They Became What They Beheld

The Islander

"We don't know who discovered water, but we're certain it wasn't a fish." John Culkin.

It's the outsider who sees the environment. The islander sees the outline of the distant mainland. When he goes ashore, he commands, for he alone sees form and process.

Yeats, Joyce, Shaw, from Ireland; Eliot, from Missouri; Pound, from Idaho, were the innovators of 20th Century English. Beaverbrook, from the Maritimes; Luce, from a missionary family in China; Thomson, from the Ontario bush, became the giants of 20th Century publishing. Detachment and perspective permit pattern recognition.

"In the histories of most peoples, there occur long lapses during which they lie creatively fallow. Western European man was late by a millennium or so in adding anything to ancient culture; the Jews between the Dispersion and their emergence from the ghettos did nothing that a historian of art and thought could not cover in a long footnote. When they re-entered the world, the Jews, as though seeing for the first time the structure to whose piecemeal growth they had contributed almost nothing, produced within a century a series of epic innovators--Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein--and scores of hardly less original minds (Kafka, for example). The re-emergence of the Islamic peoples, when complete, may give us the same kind of constellation." A. J. Liebling.

Hair

Chief Long-hair, a Crow Indian, wound his hair with a strap and folded it into a container, which he carried under his arm. It was his sacred medicine and about ten feet long. As this long tress grew, he bound it at intervals with balls of pitch, and on rare occasions released it while galloping on horseback.

Taking a scalp meant acquiring an enemy's power.

Samson's great strength resided in his hair, but Delilah shaved off his seven shaggy locks, unshorn from childhood, thus robbing him of his supernatural strength and rendering him impotent.

In the East Indies, a criminal under torture persisted in denying his guilt until the court ordered his hair cut, at which point he immediately confessed. "One man," recounts Golden Bough's James Frazer, "who was tried for murder, endured without flinching the utmost ingenuity of his torturers till he saw the surgeon standing with a pair of shears. On asking what this was for and being told it was to cut his hair, he begged they would not do it, and made a clean breast."

In most preliterate societies, ordinary consciousness is associated with the heart and chest, but the early "Indo-Europeans," according to Onians, "believed that the head contained a different factor, the procreative life-soul or spirit, which survives death, and the seed of new life." Among the reasons for thus honoring the head, he cites the analogy with the flower of fruit, seed pod, at the top or end of a plant; association of sexual experience with sensations and appearances in the head; relating the hair of the head, especially the beard, to pubic hair and to sexual power generally; and, finally, the association of life and strength with the cerebrospinal fluid and with the seed that seemed to flow from, and be part of, the latter.

Among the Norse, the hair of thralls was cut short. Among Arabs, what distinguished a freeman was the lock on his forehead, the slave's forehead being shaved. Many religious groups shaved their heads as a symbol of submission.

Jews, shorn and naked, entered gas chambers silently. Military inductees are first shorn: In one swift cut, self-identity is muted. Following the trial of the Chicago Seven, the prison warden cut the hair of the prisoners, then exhibited their pictures to a cheering Republican club. French women who slept with German soldiers were punished by having their heads shaved.

With literacy, breath, body odors and hair were dissociated from the self, which was sharply delimited. Short hair was required, especially of business and military men: The artist was exempt but never fully approved. Today, the tendency toward long hair is more than social weaponry; it reflects a new self-concept much closer to tribal beliefs. On the surface, the issue seems embarrassingly minor to generate such intense conflict; but in fact its premises are so basic, its emotional roots so deep, that identity itself is challenged.

Telephone

" 'Hello, Central. Give me Dr. Jazz.' " Jelly Roll Morton.

The telephone is said to be the only thing that can interrupt that most precious of all moments.

Aimee Semple McPherson was buried with a live telephone in her coffin.

I once observed a man walking alone past a public phone that rang just as he passed. He hesitated and then, after the second ring, answered it. The call couldn't possibly have been for him.

I called various public phones on streets and in terminals and, when someone answered, as almost invariably someone did, I asked why he had. Most said, "Because it rang."

On September 6, 1949, a psychotic veteran, Howard B. Unruh, in a mad rampage on the streets of Camden, New Jersey, killed 13 people and then returned home. Emergency police crews, bringing up machine guns, shotguns and tear-gas bombs, opened fire. At this point, an editor on the Camden Evening Courier looked up Unruh's name in the telephone directory and called him. Unruh stopped firing and answered.

"Hello."

"This Howard?"

"Yes...."

"Why are you killing people?"

"I don't know. I can't answer that yet. I'll have to talk to you later. I'm too busy now."

Ignoring Old Audiences, Creating New

Today's revolutionary movement began with an inspired use of the newly invented LP record. Black humorists, denied access to mass radio audiences, created LP audiences. Though some of these were large, they possessed a sense of intimacy, even conspiracy, totally lacking in radio audiences. When Mort Sahl and others later turned to TV, black humor died. Sahl attributed this to political changes, but I wonder if another factor wasn't involved: Restricting information makes it highly explosive, while widely disseminating information neutralizes its effects.

They Became what they Beheld

"Oh, what a beautiful baby!"

"That's nothing," replied the mother, "you should see his photograph."

All people imitate their creations. Javanese dancers imitate the jerky movements of Javanese puppets. Jazz singers imitate instruments: "I never sing anything I can't play," says Louis Armstrong, "and I never play anything I can't sing."

Victorians moved like steam engines: The grande dame coming through an archway (her bustle a coal car) looked like a locomotive emerging from a tunnel.

Today's fashions imitate our principal creations, which are electronic. Women imitate light bulbs or TV sets: Their clothes flow; their hair is luminous. They radiate. They can be turned on or off.

Illumination comes from within. It has no visible source. It's not dependent upon outside energy. Today's women are cordless.

"Is it on?" asked a three-year-old holding a ballpoint pen.

Psychologists were recently called to aid a boy who couldn't move or speak unless an electric cord, attached to his body, was plugged in.

California hippie: "One couple I know rarely speak but share the same rhythms with tambourines and drums, as well as with their breathing. These rhythms are the same as the ones their electric fan and refrigerator make."

Rural children dream of lambs and bunnies; urban children dream of cars and trains. But acidheads have visions of electronic instruments and, especially under the influence of "electric drugs," identify with TV sets.

"Daddy, are we live or on tape?" Five-year-old boy.

"It took me a long time to discover that the key thing in acting is honesty. Once you know how to fake that, you've got it made." Actor in "Peyton Place."

Mating Media

In the 1968 elections, the McCarthy campaign staff was approached with a suggestion for crossing media. In the United States, no law prohibits the mating of radio and TV. In Southern California, for example, Spanish-speaking sports fans watch the picture on TV but listen to a Spanish-speaking sports broadcaster on radio. So it was proposed that the New York--New Jersey area be offered a night of radio sound and TV picture. Five commentators were to provide the audio: John Culkin, Jean Shepherd, Marshall McLuhan, myself and Tony Schwartz, who originated the idea and had a sound studio equipped to handle the project. A bank of small TV sets would offer simultaneous coverage of all principal TV stations in the area; each would be kept on its particular channel. From these the commentators would select programs shown on a master TV set and would direct their comments toward these programs. The plan was to announce in the New York-New Jersey newspapers that at seven p.m. on a certain night, a local radio station would provide that evening's TV audio. For example, the audio for a TV cigarette commercial would be one minute of coughing via radio. If there was a laugh show, it would be pointed out that the laugh tracks were copyrighted in 1935 and that most of the people one heard laughing had been dead for some time. Then listeners would be asked to turn to a channel showing Walter Cronkite, at which point they would hear a taped "countdown," first in English, followed by an A-blast; then in Russian, then Chinese, each followed by blasts and more blasts and in the end by only a child's cry. Finally, and this was the point of the whole project, listeners would be encouraged to turn to a channel with Hubert Humphrey speaking. Instead of his speech, however, they would hear--on radio--the four letters he wrote to his draft board, gaining exemption from duty in World War Two--one letter citing two lectures he had delivered to an R. O. T. C. class, while in the background would be played Hitler's ranting, bombs and screams; then Humphrey's pro-Vietnam-war speeches--"a glorious adventure and great fun, isn't it?"--while in the background, the explosions and screams continued.

The McCarthy team, mostly literary men, saw something profoundly immoral in the suggestion. New forms always seem immoral or chaotic, since they are unconsciously judged by reference to consecrated forms. But a curious contradiction arises: New forms are condemned, but the information they disseminate is believed, while the old and valued aren't even seen.

Service Environments

The moment any service exceeds what any single individual can control, that service is environmental. When environmental services exceed the reach of the greatest private wealth, the society is communistic. In this sense, the United States has been communistic for some time, more fully than any other country. Only a bookkeeping smoke screen conceals this fact. America reached this state via technology, not propaganda or revolution.

Television is part of the only environment today's children have ever known. To punish a child by forbidding him to watch TV is as nonsensical as depriving him of heat.

To try to restrict this service environment to white adults or to regard its benefits as products of private labor is equally nonsensical. The unemployed Negro youth who demands admission into this environment understands its nature far better than the middle-class white who strives to exclude him.

The unskilled-uneducated-unemployed of 1830 London lacked even minimal resources to participate in the service environment. They lacked not only the penny to mail a letter, they lacked the literacy to write it. They lived in the midst of a service environment but could not participate in it. Their admission into it was the reform movement of that day. Today we face a similar challenge: expanding membership in the service environment.

Electronic media have made all the arts environmental. Everyone can avail himself of cultural riches beyond what any millionaire has ever known. Today no serious scholar limits himself to Morgan Library when the entire New York Public Library is open daily and paperbacks are everywhere at hand. No art lover restricts himself to Mellon's collection. LPs and magnetic tapes make environmental all recorded music from all times: Music, like a wild bird's song, now belongs to the environment.

Today in the United States there are no longer any significant areas of private wealth. The multibillion-dollar service environment of electric information is free for all. Knowledge industries are the only significant ones now. Education, news, transportation, entertainment, medicine, arts, telephone are all environmental.

Media as Codifiers

"When [Robert] Kennedy's body was brought back to New York from Los Angeles, one of us was at the airport to see it arrive. Standing with a group of reporters, he noticed that they almost all watched the event on a specially rigged television screen. The actual coffin was passing behind their backs scarcely any farther away than the small-screen version. On these occasions, the tenuous connections between journalism, written or visual, and the real texture of events usually ruptures completely." "An American Melodrama," by three British journalists.

By "the real texture" is presumably meant the initial sensory experience, devoid of all resonances and reflections. But why, on this occasion, the "connection" between that event and its image on TV was said to be "ruptured" escapes me. Any medium abstracts from the given and codifies in terms of that medium's grammar. It converts "given reality" into experienced reality. This is one of its functions. Without such structuring and classifying there could be no meaningful experience. The "real" is in no sense immediately given to us. What is given is too complex, too ambiguous, too raw. It must first be cooked. Instincts aid lower animals in selecting and responding to stimuli. Man has culture. Culture is his means of selecting--structuring--classifying reality, and media are his principal tools for this end.

We regard it as "natural" to think in verbal categories, but not in TV categories, yet language is as much a technology as TV.

In TV studios, idle employees watch programs on monitors, though the live shows are just as close. Billy Graham reports more converts from closed-circuit TV than from among those watching him live.

In New Guinea, when a village leader is ignored by his people, the Papuan government sometimes records his speech on tape, then releases it on radio, to be heard by now-respectful villagers, played to them by the village leader himself, probably on his own radio.

In the highlands of New Guinea, I saw men with photographs of themselves mounted on their foreheads, in front of their head feathers. Friends greeted them by examining the photographs.

Emptiness

Convinced that Americans fear emptiness more than fines, a justice of the peace in Battle Creek, Michigan, devised a remarkable sentence; he forced traffic violators to sit alone in empty rooms for three to five hours. Outraged citizens made him abandon this punishment, which was regarded as unnecessarily cruel.

When we have a free day, we look forward to how we will fill it. A person who is unemployed must explain: He is ill, retired, seeking work. To do nothing is indefensible. Millionaires expect their children to work during school vacations. Welfare workers are made uneasy by Indians sitting in front of gas stations, and when we come upon an idle child, we say, "What, doing nothing? Do something!"

Literate man regards silence as empty of value. He calls radio silence "dead air" and condemns any cocktail party marked by long silences. Silence at concerts is usually interrupted by applause from someone who mistakenly thinks the piece is over. A Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington, its background unfinished, sells for far less than an identical portrait with background complete.

Dorothy Lee writes: "In Western thought--and I speak here of the view of the unsophisticated--space is empty and to be occupied with matter; time is empty and to be filled with activity. In both primitive and civilized non-Western cultures, on the other hand, free space and time have being and integrity. It was this conception of nothingness as somethingness that enabled the philosophers of India to perceive the integrity of nonbeing, to name the free space and give us the zero."

Writing of the Bedouin tribesmen, T. E. Lawrence tells how one of them took him through a deserted palace where each room had a different scent, and then called, "Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all," and led him to a gaping window, where the empty wind of the desert went throbbing past. "This," he told him, "is the best; it has no taste."

Sensory Programming

Isolating one sense from all others calls for enormous training and self-control and is probably never fully achieved. Test this yourself: Run water into the bath while switching the light on and off: The sound appears louder in the darkness.

A child learns to separate the senses when he learns, in class, to read silently. His legs twist; he bites his tongue; but by an enormous effort he learns to fragment his senses, to turn on one at a time and keep the others in neutral. And so he is indoctrinated into that literate world where readers seek silent solitude, concertgoers close their eyes and museum guards warn, "Don't touch!"

But all this is history. Today's students mix homework with radio and hi-fi, even TV and telephone, and experience little difficulty correlating such data, or at least having them coexist. California students get into their wrap-around sports cars (a form of clothing), kick off their sandals so they can feel the freeway coming up through the car, travel at 70 miles an hour with signs flashing past and the oncoming traffic passing at 140 mph; top down; sun and wind in their faces; radio on and every fourth telephone pole in sync with the beat; sharing breakfast with a coed: total sensory involvement. Then they enter class, turn off all senses, put on a tribal face and go numb.

Rediscovery of the Body

Literate man valued the delimited, controlling self, which he equated with the rational mind. He portrayed this "I" as detached from the body and emotions and in control of both. He said, "I lift my foot," with the "I" controlling me and my. He excluded passions from the "I"; these lay below: I lost my temper, fell in love, delved into my unconscious, but I exercised my reason.

Early analysts were called "alienists." Alienation begins when one feels revulsion with one's body, and fears the sensate world. Trudie Shoop, the dancer, helped schizophrenics rediscover themselves by reteaching them the earliest movements of the child.

The story is told of a group of Jews, with downcast eyes, entering gas chambers. One girl, a dancer, was ordered by a guard to dance for his amusement. Naked, shorn of her hair, she had no identity. But as she danced, she rediscovered herself in the dance, in her body. This gave her the courage to act: In a magnificent gesture, she attacked her tormentor.

If you manipulate people, you must first control their environment. Pavlov couldn't make dogs salivate on signal until he put them in artificial, controlled environments. Literate man was easily manipulated. He lived in a centrally heated, air-conditioned, canned-food world, cut off from personal sensations. He was ashamed of his body. He avoided nudity, was obsessed by toilet etiquette, made sex a sin and gluttony close to it. He became aware of his body only in sports and sex, and sometimes not even then.

Today's youths have rediscovered the body. They rebel against controlled environments; they create personal sensory environments.

Sharp differences between sexes, which marked the past, today disappear. Sex is cooled down. Men and women dress more alike. They share (concluded on page 192)What they Beheld(continued from page 122) hair styles. Men wear jewelry. They're interested in lotions, hair dyes, cosmetics. This disturbs older people, who keep saying, "You can't tell the difference," and guffaw. Obviously, that difference must have meant a great deal to them or they wouldn't be so hung up on this stale joke.

It's a difference that's meaningless to the young. Young men and women today share a common sensate world. Their feelings about themselves and about this world are much alike. They can talk together. Sex polarization at social gatherings--so "men can talk, women visit"--is meaningless to the young.

"And everybilly lived alove with every-biddy else."

Violence and the Quest for Identity

William James once wrote that no more fiendish torture could be devised than when you speak, no one answers; when you wave, no one turns; but everyone simply cuts you dead. Soon, he said, there wells up within you such hostility you attack those who ignore you and, if that fails to bring recognition, you turn your hostility inward, upon yourself, to prove you really do exist.

Violence offers immediate public recognition. This is especially true for "invisibles," who thereby become--instantly--very visible. In 1967, when armed Black Panthers entered the California Legislative Assembly, pandemonium occurred. Even the threat of violence is a powerful force in any quest for identity.

Detribalizing the African slave robbed him of all identity, creating great misery of psychic alienation. Racism brainwashed him of his past, leaving him "Wandering between two worlds, one dead / The other powerless to be born." He became an invisible stranger in a strange land.

Though an estimated one third of the post-Civil War American cowboys were black, on screen they all turned white. The black was erased from history, unseen in advertisements and admitted to radio and film only in comic form. He made his first appearance on TV.

Today's invisibles demand visible membership in a society that has hitherto ignored them. They want to participate in society from the inside and they want that society to be reconstituted to allow membership for all. Above all, they want to be acknowledged publicly, on their own terms.

Electronic media make possible this reconstitution of society. But this also leads to a corresponding loss of identity among those whose identity was defined by the old society. This upheaval generates great pain and identity loss. As man is tribally metamorphosed by electronic media, people scurry around frantically in search of their former identities and, in the process, they unleash tremendous violence.

Body as Sculpture

"In the native world," writes Alan Lomax, "painting lives on the body, sculpture is something you use or worship, architecture you do yourself, and literature you recite or dance."

Grooming and dress are primary arts. Few activities involve more effort. Yet people rarely think of themselves as sculptors or painters, no matter how much effort they devote to making themselves into living art.

In the electronic environment, everyone is constantly bombarded by light images emanating from the cathode tube--Joyce's Charge of the Light Brigade--playing on us, going inside us, making us all Lord of the Flies, engulfed by flickering images.

Asked what she had on when posing for calendar shots, Marilyn Monroe replied, "The radio."

We wear our media; they are our new clothes. TV clothes our bodies tattoo style. It writes on our skins. It clothes us in information. It programs us. Nudity ceases to have meaning. How natural that we would now write ads and headlines on nudes.

Putting on the Dog

Pets don't come in breeds or races; they come in styles. Styles match owners. Pet psychoanalysts counsel both pet and owner, on the assumption they share psychic problems.

"We train you to train your dog."

A pet cemetery in Washington, D. C., guarantees that pets owned by Negroes aren't acceptable.

Sensate World of Natives

When natives talk about their own world, they speak about how things smell, taste, feel, sound: toes gripping roots along a slippery bank; peppery food burning the rectum; "He became aware of gentle heat playing on his right cheek and a fine smoke teasing his nostrils, while on the left he heard an odd gurgling sound."

"It is pleasant," said a Vedda, "for us to feel the rain beating over our shoulders, and good to go out and dig yams, and come home wet, and see the fire burning in the cave, and sit around it."

An Eskimo woman, Uvanuk, delighting in the joy of simply being moved by nature, sang:

The great sea

Has sent me adrift,

It moves me

As the wind in a great river.

Earth and the great weather

Move me,

Have carried me away

And move my inward parts withjoy

The phrase translated "moves me" also means "to be in a natural state"; to be moved by nature is to be in nature, to belong there. Emotions are expressed as physical responses: anger, loosening bowels; fear, tightening sinews; joy, floating viscera. Man is small, no more than a weed moved endlessly by the current, but intensely aware of forces acting upon him and delighting in even the most trivial.

Toothless Kuilasar, an elderly Eskimo, told of starvation, of children born and husbands lost, of new lands and faces, and concluded, "How happy I have been! How good life has been to me!" She hadn't conquered life, nor been rewarded by it, but life had acted upon her, spoken through her, and this was joy.