Letting Go

"Feelings Aren't Nice." To most of the people in the U.S., the message has been drummed in: Cover up your feelings, don't give yourself away, hold back, stay cool, because your feelings will get you into trouble. But now there is another message coming through---let go---and it comes from unexpected people in unexpected places. It is often spoken without words.

Nuns dance: In San Francisco, Sister Mary Gertrude Ann's young body is (continued on page 84) Letting go (continued from page 81) draped in a flowing habit, and her feet are bare as she whirls and spins up to the altar in the middle of Mass.

Ph.D.s strip: At the Esalen Institute in the Big Sur, California, four men with advanced degrees in psychology, three psychiatric social workers and an aerospace scientist climb nude into a hot tub together, abandon all talk---and float, touch, rub, fiddle in a sea of feeling.

Executives cry: At TRW Systems, a rocket corporation near Los Angeles, upper management convenes for weekly "sensitivity sessions," where they are encouraged into honesty jags, to shout and scream about their private hurts, to unbottle hidden resentments and fears.

Rock groups urge: "Let go. Let the world know you're alive. Let go." Their tone is joyful, exhilarating. Letting go is fun, the opposite of holding back, which is narrow and mean.

For several years, people from some sectors of society---especially the socalled intellectuals---have devalued commitments to the life of the mind and placed a new importance on feeling. In their work, calculation, control and conformity to the rules assure "success." They get places, even as far as the moon, by following certain norms, being rational and careful. But somehow that isn't enough. The sensualists need a little freedom as well, and many are turning toward what is spontaneous, personal, natural and real.

There may be some cyclic force built into men that causes them, like snakes, to shuck off the skins of reason and revert to primal states for a season or so. In the 1800s. the citizens of various European states rejected minuets and rhyming couplets for passionate waltzes and songs of nature and political revolution. An elite forsook proprieties for novelties of expression and behavior. Now, in 1969, it is obvious that many in America are adopting a new romanticism. Their thrust is anti-intellectual, anti-ideological and toward the eroticization of practically everything. Their influence may be pushing America into a new Elizabethan age or at least into the life styles of Shelley, Keats and Wordsworth.

Paul Hilsdale, a Jesuit priest from California, is a dramatic and significant example of the new romantic. At 40, Father Hilsdale had received the rigorous training of his rigorous order. In his novitiate, he had practiced all the virtues and learned to keep his "lower" self under submission by various ascetic means---prayer, fasting and self-administered lashings twice a week with a small cord whip. His subsequent studies had made him a modern Erasmus, God's spare-but-well-oiled thinking machine. And then, after 20 years of preparation for missionary work in the jungles of Asia---or possibly Los Angeles---he was seduced to the wilds of Big Sur, where he became a resident fellow at the Esalen Institute.

In order to regain his natural being, Hilsdale was told that he had to lose all the hard-won control, rediscover his emotions and learn to express them in a variety of ways: through phantasy, psychodrama and hypnosis. He was told that his eloquence with words was a barrier to self-knowledge. He was then led into nonverbal encounters, in which he tried to communicate with others with his eyes alone, or by touch, kisses, hugs and slaps. He bathed with others in the hot mineral pools. He started laughing a lot, eating well and painting bright water colors. And he met several beautiful girls. "At last," he says, "I was in touch with myself and the world. I had refound the forgotten joys of feeling. I had learned to let go. And it was good."

Hilsdale is now living comfortably in his own home in the Hollywood Hills. He is trying to turn on the underground church in Los Angeles with OM chants and marathon encounter weekends, and is leading scores of persons into his little subsection of the letting-go movement.

The movement has its public, semi-public and private manifestations:

At Uppsala, Sweden, last summer, Wilburt H. McGaw, a staff member of the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in La Jolla, California, conducted tactile liturgical services for delegates to the assembly of the World Council of Churches. He had them touching, holding one another in collective embraces, expressing feelings long suppressed. McGaw's invocation was not "Let us pray" but "Let us touch."

At a Catholic retreat on the West Coast, the men and women involved didn't bother with lectures or traditional meditation in chapel; they went down to the beach, kicked off their shoes, sailed kites, sang and laughed.

At a Lutheran camp in northern Washington, a visiting theologian named Rosemary Reuther reported:

Oh, yes, and then there is the sauna. Huddled together on shelves, we bake deliciously in the heat, sweat pouring out like salvation by grace alone. Flesh against warm flesh, we knead each other's backs and necks. Then with a shout we spring for the door, race to the stream and plunge into the icy, glacier-fed falls. It's the new sacrament! the new fellowship! the new theology! the marriage of heaven and hell! the mystical communion of opposites! God bless the pagan Finns!

The strongest put-down at Esalen is "You're up in your head"---a place where most people live most of their waking lives and definitely not as good as living in the total self, here and now. Thinking about the future is contemptuously called mind fucking---obviously no substitute for the real thing. If people are strictly up in their heads, they are turned off. In touch with their entire being, they are turned on. The constant query, "Where are you?!" is a call to come out of your head, where all is idea, abstracted from time and place, into the here and now, in touch with reality, where life is lived.

At Esalen, on a craggy cliff on the California coast, you don't talk about it, you do it---whatever might help reawaken the life you are capable of living, in yourself, with others. "We had it as kids, that joy in living," says burly, bearded Bill Schutz, a staff member at Esalen. "But something happened." In his book called Joy, Schutz gives a tiny intimation of what it was that turned us off:

"The golden era of physical pleasure is the first 15 months of life," says Schutz, and he recalls his own son Ethan "being thrown up in the air, sliding off the refrigerator into his father's arms, being tickled and hugged, having his cheeks chewed, his behind munched, his face caressed, rubbing his cheek against another's cheek.... Ethan is joy."

The seekers at Esalen will try anything that might help restore that early innocence. There's a pragmatic eclecticism about the place, a borrowing from psychotherapy, group dynamics, dance, drama, Eastern mystical philosophy, Western existential philosophy---whatever turns them on enough so they can let go.

The casual visitor may, in fact, have the opposite reaction. He may be initially frozen with fear at the very thought that anyone is going to chew his cheeks or munch his behind. His anxieties are not allayed by the bold looks he receives from the bra-less girl with the see-through top who presides over the registration desk, nor by the subsequent calls to instant intimacy by the workshop leaders. Grown men and women engaging in childlike games of blindman's buff! Locking together in a "Gunther Hero Sandwich" (man-woman-man-woman-man-woman, arms around each other, chest to shoulder blades)! Exploring one another under a large white sheet! Lying down on your stomach to be slapped gently all over by all the other members of the group! Will the visitor have to make an ass of himself, too? Or be able to verbalize his honest feelings about it? Tossed in the midst of all this, he may have a rather hard time letting go. After all, his training in the uptight culture has taught him not to. What's so good about letting go?

The people at Esalen answer that with another question: What's so good about (continued on page 202) Letting Go (continued from page 84) being alive? Some of them point to a prime kind of letting go---genuine orgasmic release---as the ultimate analog of all life. They are concerned with a wider extension of orgasmic life, but they do not put clown good, old-fashioned sexual transport. In fact, one of the hottest trends in the movement is a proliferation of "bioenergetics workshops" designed to promote just that kind of release. I attended one of them at Kairos (Greek for "unfolding"), a center for "intensive group experience" somewhat like Esalen, at Rancho Santa Fe, California, where Stanley Keleman did some fascinating work with a group of 14 men and women.

A brunette named Natalie was the star of the week. She lay on a bed with her knees raised and her arms at her sides and wore red bikini panties, that's all. Keleman sat directly behind her, saying, in a low tone, "This is a chance for you to see how you pull back and. . . ." Keleman paused. He noticed that Natalie's attention was starting to waver and her gaze going off into space. "See what's happening?" said Keleman. Disappointedly: "It's already happening, huh?"

Keleman is a disciple of Wilhelm Reich, studied psychology in Vienna and Zurich and worked for eight years in New York with Dr. Alexander Lowen, the psychologist-author of a book called Love and Orgasm. Keleman, who does not have a Ph.D., is a big man with a shaggy mane and bushy eyebrows. He is also something of a miracle worker. "I guess I'm engaged in something you might call the re-eroticization process," Keleman told me, describing his work as a counselor in Berkeley. "I help people restore feeling they've forgotten or had beaten out of them." How? By helping them remove blocks that impede a normal flow of emotions. There is something in people he identifies as a life force or life energy (he doesn't care what the psychologists call it) and he gets it flowing again by leading them into a kind of simulated madness. They kick and scream and moan. They let go. "Letting go," says Keleman, "is one of the keys---to all kinds of pleasurable activity. Fucking. Writing. Laughing."

He tried to get Natalie back in focus, principally by getting her to do some heavy head-to-toe breathing. Normally, Keleman has his patients kicking violently and screaming things like "I won't!" or "No!" under the theory that people start asserting themselves by saying no to others. But Natalie had had a recent appendicitis operation and Keleman was taking it easy. When she started breathing heavily and rhythmically, Keleman was encouraged. "Coming back a little bit?" he asked. She nodded. "See how it comes back?" Natalie continued to exhale heavily and the nipples on her breasts started coming erect. In 11 years of marriage, Natalie had never had an orgasm. But her time was approaching. "Easy," said Keleman. Natalie started to sigh.

"Now there's a rocking," reported Natalie in a whisper.

"Good," said Keleman. He had Natalie take his right hand in both of hers and he put the fleshy side of his left hand between her teeth. "Bite a little bit," he said, still sitting in his chair. "Bite harder. You haven't hurt me. Bite. Let some of that shit out of you. Bite." She laughed, an animalistic sound, and her jaws clamped down harder on Keleman's hand. "Any sexual impulses now?" asked Keleman. Natalie nodded. "OK. Really make contact now. Strongly. That's it. There you are."

Natalie screamed, then started sighing. She held onto his hand and sighed ecstatically for 45 seconds. "Hold on tight, now," cried Keleman. Her sighs became more measured for some 30 seconds, and then came a rippling, down from her throat, across her breasts---now somewhat swollen---into her stomach, through her loins and into her thighs. And then she was racked with a giant spasm of her entire being and she cried out in a kind of wonder and pain and delight. Some of the group emitted cries of vicarious pleasure.

Still sitting in his chair, Keleman leaned over and looked into Natalie's eyes. He nodded toward her husband. Bill. "You ever bite him?" She shook her head with a smile. "It's about time," said Keleman. She laughed, again with a throaty, ecstatic laugh. Keleman said, "All those aggressive impulses that you don't normally let out, they don't have to be destructive in the sense of pure destruction. They can also be sensual."

"Yeahhhh!" said Natalie throatily. "Yeahhhh!"

"You don't have to feel that whatever is assertive in you you have to hold back, and then let it come out again in a roundabout way. Do you understand now why you withdrew? No, don't defocus. Look me in the eye. That's it. That's it." The involuntary rippling of her flesh began again as she focused on Keleman's eyes. "Come. Come. Come. Come with the eyes. Yeah, that's it. With the mouth." Natalie pursed her lips, reaching out with her lips. She sighed. "Goes right through, huh?" asked Keleman. "How does it feel?"

"Ha!" cried Natalie. "Feels great."

"I want you to keep it intense, huh? Come this way." She turned her head sideways to look at him. The tempo of her sighs quickened. "That's it! Let the jaw come out, huh?" Natalie continued to reach with her lips. "C'mon, let that out. Oh, you're hungry." Natalie emitted sounds that were like laughs and sobs. "That's it. That's it. Let it go through."

Again, Natalie came to climax, a tremulous spasm that shook her petite frame.

Keleman sat back in his chair and turned to Bill. "A woman in heat is an awesome thing, I'll tell you that." Natalie laughed in her luxuriant afterglow.

Bill said, "I should be so lucky."

"That's one of the great fears men have, you know," said Keleman.

"Bullshit," said Bill.

"Bullshit? That's not bullshit; it's true. The whole part of the people thing for man is to be able to control------"

"I'd like to be able to find that button."

"---Especially the woman and the relationship to her movement. Not to let that get out of hand and overwhelm him, like a great big ocean coming up against the face of consciousness, which woman is a symbol of. And a lot of his behavior is ingrained to control this overwhelming. First, for the child not to be overwhelmed by his mother and, second, not to be controlled by woman. That's why the poets talk of lovemaking as being caught up in the great big ocean. You know, man is afraid to surrender to that, both in himself and in the woman. But when it happens, when the ego overcomes that fear, a man gets a tremendous amount of strength. But that never negates the fear he has of woman, pulsating and alive, and represents the very terror man has of earth. And yet, that's the place man wants to go. He wants to lie 'shipwrecked on the beaches of her thighs.'"

While Keleman was talking, Natalie came again, without manipulation, and, in the next half hour, she came four times more. No orgasm in 11 years and now seven times in an hour, without manipulation, in front of 14 people.

"We are pleasure bodies," said Keleman simply. "Sometimes we have to take a little trip like this to discover that."

Keleman is one of the new frontiersmen of sex in America, who hope to find in the erotic an answer to "the alienation of the age" and a new sense of wholeness for men and women. He is on the Esalen circuit, a loose confederation of no fewer than 35 experimental communities of seekers exploring ways to "help us come out of ourselves."

Horny young men may believe they have exactly the opposite problem. They may think they are already too turned on, if anything. But the letting-go therapists call that an illusion. They tell you that you may imagine turning on by climbing into a hot mineral pool with a dozen other men and women, all of you stark-naked, after talking with them all day and wondering which of the women you'd like to lie with, because it's hard to imagine being encouraged to "go with your feelings" without having a little guilt-free affair. But being in a warm pool with those people may shatter that fantasy. Nothing, apparently, could be more erotic than rubbing against those warm bodies in a darkened pool; but you find there is genuine affection---without erection. There, in the baths, you learn the false separation of mind and sex, that there is more to you than head and penis.

In the Esalen massage, that lesson is rubbed in: You are a pleasure body---all of you, head to toe. My lesson came at nine o'clock on a quiet Friday morning. I was in one of the pools, alone, soaking, getting warm and soft, as instructed. Shortly, Linda appeared, smiling win-somely, and said, "Are you ready?" Linda was small but beautiful, about 22 or 23, with straight, long blonde hair falling halfway down her back. My type altogether, in the altogether, and we were alone. My libido was high, but, it seemed, well, distributed throughout my being. "Sure, I'm ready," I said. She said, "Follow me."

I padded after her toward the room set aside for massage. She climbed into a brief black leotard while I dried off, then told me to lie on my back. She told me I shouldn't talk but, instead, try to get in touch with my body, to focus my awareness wherever her fingers led.

She moistened her hands with an aromatic pine oil and began to rub the crown of my head. I focused my attention there and began to relax. She worked on the muscles behind my ears, gently but firmly, and then on my forehead, my eyes, my nose, the muscles in my jaw, my lips, my neck. When she got to my arms, I felt a slight stirring in my loins. I refocused my attention on the sensation in my shoulders and upper arms and calmed down below. I stopped trying to hold my breath and went with the feelings Linda was creating on the surface of me. She moved lithely back and forth around the table, sometimes swinging my arms and legs in huge arcs, never removing her hands from me, giving my body a kind of continuity I had never felt before. At times, her touch was heavy; at other times, like the fluttering of hummingbird wings. There are limits, even at Esalen: She did not touch my genitals. But then, that was not the point. I was supposed to know I had feelings there. The massage was aimed at croticizing the rest of me. Linda proceeded down my legs, to my ankles and feet (at that moment, I wished I'd never worn shoes); she ended that stage of the action by holding, holding, holding the tips of my toes between her palms.

Then she had me flip over on my stomach and started again, with more of the pine oil. The same process. A slight shock when her fingers lingered on my yoni, that spot midway between my anus and the base of my penis, which I later learned was one of the cakras, the six primary centers of physical energy, according to the canons of Kundalini yoga (which is very big today in the movement). Linda finished as before, the tips of my toes warmed between her clasped palms and held, tenderly. Then she stopped. I could hear the sound of the surf on the rocks below and feel a slight breeze off the morning waters of the Pacific and the sound of my own breathing and the heavier breathing of Linda, who had been moving over me for an hour and a half. I opened one eye and saw that she was now sitting on the adjoining table, tucked in a kind of lotus position, contemplating my body. The Esalen massage is supposed to be more than a massage; it is a kind of contemplation. I had an idea that Linda was finishing her meditation and I went to sleep while she did.

A beautiful brunette named Molly Day Schackman had trained Linda and had enlisted her help, the week I was there, in a five-day workshop on "Meditation and Massage." A half-dozen men and a half-dozen women spent most of their days down at the baths near the rolling surf, in the nude, learning the art of tender, loving massage.

"There is no reason this kind of massage cannot be incorporated into everyone's sexual future," said Molly at breakfast. (I had ham and eggs, but she spooned her breakfast directly out of a Mason jar: raw oats steeped in a mixture of hot water, honey and raisins.) "The idea is for these men and women to go back home and either incorporate our methods into their professional practice or, simply, to give their own husbands or wives or lovers a new kind of tender love."

A new book of "experiments in being alive," produced by another Esalen staffer, Bernard Gunther, and photographer Paul Fusco, also illustrates how anyone can turn on his beloved, almost anywhere. One of the many recipes for "touching" in the book is called "face slapping and knowing":

Slap-pat your partner's face. Move away and allow him to digest the effects. Now close your eyes and with your hands explore---get to know your partner's face. After three minutes, open your eyes and continue the exploration with eyes open. After another three minutes, make any finishing touches that might be desirable and move away. Your partner remains with eyes closed, feeling the effects of the experience. Take a look at his face to see how it has changed. The partner opens his eyes. After a couple of minutes, change roles. After both partners are done, close your eyes and rub your faces together.

This kind of sense awakening, I was told, is an importation from the Orient, and other imports keep coming. Lama Anagarika Govinda, one of the world's leading scholars and interpreters of Tibetan mysticism, who has received students in India for years, came to the U. S. last fall for a series of lectures on tantric yoga, including an Esalen-sponsored seminar at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.

Tantric yoga is commonly thought of in the West as perhaps no more than another technique to be included in manuals for sophisticated lovers. It is said to be much more than that---an outward sign (like the Christian sacraments) of an inward grace. According to the best interpreters of Zen as a way of life, sexual pleasure is not something to be sought in itself. Rather, it comes as an added gift when a man or a woman experiences an "inner identity" between himself and the world. In keeping with the classical Western split between mind and body, many men and women do not experience that sense with the world (much less with their partner). When that happens, as Alan Watts explains, they feel themselves to be restricted islands of consciousness and their emotional experience largely confined. The sexual act remains the one easy outlet from this predicament, the one brief interval in which they transcend themselves and yield consciously to the spontaneity of their organisms. "More and more, then," says Watts, "this act is expected to compensate for defective spontaneity in all other directions, and is therefore abstracted or set apart from other experiences as the great delight." Watts argues that sexuality, thus abstracted, becomes a part doing duty for the whole. "Sexual relations are religious, social, metaphysical and artistic. ... The 'sexual problem' [is] subordinate to the problem of man and nature." But a truly natural sexuality, for Watts, is not found in spontaneous promiscuity or mere animal release from biological tension.

He suggests that the future of sex will be an honest, loving encounter with "an ever-changing, ever-unknown partner, unknown because he or she is not in truth the abstract role or person, the set of conditioned reflexes which society has imposed, the stereotyped male or female which education has led us to expect."

But how do men and women in the West, so conditioned by a "grasping" culture, learn the art of letting go with a beloved who is more than a mere stereotype? Watts suggests that tantric yoga might help, because tantra transforms sexual love into a type of worship in which the partners contemplate the "divinity" in each other. They do not dissipate their energies in ordinary sexual activity, but transmute that energy in a prolonged embrace in which the male orgasm is reserved and the sexual energy diverted into mutual contemplation. As Watts explains:

The partners are therefore seated in the cross-legged posture of meditation, the woman clasping the man's waist with her thighs, and her arms about his neck. Such a position is clearly unsuitable for motion, the point being that the partners should remain still and so prolong the embrace that the exchange between them would be passive and receptive rather than active. Nothing is done to excite the sexual energy; it is simply allowed to follow its own course without being "grasped" or exploited by the imagination and the will. In the meantime, the mind and senses are not given up to fantasy, but remain simply open to "what is," without---as we should say in current slang---trying to make something of it.

Watts warns against stopping of the male orgasm too literally:

There is no value in prolonged and motionless intercourse as such; the point is to allow the sexual process to become spontaneous, and this cannot happen without the prior disappearance of the ego---of the forcing of sexual pleasure. ... Active or forced sexual intercourse is the deliberate imitation of movements which should ordinarily come about of themselves. Given the open attitude of mind and senses, sexual love in this spirit is a revelation. Long before the male orgasm begins, the sexual impulse manifests itself as what can only be described, psychologically, as a melting warmth between the partners so that they seem veritably to flow into each other.

Watts says this interchange may continue for an hour or more, during which the female orgasm may occur several times. But "in due course, both partners feel relieved of all anxiety as to whether orgasm will or will not happen, which makes it possible for them to give themselves up to whatever forms of sexual play may suggest themselves, however active or even violent." Sometimes such experience is marked by laughter. "This is above all true when the partners are not working at their love to be sure that they attain a 'real experience.' The grasping approach to sexuality destroys its gaiety before anything else, blocking up its deepest and most secret fountain. For there is really no other reason for creation than pure joy." Watts calls this joyful abandon at the height of intercourse "mystical ecstasy" and "adoration in its full religious sense."

Watts insists this is the only way to go: Without this self-abandonment, this literal pouring of their lives into each other, sex is mere "mechanical masturbation."

But letting go in the ultimate sense, in self-abandonment to another, is not easy. To let go, a man or a woman has to have a sense of self-identity. Some of the nongame-playing young---the so-called hippies---may have this sense of self-identity to a notable degree, but the majority of American men are products of a grasping culture; and most women, down deep, have little self-esteem or self-identity. These are not people ready for anything approaching self-abandonment.

William Snow, a sociologist at the University of California at Davis, believes, moreover, that most of the young people in college are not ready, either. "College kids," says Snow, "aren't that sure yet of their own identity. They think they like Norman O. Brown. He offers a vision in which every woman can be a whore and every man a poet. But then he tells them to find themselves by getting lost, like Jonah did in the belly of the whale. Students can't let go that radically. Most of them are not Dionysian, but Apollonian. They find out who they are in action, in the rational and the cognitive. And so they take only part of Brown. Particularly the girls. They use Brown's psychophilosophical system as an elaborate justification for something that's pretty old on college campuses: petting."

Norman O. Brown is the theologian and chief seer of the great letting-go movement, and his popularity derives directly from his prescription for the world: "A little more Eros and less strife."

Brown is a professor of classical literature by trade and an interpreter of Sigmund Freud by avocation, the author of two books that exclaim the possibilities of resexualizing mankind. The first book was a closely reasoned essay called Life Against Death, published in 1959, when Brown was teaching classics at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. The second was Love's Body, a fusion of poetic, religious and psychoanalytic aphorisms, published in 1966, after Brown had taken leaves from Wesleyan and Rochester and grants from three foundations.

In Life Against Death, Brown argues that men and women are largely unaware of their own desires, in childhood, and that these are sexual desires (or erotic, but not necessarily genital). As children, we took almost total delight in exploring the many erotic possibilities of our own bodies. In adult terms, we were perverse; but Brown says adult thinking is perverse, because it narrows sexuality, concentrating on the genital, an unnatural restriction that makes us less human, unhappy and ultimately destructive.

Brown argues that we will all find a way out of "a universal neurosis" if we can return, in an analogous sense, to the richer sex life we had as infants. He concedes that such a notion is hard to accept, questioning the psychological assumptions of our Western morality:

For 2000 years or more, man has been subjected to a systematic effort to transform him into an ascetic animal. He remains a pleasure-seeking animal. Parental discipline, religious denunciation of bodily pleasure and philosophic exaltation of the life of reason have all left man overly docile, but secretly in his unconscious unconvinced ... because in infancy he tasted the fruit of the tree of life, and knows that it is good, and never forgets.

Brown says Freud himself didn't think a return to such a state of innocence was possible, because he didn't see how this goal could be reconciled with man's commitment to culture and cultural progress. But Brown believes the reconciliation comes in "a fundamental form of human activity in the world, over and beyond the economic activity and struggle for existence dictated by the reality principle"---that form of pleasurable human activity, adumbrated in childhood, called play. Brown quotes the German poet Schiller: "Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays." For Brown, "play is the essential mode of activity of a free or of a perfected or of a satisfied humanity."

This sounds as if Brown would wish to turn our country into a vast playground. Just so. Those awake to the dangers of a take-over by the letting-go movement warn that this idea was first proposed more than 100 years ago by the utopian socialist Fourier, who had more than a little influence on Karl Marx. Fourier tried to elaborate the structure of a society in which work had been transformed into play. Recently, Herbert Marcuse has considered the same possibility. Marcuse is the Marxist philosopher who was idolized by the rioting youth in Paris last year and now, according to the American Legion, threatens the security of San Diego from his position as lecturer at the University of California. In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse suggested that the "work" of a fully mature civilization, where machines did all the labor hitherto done by machine-like men, would, in fact, be "play," and societal relations would be libidinal and erotic. Men and women would get together not merely because they wanted to get a necessary job done but because they enjoyed being together, playing together, sharing together. Contrary to classical Freudian doctrine, then, Eros would not be something to be sublimated in favor of civilization, but a pleasure principle with its own aims: the continuous refinement of the body, the intensification of its receptivity, the growth of its sensuousness; and it would generate its own projects---the abolition of toil, the amelioration of the environment, the conquest of disease and decay, the creation of luxury.

If the orientations of society were such, avows Norman Brown, society would not need to impose surplus repressions on the erotic instincts in man. It is only when the erotic instincts seem to militate against the stabilizing factors in society---for example, against the family---that Eros is considered an enemy of man. There was a time when a man's erotic instincts (never mind his wife's!) could be satisfied with his wife only for a short while---before she became a brood mare. After that, Eros presumably led him to other pastures (and younger fillies). To a strait-laced Teutonic Jew such as Freud, maybe this meant chaos. But times, as the new romantics say, have changed. As is now widely known, if not as widely accepted, modern American women/wives are not brood mares and are acquiring as human an interest in sex as their men. Eros need not be an enemy of the stable family, though it could lead to other arrangements. It could lead to a spirit of polymorphous play between friends of the same sex or of opposite sexes that, in the postpill era, will not necessarily upset the basic structure of the family. Nor would other forms of play: art, music, dance, sport, which Brown and Marcuse classify as basically erotic in an extended sense, because they involve the whole man, body and soul.

And so, says Brown, "The aim of psychoanalysis [and of life], still unfulfilled and still only half-conscious, is to return our souls to our bodies, to return ourselves to ourselves, and thus to overcome the human state of self-alienation." The way to do this is not through sublimation, not diverting one's energies into bridge building or flying to the moon. "Sublimation," says Brown, "is the search for lost life; it presupposes and perpetuates the loss of life and cannot be the mode in which life itself is lived. Sublimation is the more of an organism that must discover life rather than live. ..." And the sublimating arts of "civilization" negate life, hold it at a distance, desexualize it. Civilization, says Brown, is bad. It moves toward the primacy of intellect and the atrophy of sexuality. As Freud stated in The Ego and the Id, this solution disrupts the natural harmony between thought and feeling, resulting in a "defusion of Eros into aggressiveness." Baffled instincts revolt against the desexualized and inadequate world, and the desexualized and inadequate person tries to break out of his trap with paroxysms of violence.

If there is any way to break out of this interlocking chain of repression, guilt and aggression, says Brown, it is not through sublimation but through some alternative. Brown goes back to Greek mythology to explain what that is, in mythic terms. The secret is not to worship Apollo, the god of form, of rational form in thought, of civilized form in life, which is the negation of instinct, but Dionysus, the god of letting go, of life complete and immediate. "Dionysus does not observe the limit, but overflows; for him [as the poet William Blake said], the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.... The Apollonian preserves, the Dionysian destroys, self-consciousness." As the Gestalt therapists are fond of saying: "We must lose our minds so we can come to our senses, so we can be whole again." Or, in the words of a young member of a communal-living experiment in Taos, New Mexico, "A hippie is a person who diffuses to refine himself."

This, then, is the rationale of the utopians who are preaching the gospel of letting go. Abolish repression; get in touch with yourself and with others; play---erotically, exuberantly, polymorphously---in and through every organ of perception. Resexualize all---mind and body, word and deed, speech and silence---in an end to the classic split between body and soul and a return to primitive Christian eschatology: the resurrection of the body. For eternal life, according to most Christian theologians, is not a state in which your soul wings it through an ethereal heaven in a disembodied form, but life in a body. Thus, Tertullian, a Church father of the Second Century, affirms that: "The body will rise again, all of the body, the identical body, the entire body." Brown thinks this is a way of being that ought to begin in this life. He calls it body mysticism, something that stays with life, which is the body, and seeks to transform and perfect it.

There are indications that Brown's theories are more than just theories on many of the nation's campuses. "Yes," admits Ruth Childs, a pretty UCLA student, "we play a lot, boy-girl, girl-girl, I guess boy-boy, polymorphously. I mean, anything is OK, any kind of fiddling anywhere, if it's fun and you both like it." Her friend Nancy Grimes adds: "Maybe Norman Brown would disown us, but that's what his stuff means to us---panorificism." Panorificism? All of the openings of the body. In UCLA's research library, you find a comment on this trend scribbled in the john: "Norman O. Brown eats armpits." The graffito, though scoffingly negative, is significant because it shows that the tenets of the letting-go movement are already working their way into basic popular literature.

You see other manifestations in the popular arts. Madison Avenue subtly reflects the message of the movement---as evidenced by a recent ad for Del Monte tuna, salmon and sardines in several national magazines that presented a bikinied blonde writhing in the surf next to the simple, seductive message Cut Loose.

The world of fashion cooperates: Designers put girls in miniskirts and see-through tops, boys in ruffled shirts and tight, flowered pants, and make exuberant let-gos out of them all.

Art mirrors the movement and drives it on. Abstractionism is dead and the galleries are being taken over by amalgams of real objects---constructions. Many of them are not serious; they're intended to put us in touch with our own playful feelings. In Venice, California, a young artist named Richard Register makes sculpture for the sense of touch. If you don't touch his pieces, he says, you don't understand them at all. One of them is a hard rubber ball, one foot in diameter, covered with fur and constantly purring and twisting gently in your hands as a motor vibrates and drives a weight around inside. Another piece of art is, in varying spots, hot and cold, wet and dry, hard and soft; in still other spots, it vibrates, blows, sucks, emits sound when you touch it.

Mr. Register has a rationale for this: It is designed, he claims, to put us back in touch, to make us flexible, not rigid, to make us involved, not apathetic. What makes the rigid personality? Interdictions, says Register, of a person's natural tendencies to feel. When a baby is born, he's made to feel aware of acceptance and affection through the sense of touch. In fact, without it, he dies. But soon afterward, he's warned against using his hands to feel things that are "dangerous, dirty or forbidden." Throughout childhood and into adolescence, he is told to keep his hands to himself and off the opposite sex. At the same time, he learns that working with his hands is a lower activity than working with his mind. Says Register: "No wonder we're such poor lovers. We've grown up neglecting the sense of touch; we're less able to love, less able to touch each other well, both emotionally and physically." Those who appreciate Register's exhibitions most are very young children. At one showing in West Hollywood, Register watched children enjoy plunging their hands into something that was supposed to feel like a large warm vagina.

And there is erotic art called funk, featuring giant reclining nudes 90 feet long, whom one enters standing up through a fur-covered vagina; phallic objects of yellow hue and huge proportions; endless variations of the classic derrière, and fornicating figures with blinking penises. Unlike most public art of the past, funk is intended to give the viewer a charge, make him more than a viewer by involving him in real erotic activity of his own.

The theater, as most people know, is undoing, redoing and letting go, too. In Ann Halprin's San Francisco Dancers' Workshop, eight nudes, four men and four women, rolled and thrashed in brown wrapping paper while lights played all around them, dramatizing the interplay between flesh and paper. Hair is a hit largely because of its wild abandon. Futz! won shock notices for its writhing choreography, topless and bottomless dancers, two men making love to one girl on stage, sandwich style, and a mother opening her blouse to suckle her grown son. Time magazine's theater critic said he couldn't understand what Futz! was driving at, but he relayed the play's message nonetheless, in what his editors might have interpreted as an offhanded put-down: "Sense is out and the senses are in." Another manifestation of the new letting go.

In London's new Theater of Eros, the trend is analogous. Three young Americans are doing plays there that have an ultimate meaning only for those of the audience who care to come up on the stage and take off their clothes. The aim, as in the Becks' Living Theater, is to diminish the distance between stage and audience, to involve the audience, create radical instant community. A sentimental idea, appropriate to the new romanticism.

Rock groups sing the message. The Mothers of Invention cry: "What's the ugliest part of your body? I say it's your mind."

The mind brings annihilation, according to the movement's prophets, and it is better to opt for Eros---and we are already doing so, as Theodore Roszak, an associate professor of history at California State College at Hayward. suggests in a recent four-part essay in The Nation. "From a culture that has a long-standing, entrenched commitment to an egocentric and intellective mode of consciousness, the young are moving toward a sense of identity that is communal and nonintellective." As a result, walls are breaking down everywhere, not only among the young: in the new mixed media, between scholars of different disciplines, in corporate mergers and Common Markets, between the world's religions, between East and West, even those walls that once divided men and women. Now, with nearly infallible birth-control techniques, women are beginning to cut loose from their former biological glory, losing their winning shyness, speaking before they are spoken to and insisting on their rights to orgasm. It is perhaps with this last in mind that they are urging their men into more colorful clothes, longer hair styles and fresh scents. With approval, the intellectuals who are already members of the letting-go movement call this the beginning of an androgynous culture. This means that it's not a man's world anymore; it's becoming a man/woman world. Note well the words of actor Cary Grant, perhaps himself a member of the movement, upon joining the board of Rayette-Fabergé, makers of fine smells for everyone: "Why should they try to separate us so? We should all just smell well and enjoy ourselves more."

One wonders whether or not we really can. Under the influence of a guru like Stanley Keleman, in the specially heightened atmosphere of a weeklong workshop, Natalie could let go in an almost miraculous manner. But what will happen to Natalie now? Is she exempt from all the social and cultural forces that still restrict many American women? Sociologists John Gagnon and William Simon, formerly of the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University in Bloomington, are somewhat dubious. They concede that more and more young ladies are beginning to experiment on themselves at home, masturbating at an earlier age and with more frequency than past generations. This, they say, may be all to the good. It may help the girls gain some new identity as sexual beings, help them reinforce or build a more complex sexual fantasy life. If so, say Gagnon and Simon, a larger number of girls may be "entering adult life with stronger and symbolically more complicated commitment to sexuality." But even the girls who have had 100 men by the time they are 22 still have a long way to go, for many of them are merely playing a new role---a more enjoyable one, perhaps, than the one their mothers had to play, but a role, nevertheless. Until these girls can become persons in their own right, utterly equal to men---indeterminate, ever-changing, dynamic, unpredictable---they will not be ready to let go in any radical way.

Men, for example, have always had their erotic images. It is probable that most women---who weren't supposed to enjoy sex---never had such stimuli. Professor Ira L. Reiss, recently appointed director of the Family Study Center at the University of Minnesota, and one of the few sociologists in the U. S. who have a major commitment to research in human sexual relationships, believes that "lack of erotic imagery to help focus and intensify their desires ... is probably one of the major reasons why women are not, on the average, as quickly or easily aroused as men, why their concentration on sexual fulfillment is somewhat more difficult to maintain and why they often need more manual manipulation."

Girls today have, of course, certain artificial turn-ons, like rock music or a boy's locks. Frank Zappa, the brilliant, long-haired leader of the Mothers of Invention, maintains that his chances of scoring with a pickup increase in direct proportion to the length of his hair. "If my hair is really long," he reports, "and the music is really loud, I have a ninety percent chance of getting laid by the first girl I ask."

Unfortunately, Zappa says, all the young men have got the message and the rock parlors are now filled with long-haired squares with round ideas, looking for action. "A certain look doesn't do it anymore," Zappa says sadly. At the age of 28 and hugely successful, Zappa maintains that his expertise on sex "should come as no surprise. My business is rock, and it is rock that tends to turn on the chicks, more than any social scientist might guess. When you're in the Whiskey a Go-Go or the Kaleidoscope and the sound is really coming out loud and practically flapping the skin right off your arms and stimulating the nerve endings all over your body, you've got a real turn-on."

It is Zappa's thesis that there is already a marked erotic involvement in the teenage subculture. When Zappa was in high school ten years ago, he says, the kids let go with various forms of violence. Now, as he describes the scene, the teenagers' energies are turned to sex-play. "A cat sees a girl wearing a button that says, Let's Get Naked And Smoke Grass and he knows she isn't putting him on; she means it. He spends all his energies making it with a succession of these honest chicks. Does he have time for violence?"

One wonders whether these "honest chicks" Zappa is talking about, and the guys who spend all their time making it with them, are really able to let go with abandon to each other. More likely, since they have no real core of self from which to operate, they are engaged in some kind of role playing.

The GTOs (Girls Together Only) of Laurel Canyon, California, is a community of seven girls between 18 and 21 who like boys well enough "if they are nice boys." But they've banded together because they really like one another more. For them, letting go is bisexual. "We had so much trouble with the boys," said Miss Pamela, who was wearing a floor-length lace dress, a cameo at her throat and a cap like Whistler's mother's over her blonde braids. "They were really rude and they kneed you and grabbed your bailies." She clutched her bra-less bosom (none of the girls wear bras) to demonstrate what "bailies" are.

"It's so lonely just being a girl," said Miss Christine, a young lady with a beautiful face, once you got around to looking at it. She had a Tiny Tim hair-do under a Robin Hood hat with a feather in it. Her top was a transparent, red undershirt that seemed able to cover only one breast at a time; and below she wore green panty hose and pointed little Peter Pan shoes. "But when you're with your GTO, you know you always have somebody."

"But we're not against heterosexual fucking," said Miss Sparky. "We're looking for romance. We share boys." Miss Sparky went barefoot, bare-legged, wore baby-doll pajama bottoms, a transparent nylon blouse, a patch of red rouge on each cheek and a corona of papier-mâché flowers in her short dark hair.

At this point, Miss Sandy added: "Lucy and Pamela and I have gone through one boy together. Two of us can sit in one room and tell each other, 'Isn't it fantastic?' while the other one is balling him in the other room. It's beautiful." Miss Sandy wore a crocheted dress with nothing underneath and a bandeau in her hair.

"And then, of course," said Miss Pamela, "we compare notes. We like boys," she added, "who love all our bodies."

"Yeah," said Miss Lucy, whose dress beggared description, "not the boys who fuck for five minutes and then split."

"And not the ones who pick us up when we're hitchhiking," said Miss Pamela, "and grab our bailies."

Each of the GTOs, it seems almost superfluous to note, dresses as if it were Halloween---which might explain their attraction to a certain type they find while thumbing on Sunset Boulevard. Each insists on traveling this way, partially because they delight in gathering further documentation to prove that men are, for the most part, mean and dirty, if not absolutely sick.

"The dirty old men jack off while you sit there in the back seat."

"They give you five dollars to sit in the front seat while they do it."

"And ten dollars to eat it."

"They ask you stupid, leading questions, like, 'Do you believe in free love?' "

"One guy told me, 'I'll give you ten dollars if you piss in my mouth.' "

"Another guy offered us three hundred and sixty dollars to watch us give each other head."

Amid all this, Miss Sparky had a unique testimonial to make. "I never found a pervert," she said, "driving a VW."

The GTOs have showbiz aspirations. They sing and dance and tell stories and maybe someday they'll make it as big as, say, Tiny Tim (whom Miss Cinderella dates occasionally). But what they really want is friendship.

"It's wonderful to have a crush on someone," said Miss Cinderella, who wore a short chemise and flowers in her hair. "Even for a day."

"People expect everything to be for always," said Miss Mercie. "But it isn't." She was dressed like an Argentinian Gaucho, right down to the brown, calf-length leather boots. No whip, however.

"You have to love each person for himself," said Miss Sandy.

Miss Mercie said, "I'm bisexual. I admit it."

"You can love a million people in a thousand ways," said Miss Pamela, and Miss Mercie smiled.

Some of the GTOs like the black boys they meet on Sunset Strip. "We really dig the cones," said Miss Sparky. She got some demurrers from two of the girls while she explained that the blacks were "cones" because of their current hairdos, which make it appear that they are wearing inverted ice-cream cones on their heads. "Well, some of us like them," said Miss Sparky. "They dress so great, with their green leather suits and their zircons. And they say the cutest things: 'Ah c'd kiss yoah theghs.' 'What's yoah favrite fohm of recreation?' A lot of the other boys are so square. They dress so---white front."

After our interview, the GTOs piled into my car, while three young men stood on the sidewalk, shouting good-naturedly: "Whores! Whores!" I drove the GTOs down Laurel Canyon to the Kaleidoscope on Sunset Boulevard. They sang a song for me in the car, Getting to Know You. And before they dashed with whoops and cries through the crowd on the sidewalk, they each kissed me on the cheek and the back of my neck.

Obviously, the GTOs are trying to let go, but they are like most American women today, and many men: on a new frontier, and they are terribly ill equipped, psychologically and emotionally, to be there. Dan Sullivan, director of the Princeton Gestalt Center, an independent sensitivity-training center, in Princeton, believes that most American women have as little sense of self-identity and of self-worth as the GTOs. "All women," he says, "from time immemorial, in all cultures, have been forced into a predetermined role, and even now continue to be crippled by unwitting culture patterns from infancy onward."

Sullivan cites a number of recent studies that show exactly how and where woman loses her autonomy. A Harvard study showed that men and women who thought they treated their children equally actually spoke and responded to their male children, beginning at about 12 months, appreciably more than to their female children. As a reflection of this early relative inattention, and of appreciation of the male power structure, a study at the University of Pennsylvania showed 79 percent of prekindergarten girls preferred to be boys, while only 5 percent of the boys of the same age preferred to be girls. Another Pennsylvania study found that brothers aged 8--12 possessed three times as many toys as their own sisters did in the same age bracket, at all economic levels. The girl child may again have the chance of feeling relatively unseen and unheard in grade school classes, where a University of Chicago study showed that 88 percent of the teachers, themselves mostly women, preferred to teach boys for the greater challenge and potential they offer. A study at Stanford indicated that 92 percent of college senior women would choose, on an either/or level, to have all boys, rather than all girls, as their children. Another study at Stanford and a parallel one at the University of Arizona found that if college students were given lists of words from which to choose to describe themselves and their personalities, boys were more than three times as capable as girls of applying critical terms to themselves. In other words, the girls had become so unsure of who they were, from the sense of worthlessness and imagelessness they had gained growing up, that they were incapable of objective self-criticism; yet they flattered themselves outrageously in their self-appraisal. "Doubtlessly," says Sullivan, "the cotton-picking Negro would have the same reaction to the challenge of self-judgment. Like the Negro cotton picker, woman's passivity, submissiveness and tendency to empty herself for the sake of others, until nothing else is left, is purely and plainly the result of cultural conditioning and the male monopoly of power."

What Sullivan concludes is that women have been sadly mutilated by their cultural conditioning. They cannot now really let go and are generally and relatively incapable of truly being and remaining the beloved for anyone, including themselves. The future of letting go in America, then, may be tied to the future of woman, since she will be able to let go only insomuch as her traditionally dominant male counterpart permits her to let go.

Any other predictions of the future of the letting-go movement are simply guesses. The movement will probably gain momentum because, as society becomes more organized and exerts its necessary tyrannies, individuals within it will be more and more inclined to assert themselves in private ecstasies and anarchies. It is a way of striking a balance.

Some say the movement is a passing fad. They quote the historians of behavior who talk about society as if it were an inexorably swinging pendulum, pointing out that societies suffer periodic attacks of freedom that run their course, to be followed by stages of unfreedom. They cite English history: The excesses of Elizabethan England call down Puritan repression; the people relax again with the Restoration, tighten up in a subsequent era of Neoclassicism, react with a new Romanticism, until, finally, Victorianism takes over.

Only the pendulum didn't keep swinging in the 20th Century. Mores are not managed by monarchs anymore but by the mass media. And the people manage the media. The books and magazines they are buying, the movies for which they are standing in line indicate that we still have quite a bit of letting go ahead. Some people call it living.