The Ancestors Step out of the Dreamtime and Back into the Palm Court.

The Ancestors Step out of the Dreamtime and Back into the Palm Court.

(Illustrations deleted: if you want an illustrated version write me and I'll send it to you by e-mail)

David B. Schwartz, ‘66

The Australian Aborigines speak of jiva or guruwari, a seed power deposited in the earth. In the Aboriginal world view, every meaningful activity, event, or life process that occurs at a particular place leaves behind a vibrational residue in the earth, as plants leave an image of themselves as seeds…As with a seed, the potency of an earthly location is wedded to the memory of its origin.

In the Aboriginal world view, every event leaves a record in the land. Everything in the natural world is a result of the actions of the archetypal beings, beings whose actions created the world.

-Ellie Crystal

We sat on the wall, old friends, just as we had done in the sixties when the Palm Court and New College were new. Except that now we were in our sixties ourselves, our deep familiarity and sense of ownership of this place conflicting with hesitancy over intruding upon the commons of the students who now made this home. There were forty entering classes between our time and theirs. The complete student body had changed ten times; ten generations from us. Many of us had children older than these students. Yet sitting on the wall it was still undeniably our home, the soil from which our original tribe had sprung, and all generations of the tribe since that time.

When I drove into the funky old Lido Beach resort that was our reunion base, my heart leapt at all of the familiar faces sitting around the second floor balcony, outside the room with the keg that John Daugherty had set up. My closest friends, of course, were immediately familiar. We had spent the intervening years in close contact, getting married in each other’s houses, being informal aunts and uncles to each other’s kids, holding each other as we went through traumatic divorces. It’s been that movie The Big Chill, on a larger and longer scale. When our old friend Roger Peters was dying of melanoma in Durango, Colorado, John Hart and I flew from the Northeast into Albuquerque and rented large motorcycles, so we could blast up his driveway just as we all used to do at his place at the North end of Longboat Key. It was, he said later, as if his New College youth came, kicking gravel, back into his life.

There in the Palm Court we dedicated a memorial brick to him, with an injunction he had once directed at a campus cop who objected to him pulling his Volvo P118 into the walkway between the wall and third court: “Touch that car and I’ll call a real cop!” We toasted him with Slivovitz, a Yugoslavian plum brandy/airplane fuel for which we had once shared considerable enthusiasm. I forget why.

Other friends and classmates I didn’t recognize initially, until the first word was out of their mouths. Our gathering out on that Lido balcony was an instant re-tribalization of the group who had arrived when there was not much college to speak of. Sitting there feeling a blissful and complete acceptance greater than anything I have known in the intervening years, it was clear that pretty much everyone was feeling the same thing. I leaned over to Charity. “What is this that we are all feeling?” I asked her. She looked back at me and replied simply. “It’s unconditional love.”

The Creation Myth

[delete underlining]

What astonished me as we sat on the wall that once was ours was that the current students actually wanted to talk with us. They were keenly interested in who we were. In fact, we could connect immediately. We spoke the same dialect. It was clear that I could connect with an 18-year-old first-year student more readily than I can connect with 98 percent of all of the people whom I meet. We had a common language, a common culture. And the students were deeply curious about the origins of that culture. They were full of questions:

Did you have Walls and PCP’s? (Palm Court Parties)

Is it true that you went to class naked?

Is New College as good now as it was then?

And, finally, and movingly: “Are you proud of us?”

All tribes and cultures have their creation myths. Margaret Mead herself had visited and pronounced New College not a college, but a tribe. It was, in fact, more than a little Samoan. I realized that here an extraordinary event was happening. While the ancestors of aboriginal tribes are lost to the mists of time, here we ancestors of the tribal village of the Palm Court were stepping out of the mists solid and alive. We were the ancestors, come to earth. They could ask us about the creation myth and we could tell them how it actually was. We were there.

We could remember when the palm trees were young, and so were we. We recalled when the Pei dorms stood as an island among scrub and old WWII barracks, when we walked or raced our Honda 50s over to College Hall for dinners, watching the sun set through the windows as dolphins swam along the shoreline. We remembered the first-year “core” program, which everybody had to take. Back then the academic year was eleven months long, and you graduated in three years, except if you were male and could be rewarded for early graduation by being drafted and sent to Vietnam.

I suppose I knew in retrospect that we students had in fact co-created the academic philosophy and structure of the college, along with the founders and the faculty. But it had not occurred to me until I talked with students this time that we alone had founded the unique student life of the college. We had come up with a certain way of living together, imaginatively unique, that has reached full flower today. It could have been different: we could have been dropped into those Pei dorms in the middle of sleepy Sarasota and come up with Lord of the Flies. But it didn’t happen that way.

From our rude scratchings back then, a vibrant jiva culture had taken root, winding around and up the palm trees for generation after generation of students. No, we didn’t have “PCPs;” we didn’t even know what the term meant. In the beginning, we had just hung out and danced in the Palm Court. Maybe somebody would put some stereo speakers in the window of the corner third court room. There weren’t many of us back then. These early spontaneous gatherings had grown into the Walls and PCPs: the major and minor tribal feasts around which the seasons revolved.

Like aboriginal landscape, each element of the campus, especially the Pei dorms, was etched with the communal life of the first inhabitants. Around this symbolic topography the tribal rituals of New College students have continued to flourish. The vibrational residue of our life together so long ago still persisted in this place.

The students’ question: “Is it as good now?” stuck in my mind. We are used to the nature of creation myths, which can so often point back to a simpler and purer time than the corrupted present. The sixties and the early years of the college were a heady and exciting time, it was true. It is one of the great blessings of my life to be part of it. But the romantic way we can tend to view the past can obscure the fact that, for pioneers of any new activity, life by definition is hard.

The first class hadn’t even the Pei dorms. The college was yet unaccredited. Just outside the bubble the administrators maintained for us the school was on the verge of going broke. We thought of ourselves as liberated, but in fact we were children of the fifties. So, like the 1967 “Summer of Love,” the New College experience for us was as unimaginably distant from our prior experience as an acid trip is from a martini lunch. In this vast sea change some of us just didn’t make it. There were a lot of casualties – probably many more than in current times, when there are so many safety ropes and staff guides to keep students away from the deeper crevasses. We had the Moolah of the Vietnam War hanging over our very lives. Friends got sucked up and perished. The country approached the beginnings of what felt like incipient civil war. “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” the saying went then.

We were twice thirty now, but the students seemed to somehow trust us.

The morning after sitting on the wall with the students, we talked about what we had seen. Somebody pointed out that the students seemed to have a lot of self-confidence. “How different from our own experience! We had zilch in that department, “ somebody said. I also noticed that every conversation had been initiated and led by women. It seemed natural, and good. But the women gathered with us at this reunion pointed out how different it was from our own time. “They take for granted things we couldn’t even imagine” said Kathy, a feminine force who played second banana to no man, even in 1964. It was all true.

When students asked us if the college was still essentially as we remembered it, I asked them: “Have you ever seen a multiple-choice test at New College?” They all laughed. What a ridiculous question! And there was another event. Emeritus professor Dr. Knox, upon spotting John O’Neill, who had dropped out without finishing his thesis in the late sixties, practically grabbed him by the lapels and demanded, “John, when are you going to get that thesis in?” Everyone laughed. Then somebody asked Dr. Knox – “”Hey, they wouldn’t still take it after 40 years, would they?” “Sure we would,” Dr. Knox replied. Where else could such a thing even be possibly true?

The most memorable moment for me came when a knot of students – clearly close friends – came up to a group of us ancestors, friends since the Creation. “The wonderful thing,” I explained to them, gesturing to our little group, is that we have remained close friends for all of the years since we were here.” I reached out and gave John Hart a one-armed hug. They all looked at each other. “Do you mean,“ a young woman said hesitantly, that we might all still be friends in forty years?” “Yes,” I replied. The students almost trembled with the thought. They all hugged each other excitedly, and ran off to whatever adventure might be next. I could just guess.

How can we be ancestors? I still feel about twenty years old in the core of my being, truth be told. Especially when I’m around my fellow grey-haired ancestors. There is a line from Coleridge I have kept since I left New College for the “real world:”

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke – Ay! And what then?

Holding my flower tightly, I boarded a jet home for Ithaca, that oasis of the sixties where old hippies rule and where I feel most at home, save one vibrant Palm Court in Sarasota, Florida. For there is where the ancestral tongue is still spoken and the dreamtime periodically surfaces out of the creation myth and treads at night on Welch tiles under an orange-juice sky.

New College - The Ancestors in the Palm Court

The Ancestors Step out of the Dreamtime and Back into the Palm Court.

David B. Schwartz, ‘66

The Australian Aborigines speak of jiva or guruwari, a seed power deposited in the earth. In the Aboriginal world view, every meaningful activity, event, or life process that occurs at a particular place leaves behind a vibrational residue in the earth, as plants leave an image of themselves as seeds…As with a seed, the potency of an earthly location is wedded to the memory of its origin.

In the Aboriginal world view, every event leaves a record in the land. Everything in the natural world is a result of the actions of the archetypal beings, beings whose actions created the world.

-Ellie Crystal

We sat on the wall, old friends, just as we had done in the sixties when the Palm Court and New College were new. Except that now we were in our sixties ourselves, our deep familiarity and sense of ownership of this place conflicting with hesitancy over intruding upon the commons of the students who now made this home. There were forty entering classes between our time and theirs. The complete student body had changed ten times; ten generations from us. Many of us had children older than these students. Yet sitting on the wall it was still undeniably our home, the soil from which our original tribe had sprung, and all generations of the tribe since that time.

When I drove into the funky old Lido Beach resort that was our reunion base, my heart leapt at all of the familiar faces sitting around the second floor balcony, outside the room with the keg that John Daugherty had set up. My closest friends, of course, were immediately familiar. We had spent the intervening years in close contact, getting married in each other’s houses, being informal aunts and uncles to each other’s kids, holding each other as we went through traumatic divorces. It’s been that movie The Big Chill, on a larger and longer scale. When our old friend Roger Peters was dying of melanoma in Durango, Colorado, John Hart and I flew from the Northeast into Albuquerque and rented large motorcycles, so we could blast up his driveway just as we all used to do at his place at the North end of Longboat Key. It was, he said later, as if his New College youth came, kicking gravel, back into his life.

There in the Palm Court we dedicated a memorial brick to him, with an injunction he had once directed at a campus cop who objected to him pulling his Volvo P118 into the walkway between the wall and third court: “Touch that car and I’ll call a real cop!” We toasted him with Slivovitz, a Yugoslavian plum brandy/airplane fuel for which we had once shared considerable enthusiasm. I forget why.

Other friends and classmates I didn’t recognize initially, until the first word was out of their mouths. Our gathering out on that Lido balcony was an instant re-tribalization of the group who had arrived when there was not much college to speak of. Sitting there feeling a blissful and complete acceptance greater than anything I have known in the intervening years, it was clear that pretty much everyone was feeling the same thing. I leaned over to Charity. “What is this that we are all feeling?” I asked her. She looked back at me and replied simply. “It’s unconditional love.”

The Creation Myth

What astonished me as we sat on the wall that once was ours was that the current students actually wanted to talk with us. They were keenly interested in who we were. In fact, we could connect immediately. We spoke the same dialect. It was clear that I could connect with an 18-year-old first-year student more readily than I can connect with 98 percent of all of the people whom I meet. We had a common language, a common culture. And the students were deeply curious about the origins of that culture. They were full of questions:

Did you have Walls and PCP’s? (Palm Court Parties)

Is it true that you went to class naked?

Is New College as good now as it was then?

And, finally, and movingly: “Are you proud of us?”

All tribes and cultures have their creation myths. Margaret Mead herself had visited and pronounced New College not a college, but a tribe. It was, in fact, more than a little Samoan. I realized that here an extraordinary event was happening. While the ancestors of aboriginal tribes are lost to the mists of time, here we ancestors of the tribal village of the Palm Court were stepping out of the mists solid and alive. We were the ancestors, come to earth. They could ask us about the creation myth and we could tell them how it actually was. We were there.

We could remember when the palm trees were young, and so were we. We recalled when the Pei dorms stood as an island among scrub and old WWII barracks, when we walked or raced our Honda 50s over to College Hall for dinners, watching the sun set through the windows as dolphins swam along the shoreline. We remembered the first-year “core” program, which everybody had to take. Back then the academic year was eleven months long, and you graduated in three years, except if you were male and could be rewarded for early graduation by being drafted and sent to Vietnam.

I suppose I knew in retrospect that we students had in fact co-created the academic philosophy and structure of the college, along with the founders and the faculty. But it had not occurred to me until I talked with students this time that we alone had founded the unique student life of the college. We had come up with a certain way of living together, imaginatively unique, that has reached full flower today. It could have been different: we could have been dropped into those Pei dorms in the middle of sleepy Sarasota and come up with Lord of the Flies. But it didn’t happen that way.

From our rude scratchings back then, a vibrant jiva culture had taken root, winding around and up the palm trees for generation after generation of students. No, we didn’t have “PCPs;” we didn’t even know what the term meant. In the beginning, we had just hung out and danced in the Palm Court. Maybe somebody would put some stereo speakers in the window of the corner third court room. There weren’t many of us back then. These early spontaneous gatherings had grown into the Walls and PCPs: the major and minor tribal feasts around which the seasons revolved.

Like aboriginal landscape, each element of the campus, especially the Pei dorms, was etched with the communal life of the first inhabitants. Around this symbolic topography the tribal rituals of New College students have continued to flourish. The vibrational residue of our life together so long ago still persisted in this place.

The students’ question: “Is it as good now?” stuck in my mind. We are used to the nature of creation myths, which can so often point back to a simpler and purer time than the corrupted present. The sixties and the early years of the college were a heady and exciting time, it was true. It is one of the great blessings of my life to be part of it. But the romantic way we can tend to view the past can obscure the fact that, for pioneers of any new activity, life by definition is hard.

The first class hadn’t even the Pei dorms. The college was yet unaccredited. Just outside the bubble the administrators maintained for us the school was on the verge of going broke. We thought of ourselves as liberated, but in fact we were children of the fifties. So, like the 1967 “Summer of Love,” the New College experience for us was as unimaginably distant from our prior experience as an acid trip is from a martini lunch. In this vast sea change some of us just didn’t make it. There were a lot of casualties – probably many more than in current times, when there are so many safety ropes and staff guides to keep students away from the deeper crevasses. We had the Moolah of the Vietnam War hanging over our very lives. Friends got sucked up and perished. The country approached the beginnings of what felt like incipient civil war. “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” the saying went then.

We were twice thirty now, but the students seemed to somehow trust us.

The morning after sitting on the wall with the students, we talked about what we had seen. Somebody pointed out that the students seemed to have a lot of self-confidence. “How different from our own experience! We had zilch in that department, “ somebody said. I also noticed that every conversation had been initiated and led by women. It seemed natural, and good. But the women gathered with us at this reunion pointed out how different it was from our own time. “They take for granted things we couldn’t even imagine” said Kathy, a feminine force who played second banana to no man, even in 1964. It was all true.

When students asked us if the college was still essentially as we remembered it, I asked them: “Have you ever seen a multiple-choice test at New College?” They all laughed. What a ridiculous question! And there was another event. Emeritus professor Dr. Knox, upon spotting John O’Neill, who had dropped out without finishing his thesis in the late sixties, practically grabbed him by the lapels and demanded, “John, when are you going to get that thesis in?” Everyone laughed. Then somebody asked Dr. Knox – “”Hey, they wouldn’t still take it after 40 years, would they?” “Sure we would,” Dr. Knox replied. Where else could such a thing even be possibly true?

The most memorable moment for me came when a knot of students – clearly close friends – came up to a group of us ancestors, friends since the Creation. “The wonderful thing,” I explained to them, gesturing to our little group, is that we have remained close friends for all of the years since we were here.” I reached out and gave John Hart a one-armed hug. They all looked at each other. “Do you mean,“ a young woman said hesitantly, that we might all still be friends in forty years?” “Yes,” I replied. The students almost trembled with the thought. They all hugged each other excitedly, and ran off to whatever adventure might be next. I could just guess.

How can we be ancestors? I still feel about twenty years old in the core of my being, truth be told. Especially when I’m around my fellow grey-haired ancestors. There is a line from Coleridge I have kept since I left New College for the “real world:”

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke – Ay! And what then?

Holding my flower tightly, I boarded a jet home for Ithaca, that oasis of the sixties where old hippies rule and where I feel most at home, save one vibrant Palm Court in Sarasota, Florida. For there is where the ancestral tongue is still spoken and the dreamtime periodically surfaces out of the creation myth and treads at night on Welch tiles under an orange-juice sky.

Early Palm Court Party

Seymour Sarason Eulogy

Dear Fellow Friends of Seymour:

I have learned of Seymour's death too late to be with you at his funeral today. I see, looking at the clock, that the service is just starting now. A have appreciated reading the various memorials to him, as I think of this extraordinary, wonderful, man who touched us so deeply that even the third time we always laughed at the joke; "What does it feel like? It feels like talking to the wall!" because we just wanted Seymour to talk just a little longer, wanted him to be happy for a moment, wanted to be with him.

In reading other's thoughts, I began thinking about what made Seymour so special, why he might have inspired such feelings of love and devotion, and his final moving out of this world kindles such keen feelings of loss for me, and for all of us together.

There are many extraordinarily intelligent people around, some of them in universities. There are a number of professors who take genuine personal interest in their students. But Seymour was different: if you worked with him in any way, you eventually came to the realization that there was only single reason that Seymour was helping you: because he loved you. And because he loved you and loved to help you to grow and flourish, the entire breadth of his mind was at your disposal. He had no other consideration than you, and you felt it.

A couple of months ago, Seymour told me that the hardest thing about his existence was that "I don't have anybody to care for now."

Beneath the rough exterior that only served to make him more endearing, this was the guy who cheerfully told me once that he was a really good psychotherapy supervisor. "Have you ever practiced psychotherapy? I asked?

"Oh, no," he quickly replied, almost shuddering. "I'm way too sensitive for that!"

It seems like there must be a good ironic Jewish joke in there somewhere.


Just like his mentor Henry Shaffer-Simmern, Seymour's care for you would most often be expressed in giving you a blank sheet of paper. "Artistic creativity is life, he said. For some of us, Seymour's blank sheet of paper was the charge to write a book. It was his medium: when he was teaching, he seemed to regularly turn one out a year. After he retired, I think it went up to two. "He writes them faster than I can read him!" my friend Hank Bersani complained. You'd go see Seymour, and he would tell you to write a book, and two weeks later there'd be a letter from a publisher asking of if you were interested in a book contract.

Well, I wrote that book, and just as Seymour had no doubt planned, now I don't seem to be able to stop. The next one, I dedicated to him with these words of Seneca, My guess is that is what we all experienced.

What would you think of a memorial symposium that brings all of us together to talk about Seymour's influence on us and the world, so that we can all get to know each other a bit? Maybe somebody could write a book. Seymour would like that.


Suppose, again, that the other endured labor and weariness in teaching me; that, besides the ordinary sayings of teachers, there are things which he has transmitted and instilled into me; that by his encouragement he aroused the best that was in me, at one time inspirited me by his praise; at another warned me to put aside sloth; that, laying hand, so to speak, on my mental powers that then were hidden and inert, he drew them forth into the light; that, instead of doing out his knowledge grudgingly in order that there might be the longer need of his service, he was eager, if he could, to pour the whole of into me – if I do not owe to such a man all the love I give to those to the most grateful ties, I am indeed ungrateful.



Sincerely,


David B. Schwartz

The Dream Analysis Stand at the Farmer's Market

Cartoon: Bare feet with hairy lower legs sticking out on a couch beyond the curtain of a stand at the Farmer’s Market. Hanging Signs: “Dream Analysis $15. The Doctor is “IN.”

Finding the analytic couch upstate was the hardest part. Psychoanalysts never made it much further North from New York than Westchester County. (I know they call Westchester “upstate” from Manhattan, but from Ithaca it is a long ways downstate. ) Finally I found a couch in Philadelphia, where each obituary of a psychoanalyst sends another couch to the used furniture store. Gus, who had been keeping his eye out for me, called me up. “Got one here that just came in, doc,” he said in his South Philly staccato. “Fifties style, but it belonged to a Jungian, so it’s not too rigid.” It sounded good to me. Although I don’t usually use a couch myself, I had tried one out that had been owned by a Freudian. It was no use: everybody’s dreams were both sexual and rigidly interpretive. I mean, how many bicycle masturbation fantasies can there really be? Besides, rigidity isn’t big in Ithaca, except among certain vegans, and I’m not. So I jumped in the pickup and by that Friday night I was backing up to my new stand at the market.

My neighbors at the goat cheese stand and Micro Mama’s on either side of me helped me carry it in. Then I had to only hang the curtain on a rope, stick in a folding chair for me and a box of Kleenex, and I was ready to hang my sign. People could lie down on the couch and couldn’t really be heard against the hubbub of Saturday mornings, while their feet sticking out signaled those in line that there was somebody in the stall – like a bathroom stall, only you didn’t have to duck to see.

Of course I had to address the concerns of the board of directors in the beginning. It is not like I would be in competition with anybody. But some members remembered the problems when they had psychotherapists there before. Behaviorists didn’t really fit the ethos of the market, and various new-age practitioners were disruptive: complaints about the primal scream stand had been particularly vocal. (They moved on to city planning board meetings.) A moratorium on therapists had been declared after the unfortunate incident with the shock therapy stand, when a confused patient wandered off the end of the dock with a full backpack of rutabagas and sank like a stone. Even though the practice was both ecologically correct and sustainable (the electricity was generated by stationary bicycle) the legal liability was judged just too great. Jim Hardesty took back his custom-made Tesla coil to sell to some museum, and the sign: “Zap your worries: Real Brief Therapy,” kicked around until somebody recycled it as a garlic shelf.

Psychoanalysts are the Amish of the mental health professions: they never bought in to the technology, and so remember how to do things in the “old school” way. Dream analysis, a cornerstone of Amish practice, is as potentially illuminating as an MRI, with the advantage of being more portable and a lot cheaper. Of course, it depends upon what you are looking for: if you are searching for brain damage, it’s the right technology. If you are trying to identify sources of persistent and recurring personal suffering, though, a dream can be just the thing. All sorts of people lie down on my couch for a few minutes while shopping, like getting a quick massage on the Commons: people with emotionally-based physical illnesses, depression occurring in Ithacans other than during January through March, the ever-expanding sea of human troubles that are diagnosed as psychiatric illnesses (for these I use de-diagnosis) or the myriad manifestations of hopelessness, even in doctoral students. For these, dreams are just the instrument.

It is true that the preparation of a competent dream analyst takes vastly longer than that of a radiologist. In the Philadelphia psychoanalytic community, where I learned my trade, there is a saying that “It takes 25 years to know what to say in an analytic session.” You can’t really use a dream analysis book. That only tells you the associations of the person who wrote it, along with the usual collective unconscious material. To be competent at reading dreams requires long practice in developing a certain inward focus, an ability to grasp the person’s associational network or personal cosmology as separate from one’s own, and the opening of certain intuitive capacities. When you get it right, you can feel the illumination ripple through the person (this is where the Kleenex is often useful) following which their wings open just a little bit more. If you keep this up, eventually you can fly.

Just before the market opens, a short, weathered potato farmer from Newfield pulls the drape back and plops down on the couch. “Had this nightmare last night, shook me up,” doc, he starts. I was planting potatoes, but all that came up was marijuana.” “You farm organic?” I asked him. “Yeah: biodynamic.” As I suspected: it’s another dream about money, a common theme among organic farmers. I lean back, drawing in on my briar. “I see,” I say, leaning in attentively. “Tell me more.” I suspect that for this one I’m going to be paid in potatoes.

David's home sidewalk is in under his usual table in front of Gimmie Coffee on Cayuga Street.

5/28/09

The Angel in the Dining Room (2002)

The Angel in the Dining Room
David B. Schwartz

Dedicated to the memory of Hubert Zipperlen, 1911 - 2002

To us, as students of Rudolf Steiner, the child -whatever his mental condition may be -is more than his physical appearance may indicate. He is more than his body, more than his emotions, more than his spoken or unspoken words. He is even more than his achievements. In his appearance he is merely the outer shell of an infinite and eternal spiritual being.”
- Karl Köenig

We were getting ready for dinner when Bob saw the angel in the dining room. We were at Camphill Village, a community where people with mental retardation and others of us with less visible disabilities live together. Susan was at the stove when Bob reached out and touched both of us. He gestured mutely toward the corner, by the window overlooking the woods. He pointed toward the angel.

Bob is what I consider an intuitive, which is at the root of his uncanny ability to make contact with deeply disturbed autistic children. But I had come to recognize him as something even more unusual than that - a mystic. He was so sensitive that he picked up things out of the ether. I had a patient like that. As psychologically disturbed as she was, there were certain experiences and perceptions of hers that simply could not be explained by psychology. She simply “saw” them and they were there.

Bob was trembling and his words were caught on his tongue. He looked like a man who had not so much as seen a ghost, but was seeing one at that very moment. She was tall, he whispered slowly, describing what he was seeing as he averted his eyes and looked back for another frightening glance. She filled the corner to the high ceiling. She had long yellow hair, was gowned in flowing robes, and held a scroll in her hands. She looked beatifically and protectively over the scene of the people with disabilities setting the table. Her presence had something to do with them, he knew -the scroll with Susan and me, and our being in that place. I felt something -was it simply psychological contamination, or true mysterium tremendum?

For it seemed that I almost sensed the rustle of the angel’s wings, that sound in the old testament that brought unbelievers to their knees. “My Lord!,” I said to Bob, later, walking him down to the front door. “I sure am glad that I don’t see angels. I’m quite frightened enough as it is!”

After fifteen years of visiting Camphill Village, the closest of a hundred sister intentional communities around the globe, I had finally come to stay for a whole two weeks. Instead of just being a visitor, Susan and I were houseparents. We had a family: not just our own children, but Mike and Michael and Ben and Posey. It was around their table, become temporarily ours, that we gathered for meals. We recited grace, a blessing from anthroposophy, the transcendental philosophy created by the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner almost a century ago. Our daughter, Stephanie, eight, spoke:

Sun, earth, water, and air,
Have wrought with God’s care
That the plants live and bear:
Thanking God for this food
In truth live we would
Bearing Beauty and Good.

We reached out and joined hands around the table and pronounced the final
ritual together: “Blessings on the meal.”

Then we ate. The vegetable dishes, carefully prepared by Susan despite the heat of the kitchen in the July heat wave in a village without the modern industrial comfort of air-conditioning, were savory. We had walked down to the garden barns with our cart just that morning, to pick up our allotment of just-picked vegetables from the biodynamic farm along the slopes of French creek. We passed clover fields luxurious with grazing cows, each with their names. Other villagers and co-workers like us tended the cows in the dairy.

The cows, unlike on most farms, retained their horns. This was because of biodynamic farming. Biodynamics was another fruit of Steiner’ s work, like the Waldorf school across the creek and its thousands of sisters, like anthroposophic medicine, and architecture, and other fields. In anthroposophic farming, cows kept their horns. The horns, I was eventually to figure out, had something to do with the unseen world, in which such beings as angels were said to reside over something as earthly as a cow-pasture.

Our family and work were not about any unseen world. They were about the seen world -the world of gardens, and cows, and houses between which one could walk. And a large part of the seen world, although in a quite different way than anything I had encountered in my thirty years in the field of developmental disabilities, were the people with disabilities themselves. At Camphill, there was no apartheid between such people and those who cared for them.

Here, as in all Camphill communities, no-one was paid. One simply made a life together. Early each morning, Mike, who rose early, walked down to the cow barn to bring back our freshly-filled pail of milk. Michael went down to the front step of our old mansion to bring up his Philadelphia Inquirer and read the scores of his teams, legs crossed on the couch, looking very much like an ordinary man reading the sports section before work. It was Susan who told me, eventually, that he could not read.

After breakfast dishes were washed, people, including me and Stephanie, went off to our day’ s work. I pulled out my tools and started installing a ceiling fan to stir the hot air in the dining room. Stephanie helped her new friend Alexandria pull a wagon around the village ªgatherª up all the little children from their houses for a morning’ s babysitting in the yard of Oberlin house, down the woods path from our home. Herbie showed up to chop the fresh vegetables for Susan for lunch. Sandy went right to the sink and began to energetically wash the breakfast dishes. Ross pulled out the vacuum cleaner and set about vacuuming the stairway inch by inch, just as he had done yesterday. And Jean, semi-retired but ironing a tablecloth, filled Susan in on all important events of everyone in the village since the day before. Sooner than we had imagined possible, we settled into the rhythms of an ordinary life. More rhythmic and more ordinary, in fact, than anything we had ever known.

Friendship

As days went on in that hot July, we came unexpectedly to feel as if we had found a home. Susan slipped into being a happy housemother at the center of a large home so beautifully that she started to glow, like a plant finally rooted in nourishing soil. I felt happy myself. I was living again in my life fully on foot, living in community, which I have pursued all of my life. We fell in love with the “villagers” there -and clearly, they with us. Every morning, as I rose early, as Mike appeared with the milk pail, making strange remarks to the air and wandering about outside, as Michael assumed the posture of the sports-reading businessman, Ben wandered in rubbing his sleepy eyes.

Ben was the quintessence of a man with Down’s syndrome; sweet, affectionate, acutely emotionally sensitive to rejection or anger at him, with the typical enlarged tongue of Down’s syndrome which made his speech thick and difficult to comprehend without practice. Down’s syndrome, the great founder of Camphill Dr. Karl Köenig said, was a fairly recent phenomenon in the world evolution. On a planet ever more self-destructively estranged from feeling, people with Down’s syndrome had appeared as an attempted corrective. They were all feeling . Now, of course, there was amniocentesis and abortion, and people with Down’s syndrome were disappearing. This comment of Dr. König was typically anthroposophic, in suggesting the largest possible view of a seemingly immediate phenomenon. Maybe he was right.

Surely Ben was a most positive influence on our often-challenging and
difficult to understand Stephanie. Stephanie, like the modern world, seemed a kind of a fascinatingly bright child version of Bill Gates. We presumed she would be very successful, but hoped that she would be able to enjoy relationships with others as an adult. We had tried constant explanation, exhortation, punishment -it was sometimes as if we were explaining human feeling to someone from Mars. In a week, Ben changed all that.

Ben and Stephanie immediately struck up a friendship. In many ways, they were at a similar level of emotional maturity. Soon our very “un-touchy” girl was hugging. They hugged good morning, they hugged goodnight, they played pretend games with Susan’ s stuffed animal, Buster, who became the house scapegoat for all trouble and bad behavior. They were inseparable, they were joyous. I had never seen Stephanie like this, and it was good.

Much to our astonishment, this change extended to us. This little girl who always wanted to be at a distance even from her mother, who objected to her mother even walking her into nursery school at three, began to crawl into her lap. She even started crawling into mine. Crucially, she seemed to penetrate the mystery of others’ feelings. Perhaps this was because Ben, with his fluid, open face, was as expressive as a mime. When he was happy, he smiled broadly. When he heard something that displeased him, he cried -real tears. In him maybe Stephanie could see what people felt.

Soon Susan made a close friend, a woman named Susie who came to help in the house. At first glance, I thought her to be quite cognitively impaired. She seem to say much. But then Susan started telling me of the many sotto voce observations Susie made over the course of a day. She was acutely observant, it turned out. She missed nothing, whether it was the peculiarities of our visiting friends, who somehow seemed far more impaired in the ability for human sharing and civility than the members of our new family. And all were related with a sympathetic, dry wit that made Susan, who has a similar sharply-observant but forgiving temperament, feel that she had found a friend.

One night Susan was talking on the phone with her mother, and her mother asked what she thought Susie’ diagnosis” Perhaps Susan should find it out and read up on it, so that she could best help her. Maybe I knew. After all, I was supposed to be a psychologist and developmental disabilities specialist. Putting her hand over the mouthpiece, she turned to me in bed, where I was reading. “ What did I think Susie’ diagnosis was?” she queried. “
Susie? I asked, looking up. “Humorist.”

My own deepest friend became Michael, the day he showed me his basement workshop. It was clear that he was both hesitant and very much wanted me to see it. The hesitancy only came of his fear of being rebuffed, that I would tell him I was too busy. “ Maybe tomorrow?” he asked me, while I was up on a ladder hanging a ceiling fan to at least move around the stuffy air. “ about right now? I replied, climbing down the ladder and setting down my electrical tools. I followed him into the basement. What I saw there in Michael’ s workshop was almost enough to make me cry. For I had entered into my grandfather’s workshop, and my uncles’ workshop. Even, to tell the truth, my own.

Everywhere Michael’s beloved tools hung in exquisite order. Screwdrivers ranked in racks. Saws hung from nails. Hammers of all sizes and types ranged across the walls, below sections of scrap wood carefully sorted by size. Wooden boxes of carefully straightened out and rusty used common nails were tacked to the front of his bench within ready reach. There was not a bit of dirt, or disorder, not a thing out of place. Among this sublime order I felt like a child in my grandfather’ workshop, my grandfather who also would never throw away a nail he could straighten. I still use his tin nail-boxes soldered out of discarded Prince Albert tobacco tins, although I could not claim such grandfatherly order as Michael. Were my grandfather to appear, it would be Michael’ s workshop, above my own, that would win his silent acknowledgement that all was as a workshop should be.

Against the power of this setting, there was only one thing missing: the ability to know how to use these tools to build something. Michael was painfully aware of this lack. It was that that he needed me for, he told me. To help him figure out what to do. In the center of the space was a recently-attempted project, a new workbench. It leaned down precipitously at one end. Michael knew that something hadn’t turned out quite right, but couldn’t put his finger on exactly what. He hadn’t a clue.

I had spent the last weeks -and years -dealing with the countless people without mental retardation who cross one’ s path in the world who didn’t have a clue, either. But what they lacked clues about were elemental things that were central to the knowledge of my well-raised, profoundly ethical friend. Someone who knew, also, what it to be a friend; what it was to subsume one’s own egotistic strivings freely to concern for the loving well-being of the other. To take one’ s greatest pleasure in life not from narcissistic self-gratification of all the tedious types; power, money, sexual conquest, and the pleasures of murder: personal, spiritual, environmental, global -but in “ seeing the other grow more beautiful, because we were together.”

My sickness with the latest of disappointing human beings spread across the surface of the earth in this latest, only minimally successful incarnate learning opportunity, had succeeded in opening my heart and eyes. Michael and I stood in the tidy workshop and I realized that in truth he was becoming beautiful to me and that unquestionably - he did not hide himself behind some persona - I was becoming beautiful to him. It was clear that we both sensed in each other qualities of honesty, and of faithfulness. We had been disappointed. And, happily, we had something to give each other. I took a tape measure and quickly determined the height discrepancy of the sides, pieced and marked an extension, and handed Michael the nails to bang into place. Then we rocked it on its side. It was perfect. We celebrated. You’re pretty smart, Michael Bernstein! ”he exclaimed happily. “ Yes, you are,” I agreed. Then we went upstairs to dinner.

Many years ago, I first puzzled over why Camphill afforded better lives to people than any lavishly-funded professional program I had ever seen. I read somewhere a founder pointing out that Camphill was not created as a service program for people with mental retardation. It was a community for everyone. The Camphill founders wished to live in community, and realized that it would be necessary to have people with mental retardation present in order to have it. I at last understood this.

At this time, we slowly became aware that the villagers that we had gotten to know and who had become our friends were recruiting us. They were straightforward: “ You have to move to the village and be our houseparents.” when you move here, I’ m going to work in your house.” They asked about school for Stephanie, and for Nate. With the immediacy of people with mental retardation, some people were packed up and ready to move. In with us. When we left, Michael told me that he was going to go down into his workshop and cry. All this made us pause to wonder if what we had conceived as a summer working vacation might be in fact a call to a new life. This possibility was as unsettling as seeing an angel in one’s dining room.

Back in the World

Once released from social restraints by modernization, however, [Illich claims] a disembedded economy proved to be a relentless force, one that dismantled traditional societies piece by piece. The innumerable and varied ways that people got by and got along were replaced with a life of dependency on commodities...
- Eugene Burkhart

No one takes the trouble to reflect uncompromisingly about the enigma
of a historical situation that is without precedent: the death of all cultures.”
- Ivan Illich

When I got back home from Camp Hill, it seemed as if the dump had caught on fire. Suburban sprawl was steadily expanding, even in the intolerable and exhaust-choked heat. Heavy equipment had leveled what had been a woods only when we left into stripped subsoil ready for an asphalt parking lot. People plowed through the choked atmosphere in air-conditioned automotive bubbles, passing from one cool, bright, windowless big box store to another, a flat sun hanging heavy in the orange sky.
Returning to Hershey after the time in Camphill was like returning to an inner-city tenement after a summer as a fresh-air kid. What was marginally tolerable before now seemed unbearable in comparison.

This is of course the way that change takes place; you get a glimpse outside of your existing situation, and the polarity of experience heightens the contrast so much that it motivates you to take steps toward a new possibility rather than put up with the old. I am always encouraged when I see this with one of my patients. That's when they start moving, albeit with struggle and difficulty. So it was with us: we had left our summer big family and community, the village one walked on foot on paths through the fields and woods, the life so demanding that one fell into bed tired out every night, looking forward to the next day, for a suburban America where one sees faces through the glass of minivans, driving through the blighted landscape of modernity. It was enough to give you the bends.


Dr. Köenig’s vision.

A few years ago I had stood on the site of the first Camphill, overlooking the River Dee on “ Camp Hill” in northern Scotland near Aberdeen, the ancient hill once site to the Northward-thrusting Roman legions. It had been more than fifty years then since Dr. Köenig had come to this place. It was here that he and his colleagues, a group of young physicians and friends fleeing the Nazi holocaust, had made their lonely stand against the forces of darkness by planting “ a candle on a hill.” In company with handicapped children they on that remote hill sought to found a transcendentally -inspired community just as their home Europe was burning in Hitlerian destruction and murder. The
candle lit by those pioneers had burned brightly and had spread throughout the world. Now each stood on their own hills, in contrast to the modern incarnations of evil which were once more gobbling up the world.

It was materialism -the belief that the world was merely matter, a modern form of the ancient sin of hubris, that was destroying the earth. The other six of the ever-present seven deadly sins were, as always, flourishing too. Camphill and anthroposophy’s key contribution, it seems to me, were in trying to break what William James called “ the reign of hardness” in viewing the world. The world was more than “stuff, and people were more than the shells of their exteriors - even people with disabilities. They were a divine mystery. The earth itself was a divine mystery, to be treated with reverence. And there was a way to perceive the divine, to see the world as transcendent and holy, rather than as a site and as consumers for another Wal-Mart.

Bob, when he came into our home and saw the angel, was such a person who could see things -a mystic. But he perceived transcendental aspects of the world with his heart only. He could read the scroll, however. It had to do with me and Susan, and our linked destiny with the people there, he told me. More than that he could not say, he said: such messages are never specific, but rather dropped into one’ s heart to be worked out in one’ s own way.

But he was sure that the angel’s visit and message was about us somehow, and this place. Rudolf Steiner, in contrast to Bob, brought both mystical intuition and a disciplined intellect to the project of seeing the unseen world. The difference was illustrated by my late friend Hubert Zipperlen, who used the example of someone who could perceive auras around people and who said that someone who had a lot of green in her aura, so “he was good with plants.” Just seeing a color in an aura, he pointed out, had nothing whatsoever to do with knowing what that might mean, people at Camphill quietly try to perceive things beyond matter. When Hubert worked in his garden, he talked with the elemental beings who brought growth to vegetables. Water sprites found a home in streams and flow-forms. And most importantly, everyone strove to see the “ infinite being” in each person with a handicap passing through this life. As Köenig
wrote:

We are convinced that every human being has his individual existence not only here on earth between birth and death, but that every child was a spiritual entity before he was born, and that every man will continue to live after he has passed through the gate of death. Thus any kind of physical or mental handicap is not acquired by chance or misfortune. It has a definite meaning for the individual and is meant to change his life.”

The presence of people with disabilities was an opportunity to not only them, but each of us. Perhaps my own handicaps, then, against which I had struggled so long, had meaning as well. Perhaps they had meaning in changing my life. In considering the core passing from incarnation to incarnation in myself and in all those around me I had an opportunity to see the world become alive, transcendent, holy. And even the cows and the fields could keep their horns because the possibility that they might gore other livestock was far outweighed by their importance as antennae bringing cosmic forces into the farm. So I decided to stand, myself, poking my own horns tentatively into the world beyond matter, standing out on a hillock under the stars among the cows, hearing their low mooing in the shadows. What might I discover in such a strange and powerful place? What did the angel’s scroll say about Susan and me, and the company of these people? Maybe, we decided, we should find out.


August, 2002

A Eulogy for Harry Guise (1997)

A Eulogy for Harry Guise
August 14, 1997
St. Patrick’s Cathedral
Harrisburg

David B. Schwartz


It is with a sad heart that I walk from my home in the shadow of this cathedral to join in mourning the loss - but celebrating the life - of my colleague, friend, and mentor Harry Guise. I wish to sing the praises of a good man.

Harry and I worked together. Anyone who knew Harry even slightly knew that for him work was not a casual affair. He worked hard all of his life, and his work was helping people. I want to tell one story that tells a little about this work of his.

A few years ago our organization in government had an opportunity to hire someone for the summer to help us. When the paperwork was completed, the bureaucratic office handling hiring offered immediate approval - if we would take a person they’d like us to hire. In fact, she could start tomorrow. But Harry felt differently. We were an office to help people with disabilities, and we should hire someone with a disability for this job. So he persisted.

Harry had to persist a long time to get what he wanted, and the summer was long past and he had done a lot of additional work before he was able to hire such a person. That is how Horace came to work with us.

Horace was an older man who seemed to have never had much of a break in life. Harry took an interest in him, spent time with him, and he did good work for us. When the position ran out, he went on and moved someplace else.

A couple of years later, I was surprised to see Horace sitting in Harry’s office, visiting him. He had come back to town, and the first thing he did was to see Harry. Horace was dying, Harry told me later, and had come back to see Harry one more time. In Harry, this old disabled African-American man who no-one seemed to want had found someone who wanted him, who encouraged him, who saw something in him. So it was no surprise, actually, that he would come back to see Harry one more time.

How many Horaces were there in Harry’s long working life? How many people did he take an interest in and help them to find the blessings of work, a blessing that they would otherwise have not known, and which was so important to him? In fact, if you assembled all the people who Harry helped in this way, the crowd would fill this Cathedral, and the street beyond.

Harry, as others have said, was very self-effacing. He would never sit still for such praise as this. I used to tease him with a nickname I had for him: “Columbo,” after the Peter Falk character in the detective series. For Harry, like Columbo, combined his self-effacing nature with extraordinary perception and intelligence in service of his calling. Like Columbo, when he needed to get to the bottom of some knotty problem he would engage people in offhand conversation. If it was winter, perhaps he would even be wearing a rumpled raincoat. People would take in his comforting diminutive figure, look into his innocent face and his twinkling Irish eyes, and they would tell him everything. Then Harry, who would never miss the subtlest of inflections, would figure out from what they had unself-consciously told him just what to do to be able to get someone a job, or fifty people a job, or a hundred people a job.

I quickly learned not to do anything important without asking him. I would sit down in the big chair in his office, and run by him some new, enthusiastic idea of mine, and Harry would reveal the gaping hole right before my feet that I would disappear into if I took one more step. “How on earth do you know where all these holes are?,” I once asked him in amazement. “Oh,” he replied with a wry chuckle, “I fell in all of them.”

Sometimes, after patiently hearing out some new exciting proposed plan of mine, and being asked what he thought of it, Harry would ask, “How about if I sleep on it?” This, I came to realize, was Harry’s gentle way of saying “David, that is such an extraordinarily bad idea that I am actually worried about you, and maybe if you sleep on it you will forget about it by the morning.”

He was always saving me, and us.

In a meeting over some difficult problem, when everybody was starting to get just a little irritable, Harry would look up and say “Well, are we having fun yet?”


It is important to sing the praises of unsung heros, and Harry was such a hero. He was a hero of mine. He helped people. He was never confused about what was right. He was unwavering in his commitment to people, and untiring in his efforts. He taught me patience.

Thanks for being patient with me, Harry. And be patient for a moment, past the threshold of this world, while I sing your praises; that of a good man.

Post-Katrina in the Big Easy (2008)

The Fragility of Natural and Human Culture in New Orleans

David B. Schwartz
3/30/08

“Culture,” the social philosopher Ivan Illich once said, “is that which holds the economy at bay.” A culture says that here in this place we do things in this particular way, we live in this particular way, which we hold above the measure of money alone. It is the unique, local way in which we “face illness, suffering, and death.” Here we eat in a certain way, live in a certain way, create in a certain way. “When a culture perishes,” Margaret Mead once wrote, it is a terrible loss for the world:

Human cultures are the most distinct creations of human beings, drawing as they do not only upon the special contributions of the singularly gifted, but upon the imagination, explicit and implicit, of every man, woman, and child who live within them, and through them, and who, each generation, remodel the traditions they have received from their cultural ancestors. But although human cultures are the most distinctive creations of the human, they are also the most fragile, for they live primarily in the habituated beings of living persons. Like a dance, for which the music and choreography have never been written down, a great part of human culture is lost to humanity when the group which has carried it, devotedly, in every word or gesture, is dispersed, or destroyed, or forsakes the traditional ways for ways which are new.*




One might think of the borders of a culture as a kind of levee holding back the sea of monetary economics which drives the modern world. Standing in New Orleans’ lower ninth ward I could see where the material and cultural levees failed in hurricane Katrina, and the scraped and barren ruins left in the wake of that breach. I stood where an enormous Mississippi barge, surfing a wall of water, scoured a living neighborhood from the face of the earth, taking a big part of a musical culture with it.

I was shown around the lower 9th by my old friend Richard Waller, a conservationist and volunteer with Common Ground, a visionary and unusual community organization operating out of a tiny house stuffed with 50 college students. They were stacked in bunkbeds, using one bathroom and a garden hose for a shower. The students and the organization’s leadership were there to try to do what they could for those who had called the lower 9th home. Richard’s own focus was not in house reconstruction, but in attempting to restore the wetlands whose slow death over decades had allowed the full force of wind and storm surge to strike unmoderated from the Gulf of Mexico.

“This neighborhood,” Richard gestured, “once had the highest percentage of home ownership by African-American people in the entire United States.” If one listened to mere reports on the news, one would assume that Katrina had washed away some kind of impoverished slum. But this was far from the case. This marginal, below sea-level land was once home to a unique culture whose art has spread throughout the world. These streets gave birth to the blues. It gave birth to jazz. It held the home of the legendary jazzman Fats Domino, who had to be pried away from his beloved piano by his family as the water rose. It’s a good thing, because when the levee broke his piano submerged under fifteen feet of water. It stayed for three weeks. The few remaining houses, scattered here and there across now open lots, still retained numbers spray-painted by national guard troops showing the number of bodies to be removed. There were 1600.

Why did art flourish here? What was so rich about this soil that such creativity emerged? One thing that was unusual about this neighborhood was what they did with their small homes. And they were small – tiny, in fact, by modern American standards. Most of these modest homes did not even have air-conditioning despite its near, humid subtropical climate. While almost everyone in an American suburb strives virtually ceaselessly to pay mortgages, car loans, and increasing improvements, something which requires two incomes to support even with effort, people in the lower 9th part of the “Big Easy” took quite a different approach. With many houses handed down and paid for, often only part-time jobs – even as musicians – were needed. They chose the luxury of time over productivity. With only part-time effort required to secure an acceptable roof over their heads, they could sit on their porches, drink some beer on a hot afternoon, play music, and sing. We are told by anthropologists that “primitive” tribes, including some still existing today, spent and spend much less time securing food and shelter than people in modern societies. In the modern world, work without end is taken to an extreme. Yet right in America, in a Southern city which was home to a community of free slaves even during the civil war, a certain traditional way of living persisted even into the beginning of the 21st century. Persisted, that is, until the levee broke.

Why did the levee break? In a phrase, the war against culture and the war against nature are the same thing. Richard took me out to the edge of the wetlands bordering New Orleans. Walking through piles of rusted steel from depots supplying offshore oil derricks, we came to the indistinct boundary between land and water. “They say down here that when God was trying to decide whether to make this part of the world land or sea, he finally decided upon - neither,” Richard said. You could see where the hurricane had torn up vast swatches of wetland grass, leaving reflective pools of open water that presented no resistance to winds and storm-surges. It was this grass that Richard and his teams of student volunteers were replanting from grasses sprouted in children’s blue wading pools. It seemed an inspiring effort, against overwhelming need.

But what was of greatest importance in that wind-swept place was not what you could see, but what you couldn’t. What was not there to be seen were the endless cypress and hardwood forests that within recent memory covered the spot where we were standing, as far to the north as one could see.

The previous day Richard showed my son and I through such an intact cypress swamp. Tall cypress trees with their characteristic “knees” emerged from the ground that was neither solid nor liquid, in the way that cypresses are particularly adapted to flourish in. Around their roots, a rich and complex ecosystem flourished, too: tall grasses, wild irises in bloom, seemingly somnolent alligators, and more snakes – mostly venomous brown cottonmouths, than I had ever seen anywhere. The boggy land practically squirmed with them. Although the swamp had been hit by Katrina too, here miles of established wetland vegetation had helped to muffled the blow.

It was only as long ago as when Richard and I were in high school that the Army Corps of Engineers had carved a canal through a swamp just like this to make barge traffic from the Mississippi to the Gulf more efficient – and profitable. It was called, by it’s acronym, “Mr. Go.” This immense and destructive undertaking had never turned out to be useful – it was now being decommissioned - but one thing that it did accomplish was to let the salty water of the Gulf up into the freshwater swamp. This breaching of an invisible biological levee caused the death of the forests, and the grasses, and the ecosystem itself. When the hurricane swept through this wasteland, the man-made levees failed. When they did, the culture of the lower ninth ward went under.

While much is made about how governmental systems failed in the emergency, the failure of technology is hardly a surprise. Louisiana is, too, hardly Holland, where an efficient system sticks its technological thumb in the first trickle of a leak. Here there was a pumping station that, unmaintained, failed to start when remotely signaled. We admired the massive concrete construction of a watertight door made to swing shut over a railroad cut in case of flood. Also remotely activated, it was disabled by rusty chains and padlocks. It was like chaining shut an emergency exit. You would have to wade out there with a key to get the thing closed in a hurricane.

Cypress swamps need no activation. They just need to be there. To claim that global warming spawned a killer hurricane is just a fragment of the story. All aspects of nature manifest boundaries that define inside from outside. They may be a cell wall, or a saline differential or a cultural boundary of language, of art, of ways of living. They are all levees that hold the economy at bay, to use Illich’s terms. For it is the unlimited workings of a freemarket economy that is the sea that ultimately covers them all. It starts with the death of a wetlands, proceeds to the collapse of man-made levees, and ends with the death of a culture. Standing in the remains of the lower 9th ward, where concrete steps punctuating blank grassy fields are all that remain of a community, you can walk the lonely streets and strain to hear a single blues note.

When the levee broke in the lower 9th, the storm had passed. It was a bright, blue-skied day. Everyone but the meteorologists, whose accurate warnings were ignored by politicians and the news media, breathed a sign of relief. When the levee gave way, it was like the proverbial Flood.

The legendary urbanologist Jane Jacobs published a book describing how cities really worked at about the same time that the “Mr. Go” canal was dredged. Called The Death and Life of American Cities, its original title was this: Why the Planners Are Wrong. While planners like New York’s Robert Moses sat in high towers marking neighborhoods for demolition and replacement by public works, Jane Jacobs pushed her small children in a stroller through streets and parks, noticing the cultural ecology of people as carefully as Richard observes the ecology of botanical nature. In New Orleans, you can see in dramatic form why human planning always fails to equal the intelligence of the natural world, a world that encompasses cells and people alike.

When Ivan Illich first encountered the word “planning,” which emerged in the language for the first time as the canal’s dredging operations, he was puzzled at his meaning. He went to visit his old friend theologian Jacques Maritan. Did he have any idea what that word meant? As Illich told the story, Maritan sat back in his study and reflected a bit. Then he responded. “I believe,” he replied carefully, “that it is a new word for the sin of presumption.” A more common word for presumption is hubris; the sin that is inexorably followed by nemesis. It is believing, as Illich used to observe, that man can do what God cannot.

Pulling out of Common Ground’s makeshift nursery with a load of idealistic college students and sprigs of seagrass, Richard heads out for a day of wading in the mud planting single stalks of grass against an ocean. He is cheered by these students, who are flocking to New Orleans to help. He’s one of the few “greybeards” among them. He’s been through this kind of thing before. He believes that it is particularly good that they are here, because New Orleans shows them first-hand what the world that they are going to be living in will increasingly look like. New Orleans, he speculates, is merely the first American city to fall to global warming. They can get a good look at what they are going to have to deal with as adults.

Pushing a CD into the dashboard player, he punches up his favorite current song, Bob Dylan’s 1983“Blind Willie McTell.” Dylan looks out the window of his New Orleans hotel and sings homage to the man he considers the finest blues singer of them all, a man who drew upon the traditions of the Delta. Dylan’s song comes out of the pickup’s tinny speakers:

Well, God is in heaven
And we all want what's his
But power and greed and corruptible seed
Seem to be all that there is
I'm gazing out the window
Of the St. James Hotel
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell

There’s no money in singing the blues. And there is no money in restoring wetlands. But that doesn’t stop these people. Cautioning his volunteers against alligators, snakebite, and sunburn, Richard wades out with his crew to plant the grass he has grown from seed divisions.




* Mead, Margaret, Foreword, in Zborowski and Herzog, Life is With People: The Culture of the Shtetl, New York, Schocken, 1973, p. 11.


Common Ground is a nonprofit community organization founded by Malik Rahim. It welcomes volunteers and contributions http://www.commongroundrelief.org/