the reconciliation process," a congressionally mandated budgetary procedure in which appropriations bills have to comply with previously enacted spending limits. That way the Administration was able to establish broad spending limitations and avoid wrenching floor fights over every budgetary item. Administration insiders concede that significant further cuts in domestic spending will be possible in the second term only by pushing a single comprehensive package through Congress once again. Says one White House aide: "The package deal makes the impossible possible."

Lacking a compliant Congress, the Administration will have to negotiate with congressional leaders. "I'm not sure that the first 100 days will be any different from the pattern of the last three years," suggests one well-placed insider, speaking of the period since Labor Day 1981, by which time Reagan had gotten his tax and spending cuts in his first Administration. That pattern produced the 1982 tax boost, the Social Security compromise of 1983 and the deficit "down payment" package of 1984, all of which raised taxes.

One thing Reagan will have going in his favor is lots of experience-his as well as that of the members of his Cabinet.

Ed Meese takes pride in pointing out that the Reagan Cabinet has been more stable than most. While the average tenure of a Cabinet officer in recent Administrations has been less than two years, all but 5 of Reagan's 18 Cabinet-rank officials have served a full term. Most would probably be asked to stay on by Reagan, a fiercely loyal man.

Top White House aides insist that, thanks to a strict exercise regimen, Reagan is in better shape than before he was shot three years ago. Pollster Richard B. Wirthlin says that even Vice President George Bush, a jogger 13 years Reagan's junior, has trouble pumping the iron bars on the President's chest exercise machine. Flonal~ Reag?n is .,still pretty.good at pumping iron politically too.

0 About the Author: Fortune magazine.

Peter W. Bernstein

is an associate

editor of

ii ~-TheArts

That is what has characterized the art of our times. New forms (or nonforms) of painting, music and dance have emerged. Artists and their creations have traveled across the world, giving countries a better understanding of each other.

Films. Godfather 1I was described by New Yorker critic Pauline Kael (SPAN December 1975) as "maybe the most passionately felt epic ever made in America."

Giving a remarkable performance, Al Pacino, (seen here with the late John Cazales) typified the new, talented Hollywood hero.

Dance.

Huge stylized eyes form the background for dancers in this student ballet, Remembrance, featured in SPAN in January 1976.

Indian sculpture.

The exhibition, "Manifestations of Shiva" (SPAN August 1981) enthralled thousands of Americans in 1981-1982.

American sculpture. The grand dame of American sculpture, Louise Nevelson (featured in SPANin November 1975 and February 1982) visited â&#x20AC;˘ India during the Third Triennale in 1975.

Freedom.

Frank Stella's Stellar Quality

"Art is> a form of play .... It's pretty embarrassing to admit that you've never worked a day in your life when you're 50 years old," says Frank Stella. Work or play, Stella's creations are always on a grand scale and have made him one of the most influential and controversial of contemporary American artists.

The Birds, the Bees and the Plants

For plants, three isn't a crowd. It's a necessity-for male and female may be a kilometer apart, each rooted to one spot. So they use their odor, color or food to attract insects and birds and then deposit pollen on them which the unwitting go-between passes on to the mate. American scientists are discovering fascinating insights into this relationship.

A Chip of Silicon Valley in India

Computer country is tooling up in India at Mohali near Chandigarh.

A joint Indo-U.S. venture is manufacturing silicon chips, the heart of computers and other electronic devices.

A ;rime to Dance

/ / ..-/

I

When the American Dance Festival-a pioneering institution for modern dance-planned its golden anniversary last year, it conducted an international dance search for performers. One stop, naturally, was India, which led festival planners to Astaad Deboo, Bharat Sharma and Amala Shankar's group.

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Mind and Matter Expanding the Power of the Brain Philosophers used to ask, "What is matter?" and reply jokingly, "Never mind."

Psychologists asked, "What is mind?" and replied, quite seriously, "It doesn't matter." Now U.S. brain scientists are studying both mind and matter together through biofeedback-a technique that employs electronic gadgets which measure and amplify the minutest physiological changes. The research confirms what Indian yogis and Buddhist meditators have known for thousands of years-that it is possible, with training, for the mind to control the body. For example, in the "alpha" state of consciousness-the state people are in when they are deep in meditation-the mind can "will" changes in blood pressure, heartbeat or even stop the activity of a single cell in the spinal cord. In this article, adapted from a chapter of her book The Brain Changers, the author reports on this research.

At the opposite extreme from the efforts to manipulate the brains of others, a movement to teach people how to control their own brains has been gathering speed in recent years. Some of America's most imaginative researchers are now involved in it, as well as thousands of students, volunteers and camp followers of all kinds. Together they are soaring off into a beautiful world where everything seems possible-the world of biofeedback.

It is not necessary to drill a hole in the skull to control the brain, they say. Nor is it necessary to take drugs. All one needs !s concentration, coupled with precise information on what's going on in one's brain at the time it occurs. Then, with training, one can achieve the kind of self-control that people have always dreamed of but seldom attained. One can become oblivious to pain, exceptionally alert or fall into a

creative reverie-at will.

Of course yogis and Zen masters have known such skills for years, but they learn them the hard way, through a lifetime of meditation and study. In the West, people want speed as well as hard evidence. Today, both have become available through biofeedback, a technique that depends on electronic gadgets which measure and amplify physiological changes so small that until recently they were almost totally ignored.

By now hundreds of volunteers have learned to produce small changes in their blood pressure, lower their heart rates, alter their brain rhythms or stop the activity of a single cell in their spinal cord-functions previously believed to be "involuntary" or beyond human control.

They have done all this without drugs and without black magic. For biofeedback simply extends normal ways of learning. Everything we learn depends on

.. From The Brain Changers: ScientisLS and the New Mind COlllrol. by Maya Pines. Copyright Š 1973 by Maya Pines. First published in the United States. Reprinted from SPAN February 1975.

some sort of feedback-from eyes, ears, hands, feet, other people or other sources-that shows us whether we are succeeding or failing in what we are trying to do. But under normal circumstances, we are limited in the kind of feedback we can get from our body. We don't have words to say what's going on inside us.

Very often we can't even identify it.

Small increases or decreases in blood pressure remain hidden from consciousness. So do changes in the rhythm of our brain waves. With the aid of biofeedback equipment, however, such internal fluctuations cao be measured, displayed and evaluated instantly to tell the learner whether he is improving or not.

It is somewhat like hel~ing a blindfolded man learn to type. He could never make any progress if he didn't know what letters he was producing. But if someone told him the name of each key as he struck it, he could begin to type certain letters at will. With time and practice he could even learn to type rapidly, until at last his fingers would seem to do their work by themselves. Suppose the person who named these keys also handed the man a raisin as a reward for each letter he typed correctly. This would be called operant conditioning-the kind of training, systematized by B.F. Skinner, in which rewards (or positive reinforcements) are used to shape behavior [see SPAN August 1974]. If the man had strong reasons of his own for wanting to type, however, simply knowing that he had struck the right key would be its own reward.

"You must care," says Rockefeller University's Dr. Neal E. Miller, "otherwise the results cannot be rewarding." In biofeedback, rapid signals such as a flash of light or a beep show the volunteer that he is doing well. While taking part in an experiment at Harvard Medical School, I was amazed at how much I cared. Sitting alone in a dimly lit, soundproofed room, with no distractions and nothing to do but focus on the beep, I began to feel elated every time I heard it. I didn't know what the experimenters had decided to reward (it turned out to be lower blood pressure, combined with a lower heart rate), nor what I was doing to earn it, but every time the beep went on it was like hitting the jackpot. What surprised me most, however, was the speed with which everything took place. The beeps sometimes followed each other incredibly rapidly-up to 32 times a minute. At other times, of course, there were long,

dull periods without any evidence of success. As psychophysiologist Bernard Tursky explained, the signals had to be almost instantaneous so as to reward the appropriate heartbeat and allow me to control the next one, which came less than a second later. The speed at which the body works is the strength of biofeedback. Just because of the short time lapse between heartbeats, one can learn very rapidly, through much trial and error, while the clock hand barely moves.

Biofeedback requires lightning-swift measurements, rapid calculations of whether each change is a step forward or backward, and instant displays. It is a child of the computer age. But it might never have developed without the persistence and wide influence of psychologist Neal Miller, a big-boned, bouncy man in his early 60s, who maintained for years

"I believe that men are as smart as rats. However, we may not yet be as clever at training them," says a brain scientist. that the body's internal functions could be brought under voluntary control, even though the textbooks said this was impossible.

Miller, who had won fame for his book Social Learning and Imitation, written with John Dollard in 1941, stood nearly alone in his belief that, through practice, one could learn to control the internal organs and glands, just as one controls the skeletal muscles (arms, legs and other visible parts). The skeletal muscles are triggered by the motor area of the cortex, through nerves running down the center of the spine. Internal responses are regulated by the "emotional" areas of the brain-the limbic system and particularly the hypothalamus through two chains of nerve fibers traveling down the sides of the spinal cord. Ever since Plato, people have considered these internal functions to be somehow inferior. The nervous syst~m that controls them was supposedly "involuntary" and independent-hence its name, the autonomic nervous system.

Most psychologists believed that it could be conditioned in the classical way, a la Pavlov, but could not be taught t.hrough trial and error. Pavlov's dog salivated naturally at the sight of food ..When C),bell consistently preceded the food, the dog

learned to associate the two and eventually began to salivate at the sound of the bell, even when no food was presented. However, it could not be expected to learn any response other than salivation. Skinner taught pigeons skills that no pigeon had ever had before-for example, how to play ping-pongthrough a step-by-step reinforcement of some of the movements they produced by trial and error. Such methods were reserved for the skeletal muscles, however. In the traditional view, the autonomic nervous system was too "stupid" to learn by operant conditioning.

The shortcomings of the autonomic nervous system seemed so obvious that Miller had a terrible time convincing any students to work on what later became biofeedback. Even the paid assistants whom he assigned to the project did it halfheartedly, believing it was a waste of time. Finally, a young man, Jay Trowill, volunteered to run some experiments. He faced an immense technical problem: proving that any change in a rat's heart rate resulted from direct control over the heart itself and not from some other muscular exertion to speed up the heart or relaxation to slow it down. It was extremely difficult to prevent such "cheating." After a series of discouraging attempts, Trowill paralyzed his rats with curare, the substance that South American Indians use in poison arrows. This stopped them from using any skeletal muscles at all. Since curare does not affect the internal organs, however, the rats could still use their heart muscles. In this totally helpless condition, the rats were required to control their heart rates.

Of course, none of the ordinary rewards such as food or water held much appeal for them. So the experimenters implanted electrodes into the rats' brains and stimulated their pleasure centers every time their heart rates change~ in the desired direction. Some rats were rewarded for speeding up their heart and others were rewarded for slowing it down. By 1966, after three years of painstaking work, Trowill had unequivocal proof that rats could achieve direct control over their heart rates, without assistance from their skeletal muscles.

As soon as the rats learned to produce small increases or decreases in heart rate, Miller and Leo DiCara, his principal associate, upped the ante-from then on the rewards came only for bigger and ;;bigg~r changes. By' "shaping" the rats' heart rates in this way, they produced

changes of roughly 20 percent in either direction, after' only 90 minutes of training-an almost unbelievable speed.

Clearly, the mechanism for self-control of the internal organs was there. Not only was it there, it was also surprisingly precise. Miller and DiCara pride themselves on having trained some rats to perform a yogalike trick: dilating the blood vessels in one ear -more than in the other, a sophistication that Miller finds "eerie."

These results opened up all parts of the nervous system, the internal organs and the glands to highly specific forms of training. None of these was "beyond voluntary control" any more. "There is only one kind of learning," Miller declares happily. "We are now forced into a radical reorientation of thinking about functions ordinarily concealed inside the body."

Soon a number of patients whose hearts skipped a beat succeeded in training their hearts to beat in a normal manner through biofeedback-at least in the laboratory. Others who suffered from hypertension learned to lower their blood pressure, though the changes were too small to be very useful. Migraine patients cured themselves of headaches by increasing the blood flow in their hands, which relieved their heads. These changes were not as dramatic as those in animals, -nor did the people involved learn as rapidly, probably because the training conditions could not be controlled as carefully. Nevertheless, there is growing evidence of success with biofeedback, especially in the control of the brain.

Miller and his group had noticed something strange about the rats in their heart experiment: Those that had been trained to speed up their hearts seemed more "emotional"-they squealed, squirmed and defecated more-than those that had been trained to make their heart rates go .down. Their brains also contained more of certain neurotransmitters, which meant that their central nervous systems had become more excitable. Evidently the change in their heart rate had triggered changes in their brain chemistry as well as their behavior.

The next step was to try to train the brain directly. This time cats were the subject-wide-awake, non curarized cats that could move freely despite the long wires connecting their heads to lab instruments. The wires led to electrodes implanted in their brains' pleasu,re centers.

A graduate student, Alfredo Carmona, and each time he told them whether they stimulated some cats iri these pleasure were right or wrong. During the first hour centers every time they lowered the vol- they usually guessed right only half the tage of their brain waves, and others time, which suggests that nothing more whenever they raised it. Before long, he than chance was operating. But by the had two different kinds of cats on his second hour of training they could guess hands. The group that had been re- right 60 percent of the time, by the third warded for high-voltage, low-frequency hour they were right 75 to 80 percent of brain waves "sat like sphinxes, staring out the time, and after a while some of the into space," Miller recalls. The other volunteers' could actqally guess right cats, which had learned to produce low- every single time-as often as 400 times voltage, faster waves, paced about in a row! restlessly, sniffing and looking around.

"The subject had learned to read his own brain, or his mind," Kamiya To make sure that this was happening through direct control of the brain and announced. "He had become aware of an not through eye movements or some internal state." other activity of the skeletal muscles, Even more exciting was something Carmona repeated the experiment with Kamiya discovered by accident: Having curarized rats and proved that they could learned to recognize his alpha waves, one change the rhythm of their brain waves of the volunteers also knew how to turn at will. them on or off at will. And when Kamiya Could human beings learn as well? "I tested the others, he found that all his believe that men are as smart as rats," subjects were able to do so, at least to says Miller. "However, we may not yet some extent. be as clever at training them."

Now that was a really extraordinary Very fittingly, the first person to offer development, and when Kamiya moved evidence of Zen-like control over the to California he set out at once to see brain through biofeedback was a serene whether people could be trained to conpsychologist of Japanese descent, Dr. Joe .trol their brain waves without first going Kamiya, of San Francisco's Langley Por- through the discrimination phase. He ter Neuropsychiatric Institute, whose found that they could. The 10 volunteers early experiments antedated the Rocke- in his experiment had no previous prepafeller work. Kamiya had come to the ration. They simply sat in dark, soundproblem from quite a different angle. He proofed rooms, with electrodes on their had long been interested is states of heads, and tried to keep a tone sounding. consciousness-the inner states that They were told that the tone was turned change so radically during dreams, under on by their brain waves when they were drugs and at other times. However, his in certain mental states. After a while training as a behaviorist made such vague they were told to try to keep the 'tone' off concepts as "mind" or "consciousness" as much as possible. At the end of 40 taboo as subjects for research. Behavior- reversals, 8 out of the 10 could control ists were supposed to study only what the tone. When asked to turn it on, they could be measured-specific stimuli and had alpha waves 55 percent of the time, responses. So, while doing conventional and when asked to turn it off their proresearch on EEG (electroencephaloduction of alpha dropped down to 17 gram) changes during sleep and dreams percent. in Chicago in 1958, Kamiya "bootlegged" However, they didn't quite know how some work on the EEGs of people who they did it. They knew only that i! were wide awake. He wanted to see couldn't be forced. The more they tried whether he could train them to recognize to produce alpha, especially at the beginthe comings and goings of various ning, the less they had. They would try all rhythms in their brains, starting with the kinds of tricks: mental arithmetic, thinkmost prominent rhythm of all, the alpha ing sexy thoughts, listening to their rhythm, which Austrian psychiatrist Hans breathing or focusing on the back of their Berger had discovered in 1924. He pasted head, all to no avail. Then they would electrodes on their scalp, watched the give up-and suddenly improve. "Grapattern of their brain waves on an EEG, dually they'd sift out the crucial mental and rang a bell sometimes when the alpha state from what's irrelevant," Kamiya rhythm was present, sometimes when it said. It usually took at least four or five was absent, asking the volunteers to sessions to gain any real control. Once guess which state they were in. Every they had achieved good control, howtime he rang the bell they had to reply, ever, they retained this skill for weeks or

months. Of the hundreds of volunteers he has trained, nearly all preferred alpha to the nonalpha state.

What's so good about being in alpha? I asked Kamiya. "Here are the words that subjects use to describe it," he replied.

"Calm; alert; relaxed; open to experiences of all kinds; pleasant, in the sense that to be serene is pleasant, as opposed to the hassle of American life. It's akin to the good feeling that comes from taking a massage or sauna bath-a relaxed, puttogether sort of feeling. It's receptive, as opposed to a getting, forcing frame of mind. You have to let it occur spontaneously, then be happy you have it."

The alpha state itself is probably not creative, he explained. "But a poet told me that just before he's ready to write a good poem, he's in a state that seems very similar to high alpha. You see, alpha is a state of attention directed toward letting things happen." How can it be a state of attention, if you can't focus your attention on anything in particular? I asked. "That's one of the most peculiar things about it," said Kamiya. "It's probably best described as a shift in the focus of attention. You can't let yourself get drowsy, as this would take you out of the alpha state. You remain alert, expanding your focus of attention in all directions."

Brain waves in the alpha range-a frequency of 8 to 13 cycles per secondmay represent the brain's way of idling between states of high mental activity and sleep. Some people, especially those who are introspective and intuitive, normally produce large quantities of alpha, while others produce very little. The reasons for this difference are unknown. Nor is it known which of these groups benefits more from training, though all kinds of people can learn to increase their output.

When Kamiya's subjects told him they felt calm and tranquil in alpha, he realized at once that this sounded like a Zen state. But he didn't like the idea. Kamiya was still a proper behaviorist and he hadn't planned to dabble in meditation; he thought he was conditioning alpha.

The temptation was too strong, however, and finally he hooked up some experienced Zen meditators to his EEG feedback system, just to see how they would do. When they learned to control their alpha waves much more rapidly than other people, he was forced to take notice.

"And so we found ourselves at the back door of a centuries-old tradition that we, in the West, have very little under-

changed. In self-education, a person learns to bring a normally unconscious process under conscious control and gains an extra measure of freedom.

In B.F. Skinner's opinion, we have no choice but to use operant conditioning, in one form or another, to change people's behavior. He believes this is the only way to ensure peace without repression. Disagreeing, most of the researchers involved in biofeedback believe that man can change himself through voluntary action. He can reshape his personality, improve his health, in a sense remake his world through biofeedback.

Biofeedback is a new field of research and it is moving along with explosive speed in many directions. "We are now embarked on a historic search into our interior to see what has always before been hidden to man," Dr. Gardner Murphy, former director of research at the Menninger Foundation, told. members of "In Sanskrit there are 20 the American Psychiatric Association redifferent names for varying cently. "It is a shocking possibility. What states of 'consciousness' shall we see? Are.we prepared, really, to face the tremendous blinding flash that's or 'mind '-yet we are going to come?" limited to these two words."

Along with all the discoveries of what our brain, our muscles and our autobeen spanked or rewarded for them. Nor nomic nervous system are doing, Dr. do we sit around the living room talking Murphy warned, will come some larger questions-some very sticky, compliabout how much alpha we've had." cated philosophical issues, like the nature He hopes that a "vocabulary of moods" of individuality-which now lie half conwill soon be developed, a vocealed in the research reports. Though cabulary much more precise than the words available to poets today. If you the notion that we can't observe the were a Martian and wanted to find out process of thinking is quite old, it may no the earthlings' dimensions of taste, he longer be true. "What with feedback, and notes, you could start out with sweet, slow motion of all sorts, and tremendous sour, salty and bitter, since all tastes are gains in equipmen~, '>0 that what is little combinations thereof. But how would becomes enormously big to the observer, you begin to understand human moods perhaps before very long the little inas when I beand feelings? What are their basic dimen- direct awareness-such sions? His long-range goal is to develop come aware that my words aren't clear, I coordinates for the various qualities of must hurry, I mustn't overstate my case and so forth-all these little phases of experience associated with brain-wave changes. Then one could describe a thought will be right there on the panel." melancholy mood, for instance, as a spe- It may even be possible to observe evidence of the will, or at least of decisioncific point on this map of consciousness.

Kamiya is no longer an orthodox be- making, and the final confirmation of an haviorist, but he still believes in precise act of will.

"There is only the limit of our own techniques. "We must be able to index ingenuity," he declared. While some of our experience," he says.

The difference between operant con- the claims now being made by the biofeedback researchers may turn out to ditioning and self-education through biofeedback is sometimes elusive, but it is have been overbold, Dr. Murphy conimportant: It's merely a question of who cluded, most of them will prove to have 0 been not bold enough. is at the controls. In operant conditioning, the experimenter decides on tasks, About the Author: Maya Pines, contributing rewards and puniShments, and the sub- editor of Psychology Today, is a science writer ject may not even know that he is being specializing in the field of human behavior.

standing of," he says. "Right now in the United States, a growing number of people, especially college students, are interested in meditation. Many of them seem to have cultivated their interest through drugs such as LSD. But I don't think it's transitory-some interest in Eastern meditation practices will be here in our culture to stay."

In Sanskrit there are 20 different names for varying states of "consciousness" or "mind"-yet we are limited to these two words. If Kamiya's subjects find it so difficult¡ to give satisfactory verbal descriptions of their experiences while turning on alpha, it may be partly a language problem. However, he believes it really reflects the fact that "we have not been trained to name various physiological states. As children we have never

As a celebration of our Silver Jubilee year we reproduce here a few of the paintings that were sr:>ecially commissior"led by SPAN from eminent Indian artists. Throughout this anniversary year, we hope to reprint other works of artists, cartoonists and photographers that have appeared in the past twoand-a-half decades in SPAN.

1. An illustration of R.K. Narayan by his distinguished cartoonist brother R.K. Laxman (SPAN April 1975).

2. Artist G.R. Santosh freezes ,the world into one solid block as his impression of a forthcoming ice age (SPAN May 1974).

3; A P9rt(ait of Nobel laureate John Steinbeck by M. Dutta Gupta (SPAN December 1962).

4. SPAN Art Director Nand Katyal's vision of the "three faces" of American literature (SPAN May 1975).

5. The American Revolution as seen through the eyes of M.F. Husain (SPAN January 1975).

6. Paritosh Sen illustrates the limitations of a computer's "brain" (SPAN January 1976).