The New Salvationists

It took years of indoctrination to teach me that I was basically a no-goodnik and that life was a serious and intense struggle to amount to something. The long-suffering Jew may find it hard to believe my struggle, as, indeed, may the militant black, since my blood is pure Aryan and my skin is delicately white. But gradually I realized that I was sinful, selfish, proud, cowardly, uncommitted, insensitive, guilty and generally ill-equipped to live. I was lacking in height, my teeth were crooked, I talked too much and I needed glasses. (I also heard that I was a child of God--nice, kind and well meaning--but I refused to believe this blatant propaganda.) Life was serious, I was serious, and only by arduous effort would I survive these innate handicaps. When I grew tired of being a bastard, I left the Catholic priesthood and a short time later left the Church.

I don't regret my leave-taking at all; I merely think that it should have been more fun. When I walked solemnly into the bishop's office for my last appointment, it was an awesome encounter. The furniture was dark and ponderous, the light dim and deathly, the carpet the color of dried blood. I thought I heard the distant echo of taps when I left his office, and as I drove away in my Volkswagen it seemed that Boris Karloff and Charles Addams were waving fiendishly from the porch. But how different it might have been: I could have played a final golf game with the bishop--he's a five handicapper--and wagered my old cassocks against his violet ring. Or I could have sent a singing telegram to Pope Paul: "Long Live The Pill (Stop)--I'm Going Over The Hill."

So many things in the Church might have been fun. Take Confession, for instance: Why couldn't there have been a trophy every Saturday night for the most imaginative story? Or a button that the priest would push to set off fireworks outside the church whenever he heard an exciting escapade? Even ecumenism was dull. It would have been great to erect a statue of the Blessed Virgin in front of a nearby Baptist church. Or why couldn't the Episcopal church send a year's supply of birth-control pills to the Catholic mother of the year? It was all so intensely serious.

Since I left the Church, however, I've been exposed to a variety of other salvation schemes that remind me of it. What I thought was ecclesiastical seriousness appears to be the condition of puritan man. It doesn't seem to matter whether the purpose of an organization is to liberate the blacks, to sustain an orgasm for seven minutes or to restore tone to flabby muscles; these secular groups all seem to be an aggregate of no-nonsense "true believers." They've built their temperament into a system, defined their enemy in detail and offer a unique vision that will lead to "personal liberation and salvation."

It's not that these causes aren't important; it's merely that they aren't all-important. Take therapy or encounter groups, by whatever name or sect. A weekend workshop can be as intense and epiphanic as an evangelistic revival. Men and women emerge like the Apostles on Pentecost with a new vision of life--one that generally lasts about 48 hours. They hug and kiss, shout and laugh, touch and weep, and thus build their weekend hysteria into a soul-searing conversion. It's not enough for them to let the emotional barriers down for a while, to gain a little insight into self, to have great fun. It has to be an apocalyptic explosion. No one in the group can hide; each member is sought out like a sheep in the brambles and flogged by the group until he laughs or cries or feverishly shouts, "Fuck Grandmother!"

Let me not mislead you. Sensitivity sessions have been extremely helpful for me. I've been both a participant and a leader innumerable times. At first, I demanded instant change of myself and others. I've since learned that group encounter is a slow process of growth and education that can be far more delightful than any classes I attended as a student, and I recommend it highly. But it can also be ritualistic, dogmatic and overwhelmingly serious.

Consequently, the group movement has developed its fanatics, its gurus and its sacred shrines. I made a weeklong pilgrimage to the Lourdes of the encounter phenomenon, Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. I also enjoyed myself and had an important experience in psychodrama with Carl Hollander, the director of the Evergreen Institute in Denver. I gained in self-knowledge; I was assisted in making some decisions about my life; but I wasn't saved. Carl isn't one of the gurus who have built a gimmick into a holy cause. He's simply a concerned, warm, talented, believable human being. Which is why he may never make it big in the movement. To make it big requires a gimmick, a book written about it, a following of middle-aged matrons--and a kind of messianic complex.

Esalen is a fine place. It has the rough beauty of the northern California coast line, the warm mineral baths that flow from the mountains into large, quadrangle tubs wherein the guests, staff and itinerant hippies soak in ecumenical nakedness. It is also expensive, with somewhat meager accommodations, and extremely cultic. It is the Vatican of communication and inner feeling, the Latter-day Church of telling it like it is. All of this makes it nice for the hippies who camp there, of course. As one ragged youth told me, "They tell us to leave, but we stick around anyway. They really won't hassle us much, since the appearance of the police would mar their image."

I met many delightful, functional people at Esalen who had come there for a personal growth experience. I also met many of the cultists who have made encounter groups a way of life. In order to function, they need this artificial framework as a permanent environment, much as the professional student needs to take classes forever. I met a group of cultists at the baths one day and we sat looking out at the ocean in prolonged silence. A balding, nearsighted man of 35 asked in a gentle voice, "Have you been here before?"

"No, this is my first visit."

"Well, you've come to the right place, baby. This is where it's at. I'd like to stay here forever."

"Yes, I'm enjoying it."

(continued overleaf)

"Have you read Joy?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Great, eh?"

"Actually, I was disappointed. It was rather poorly written and needed a good bit of editing. I think Dr. Schutz could have done better if he had worked at it. It seemed awfully superficial."

"Yeah, well, that's the way with Bill. He just doesn't get hung up over something like writing. What are words anyway? Ever made a week with Bill?"

"No, I met him but didn't get a chance to talk."

"He's something else. If he picks you up on his back, it really blows your mind"--pause--"You familiar with Bernie's stuff?"

"Bernie?"

"Gunther, Bernie Gunther; you know, the sensory-awakening guy?"

"I've seen his book advertised here, but I'm really not up on that. It sounds interesting."

"Interesting! Ha! You've never lived until you've taken that program. Your whole body starts to live for the first time."

I looked at his body and an attractive blonde girl, plump and serenely solemn, interrupted my meditation: "Have you visited the holy man in the hills?"

"No," I said, feeling that I'd really wasted my time. "I've only been here a couple of days."

"You've got to get up there. He's great, really great, an incredible trip."

"Sounds like fun!"

"Fun?" she said patronizingly. "It's a spiritual blast-off."

"Did he tell you anything important?" I had formed a vision of a smoky oracle in the mountains of Greece.

"No, he just answered questions."

"What did you ask him?"

"I didn't really ask him anything. He didn't have much new to say. It was just a mind blower to go up there and see him."

"I still think Fritz had them all beat," said the balding man, who apparently had missed the vision of the holy one.

"You mean Fritz Perls?" I asked, proud of my knowledge.

"Yeah, the Gestalt man. Too bad he's gone! Imagine that dirty old man, 75 and still ready to screw at the drop of a hat. He really dealt with the now. None of that Freudian bullshit for old Fritzie."

"Yes, I like many of the things he wrote," I said. "Have you ever heard of Carl Hollander?" I was trying to get even. No one heard me.

The plump girl was talking: "I was a disciple of the Maharishi when he was here--well, kind of a disciple. I have a pen that he touched." The balding man was impressed. "I'm one of the few who really learned meditation from him," she continued.

An itinerant matron on pilgrimage suddenly appeared and headed for one of the tubs. Two bearded young men, roused from their trance, stared at her as she snatched some water from the tub with her cupped hands and drank it. "Marvelous, marvelous, marvelous," she said and wandered off.

Our group was getting larger. On a nearby table, one of the staff girls was going through her yogic exercises. It was beautiful to watch. Her face was serene and intense, yet at times her expression revealed pain. It was comforting, for some reason, to see a little pain. No one seemed to notice her. My mind was drifting off from the group and, in my reverie, I heard only snatches of conversation:

"I don't think that's honest. You're mentally masturbating. Lay out your gut feelings." . . . "She never had an orgasm until she worked with Stan." . . . "That doesn't sound like Bachian encounter. It strikes me more as Reichian sensitivity." . . . "You won't dig the simple message after you've been Rolfed." . . . "Deal with it, deal with it." . . . "But I never had feedback before." . . . "You're confusing your Lowen techniques with Gestalt." . . . "She was on the Tai-Chi scene. When did she start the bio-energetics bit?" . . . "That's not lovemaking, that's simply fucking. It has nothing to do with commitment." . . . "Herb says it centers around death." ... "I think George just stole that from Maslow."

For some reason, my mind was drifting to the shores of the Sea of Galilee as I listened. Christ was there, telling Peter to drop his nets and follow. I was hiding behind the boat, hoping the oarlock would stop squeaking lest he notice me.

"Sell everything you have and follow me," said Christ.

"OK," said Peter. "Good deal. I want to say goodbye to the wife and her mother."

"No, when you put your hand to the plow, don't turn back."

I whispered to Peter: "Go back and get your Honda. Bring the color TV, that gold sports coat you like and your guitar." But he didn't hear me.

"OK, let's go," he said. Suddenly they left and I was alone, staring at the Pacific. The voices had gone.

I had been confronted with the true believer. He isn't satisfied to enjoy his current interest as a growth experience. He must make of it a salvation scheme to convert the whole world. If he decides to take off his clothes in a sun-bather's camp, he wants the whole world to be a giant nudist colony. If he becomes disillusioned with marriage, he wants to abandon the entire institution as a valid social form for anyone. Only communal living will work. If he happens to be a homosexual, the future of man lies in the merging of the sexes into a polymorphous mass. If he's black, he has to build a black nation. If he's white, he talks about intermarriage as the only solution to the racial dilemma. If he's Catholic or Mormon, he'll impose his "good news" on all mankind. And if the true believer discovers that a therapeutic encounter had some meaning in his life, then the entire cosmos must become an Esalen.

Currently, therapy is in. Groups of every shape and form are dotting the country like religious sects. Housewives start them in their homes; priests append them to their parsonages; Arthur Murray instructors are leaving their studios to provide dance therapy; the Chinese are closing their laundries to promote Oriental encounters; and ex-eagle scouts are offering nature therapy. There are groups at the colleges, groups in the hills and dating games that call themselves "therapeutic" to make the lonely feel less guilty about their solitude.

I attended a dating game in West Hollywood at the Topanga Center for Human Development, an honest organization with some excellent programs. The Friday-night program for single adults was held in a lovely home in the hills that apparently was built for Zsa Zsa Gabor by an eager and frustrated admirer. It provided a chance for the lonely to get together to play at therapy. The uninitiated groupers didn't expect much for their three dollars, and they had the most fun. Two hundred people came and were divided into seven groups. There were approximately 40 young men and women in the group I joined, which was under the direction of a young Negro. We were divided into clusters of three, and each participant was given ten minutes to tell what he liked and didn't like about himself. Then there was a general discussion during which some of the professional groupers proved their competence by saying "Bullshit" and "Up yours." The neophytes, however, said it was fun, and I found their reaction particularly refreshing. At the end of the discussion we stood up, closed our eyes and circled the room, touching one another's faces. Finally, we paired up; only the professional groupers were serious enough to end up in a homosexual alliance. The others settled for a member of the opposite sex. This beat computer dating all to hell.

The pros sat in the corner after the meeting, complaining about the evening's fare, and talked about the gurus of East and West or recalled the great encounters they had had in the past. The newcomers appreciated the chance to meet someone, and many of them made use of a large, attractive pool where nude swimming was permitted for "therapeutic" reasons--not, of course, for fun. It really wasn't therapy, but it was terribly therapeutic, and all for the price of two martinis.

Therapy, of course, is properly the domain of the psychiatrist and the psychologist, and of their respective professional organizations, the A. M. A. and the A. P. A. But, with typical American ingenuity, those group leaders who don't meet the establishment's requirements and consequently cannot fill out health-insurance forms (which is a major concern) call their sessions sensitivity workshops or encounter groups or human-potential classes. Soon the establishment will face the same problem it has faced with religions: What constitutes valid ordination to the ministry?

The psychoanalysts, like the Catholics, refuse to go to sensitivity meetings, insisting that they alone have the true Freudian faith. Righteously, they meet privately to practice the orthodox tones of their analytic "Ohs" and "Mmms" and to denigrate encounter groups. The frightened psychiatrist challenges the psychologist, the humanist tells the clinician to shove his lab rats up his ass (which the A. M. A. will say is practicing medicine without a license), and workshop leaders of all kinds insist that anyone with sensitivity, experience, clients and a rented room is capable of running groups. Bibles are quoted: Freud is pitted against Jung, Fromm is raised against Maslow and May, and Carl Rogers is invoked by thousands who have never read a word he has written. The brawls are and will continue to be marvelous.

And despite these properly religious wars, the encounter movement will grow. Despite the salvation complex that overshadows the movement and transforms talented men into gurus and messiahs, wounded men and women will grow more in touch with themselves. The Birchers will see the entire phenomenon as a Communist plot; the Protestant ethicists will assert that it's a money-making racket even as they themselves amass more real estate and buy more stocks; the puritans will insist with envy that some therapists are screwing their patients; and the therapists who ordain their wives or mistresses to serve as cofacilitators will be accused of nepotism. There will be heretics and apostates and a variety of reformations. All of which could be great fun if the conflict were considered no more seriously than the human condition.

I have learned to like groups. I enjoy marathons and encounters even as I enjoy skindiving, Bergman movies, Greek food and a bloody mary on Sunday morning. But I like to keep my pleasures separate. And even as I resent the religious fanatic who asks me at a horse race if Jesus is really my "personal savior," so am I tired of the cocktail parties where a matron attempts to prove she's really liberated by pouring her drink down my back and shouting, "Fuck you, Charlie Brown!" I just can't take my groups that seriously.

I even refuse to take my orgasms too seriously, and for a celibate of some 20 years, that's progress. Recently, I watched curiously from a safe distance as seven middle-aged ladies sat in the yogic manner facing the ocean. Naked as jay birds, they were wrapped only in cosmic meditation, attempting to learn the methods of sexual yoga called tantra. The local guru instructed them to concentrate on their breath and to notice the growing freedom with each exhalation. Meanwhile, they were to fix their attention on the sacred sensory area between the anus and the genitals and to utter the soft "Ommmm" of the Hindu world. The guru told them to await the arrival of the Kundalini Fire, which would transport them into sexual ecstasy. Any form of manual manipulation wasn't really wrong, but the tone of the leader's voice indicated that masturbation would really be a cop-out. The ladies were serious and intense; this wasn't fun, it was the struggle for liberation. Some began to writhe a bit on the sand and I wondered if the Kundalini Fire was moving in or if the sand crabs were having a field day.

I wanted to yell from the nearby hill, "This sure beats the P. T. A. all to hell, eh, girls?," but somehow I sensed that I would be invading a sanctuary. When the lesson ended, one woman was softly weeping because she had had as much difficulty following this guru as she had had following another one only a few short months ago. Another was ecstatic, and she wandered solemnly down the beach in pursuit of the holy man. This was serious sex, and a sustained orgasm was the equivalent of a divine apparition. But it didn't seem like fun.

Even the swingers don't seem to be content with having fun; their search for sexual variety, in fact, seems like the pursuit of the Holy Grail. When I interviewed a group in Chicago, my own seeming sexual naïveté was treated as the residue of original sin. I had read about the encounter weekend that Dr. Gerard Haigh and Dr. Gerald Goodman had conducted with a group of Los Angeles swingers to explore the "Intimacy Barrier in Sexually Liberated Groups." While the results of the weekend, as reported in the Elysium Institute bulletin, New Living, were glowingly positive, one of the participants talked of a consistent problem: "Most of the swingers found it terribly simple to be immediately physical with a stranger. They could jump immediately into sex-play. They had great difficulty, however, in tuning in on the feelings of another person. It didn't seem like a liberating step or simple fun. It was a serious way of life."

I had the same feeling in Chicago. They were not a particularly joyous lot; they were dedicated revolutionaries. They insisted that man was moving toward a messianic kingdom of sexual neutrality, that communal living was the only way to go, that children would have to be raised in separate compounds, that sex would one day replace charades at parties, if not the handshake at airline terminals.

"But won't sex get pretty tiresome?" I asked.

"Only if you're afraid to experiment with endless varieties," said a thin, ascetic-looking girl.

I was reminded of the devotees of the drug scene, where pot was not merely a sometime delight and LSD not simply an expander of consciousness. They were a way of life, as demanding as a religious order, as exacting as the pursuit of personal holiness and sanctity. As the swingers talked, I fantasized a bearded prophet standing in front of a giant phallic symbol and holding his hands aloft in front of thousands of men, women and children engaged in serious sex-play on the plains of Gettysburg or Appomattox. He shouted: "Go forth and embrace the whole world in endless orgasm. Neither snow nor sleet nor hail will deter you. Go forth and teach the world the endless varieties of sex."

After an hour's discussion, I had heard about Amazing Charley, who could screw for 45 minutes while rotating clockwise, and about Awful Annie, who had attended two swinging parties the same night and was the hit of each. I really wanted to talk about something else.

"It looks like Daley has as firm a grip on the city as ever," I ventured.

"He sure does. Did you ever try the homosexual route?" asked a solemn man of 45 with a bald head and thick eyebrows.

"I'm afraid I'm pretty straight," I said apologetically, wondering if I could ever be redeemed.

"I'm just getting into it now. It's been rough for me."

I felt his desperation: "That's tough, man, but you'll make it. You look pretty determined. I've had the same trouble trying to learn Chinese."

"I used to dig Chinese women. Now I can take them or leave them. A good woman's a good woman."

"Do you want a beer?" asked a tweedy-looking woman of 40.

"I think I'll have a little Scotch on the rocks, if you don't mind," I answered.

"No, that's OK. Scotch it'll be."

"I'm glad it's OK," I whispered, relieved that something was.

(continued on page 146)New Salvationists(continued from page 134)

When I left, sex seemed about as appealing as macaroni, and I'm not very fond of macaroni. So I went back to the hotel, caught the Johnny Carson show and had a weird dream about a fat man in a delicatessen who kept stuffing macaroni into my Scotch.

But it doesn't take anything as bizarre and dramatic as a swingers' group to encounter a salvation scheme. When I decided to work out at a gym near my California home to keep the old muscles in tone, suddenly I was lying prostrate on the sanctuary floor in my sweat suit. It had all started very simply.

"Hi!" I said to the firm little lady in the leotards. "I'd like to join your gym."

"You mean health salon!" she said.

"Right! Of course I do."

"I'll ring for the director."

The minute I saw him, I knew I was in for it, but I was too proud to leave. "What kind of program did you envision?" he asked, with his arms folded to keep his biceps showing.

"No program, Coach, just a little space to loosen up, to work out a bit, take a shower and call it a day--just once in a while, when I feel I need it."

I wasn't getting through. He signed me up for six months, payment in advance, and looked me over appraisingly: "Your weight's not bad, a little flabby, but let me get your measurements."

He began taping me and writing furiously. In the background I could see a variety of pupils lifting weights and groaning. "I want you on a little vitamin C and E. How's your appetite? Bowel movements OK? And knock off the sweets."

Two weeks later, I didn't know what had happened. I woke up worrying about my left trapezius, whereas a few days before I hadn't known what the hell a trapezius was. I did a few sit-ups, viewed my little potbelly with disgust, ate my wheat germ and rushed down to the health salon with the other initiates. I passed a priest on his way to the early Mass. I entered the salon cautiously, since I had missed the day before.

I was in the middle of the seventh of the ten required side bends when a firm hand grabbed me from behind on the left trapezius. I jumped a foot.

"Didn't see you around Wednesday," the director said. "Letting up? Not taking it seriously? You're looking a little pasty."

Suddenly I was making excuses. "I . . . well ... a little party . . . you know how that goes."

But he didn't know at all: "Stay off the sauce for a few days and double up today on the deep knee bends and the fifty-pound curls."

I looked around and heard the ritual groans coming from every part of the room as man atoned to Venus, Bacchus--and Ceres, the goddess of starch. Metal crosses were tenderly raised in processional splendor and the incense of sweat and vitamins filled the air. So I apostatized from the health salon and decided to play a little volleyball on the beach.

But this was no ordinary volleyball crowd on San Diego's Mission Beach. This was a passionate group to whom a good serve was comparable to a stock option. This was a way of life with all the intensity of Little League. Here, lean and beautiful bodies paid their costly tithe to live near the permanent courts. There was no way to pass off a sloppy shot with a sexy grin in this group. Loving couples stroked each other's forearms in seductive awe and a voluptuous figure had meaning only if the tips of the fingers were strong and nimble. This was no weekend diversion, no casual fun in the sun. This was the fierce puritan at play. So I slid away, a heretic, and tried to hide quietly down the beach. Even then, the midday joggers trampled sand on my blanket in obvious disdain and logged their 60 miles a week to conquer anxiety and to keep the body beautiful.

The body beautiful seems also to be the quest of the nudist cult. Sun bathers assemble to ripen on the volleyball courts and speak of the freedom that envelops anyone who appears in the altogether. A variety of noble reasons are given for nudity, but in the catalogs I read, no space was given to the simple fact that nudity might be fun. It's meant to provide an end to lascivious leering, to build healthy and natural children, to promote love of the body, to teach the sacredness of sex--and thus to give proper answers to the puritans, who are presumably asking dirty questions beyond the trees and fences.

At Elysium Field in Topanga Canyon, however, executive director Ed Lange provides a refreshing playground with only a vestige of the prude-nude overtones. Ed was the publisher of nine nudie magazines--some with surprisingly good copy accompanying largely biological pictures. But the membership brochure appears as if it were written to satisfy the California board of regents or the sheriff's office--which it well may have been. The Elysium Credo, if the word body were replaced with soul, might well double as the "progressive revelation" of the Bahai faith. Despite the brochure, beer and wine appeared in public, and there were only passing references to organic peaches and alfalfa sprouts, and the prude nudes were segregated with proper concern and respect. Ed and his "cosmic companion," Sandy Ross, were delightful hosts and stimulating conversationalists. Sandy, a beautiful young woman of Orthodox Jewish background, survived the cults of middle-class marriage, current fashions, narcotics, therapy and Waldenlike living in the San Lorenzo Valley and, with little apparent guilt, has become satisfied to "contemplate the perfection of it all" and "to let my light shine."

Only occasionally while I was there did Ed show signs of what the puritans had done to him, as when he said, a trifle self-consciously, that his "mission" was to put himself out of the nude-magazine business by flooding the market with enough material to make the bare body commonplace. In his more honest moments, he admitted that life had been great since he had dealt with his own pain and youthful confusion. A warm man, bearded and prophetic in appearance (potentially, an ideal guru), he spoke openly of his past illusions that nudity of body would produce freedom of spirit. Today, settled among the mountains that surround Elysium, he fathers his communal family and directs his business enterprises. He is almost free enough to admit that he is making money and having fun without an apologetic description of his plans to save the world.

The program director at Elysium, Emily Coleman, found her way to Ed Lange by a devious course of freedom rides. A 50-year-old divorcee, who looks it only when she talks about the past, Emily provides the group-encounter atmosphere that gives Elysium a kind of openness not commonly known among sun bathers. She has emerged from a variety of cults that supported her when her 28-year marriage ended. The symptoms of her perfect marriage--headaches, fatigue and skin rash--have disappeared and she is no longer looking for the key to life in the endless varieties of encounters she attempted. Each was merely a step toward living, and, with the Russian student Kostya Ryabtsev, she seems to say: "Life--in contradistinction to all man has created--is something that requires no theory. Whoever is able to function in life will need no theory of life."

Emily seems to know only that her search is well under way and that Elysium may not be a part of her future plans--as it may not be a part of Sandy Ross's or even Ed Lange's. Maybe that's why I enjoyed Elysium and its staff.

While the nudes at Elysium were darkening their bodies in the sun--oblivious to Huey Newton's cry that "the slave-master has lost his body"--young white radicals in Chicago, at the national headquarters of Students for a Democratic Society, were pledging themselves to destroy American imperialism, uproot capitalism, achieve racial equality and end male chauvinism.

The organization and the entire movement has undergone many changes in the two years since I explored SDS in Chicago, but those changes--the move underground, the bombings-have only deepened the feeling of near despair for young political radicals that the visit gave me.

After refusing, in my own anticapitalist way, to pay for an interview, I finally found the gray metal door without an outside knob on West Madison and talked with Bill Ayers, then the national education secretary of SDS. Bill, in his early 20s, is bright, verbal and the product of a successful upper-middle-class Chicago family. We shared coffee, Pepsi-Cola and cigarettes at a small Mexican establishment just west of the gray door.

When Bill wasn't discussing his ideologies, he seemed to enjoy being a revolutionary. He liked the excitement of the neighborhood, which seemed to enhance his role. He was too young to laugh with Fidel at the Bay of Pigs and too far removed to fight with Che, but he wore his guerrilla uniform, slept on the floor and greeted passing prostitutes and panhandlers by name as he walked in the area where Richard Speck, the multiple murderer, was apprehended and where racial violence was feverish after the assassination of Martin Luther King.

After Bill settled into the wooden booth to talk, however, he lost the appealing demeanor of the romantic revolutionary and smothered me with the dismal and doctrinaire verbiage, the intense, humorless and repetitious rhetoric of the SDS periodical, New Left Notes. He talked of the major coup that had severed the Progressive Labor Party from the SDS, because P. L., with all of its Ivy League money, had become more of a debating society than an activist group. His bibliography didn't include the broad expanse of college reading programs, which were basically the ramblings of the bourgeoisie. Even Herbert Marcuse was too theoretical. Fidel, Ché and Eldridge, along with Marx and Mao and Lenin, had said it all. I wanted to plug for Peanuts, but I couldn't bear hearing Snoopy called reactionary. As Huey said, "Many books make one weary," which may indicate that Huey doesn't read many novels, or as Bill himself put it: "A little spine is as educational as a lot of brains." Which any football coach or drill sergeant would immediately endorse.

The strange thing is that I was in almost total agreement with all of Bill's goals. My difficulty was that I found it hard to accept his sense of infallibility and his embrace of dogmatic violence as a means of redress of the world's ills. I felt as if President Nixon were telling me that my future depended on the ABM, or Senator James Eastland suggesting that I get 100 slaves and farm cotton. Bill was a likable young man, a born leader, and I admired his concern to bring "power to the people." But when he said coldly, "My father, for example, is a nice man, but he shares in the violence of the imperialist, and such violence can be met only with violence," I formed a fleeting picture of patricide and wondered if his leadership could be more amiable than that of the present power structure.

I wanted to ask him good-naturedly if he was ever tempted to slip out of his fatigues some night and to "dominate chauvinistically" some bourgeois dolly from Northwestern University, but he had informed me that there was no place in a guerrilla's life for marriage and children--nor, apparently, for fun. I discovered that even the college students were too bourgeois for Bill and SDS and that the hope of the world depended on armies of "greasers and young teens and high school dropouts." I started to quote one of my favorite revolutionaries, Hermann Hesse, but I sensed that Bill wouldn't hear me:

We immortals do not like things to be taken seriously. We like joking. Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I don't mind telling you, in confidence, in putting too high a value on time. . . . Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.

As I talked to Bill and later read the material he gave me from the SDS printing press, suddenly I was back in the Church reading wordy encyclicals that divided the world into good guys and bad guys and proposed to save it with true faith. And even though I have no respect for our war in Southeast Asia nor for the empty value system that has produced want in the richest nation in the world, and even though I recognize our greedy exploitation of other nations and have only shame for our racist society, Bill Ayers frightened me with his solemn vow of poverty, chastity and obedience. I have tried that route with utter sincerity. Perhaps Eric Hoffer best interprets my fear: "Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves. . . . The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless."

A happy revolutionary intrigues me; an intense and infallible one turns me off. Perhaps nothing needs revolutionizing as much as the revolutionaries who learned their approach to a problem in the puritan society they seek to reform. I found myself doodling when I got back to the hotel. It came out this way:

Why can't we revolutionize revolution

And make it a permanent institution?

Free it from blood and contusions,

Provide it with several transfusions

And make it our national sport!

Melody wouldn't have liked that. I met her as I flew from Chicago to Detroit. On the lapel of her SDS fatigues was the green-and-gold medallion of a lady freedom fighter in Vietnam. She was working--intensely, of course-to indoctrinate the young for the fall program in the Detroit area.

"I admire your goals," I said, "but your intensity and hostility frighten me."

She was pleased: "Freedom is serious business."

"Could someone like me be of help in your cause?"

She looked at my reactionary dress; she was suspicious, but she said: "If you have money, we can use it."

"How old are you?" I asked.

"Eighteen," she said.

"You look older."

"I am," she replied without changing her expression.

While I was in Chicago, I had visited the Capitol Theater--now the Dr. King Workshop--at 79th and Halsted, to hear the sublime oratory of a revolutionary who can laugh. The Reverend Jesse Jackson, a powerful, handsome man of 30, heir apparent to Martin Luther King in the SCLC, was preaching to some 3000 people--largely blacks, predominantly women--who gather each Saturday morning to hear him. An unforgettable choir of beautiful young blacks sang You Know My Heart and I Wish I Knew How It Felt to Be Free. There were a few preliminary remarks by the Reverend Calvin Morris-again, handsome and eloquent. Then Jesse appeared and the Capitol rocked and stomped and sang with the beauty and the pain of soul. And somehow I, who wanted to belong to all of this, was made to feel that I did. I was not simply white, not the bourgeois liberal, I was a man who had known pain, gathered with brothers and sisters who had known it as well. We were not graded according to the degree of our suffering. Each knew that it had been enough and we answered in chorus the litany that Jesse led: "I am somebody. I may be poor--but I am somebody. I may be in prison--but I am somebody. I may be uneducated--but I am somebody."

I was listening with tears to a charismatic man who seemed to be real. Three hours went by somehow. This was not the somber Martin Luther King. Nor was this a man afraid of necessary violence: "Know who your enemy is. He is not the black man." Nor was this a man who would turn his own hatred into a holy crusade of bloodshed without personal responsibility. This was a loving man beyond party lines, a man who could laugh at himself, a man who could be fierce and angry, gentle and warm, who could listen as well as speak. I could hear Norman Mailer: "Being a man is the continuing battle of one's life, and one loses a bit of manhood with every stale compromise to the authority of any power in which one does not believe."

I like Jesse Jackson and I believe that I am his brother in the struggle for my own freedom and the freedom of man. But I also believe that he is my brother. I do not crawl to a brother and beg his permission to be of service to pay for my past ignorance. I owe nothing for my ignorance except to become aware of it and to end it. I cannot make restitution to my black brother when I am as much a victim of circumstances as he is.

I do not agree with Eldridge Cleaver when he says: "We shall have our manhood ... or the earth will be leveled in our attempts to gain it." I do not believe that manhood is thus regained, either by leveling the earth or by the destruction of the capitalist system. Manhood is one's own decision, one's own struggle, one's own pain; and until the black man has it, I do not believe that black leadership or black capitalism will be more humane and less tyrannical than white leadership or white capitalism. Perhaps the black man will lose his sense of humor in his struggle to gain the human dignity that is his right. If so, it is a pity, for his humor is more than the badge that he has worn to relieve his degradation. It is the mark of his wisdom and beauty, even if it was learned at the end of a slavemaster's whip.

I well understand that my comprehension of the black man's pain is clouded by inexperience. But I cannot accept the caricature of the white man that I read in Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Eldridge Cleaver. My life has not been as beautiful as the prisoner has painted it. Nor has my awareness of personal guilt antedated the black man's awareness of his slavery. And the SDS rhetoric that chastises me only reminds me of the synthetic heroism of every simplistic group that looks beyond itself for the source of misery. Hesse says it well:

Now and again I have expressed the opinion that every nation and every person would do better, instead of rocking himself to sleep with political catchwords about war guilt, to ask himself how far his own faults and negligences and evil tendencies are guilty of the war and all the other wrongs of the world, and that there lies the only possible means of avoiding the next war.

Such a man can recognize that the capitalist is as much a victim of his society as the Negro is of his; and he, too, is struggling to find the manhood that has eluded him.

As I said earlier, it took years of careful education for me to learn that I was basically a bastard, and it took a number of holy causes to convince me that, without true devotion to them, I couldn't live. Now I would like to be a happy revolutionary who is able to enjoy the transformation of a society because he sees the gradual transformation of himself.

When I left Elysium Field on a Saturday afternoon, I picked up a hitchhiker who symbolized my feeling that the happy revolution is moving as vigorously as the serious one. This young man seemed to stand as far from the doctrinaire revolutionaries of whatever kind as he did from the dogmatic and infallible establishment. I have met his refreshing kind many times before. He is, in my mind, the flowering of what Carl Rogers calls the New Man.

He had been working in a machine shop; his pants were filthy, his naked chest and back covered with grease.

"You've been working?" I asked stupidly.

"Yes," he said, "I make machines and repair them."

"Do you like it?"

"I think it's the greatest job there is. I work outside and it's interesting."

"You work Saturdays, too?"

"Now I do. I was picked up in San Diego and they found a pipe in my car and I was fined two hundred and fifty dollars. I have to earn that much more money."

"Were you smoking pot?"

"No," he said calmly. "They said I was, but I wasn't, but it doesn't matter. It was my long hair and my clothes that bothered them."

"Aren't you going to fight it?" I asked angrily.

"I can't afford it," he said. "Besides, I wouldn't win."

Then he said very quietly but with immense strength: "Anyway, they won't win. Soon it'll all be different. I can tell, it's everywhere. It'll all be different."

I dropped him off by the ocean so he could walk along the beach to "enjoy the sight of the waves." He said simply: "Goodbye, brother," and it sounded right and felt good.

I was happy because I, too, know it will all be different, because a New Man is here, no matter his numbers, a strong New Man, who knows what Hesse means:

It is certain in any case that life is quite disarmed by the gift to live so entirely in the present, to treasure with such eager care every flower by the wayside and the light that plays on every passing moment.

Such a man can be part of a social change without turning it into an angry crusade. He can accept his body and bare it freely to the sun without equating nudity with the godhead; he can discover his feelings without a permanent commitment to therapy; he can care about other men without belonging to a church; he can enjoy his sexuality without making life a sustained orgasm; he can love blacks without hating whites; he can fight for justice without making a threat or carrying a gun. He can be young or old, black or white; he can even be a capitalist. He is not a true believer. He is a happy revolutionary who changes the world--because his light shines.