Volume 3 - Issue 6

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Volume three. number six Decem ber 14, 1969

Comment: the numbers game, the fifties game, and, if that isn't enough, the ol' time strippers' game.

Numbers What kind of a day was it? A day like all days, filled with those events which alter and illuminate our lives-only we were there.

You bet your sweet one we were. From the first blurred New York Times column the Monday after Thanksgiving, which was a real joke this year.

It was a day of increasing reality, disbelief and immediacy, with the morning speeding by and huddled groups at lunch tables chain smoking and almost joking about the imminent blast of outrage soon to be perpetrated on American youth.

A day of increasing sweatshiver with the reason not until eight that night. Prime beef would stand naked and helpless before the Court of Fate and Stupidity-and book larnin' don't do no good 'tall in karma country.

The afternoon a replay of puberty's first possible ball.

One can't really plan that which comes from above. One must hope for the best and stride whistling into the dark. Right. Activities are incidental, the future is what counts, and that's at eight.

Conversations concern matinees of youth and door prizes won by the friend you let into line behind you; the future, if; if not; the absurdity of television as a medium; and birthdates. Nothing is said.

Once again, a feeling of world rumble and celestial cacaphony. Once again, brought to you by everyone possible. Of course the Kennedy assassinations were mentioned, and the Cuban Missile Crisis and Shirley Jackson.

But they didn't really seem too important Monday night.

A night when Point Blank's dominant theme is paranoia.

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Into a black and blue television room. Laugh-In without the audio, WYBC supplying that, visions of conspiracies as Laugh-In skits seem synched with NUMBERVOICE, who is interrupted only by tragic audible despair.

Sam who studies stops in hopefully, "Have they called September 14th yet?"'

Hard knocks and wet socks. Pain. Winners and losers.

Groups just sitting, smoking, looking beyond, eyes cJosed, heads bobbing, sigh, sigh, shit and sigh.

Eventually, the wasted participants appear drifting throughout the darkness, exchanging numbers, asking about friends, throwing and kicking things, just walking.

Shadows merge, sweet strength in numbers. Students forced to deal with ultimates, many dragged for good into outlaw consciousness.

The women of America stood weeping as they watched. No one was cool or ugly Monday night, just dancin' beneath a diamond sky or in Ratzo Rizzo death slumps. The ship is slippin' from the dock, Johnny's off to war. The best night of the year to get laid, a further forging of a generation; or a diving of the grateful and the dead. One thing's for certain, you'll surely be a-hurtin'.

Bryan DiSalvatore

Days of Grease Sha-Na-Na was a fabulous success at Yale, two thousand cheering people, some of them greased up, rave reviews, and lots of money for the Record. It was the Harvard weekend's Rock 'n' Roll Revival, the Grease Festival, cathartic therapy for college kids on their way out of the '60's. In a certain sense, it was just the big bash on Saturday night; then again it was an economy trip back to the Fifties which many people there neither remembered nor admired very much. It was a surprizing trip. Grease was nice, hanging on the juke box was cool, bot rods were very definitely the big thing. You didn't have to worry about being white because blacks were still niggers then.

You could shout "We like Ike" or even "Ike is a Kike" and "Get the Gooks." Because it happened at Yale, you didn't have to worry that the real old hoods who made the music would come back and ·make trouble.

It was a comic routine, but it should have been much more. Rock 'n' Roll is more than that, and to turn it into a joke ip a denial of the real energy of the Fifties and of the relf.ion of that energy to the music of all of the Sixties. ''Teen lAngel" is a tremendous cliche. But it deals with love and death and the horror of a fatal car accident. If one wants to accept the real energy of that song, it is tragic, and meaningfully so. Hot rods were not a joke either, and the meaning of dancing around the juke box isn't really different than dancing now or anytime in history. Chuck Berry's song "School Days," about listening to rock after school, brought on hippies and the "rock culture" that we are a part of now.

The music itself is worthy of sincere attention. No matter how simple or badly executed, it was effective. It made kids dance all over the country, it turned them on.

The "magic of the rock 'n roll, the magic that can set you free," worked then and it works now-same rock 'n roll, same magic.

Compare Sha-Na-Na with the Beatles and Rolling Stones in 1963. They all rediscovered the power and vibrancy of old Rock 'n' Roll. The Beatles and the Stones felt rhythm and blues was still valid, and they poured their own energy into it. They did old music, and it was NEW. It was Chuck Berry's, and it was their own. Their careers rest on their tasting ability to feel the energies of their own times, and effectively express them, relating them to old sounds and future forces. They keep reinvesting their musical wealth and they borrow from every source, but the music is fresh and honest.

Sha-Na-Na just have not done that. They are on a memory trip. They are doing someone else's show adding nothing of their own. By not committing themselves, maybe they meant to force the audience to commit itself.

But at Yale, it did not. Sha-Na-Na's tack of sensitivity to the music promoted a separation from its real forces. I heard several people say that it was the best rock concert they bad ever been to. How can that be true when they clearly were not touched by what happened, when they had not really been into that experience? Before Sha-NaNa can honestly sing "Rock 'n' Roll is here to stay ... rock wilt go down in history·• they will have to communicate the real magic. When the revival is not a memory trip, it will not be exclusive either. The people will know that "Too Much Monkey Business," "Heat Wave," and "Help" have to be revived. When they dance the Lindy, there wilt still be the monkey, the shimmy, and even the Freddy.

Patrick Lydon Comment continued on page 14

Volume three, number six December 14, 1969 Contents 3 American Architecture arui Urbanism: a review

by Alexander Garvin 4 The Fourteenth Street Swatter

by David Freeman 7 Searching for consciousness in California: Esalen

by A /ton Wasson and Roz Driscoll 10 Vietnam: a search for perspective

by Bill Stotl 17 Yale and its Five-Year B.A.

by Richard Conniff Editors: Herman Hong Paul Goldberger Business Manager: Stephen Thomas Designer: Nicki Kalish Copy Editors: Richard Caples Stuart Klawans Advertising Manager: Robert Kirkman Assistant Editors: Charles Draper Bryan Di Salvatore George Kannar Edward Landler David Meter Sam Miller

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Circulation Managers: John Callaway Thomas Davison Associate Business Manager: William Palmer Promotion Director: Charles H. S. Chapman Contributing Editors: Susan Braudy David Freeman Mopsy Strange Kennedy Lawrence Lasker Jonathan Lear Michael Lerner Leo Ribuffo Walter Wagoner Staff:

Jay Adkins, Richard Conniff, Jack Friedman, Joanne Lawless, Cathie Lutter, Patrick Lydon, Gus Oliver, Pat O'Rourke, Manuel Perez, Barbara Rich, James Rosenzweig, Lynne Rutkin, Ann Wagner.

THIRD CLASS NON-PROFIT PERMIT: Third Class Non-Profit postage PAID in New Haven, Conn. The New Journal is published

by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. 3432 Y~e Station, New Haven, Conn. 06520, and 1s printed at The Carl Purington Rollins Printing-Office of the Yale University Press in New Haven. Published bi-weekly during the academic year. Subscriptions for Yale students are $2.00 per year and for Yale faculty and staff, $4.50 per year. For all others, subscriptions are $7 .SO per year ($4.50 for students).

Newstand copies are SO¢ (30¢ for back issues).

New Journal © copyright 1969 by 'Ibe New Journal at Yale, Inc., a non-profit corporation. No material from this publication may be used in any form without written consent from The New Journal at Yale, Inc.

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Credits: John Boak: page 3 Ellen Smith: page 5 Steven Hein: pages 12, 13 Samuel Miller: page 12, 13

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VincentScully'sinvitations to acom1try

by Alexander Garvin American Architecture and Urbanism

by Vincent Scully. Frederick A . Praeger, New York, 1969,275 pages, $18.50.

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c ities are in fashion, and Praeger has rushed to meet the vogue by publishing Vincent ScuJiy's American Architecture and Urbanism. Happily, this publisher has produced not a fashionable coffee-table decoration advertising a concern for the "urban crisis" but a profound interpretation of the American landscape by Yale University's most popular lecturer and the nation's most creative architectural historian.

Many of the readers of this book may think that its author is, in fact, simply responding to contemporary fashion by writing a book on "urbanism." After all, he writes that his thinking has undergone a "major change since 1961." However, those of us who have had the privilege of hearing Scully's lectures (as I have as auditor, student and fascinated listener since 1958) wiU know that many of the ideas in this new book have been present from the very beginning. They have only been sharpened in the light of travels to new places, exposure to new architectural personalities and acquaintance with new scholarship. Thus, Scully's trip to Russia has led to fascinating comparisons of the Capitol in Washington with St. Isaac's in Leningrad, the Municipal Building in New York City with Stalin's wedding cakes in Moscow, and Chicago's Tribune competition entries with designs for Izvestia. His visits to the Southwest have led to insights into the architecture of Pueblo villages.

His exposure to Robert Venturi has resulted in voyages along America's evergrowing network of neon-decorated highways. His reading of Gans, Tunnard and Tom Wolfe has taken him away from writing only about great monuments and led him to consider in this book the landscape of the slum, the suburb and the freeway.

Though American Architectllre and Urbanism explores territory not yet examined when I first sat among the mesmerized auditors in I 00 Art Gallery, it is still fundamentally the same fascinating amalgam of scholarship, insight, humor and poetry that Vincent Scully presented to the students of History of Art 53 b. Then as now the major element was observation, not theory. Scully's major concern is for the forces shaping the American landscape. So, as he points out, while "many architects and critics in America and Englan.d " could depict the work of Mies van der Robe as " Renaissance architecture," he could never simply equate Mice;' "simplified, pure, clean, generalized, reasonable, abstract" buildings with Florentine p alazzi or colonial houses.

Mies' buildings are just "not at all Renaissance in scale." Unlike critics who fit the history of architecture into neatly packaged theories, Scully has been able to deepen his vision with time and not seriously alter his perspective. He has been able to build upon the prior judgments of Giedion, Hitchcock and Johnson without being warped by their earlier prejudices.

He can see colonial buildings as more than just the results of a building technology or sharpened versions of British prototypes.

• L s new book, like Scully's earlier lectures, goes beyond architectural history to a socio-cultural examination of the entire American landscape. It is a vision of "an archetypal colonial sense of uprootedness

and partial alienation" that has resulted from the interaction of the land with its colonizers. Scully presents a restless people that has "always been the most adrift from precedent" and a culture that "has consistently remained that of a frontier-at first physical, later a social and technological one." So it is not surprising that the opening images in the book are automobiles, Indian tepees, and trailer camps. Further on he presents houses that are "above the land, not of it," Western main streets with their wooden false fronts and proletarian housing projects that have been created through a cataclysmic cutting away of the city fabric. This too is not surprising. The American landscape is not made up only of Jefferson's Monticello, Sullivan's Guaranty Building and Frank Lloyd Wright's "Falling Water." What is surprising is that Scully can bring us to see the interaction of great monuments with our desire for disposable buildings that are both "new improved" and "good old-fashioned." For example, Henry Hobson Richardson's suburban railroad stations are seen to combine: two qualities previously considered natural opposites: "classicism" and "romanticism," if one wishes to call them that. They also combined the new continuity of space with weight and permanence of ma,ss: archetypes of movement and stability synthesized. In all these ways they may be felt to have summed up the main conflicting aspects of modern, and peculiarly American, middle-class aspiration: to be fn.:e and protectttl at once. In the same sense they were both urban and suburban, place-fixing masses adjusted to expanding suburban patterns along the commuting railroad lines.

E haps the most important aspect of Scully's recent thinking is his ability to reach beyond architectural history or even criticism of the physical landscape. He has begun to see the problems of art schooltrained architects trying to work as "social engineers," trying to alter both the landscape and the patterns of our culture. He vividly depicts their battles with lawyers, civil administrators and politicians "full of lies and dodges, with hearts like small stones." Though Scully understands that this is an unhappy confrontation, a confrontafion that is fundamentally wrong and that "clearly has to be reconsidered in terms of who does what for whom and who controls it," he never suggests that the architectural profession (now with its own "urban design"bureaucrats) has found a way to resolve this situation.

If American Architecture and Urbanism were simply the summation of Vincent Scully's thinking to date, it would be an important book. It is more. It is a shatteringly new approach to architectural historiography. In many ways it reminds me of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps. Where Stravinsky's work is rooted in the art of Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin and Pushkin, Scully's grows from the work of Meeks, Mumford and D. H. Lawrence. RimskyKorsakov's Le Coq d'Or is larded with satire. So it is not surprising that Stravinsky could describe the opening of his revolutionary work as "a group of knock-kneed and long-braided Lolitas jumping up and down." Borodin's Polovtsian Dances get violent. Stravinsky has described the opening of Le Sacre as a "frightful tumult."

American Architecture and Urbanism includes the same combination of violence and satire. New Haven's Lee High School

js seen as "a pillbox at the edge of the Hill," Yales's new Becton Engineering Laboratory as "a huge radio cabinet," Saarinen's girls' dormitory at the University of Pennsylvania as the "Chateau d'If outside, Blanche DeBois within," and the attempts at the monumentalization of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington as "the garbled experiences of American architects as tourists abroad." Like Le Sacre, this book is deeply poetic. The houses on the New Haven Green are "ships moored around" a central open space, Sullivan's Guaranty Building is a "vertical body standing on legs stretched and swelling with muscular force," buildings on the coasts of Massachusetts and Maine are "weathered silver, floating like dreams of forever in the cool fogs of the sea." When the poetry and the satire come together we are made to see the Empire State Building as "a lonely dinosaur" that "rose sadly at mid-town, highest tower, tallest mountain, longest road, King Kong's eyrie, meant to moor air ships, alas." These images are tightly condensed evocations of Scully's lectures. In a few words-describing the "darkly glowing squares of Froebel-decorated amber skylights" in Wright's Unity Temple or the "canvas-covered Conestoga wagon" that is his Taliesen West-this book calls to mind those marvelously impassioned torrents of words and slides that made up Scully's lectures on these buildings.

American Architecture and Urbanism is no more a tr~ ditional work than was Le Sacre du Printemps. There are no chaplets, no section captions, no footnotes, just one continuous flow of images. The photographs are even repeated so the stream of consciousness does not have to be interrupted by flipping back to earlier illustrations. The pages of this book come together as Vincent Scully's invitations to a country.

Like the American landscape, this work is a never ending stream of development.

What could be more fitting for a study of " urbanism"? ~

Alexander Garvin, Architect-Planner of the Coalition Redevelopment Program for the New York Urban Coalition, is also a Visiting Assistant Professor of City Planning at Yale. Mr. Garvin also serves as an associate designer with the New Haven architectural firm of Roy and Millard.

If you live on 14th St., you know Elsie. Or Elsie. Or Elsie.

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by David Freeman

When the winter smog hangs a little heavier and the paper flowers begin to blossom and the sounds of Spanish Christmas carols fill the 3rd Avenue station on the Canarsie line, shopkeepers in the East Village and along 14th Street know that Christmas is coming and that Elsie, the 14th Street swatter and dog lady, will be in bloom again.

Christmas is the busy season for that sweet perennial scrawny lady with orange yarn hair and arms covered with tattoos, who spends her days leading her pack of dogs up and down the east end of 14th street, foraging through the rubbish piles and garbage cans, saying Elsie is her only name, "Elsie, just Elsie ... Elsie."

Her dogs, she has three regulars and occasionally one or two temporary strays, are called Elsie, Elsie and Brownie. Why Brownie, a splendid if slightly ragged Irish setter, did not get in on the Elsies is a question that Elsie (the lady) does not answer.

The canine Elsies are mongrels of the common street variety, and all three are as skinny as their mistress and usually a good deal dirtier.

Elsie and her dogs, like a French peasant and her hounds hunting for truffles, root through the side streets and doorways, foraging, but never taking anything. She just keeps turning over strange bits of cloth and half broken objects murmuring, "Now what the hell is this? What do we got here ...?" searching for some private and probably half forgotten secret in the garbage cans.

Even if Elsie tends to leave trash alone, she does take bizarre liberties with passersby. She always carries a rolled-up newspaper under her arm which she uses as a club to swat strangers on the backside as they pass. The swat is no gentle tap but rather a sadistic smack, clearly meant to punish her victim. Happily for those who travel 14th Street regularly, Elsie only swats occasionally. Usually her targets are so stunned at the idea of being clobbered from behind that they respond in the best Manhattan tradition, and pretend it didn't happen and move away from the trouble as quickly as possible.

One victim of an Elsie swat, a ruddyfaced salesman in an ill-fitting tweed carcoat, pushing a suitcase, on wheels, decorated with a sleazy green wreath, did complain after Elsie whacked him. The salesman turned and yelled at Elsie, who always keeps walking as she swats, never breaking her stride.

"Hey you! You bit me?" No answer from Elsie, and the salesman dragging his suitcasa chases her and grabs her arm.

"Lego the arm," Elsie says softly.

"You hit me? Why'd you bit me?" Elsie says nothing; the dogs relax on the pavement in front of the Orange Julius at 14th and 3rd to watch impassively.

Elsie yells in a rough staccato startling the salesman. "Hit you? You crazy or something? Just lego the arm."

"Well somebody hit me. With a paper.

You got a paper."

"You're crazy. Ask anybody." Elsie turns to the crowd beginning to gather and to the patrons of the Orange Julius who David Freeman is a Contributing Editor of The New Journal. His writing has appeared in many national publications, and his new play, Captain Smightln Hi~ Glory, will be produced this month by the Theater Company of Boston.

stare indifferently, their faces distorted and elongated by the glass walls.

"Did I hit him?" Elsie screams to her audience. "Did I? Did I? Did I?" The salesman senses the incident getting out of control. He mutters an ominous "Well somebody hit me," turns his suitcase sharply and heads back down 14th Street. Elsie wakes up Brownie and glides victoriously across the street to rummage through the cardboard boxes in front of the United Cigar Store.

Elsie usually seems uncaring in her choice of victims, however, she occasionally seems to be reacting to injustices or to some of the grossness that abounds in New York streets. One morning about nine Elsie, caressing a box of trash in front of Blimpies at 14th and 1st, looks up long enough to see two middle-aged women in long black coats. One is carrying a shopping bag marked "Christmas greetings from J ohn's Bargain Store," and the other is tugging at her ear. Both are jabbering at the top of their lungs. As she passes Blimpies, Ear tugger accidentally steps on Brownie's paw, and Brownie gives an uncharacteristic yelp. The woman either doesn't hear or chooses to ignore the dog.

Elsie drops the roll of slightly soiled brown wrapping paper she has been fingering and follows the women across 14th Street.

"He took a bum rap for her," from Shopping bag.

"Yeah, I know," from Ear tugger.

"On his own the dumb sonofabitch took a bum rap."

"Yeah."

"I'll kill the shmuck. He took a bum rap."

As Shopping bag steps up on the east curb, Elsie pulls back a two week old rolled-up copy of the Times and swats each woman on the rear twice. Ear tugger turns around sharply ready {or battle, but Elsie treats her to the punch with another quick swat, a rare frontal assault. Brownie barks again. Ear tugger screams "muggers," and the two women disappear into the BMT stop at 14th and 1st. Elsie watches them go, smiling quietly, privately, and then marches away forgetting about Blimpies and the roll of wrapping paper.

Elsie always dresses the same way, just more or Jess of it, depending on the season.

At the moment her year-round black woolen stockings are pulled down over her swollen ankles onto the tops of torn blue tennis shoes. Her red cloth skirt and blouse are dotted with dabs of brightly colored paint and the pink moth-eaten cardigan sweater that is always with h~r is, for winter, wrapped elegantly across her back. The khaki knapsack she carries for the swag she never collects is slung over her shoulder like a purse. Elsie wears glasses with round plastic frames that sit easily on a slender red nose that is usually runny and decorated with cold sores.

In warmer weather one can see Elsie's arms, and they are her outstanding feature.

Each one is decorated with lush purple tattoos. On the left forearm there's a venomous snake coiled around a long dagger dripping three perfectly shaped drops of blood. Her right forearm has a large dog's head-a purple Cocker Spaniel, with its tongue hanging out and a friendly looking eye. Below the dog there's a series of twisting, intertwined almost psychedelic patterns of purple ribbons winding down onto the back of a hairy hand.

When Elsie wanders south of 14th Street into what's left of the hippie district, she pretends to ignore the crowds of kids on

2nd Avenue between Gems Spa and The Fillmore-but the kids rarely ignore her. A few of the hippies have seen the Marx Brothers in "At The Circus," and when Elsie approaches they serenade her with a chorus from Groucho's famous song: Lydia, oh Lydiathat encyclopedia, Lydia the tattooed lady.

Oh say have you seen Lydia?

Lydia's the queen of them all.

E lsie enjoys the singing and the attention, and the hippies love to harmonize like a barber shop quartet. For a while a few months ago it looked as if Elsie might set a new style among the hippies. They talked about getting tattoos for themselves, but the plan fell through when nobody could find a tattoo parlor. Now they seem content to sing occasionally "Lydia the Tattooed Lady" to Elsie and to wave after her as she roots her way up to 14th Street.

If some of the hippies have been watching G roucho, at least one of them has a more literary bent, and has read e.e. cummings. The boy, a tall slender effeminate Negro in Levis and a denim vest that he wears over his bare chest, stops Elsie as she inspects two large cardboard barrels in front of Ratner's Dairy Restaurant, to give his version of cummings' "my father moved through dooms of love." He lisps his poetic riff in a soft girlish voice: sweet elsie moved through dunes of trash through stains of paint through halves of cloth deathing each morning into each night my elsie moved through dogs of fright Elsie looks at the boy warmly and touches his arm. He smiles, kisses her on the cheek and offers a flower from his hat, but the gift frightens her, and she moves away quickly. The boy blows her a kiss as Elsie heads south to Houston Street, and home.

The farthest west Elsie ever gets is Union Square. She works her way up 2nd Avenue, goes across 14th to Klein's then back down the other side to Avenue C, down to Houston and across to the Bowery and home.

Home for Elsie and her dogs is what's left of an old brick yard at the lower end of The Bowery, where there used to be a great many old-fashioned brick kilnslarge red brick domes with earthen floors a nd open hearths in which an earlier generation of craftsmen made the bricks and slabs of brown stone that built New York. The brick domes, like the artisans who worked them, are mostly gone now, but one--<>r most of one- remains, hidden behind a Bowery bar and flophouse, and Elsie calls it home.

The dome, which is about fifteen feet at its highest point and about twenty feet in diameter, is by New York apartment standards rather spacious. Elsie has run electricity from the hotel to her home with a Rube Goldberg patchwork of extension cords, zip cord and black electrician's tape running down the hearth's chimney and into Elsie's quarters. The cord gives life to an old fashioned floor lamp with a broken Tiffany shade, that despite its damage would probably bring several hundred dollars in an uptown antique shop.

Elsie also has a hot plate and a splendid looking pink electric blanket with silk binding and dual controls as well as a space heater. The blanket, Elsie's most valued possession-she's indifferent to the rest-is spread casually across an ob-

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51 The New Journal I December 14, 1969

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cenely filthy mattress which in turn rests on slabs of cardboard. The door to Elsie's oven is a tiny arched opening in the bricks -tiny in order to keep heat in, during the dome's more productive days. Now the opening is just the right size for the dogs, but Elsie has to crawl through on her knees. She keeps a pail of water near the hot plates; the dome of course, has no running water. At night she covers the doorway with a wooden crate marked "Dried Norwegian Codfish: Heavily Salted." By day the crate is a bedside table.

Inside her dome in addition to her furniture, E lsie has her "piles," mounds of carefully selected and arranged scraps of cloth, bits of plastic, and tin foil and string-souvenirs from days when she did more than just pick through the rubbish. The order of the piles is very private and very distinct, and Elsie has obviously spent a lot of time keeping things straight.

There are no apparent signs of Elsie's past life among her possessions and the only decorations in the dome are two pictures torn from magazines, one of Marlon Brando in "The Wild One" and the other of Pope John XXIII celebrating mass at St. Peter's.

Elsie is unclear as to how long she bas lived in the oven, but she cannot or will not recall living anywhere else. The dogs, Elsie, Elsie and Brownie, live in the dome too. "Brownie, he sleeps with me all the time" Elsie says, "the other ones, Elsie and the other Elsie, just in the winter time.

This time of year sometimes they sleep here; sometimes they don't."

E lsie seems to have worked out an arrangement with the flophouse that shields her from the prying eyes of The Bowery and allows for the use of the hotel's bathroom facilities . The hotel's manager, a gentleman not given to casual chats, seemed to think that the oven, like Elsie and her dogs, had always been there.

Elsie sometimes picks up spare change panhandling outside the Variety Photo Plays on 3rd Avenue near 14th Street. With her dogs asleep on the pavement, Elsie stands beneath the marquee and politely mumbles to passersby soliciting "extra money."

She keeps her rolled-up newspaper handy while she's panhandling, and when the mood is upon her, Elsie swats her benefactors, black or white, rich or poor, whether or not they've given her money.

Once in a while she goes into the Variety Photo Plays, in the morning admission is forty five cents. On movie days, Elsie ties Elsie, Elsie and Brownie to a parking meter in front of the theatre and goes in to watch the double feature. She usually stays only an hour or so; then, concerned with her brood, or perhaps bored with Hollywood, she leaves and heads back to 14th Street.

For a ll her unusual habits and style, Elsie seems reasonably content with her lifeor at least it hasn't occurred to her to question it. Perhaps the strangest thing about her is that although she doesn't say it, one gets the impression that Elsie assumes everyone lives the way she does.

Like all of us, she manages to find simple pleasures in her daily routine, and like all of us, she has her share of routine disappointments.

One of her greatest joys is playing with the small girls who skip rope on the sidewalks year round. The girls chant the same verses that girls have chanted for generations, adding only their Spanish accents. And Elsie loves to tie Elsie, Elsie

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and Brownie to a fire hydrant or car bumper and join the chant: Operator, operator give me number nine.

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When they allow her, Elsie jumps, skirts flapping and tattooed arms waving till she misses. She jumps as fast as she can and the girls watch squealing and giggling.

E lsie, however, is a lousy loser, and when she misses, even if she's doing better than most of the ten year olds, she yells at the girls. "You twisted it. You screwed it up."

"No sir," is the indignant reply.

"You twisted it. You screwed it up on purpose." ''No sir. I didn't twist nothing. No sir."

The exchange goes on for a few minutes till Elsie tires or the dogs wake up. But before she moves on, Elsie takes a couple of free-wheeling swats at the girls and kicks fiercely at the jump rope, all of which serves to break up the game for the day.

Getting Elsie to talk about her past is almost as difficult as getting her to talk about the present. Like the true existential creature she is, talk of the future is out of the question. However, for the price of a roast beef sandwich, a glass of beer and a few raw hamburger patties for E lsie, Elsie and Brownie, she will open up a bit.

It's hard to tell how much of her past is present fantasy and how much of it actually occurred; with Elsie it's impossible to know the truth. What is certain, is that it's all very real to her.

She remembers growing up in Jersey City earlier in this century and as a teenager moving to New York-she can't say when, but she looks as if she's in her late forties. "One teacher, she always taught us about Indians. I learned about Indians from her," seems to be the most vivid memory of her childhood and formal education. Elsie worked for a time in the garment district sewing dresses, "all day you worked there. It was hard, so I didn't go back." It appears that Elsie dropped out of the garment business in the late forties and has been living off the land ever since.

The tattoos are the result of a brief liaison with the owner of a tattoo parlor near the old Brooklyn Navy Yard. Told that the Brooklyn Navy Yard no longer existed, Elsie seemed surprised, but not particularly affected by the news. She was most willing to talk of her most immediate problem, her ill treatment at the hands of area shop keepers. She pulls on the stringy reddish orange hair and stares at her beer, "They should just let us alone.

We don't make trouble. We don't bother nobody. They won't let us at the stuff. If they don't want us at the stuff, why they put it on the street? If it's on the street, its not their stuff anymore." Elsie bas considered the question of ownership of "stuff''-street refuse-more deeply than any other issue, and she feels ill treated. Although she does not get emotional about the subject, it seems the closest she comes to caring about anything. "I don't go in the stores ... They shouldn't go in the street," is her pronouncement, and then she gets up abruptly to go outside and check on her dogs. She squats down next to Brownie who is t ied to a parking meter by the piece of clothesline be wears around his neck. Brownie is panting in the cold, and Elsie strokes his fur gently and scratches him fondly behind the ears, one of which is tom, and probably deaf. She

mumbles something private and secret into Brownie's good ear, and stares across 3rd Avenue towards the Hudson Army and Navy Store. One of the Elsies reaches out her paw to shake hands, and then goes back to sleep.

Later, after a few more glasses of beer and a piece of apple pie, Elsie picks at a yellowed tooth and absentmindedly fingers the tattoo on her left forearm. As she thinks, she begins to speak again in her rough voiced staccato way, nothing for long periods, and then little bursts-as if she's hearing the words somewhere e lse and only repeating the message. Today she has Chiclets on her mind. It's unclear whether Chiclets is a man, or a dog long gone. She speaks of Chiclets, punctuating her reverie with jabs at her pie and sudden turns towards the door and her dogs.

"It was better when Chiclets was around," she begins. "With Chic there wasn't so much trouble with getting stuff . .. then we found all the best stuff ... no trouble. Now they're all the time stopping me. Chiclets knew how to handle 'em all."

She stops for a moment and roots through her knapsack, perhaps searching for some souvenir of Chiclets, which does not present itself. Asked if she expects Chiclets back, Elsie gets excited at the possibility and pushes a honey hand through her hair again. "He might," she blurts, "he mightyou never know about Chiclets ... it's a long time, but you never know ... he might show. Then we'll start getting good stuff again. When Chiclets is around, you don't have to worry. Chicie can handle 'em all. They give me trouble all the time.

'Get out of here ... get the hell away from that stuff ... ' But.not Chic. They don't get so smart with Chicie. Chicie guards me. He guards all of us. Chiclets knows where the best stuff is. He knows where they hide all the good stuff. He knows Brownie and Elsie and Elsie and me and you. He knows it all. Chicie knows stuff that you and me never thought of â&#x20AC;˘..

Chicie knows where stuff is that you can't find even in dreams."

Each Saturday afternoon about 2:00, Elsie shows up in front of the Evangelical Christian Church on 11th Street near Avenue B to hear the Bible school chorus sing. The children, black, white and Puerto Rican, gather on the church steps to serenade their neighborhood. Elsie usually watches and listens to the first few songs and then joins in when the teacher, a desperate looking young woman about thirty, with mammoth breasts, adds an accord ian accompaniment. As the boys in the chorus begin to giggle at the very real possibility of the teacher catching her bosoms in the folds of the accordian, Elsie smiles and joins the singing. She has a thin reedy contralto voice and absolutely no sense of pitch. But what she lacks in musicianship she more than makes up for with pleasure and joy in the music.

Jesus loves me, this I know They are weak, but be is strong, Jesus loves me, this I know because the Bible tells me so.

Elsie looks forward to the singing all week, and after the half-hour concert when the children have gone back to their lessons, she stares at the church door for a few minutes and then looks at the blue and red neon sign as it lights up proclaiming "Jesus Saves." Elsie considers this possibility for a moment, and then steers Elsie, Elsie and Brownie back towards 14th Street, looking for somebody to swat. ~

-'

Searching for consciousness at Esalen: "After spending thousands educating our heads, this was the least we could do for our bodies."

by Alton Wasson and Roz Driscoll

In its official language, Esalen Institute "is a center to explore those trends in the behavioral sciences, religion and philosophy which emphasize the potentialities and values of human existence. Its activities consist of seminars and workshops, research and consulting programs, and a resident program exploring new directions in education and the behavioral sciences."

Looking through the catalogue one finds such courses as "Authenticity Revisited: a workshop for the overgrouped," "Mores, Mysticism and Madness," "Ma.s sage and Meditation," "The Open Couple," and "Dreams, ESP and Altered States of Consciousness." The Esalen experience is, however, more than just what the catalogue describes: it begins months before one actually arrives at the Institute, is altered by what one finds there, and continues long afterwards, growing, shifting or changing along with the individual. The following is the first-person account by Alton Wasson and Roz Driscoll, two members of the Yale community who recently spent a week at the Institute in Big Sur, California.

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·

Before arriving, our visions of Esalen Institute were fabricated of hard-to- believe stories and vaguely Utopian descriptions. We knew from our reading that there were peopfe there involved in verbal and nonverbal encounter, the "letting go" movement, educational innovation and Maslow's theory of human potential. We were nervous about the rumors of nudity, physical contact and mind-shattering encounter, frightened of being touched, physically and emotionally, by strangers.

We both were wiJiing to take the risk, however, on the assumption that what one is most frightened of may be just what one needs. And, of course, we were curious.

We signed up for a week-long workshop in body awareness which cost us $260 each.

After spending many thousands educating our beads, this was the least we could do for our bodies.

To reach Esalen from San Francisco, we drove down the coastal highway which hung on the edge of the land between the mountains and the sea. Each bend in the road revealed another awe-inspiring vista.

This grandeur shook us out of our ordinary sensations and intensified the feelings of trepidation and anticipation. After several hours, we arrived at "Esalen Institute, By Reservation Only." We drove down into a casual scattering of low buildings and assorted trailers. A lovely woman playing with a baby sat behind the desk where we registered. Our rooms were plain but for a tiny vase of fresh flowers, a candle and some incense. A few people strolled about or sat quietly on the thick lawn in front of the lodge. We soon sensed that the ambience was far more informal and gentle than we had anticipated. No one rushed up to greet us or to take us in. We were left on our own most of the time. Our first meeting that evening (and most subsequent Alton Wasson, '67 B .D., is a chaplain at Yale serving as Chairman of the Yale Religious Ministry and special consultant to Dwight Hall. He is also studying parttime in a Master of Sacred Theology program.

Roz Driscoll, Smith '67, is now a student at Silvermine College of Art after two years as the Research Assistant in the Oriental Department of the Yale Art Gallery.

meetings) was held in "Maslow," a redwood-panelled room containing no furniture except for a thick, red, wall-to-wall carpet. You removed your shoes before entering. There were about twenty people in our group, of all ages and from all over the country: a few ·psychologists, a few students, a secretary, a technician, some older women, an ex-minister and several people we never really knew at all. The leader, Ed Maupin, who wore a long, black beard sprinkled with gray was very relaxed; and appeared very gentle. He began by asking us what we had come to learn, and then explained that we would be investigating the presence of our bodies: the feeling the body has in relation to the sensual world, and the relation of part to part, in an effort to integrate the whole body into one's self-awareness. He would lead us in daily exercises in the morning,

give us each two individual sessions of the Rolf process, and in the afternoon, others, including his wife, would teach us movement and Tai Chi Chuan. The usual Esalen extras were bot mineral baths and massage.

One of the rumors about Esalen revolved around the hot mineral baths, the "nude baths." We found them to be innocent and pleasant, (especially in relation to our fears and fantasies) and even liberating in a subtle, unobstrusive way. After the first moment of embarrassment, it felt natural and normal. Men and women could soak in the big square tubs always fiJled with hot mineral waters, or peacefully sun on the deck, looking out over the Pacific, the surf crashing and the sea otters playing below.

At night the only light was from candles and the moon.

•---

Alton

Having participated in several T-groups, I felt that as a chaplain, I needed some training in non-verbal encounter groups, which I thought were central to the Esaleo experience. The workshop leaders and staff, however, did not resort to facile openness in getting to know us, and the slow pace of working in the seminar and of just moving and breathing was not what I had expected. Where were the encounters?

I soon found them among the others in our seminar who had come with similar expectations. It became clear that Ed was not interested in leading an encounter group, so we met once without him. The attempt was abortive, and I finally accepted the fact that I was there to Jearn about relating to myself, and even more, I was to learn to relate to myself as a body.

Roz

On the other hand, I was delighted to discover that there would be no encounter activity, but I joined the spontaneous group attempt out of some sense of duty to the

-···

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group. When it dissolved, I was again relieved to know that I would not have to engage in other peoples' lives in this unnatural and forced manner. Instead, we were to learn about ourselves in what turned out to be the most natural way of all.

During our exercise sessions Ed would constantly advise us, while exploring a feeling or breathing, "Don't try to change it. Just notice it." He was suggesting that we pay attention to our behavior as it is; I waited for him next to explain what the proper behavior might be, but he continued to repeat, "Don't try to change it." Finally I began to see that only by being aware of a feeling as it is and accepting it as it is can any genuine change occur. Otherwise I impose external patterns over my own, and conflict may arise. I began to see that the most difficult part is the acceptance rather than the change.

An exercise we were taught required bending over and straightening our legs to the point where they began to shake, sending energy through atrophied muscles.

The first time we did it, an older man complained that he was a complete failure, that he started vibrating right away and rather violently. Ed replied, however, that it was all right, and that he was, in fact, probably the "best" in the group. At first I was surprised and confused that someone I thought was performing less well than anybody should receive the praise. Was it possible that the standards of achievement were reversed? Or that there was no "performance" as I was used to it? Slowly it began to dawn on me that my competitive desire to do well was out of place here.

Most of my life "to do well" was usually used in relation to specific comparative measurements such as grades, awards, and college boards, or in the eyes of certain people such as parents, teachers and employers. Now I was in a situation where

personal growth bad top priority, and no one stood by to approve or disapprove. I waited for Ed to give encouragement, or to explain to me the meaning of certain puzzling experiences, but he never did, leaving the burden on my own shoulders where it belonged.

Alton

Members of our group arranged for special yoga lessons with the resident yogi in order to squeeze all we could out of Esalen.

We attended a couple of sessions, but soon found that we were playing with too many philosophies of body structure. Ed taught us through his use of the word "yoga" that it means a person's own physical growth discipline. He had us lie on the floor stretching and moving in whatever way felt good to our tired and tense muscles. By working in this way, we were developing our own individual yoga, letting it evolve out o f our own needs: it should be possible to discover your own pains and tensions.

After one session, a woman in our group was crying because she wanted to move on through her tensions and couldn't.

Roz

There is something about the effortlessness of nature that I want to resonate with.

A tree just grows, unerringly seeking the sun. In the autumn the leaves turn dazzling colors with no aim to please. I would like to live that effortlessly. Perhaps a way to move in that direction is the practice ofTai Chi Chuan, a beautiful, disciplined series of rl)ovements we learned at Esalen. The pace is very, very slow and the movements graceful but strong. After long practice it is possible to be so at one with the motion that there is no effort whatsoever, and the body is so sensitized to the surroundings that one becomes part of the flow. Of course we didn't reach that point, but we did feel a new ability to slow down and a new alertness in all the senses. We took a walk on the lawn with our eyes closed, and I could actually feel the coolness of the ocean on my left side and the warmth of the sun on my right. A visually oriented person, I was moved by the discovery of this whole new realm.

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Alton

Tai Chi Chuan (Supreme Energy) as a form of meditation is a way to develop movements which become so natural that one eventually transcends the awareness of the body. For the Tai Chi master each breath is an intake of energy which explodes from his center into all parts of his body. Although my brief introduction to Tai Chi did not provide such transcendence, I experienced it as an excellent kind of meditation for calming down my mind and giving me a sense of balance.

Roz

During each session we would end with a period of sitting meditation while Ed supplied us with regions Qf the body or images to explore. One day as we sat in meditation he suggested feeling the inside of the head.

The inside of the head? Although I had never noticed much distinguishable feeling there, I concentrated on that space. Mter a short while something odd began, a sensation that felt like a sparkler alight, and then a long burst of electricity filling the space inside my head. It must have been energy, that element, still mysterious to me, which is a lways running through us, but which we stop off and close down all over. Opening up to this energy was the

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91 The New Journal! December 14, 1969

aim of most of the contortions we went through.

We each had two individual sessions with the leader in the Rolf process, which is a manipulation of the muscles in order to realign the body structure in a more natural integrated way, and to open it up to its fuii potential. Through physical injuries or psychological traumas (ma~y dating back to childhood) we have bUJlt up many tensions. The Rolf process physically breaks through the old tensions and reorganizes misalignments. The first session left me feeling peaceful and glowing, although most people found it agonizing. In the second session Ed worked on my feet and ankles and then on my back. He slowly ran his thumbs down either side of the spine and then repeated the pressure, more deeply, with his elbows. Minutes later I began to cry, not from pain but because he must have released emotion long stored somewhere in the middle of my back. I cried continuously for no apparent reason and for all reasons, for five hours, sorrow and joy blending into one.

Alton

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...

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Throughout the week in conversations with us, Ed explained how his own body awareness had evolved into Christian mysticism. He had long rejected Christianity but eventually realized to his embarrassment that much of his interpretation of reality was based on Christian symbology, which he found to be part of his very being in spite of his spiritual wanderings. He came out of his first acid trip singing the Doxology. While trying to become aware of his body in the last few years he remembered how as a child he had empathized with the grief his mother was experiencing to the extent that his body took a posture of grief-head forward and chin down. _The. best body image he found to help ra1se his head and open his throat came from his Christian experience of the way it feels to "praise the Lord." He believ~s that !esus. was asking people to feel theJC way mto hts life, but too much rationality in the church and in the culture has hindered this. "It's hard to take the Jesus trip if you don't know how to take any trip at all." On the last day he took us all on a trip by telling some stories and asking us to enter the stories totally, to be present in the stories with our whole body, in a way we had not done since childhood-without analysis, analogy or theology. We lived through vividly told stories such as that of the Garden of Eden and tales from the Arabian Nights in a way that deeply affected us, physically and emotionally. We ran through fear, suspense and delight as if for reaJ. When I returned to Yale, the initial culture shock I felt showed me, somewhat to my surprise, that I had indeed been changed and that the environment at Esalen had been radically different. I was expected to slip into my old patterns and responsibilities, but they were uncomfortable; I felt fragmented. Although I had long been cognizant of the cynical, c~mpe­ titive authoritarian aspect of the envJConment'at Yale, I was deeply disturbed by it now. So I have searched out a group of friends to create an alternative community to try to live out a new life style. For me this means becoming more at home in myself so that I can give more to others. After working for institutional reform for several years, it now seems that the most revolutionary move I can make is first to end my

own disunity and support others in this process. Otherwise I continue to act in the same authoritarian, harassed style of the institutions and people I would like to see change. The way I have cho~e~ to do th~s is to continue learning the Chnst1an emotions and passions-to take the Jesus trip.

Roz

. d. .

There seems to be an mgre 1ent m the atmosphere of Esalen and of California, missing in the East, that tole~ates and respects different kinds of behav1or, thought and life styles. I saw approaches to life and happiness totally new to me. We met four people who lived among the redwoods in the Big Sur hills on an old wooden dance platform with nothing but the trees around and overhead. A big brass bed graced the "room." Ways of life I would have dismissed at one time as impossible or odd now are open to me.

After returning to the East, I found myself talking increasingly apologetically and selectively about my experiences in Big Sur. They began to sound slightly unreal in this environment, for the response I've repeatedly met here is one of rationality and skepticism. Since I know that I myself would have been just as skeptical had I not been the one to go to Esalen, I empathize with this reaction. I stand as if with one foot in California and the other in Connecticut, and I want to feel a connection.

There are people at Yale who have been through similar experiences, and Ed Maupin even came to Yale for a coup~e of days, but certainly for me the connectiOn won't be made through Ed or even through a community of people, but rather in myself.~

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It isn't tliateasy to leave Vietnam

by William Stott

When President Brewster spoke the sentence at the Moratorium Rally, I thought I hadn't heard right. The next day, though, the newspapers published it in all its oddity: Let us admit that it is not easy to abandon the anonymous masses of South Vietnamese who have relied upon us.

I don't know what Mr. Brewster meant this sentence to mean in the context of his appeal for a disengagement from the war.

I assume he didn't want it to say what it said: that we should abandon those who rely on us while comforting ourselves with the assurance that it's not easy for us to behave so despicably. But if he did mean this, I think I agree with him.

Without question, if we pull out of South Vietnam now, a lot of people who count on us are going to suffer. Who they are, how many they are and what will happen to them are matters no one I know has much discussed. Before we kill them off, maybe we should.

First, we must dispell the agreeable leftist illusion that the only people who will suffer when the Americans withdraw are those who deserve to: the great land owners and the military leaders. No doubt these people, as a class, should suffer; but it is precisely they who won't. When South Vietnam falls, the rich land owners and the top echelon military will be far away. .

Already their capital, their heirlooms, their sons and daughters, often their wives and retainers, too, have preceded them into exile. You find them in Bangkok and in the South of France. Their sons are learning skills-medicine, architecture, commerc<!-that they won't have to own a country to exercise.

The people who will suffer when we pull out are hard to name. They are not the five percent who are upper class: the rich, as I say, emigrate. They are not the seventy percent who are landless peasants: the poor st~y and suffer, and will continue to suffer, with or without us, until the Vietnamese economy is modernized. The people who will suffer as a consequence of our withdrawal are those who remain.

Who are they,this remaining anonymous quarter of the country? A social scientist might describe them as the middle class. A large percentage are, ironically, North Vietnamese-people who took refuge in the South because they didn't want to live under Ho Chi Minh's regime or feared that if they tried to they would be killed as were hundreds of thousands who stayed behind.

In thinking of the war, we continually Fran~ois then went on to make a point that surprised me. He insisted that it was overlook this "middle" class of between not the French that were most cruel to the three and four million people; to us, as innocent anonymous mass of the AlPresident Brewster says, they are "anonygerians, but the rebels themselves. "Everymous." We should have noticed them long one knows that the N.L.F. used terrorism," ago, because their welfare was the only he said. "But no one seems to remember moral justification on which to build a that they used it mainly against their policy toward the South Vietnamese. They people." I said that probably the N.L.F. are the people willing to see the society felt it had to punish those who collabochange and able to make it do so: the rated with the French. "I'm not speaking trained workers, the small professional and of the collaborators," he said. "Of course business men, the teachers and the minor they killed traitors; that's war. I mean government officials. The final failure of plain people. They weren't strong enough our Vietnam policy-which, contrary to to take on the French, so they pushed its intention, has proved: that outside help, around Arabs." As he explained it, the however generous, cannot stop "wars of N.L.F.'s chief goal was to discredit French national liberation"; that the Domino ability to protect Algerians, particularly in Theory will hold true if the other side is rural areas. "As soon as the Algerians knew able to mount such wars; that the United that we couldn't defend them, they would States will never again live up to its comgo over to the rebels." To show France's mitment to intervene on behalf of an weakness, terrorists would strike at ranattacked ally unless that ally fully controls dom against Algerians who didn't support its own people-the final failure of our their cause. Villages refusing to pay policy will be to be destroy those Viettribute were located and blown up, their namese whose welfare should have been leaders killed. our major concern.

As Fran~ois' district was a calm one, "Destroy"-is this too strong a word? I he could argue persuasively that the Alhope so. But no one can say. Joseph Alsop gerian people were safe with France. predicts that our withdrawal will bring on Indeed, so persuasive was he, he claimed, the murder of 1,500,000 people. Mary that a majority of the people and nearly McCarthy, at the other end of the political spectrum, says that only 10,000 risk being â&#x20AC;˘ all the leaders remained loyal to France.

He swore-as have all Algerian-born killed and suggests that the U.S. relocate Frenchmen I've known-that even at the them. Of the two, I'm afraid that Alsop end a majority of the Algerian people may be closer to the truth. I say this bewanted to stay with France. They weren't cause I had the misfortune to meet the able to, he said, because De Gaulle chealed villain of another war-a war the radicals, them. In the 1962 plebiscite in which the at home and abroad, have always equated Algerians voted an overwhelming oui with our war in Vietnam. to France's offer of autonomy, the non ballots were purple-a color no devout When I met Fran~ois in the summer of Muslim will touch. But the vote really 1966, he was a tall, corpulent young man didn't matter, said Fran~ois: before thereof twenty-five with thickly pomaded fair sults were counted, Paris announced that hair combed straight back in the Spanish Algeria had chosen independence. I didn't fashion; his cheeks were immense and know what to make of this story: it seemed beardless as a baby's and his eyes no all cockeyed. bigger than raisins. He came to see me in He then said something though that the American Cultural Center I ran in struck me as plausible. "What did most Fez, Morocco, because he considered of the Algerians want? Simple. A little immigrating to the United States. peace, that's all." He put his head back He was a Frenchman, but a Frenchand touched his fat chin with two fingers, ma o born and raised in Algeria. After the looking at me out of the corner of his eye. revolution he found, as did many AlgerHe said, experimentally, as though curious ian-born French, that he couldn't stomof my reaction, "I am responsible for the ach the discrimination in France. As for death of I 0,000 people." I only stared at Algeria, living there was out of the queshim and said nothing. I knew immediately tion, he said. And without any prompting, that he had told me his past just to tell me he told me why. that, but even knowing this didn't help¡me Fran~ois had been in the O.A.S., the find words. It was an unusual accomplishbruta l cabal in the French army which ment for a man of twenty-five to feel he opposed De Gaulle 's belated attempt to had so much blood on his head; Fran~ois give independence to the Algerians. On didn't like it. He shifted his weight in the and off for five years, three of them after chair. He had told the Algerians of his the Algerian war. Fran~ois had served as district that France would defend them. courier for J acques Soustelle, an O.A.S. When France pulled out, an uncountable chief . H e had given interviews in Sousnumber had been killed. He called it telle's name; he remembered that in I 0,000. Surely it was much less.

Copenhagen during the early sixties he gave one to Joseph Alsop.

His main work during the war, however, bad been for the French army. Because he spoke Arabic andknew the country, he was a military liaison between the Algerian population in a certain province and the French government. It was his job to persu ade influential Algerians that the French were there to stay and would protect them.

"Collaborators?" I asked hopefully.

"Collaborators? Like fun. If we'd had 10.000 collaborators. the war wouldn't have taken place." He said that the first to be killed were the leaders whom he'd persuaded of France's constancy. They were by no means the last. Algerians who were clerks or skilled workers in French establishments, or mechanized laborers on French farms; Algerians who spoke French too well or had too much education for their village; and finally Algerians who had money or a nice house or a motor scooter or a bicycle were killed. "You've got to understand," said Fran~ois, "the rebels had nothing-but nothing. Only, they had weapons."

And this wa.~ the last revelation he brought me. Today Fran~ois lives, I presume, in Canada. He had no relatives in the United States who woull;l sponsor him and none of the skills our immigration Jaws favor. Canada, as I told him, has more liberal standards, and particularly seeks French speat<ers. Fran~ois would have preferred to be an American, he said.

He liked our combat in Vietnam.

In subsequent conversation with people who had known the Algerian revolution, I tried to find out whether what Fran~is said was anything like the truth. Those I spoke with and the books I read agreed on one point: the N.L.F. had killed many more Algerians than French. The excuse usually offered- two very liberal United Nations officials from the third world countrie, gave it to me, each shaking his head- was that those murdered belonged to "opposition groups" that is, groups wanting independence of both France and the N .L.F. This is a half-truth at best. An American woman who worked from 1959 to 1963 in a Quaker-sponsored camp for Algerian refugees in Morocco, said that while most of the peasants had been displaced during the French army's relocating of their villages, a large number had fled the N.L.F.'s violence.

On other matters it was more difficult to find a consensus. There are widely conflicting eo;timates of how many Algerians were killed in the revolution. The only reporter who discusses the killing of Alger ians by Algerians, Arslan Humbaraci, a strong supporter of the independence movement, puts the figure at nearly 1,000,000. The observers with whom I discussed this issue agreed that.a very large number of Algerians were killed in the year after independence and only a small percentage of them by O.A.S. terrorism.

1 suggested to a French diplomat of liberal views that most of the bloodshed after the Fre nch withdrawal resulted from virtual civil war between rebel groups and, within the N.L.F ., between partisans of Ben Youssef Ben Khedda and Ahmed Ben Bella. H e disagreed. ' They fought for control of the country, yes. But then they fought for everything." According to him, when the French gave up the war, there ceased to be a force in Algeria to police the rebels. "The rebels themselves couldn't do it; they were too fragmented. So what did you have? You had bands of guerrillas, a few men in each, who knew nothing but destruction and who felt ttiey had made-as was true-a great sacrifice for their country. But they come into a village or town, and what do they see?

11 I The New Journal I Deceml>er 14, 1969

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Men, Arabs, who haven't carried weapons, haven't risked their lives for freedom, and who yet own something more than just a rifle." He argued that many rebels simply took whatever they wanted, even if they had to kill to get it, because they felt it was owed to them. "You must remember these men hadn't gotten high wages for their war."

Asked how many Algerian civilians died after the French pulled out, the diplomat said. in a tone of disgust at my innocence, "Ah, rat Des choses com me ra n.e se comptent pas." ("Things like that can't be counted.")

...

0

In Algeria, theN.L.F. guided rebel troops in battle, yet couldn't police them when victory came. In Vietnam the N.L.F. are politicians, not soldiers; they don't lead the rebels in war and won't in peace.

Besides, as far as we know, the N.L.F. leaders, though middle class, prefer anarchy to the old order. The Viet Cong are out to undo the society; it has a debt to them, they feel, and they have the means to make it pay. The N.L.F. couldn't stop them and probably wouldn't want to.

How many people will be killed when we finally leave Vietnam? I have no idea: des choses comme fa n.e se comptent pas.

Many Vietnamese who relied on us will be destroyed, but if this is the price of getting us out of the war, I'm ready for them to pay it. And I'm ashamed to say, I'm confident our souls won't be much troubled at their suffering. In the last five years, there have been several episodes of unaccountable civilian murder. First the Algerian war. Then the Vietnamese war.

Then 500,000 Indonesians killed in the name of anti-communism. Then I ,500,000 Biafrans. Only about the last of these have we Americans shown a slight concern, and of course the Biafrans are black, and blacks just now are at the center of our thinking. We will overlook the destruction of South Vietnam's anonymous masses, I feel sure, as we've overlooked such things before. Perhaps, as Mr. Brewster says, it will not be easy: this time the blood will be on our heads. But we Americans can do it, if only we put our minds to it. ~

When we withdraw from Vietnam and the Saigon regime falls, the guerrillas of the VietCong will come from the countryside to claim the wages of their victory. And who will stop them? Not the South Vietnamese army; with it~ leaders flown, its provisions and salary stopped. it may turn out to be as de~tructive of the nation as its adversary. North Vietnam's army in the South will also, one assumes, join the plundering. The people that will pay these armies are. the Algerian war suggests, those who are still there and have anything to lose. Those who will die are those whom the VietCong have been killing all along: teachers, tradesmen, salaried workers, doctors and lawyers, minor government officials.

If we were to remain in South Vietnam, could we protect this middle class? Only if we stayed indefinitely. I think. The longer the war, the more bitter will be the reckoning when we pull out and leave tbe field to William Stott, a gradiUlte student In the guerrillas. For it must be clear now to American Studies, has worked in Africa all rational observers that either we fight for the United States Information Agency. for years to come or we leave the field to them. President Nixon knows this. The "Vietnamization'' he promises is a deception, though just whom he wants it to deceive is not year clear. Richard Rovere feels "Vietnamization" will prove the code word for unilateral withdrawal, a sellingout of those who rely on us. My fear is that the President means the word to trick not Vietnamese but Americans. His November 3rd speech makes "Vietnamization" the excuse for Jetting the war go on as is, with our soldiers dying for no good reason. In essence Nixon said: "We want nothing more than to turn the war over to the South Vietnamese, and when the enemy stops fighting enough, we'll do it." {}ut the enemy won't stop. And if 60,000 American soldiers is the most the Sooth Vietnamese can replace at this late date, we can't expect them to take over the burden of the war for years to come. And our people won't wait years.

Sooner or later, pressure at home will force a President of the United States to pull our troo~ out of Vietnam. Sooner or later, the VietCong will win. They know it. and because they do, it is probably too late to appease them. A coalition government including the N.L.F., even if such a compromise is attainable, would by no ~IS'!,i;,o';:s..;~ means bring the Viet Gong UndCT co:ntr·oJ:

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The Yale Symphony Orchestra John Mauceri, director Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 Judith Fay, soprano Joy Zorning, mezzo-soprano Blake Stern, tenor Richard Anderson, bass Yale Glee Club Fenno Heath, director Yale Women's Chorus Bruce E. More, assistant director Saturday, December 13 8:30p.m. Woolsey Hall Tickets $3, $2.25,$1.50 Yale Co-op, Yale Glee Club office or at the Box Office

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The Five-Year B.A. may take you to lands away and beyond but when it's all over, you have to come back to Yale.

â&#x20AC;˘

by Richard Conniff

Kingman Brewster glanced at the pile of uneaten french fries on his plate like a wishful but self-restrained weight-watcher.

He pushed back his chair and inconspicuously began twiddling with a book of matches. The student sitting to the President's left gulped down his second cup of coffee and said, "Well, it seems as if we agree on the necessity of reform. Hopefully, we can work together to convince the Course of Study Committee to adopt the proposals. You can work from the top and we'll work from the bottom."

Brewster chuckled and said, "You mean you want to squash them from both sides."

Five-Year B.A. Program Director William Foltz laughed nervously from the corner.

To discuss changing Yale's academic structure with Kingman Brewster while lunc,hing at a place like Mory's seems almost as awkward as talking to Tricia Nixon about Women's Liberation while touring the White House. Yet last Thursday, eleven returning participants in the Five-Year B.A. Program lunched with President Brewster at Mory's to discuss such change. Conversation centered around a set of proposals previously submitted to Brewster by the "Fivers" aimed at changing the academic structure of the university. Sipping an Old Fashioned, Brewster listened as the Fivers explained that their proposals grew out of a dissatisfaction with the insulated academic environment they encountered upon their return to Yale.

Brewster sympathized with the desire of the Fivers to introduce greater flexibility and broad inter-disciplinary approaches into the academic framework. But hereluctantly admitted, "I haven't really read the proposals yet ... the first thing I'll have to do is look them over."

"Right on," a Fiver muttered sarcastically.

Brewster felt" ... that the unbroken prospect of competitively driven, conventional, academic achiev~ment from age five to twenty-five breaks the motivation of many of the most highly motivated and dulls the intellectual enthusiasm of the most intelligent." He conceived of the Five-Year B.A. as a remedy to this problem, as an exploration of new paths of learning. It was to be an attempt to expand the student's capacity for self-education.

But the Five-Year B.A. Program served only to emphasize the problem.

There exists at Yale a basic incompatibility betwen the academic and non-academic worlds. With few exceptions, Yale courses center on the observation of experience rather than on experience itself. Our art comes to us through slide projectors, our anthropology through texts. The Five-Year student has the opportunity to escape this academic world, at least for a year, and to further his learning through living abroad.

Unfortunately, he finds that living experience is incompatible with the emphasis on purely academic pursuit prevalent at Yale.

The lack of individual responsibility in forming his education intensifies the FiveYear student's sense of frustration. He finds himself shunted into a standard major with no relation to his work abroad.

The Division IV program supposedly allows him to create his own major, but the five-year students imply that it operates under" ... antiquated assumptions of what constitutes an 'intellectually justified' program of studies."

To correct these problems, the eleven students who met with Brewster last Thursday made five proposals which would affect not only Five-Year B.A. students but, more importantly, all Yale students.

which finances the program's annual budget of nearly $50,000 expires. In light of that, both the university and the students have begun questioning the value of the program to their education and to the quality of education at Yale. Brewster, Foltz and others will meet this month to examine the Five-Year B.A. The answers to their questions will determine whether the present sophomore class will be the last to benefit from the advantages of the experimental Five-Year B.A. Program.

Since 1965, forty-six students have enjoyed those advantages. The program has selected them from a small group of applicants which remains small because of paperwork designed to discourage all but the more seriously interested applicants.

The chosen few soon find themselves scattered in unusual situations across the world. Each student makes his own arrangements for a suitable job in a nonWestern culture at which be can work for twelve to fifteen months.

Those selected receive assistance in dealing with the draft, as well as medical attention and advice in choosing preparatory courses, which include tutorial arrangements. Yale also pays the travel expenses. The only obligation after the student arrives in the country is that he communicate regularly with the program office.

Participants in the Five-Year B.A. have found themselves doing everything from teaching debating and English in Katsina, Nigeria to translating at the Japan Economic Research Center in Tokyo. Almost all agree that aspect of the experience has been worthwhile and often amazing.

1. The replacement of present major require-

2.

3.

The chaos of the Sixties will collapse behind us in less than a month. It could have been a decade echoing the calm and complacent 1-lik.e-lke years which preceded it; instead, it exploded. This decade has been a time for change, a time for hatcheting outdated standards and innovating with untested substitutes. By the mid-Sixties, even Kingman Brewster had raised the axe over a traditional American concept of education. It was in the Spring of 1965 that he asked Yale College to join the innovation by examining the worth of its own foundation: the unalterable four-year college career. As an alternative to it, Brewster created the Yale Experimental FiveYear B.A. Program.

4.

5.

ments with suggested guidelines formed by a faculty-student committee within each major, so that a student may affiliate with a major without strictly limiting himself to its guidelines.

That all students at the end of sophomore year present an intended program of study for the next two years, not limited to present major programs.

Redefinition of the credit system to allow greater emphasis on courses of individual interest. For example, a student could arrange to receive two credits for a one credit course in which he intends to concentrate more heavily than other students in the course.

Use of the two grade pass-fail system.

The continuation and expansion of the Five-Year B.A. Program (already guaranteed in weaker form by faculty action allowing two-semester leave for independent projects to any student in good standing).

Today, nearly five years since its inception, the Five-Year B.A. faces natural death; a weaker five-year alternative has gained ground; but for most, the traditional four-year career stands victorious.

In 1970, the Carnegie Foundation Grant

One student wrote: "Friday evening, perhaps stimulated by my interest in his performance, one of the Durgas, still masked, took from around his own neck three special garlands of seeds and flowers and placed them around mine. At that moment, although I did not know it until my astonished village friends told me, I became officially, and beyond a shadow of a doubt, a Hindu God." But the experience also leads to a questioning of deeper issues. Many five-year students, like the people they live with, look with jaundiced eye at the abundance of Ugly Americans they encounter around the world. They see, as few Americans have the opportunity to see, the insanity of South American dictatorships, of corrupt Congolese governments and of American policies in the midst of this.

In that sense, they do achieve the

.\

13'1The New Journal ! December 14, 1969

Yale Film Society

" ... healthy tolerance of strangeness and a healthy impatience with complacency" at which Brewster originally aimed the program.

Their pre-packaged ideas burst in the face of reality: "I left the village thinking all sorts of marvelously deep Reader's Digest-type thoughts about 'timeless Africa,' "wrote Brian Sheehan after visiting a village's sacred place. "A few minutes later we came across this naked old woman

living in a tiny mud hut. Her most prized possession seemed to be a transistor radio which at that particular moment was blasting out 'Dance till the Midnight Hour.'"

But their experiences abroad succeed not just in increasing their awareness of others. By escaping the frustrations of , our educational system for a year, many 1 of the Fivers have been able to see themselves more clearly. Perhaps because they 1 are totally divorced from their own culture, they begin to question their relationship to that culture. At work abroad, they find real independence possible and genuine responsibility unavoidable. And those are two advantages the traditional Yale education has more often than not denied its students.

The year-long time-out lets them put â&#x20AC;˘ ¡ thoughts into proper perspective. The FiveYear students return more convinced of their doubts about Yale and in their ideas for changing it. That conviction gave birth to their proposals.

The Five-Year B.A. has succeeded for these students in expanding their horizons.

But the university fails them in that on their return, it is incapable of handling those expanded horizons, providing little opportunity for their integration into course work. The luncheon proposals to Brewster attempted to alter this.

"The thing many of us discovered abroad,'' explained Jay Fleming, who worked last year in Nepal, "is that education-learning about oneself-proceeds whether you're in an educational institution or not. The changes we want would make every Yale student responsible for his own education."

Most Fivers begin to believe in the overwhelming importance of non-academic education. Away from the paternalism and the structured life of Yale, they must direct their own learning process. They are responsible to, if nothing else, themselves. The problem, as those at last Thursday's luncheon felt, is that" ... the restricted academic and social opportunities encountered by Fivers upon their return to Yale have made it extremely difficult to capitalize on their non-academic experience.''

Brewster missed his mark in creating the Five-Year B.A. without simultaneously making major changes in the educational structure. Yale cannot expect a student who has spent a year organizing co-operative farms in Peru to forget that experience or even temporarily put it aside so

.,.

that he can waste two years completing the impersonal requirements of a standard major.

Yet the Five-Year B.A. Office claims that the student will not have to ignore his non-academic experience during h.is last two years at Yale. It promises"... individual programs of study during junior and senior years specially fitted to their interests."

In the statement which they presented to Brewster, these students claimed that the promise does not always come through.

They criticized not just the "antiquated" criteria for Division IV, but also its impracticality: "Those who attempt to channel personal motivation and academic interest into a coherent educational program encounter difficulty in finding support and supervision from the faculty.

All too often the student's response is frustration and discouragement. He abandons the pursuit of a personally more meaningful and stimulating course of study and passively allows himself to be channeled into existing academic structures."

These problems cloud the success of the experimental Five-Year B.A. Program. It has proven its worth while at the same time pointing out other means of i~proving Yale. Through such suggestiOns as the proposals, the program has made itself a catlyst for university progress. Not only do the students benefit from a year of self-inspection, but, through the students, so can the university.

When Kingman Brewster proposed the Five-Year B.A., he wanted it to reach the "considerable number of the young who

yearn to become involved in something more meaningful than inherited patterns of success." He cannot do this unless he continues and extends this program to encompass a larger portion of the student body. Any student can now leave for two semesters of work. The university should begin encouraging students to do sosome through a new Five-Year B.A. Program, others on their own. The four-year college career is too arbitrary to be suitable for all students.

At the same time, Brewster and the university must begin a revision of Yale's educational system so that no student, whether he can afford to take a year off or not, will find himself frustrated by a 'protective' education.

The first Five-Year students found it difficult or impossible to relate the world of Yale College to the one in which they spent their year abroad. The one seems totally unrelated to life, the other is as real as a begger sleeping on the streets of Calcutta. U his promises mean anything, Brewster must continue on a larger scale the Five-Year B.A. Program, which strives to merge and improve both these worlds in a rational program of learning. ~ Richard Conniff is an undergraduate in Silliman College.

Thursday, December 11 Mann's THE MAN FROM LARAMIE (1955) Friday, December 12 Renoir's THE ELUSIVE CORPORAL (1961) Saturday, Decem ber 13 Edwards's THE PINK PANTHER (1964) Note: Shows at 6:30, 8:30, and 11 :00.

Tuesday, Decem ber 16 Godard's PIERROT LE FOU (1967)

Wednesday, December 17 Hitchcock's SABOTEUR (1942) and THE THIRTY-NINE ST EPS (1935) Note: Shows at 7:00 and 10:00 p.m.

Thursday, December 18 Walsh's WH ITE H EAT (1949)

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Comment continued from page 2

Cha Cha Candy

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It's too bad Richard Farina isn't at Yale this year. After two hundred-odd years of soul-deadening mono-education, the girls have finally arrived , and the boys h ave been down so long that they know less about up and down than old Giant Leap for Mankind Armstrong in his weightless space capsule. They are floating around every which way trying to figure out how to cope with this major existential event.

For many of them the road to Reconstructed T hought is proving to be long and rough.

Take the college social committees, for example. Two of them (at least) hired strippers, yep, that's right, bump-andgrind artists, for their Harvard weekend festivities. In at least one case the committee found the whole affair a bit traumatic. Some of the committee members were against the idea, some were in favor of it, some d idn't much care either wayand all of them were embarrassed.

The female members of the social committee were asked to leave the room when the subject came up. The idea was not to ~tic~ your neck out in front of the girls JUSt m case the other guys were against it.

It's OK to talk about it with the other guys, but, gosh, the girls might get offended and there's no sense risking that unless it's unavoidable-like if the vote is close and you have to have their opinion. Well, in t~e e,nd the guys by and large agreed, the g1rls vo~es were not needed and the thing was dec1ded upon. But of course it wasn't announced to the college at large for fear of upsetting a lot of people, and it would ~II be so messy and embarrassing.

I must confess that for no particular reason I missed the first show. Right after I got to the dance, however, Bill came up to me and asked me if I'd seen it. He said he hadn't seen it either but that he had heard from reliable sources that such an event had taken place. It sounded like a wild rumor so we sat down and with Alice's Restaurant-like diligende, tried to figure out what might actually h ave happened. T he two most likely things were: one, that it was a lie, that nothing had happened at all; and, two, that it was a joke, that some crazy guy or coed was making fun of the old Yale mentality.

It was neither, for at five minutes to midnight Cha Cha Candy came downstairs from the college library. And we all suddenly knew that it wasn't a lie or a joke: it was for real. It proceeded to get more and more real for the next five minutes; lights low, fraternity types surrounding the stage, soul band playing Cannonball Aderley's "Mercy, Mercy" in a slow, soft, tempting, mournful, aching way.

First a cape came down to eager social committee arms below the stage. Next someone had to do the zipper. After that I couldn't see much because Candy seemed '?be sitting down or something, but next time she popped up she had a telephone attached to one of her breasts, and she star ted going around inviting (or daring?) people to dial a number. And the telephone dial? Yep, right where you guessed.

The crowd did not exactly go wild, mostly because they did not know just how to deal with the situation. Many cheered with d runken good nature, a few were appalled, and most stood silently by, struck either

by the crudity of the performance (which, at a mere eighty dollars of social fee money, was pretty cheap) or the incomprehensibility of the stripper's presence in the fi rst place. M a ny unab ashedly gawked.

And, a little surprisingly, the girls, both coeds and dates, didn't seem to mind at all.

Afterward the social committee obviously felt kind of guilty about the whole thing, so it put out a cover-up story which blandly asserted that most people enjoyed the show and taunted the silent majority by saying only "a few anonym ous complaints were heard about the 'degradation of the female body.'"

But would they have said such things at all before this year? One suspects that though ts of equality and ideas of rethinking social relations between the sexes are gradually and painfully beginning to seep into the minds of even the most unreconstructed Yalies. That's a good thing certainly, but I wonder how many more of these "conversation pieces" (in the social committee's own words) we will have to endure.

We've been down so long it all looks fuzzy to us-and it probably will for some time yet.

..

George Kannar

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KEEP C.M.P. I N NEW HAVEN-rally Friday at Beinecke Plaza Jennifer, we forgive you. Study hard.

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