Kenneth Rexroth
Three More Columns from the San Francisco Examiner of 1964
Riotous Despair
The City of Brotherly Love spends a week under control that differs little from martial law, after days of rioting. Vietnam breaks down once again. The Congo stays broken down. Riots come and go in a half dozen American cities. Mods and Rockers enjoy a riotous summer in Great Britain. They even have riots in Moscow and Stockholm. India, the creation of Gandhi, seems to manage some kind of riot somewhere in its vast expanse every 24 hours. Disorder spreads over the world like an illimitable corrosive stain.
It is not due to race. Blond Nordics riot with each other in Sweden. Mods and Rockers are both lily white. It is not due to poverty. The drive-ins in Marin County, the beaches in the southwest corner of San Francisco are in a chronic state of mild riot, night after night. The rioters drive sports cars and hot rods. They are the ultimate achievement of the Affluent Society.
Very few people are willing to face what is happening all over the world, in Russia, in Rumania, in Rochester, New York. It’s like death. The fool in his heart has said, “It can’t happen to me. I’ll beat the rap, somehow.” Yet all the time in every living being death moves nearer, second by second.
The very people who dispose of the dead, who were once called grave diggers, now call themselves a variety of foolish ambiguous names and thrive on providing the survivors with a highly specialized service. What service, really? A carefully processed illusion that nothing has happened. Nothing to worry about, anyway. Even the people who exterminate your aged pet dog talk an obscenely evasive gobbledygook.
So it is with what is happening to modern civilization. We are just at the point of breakthrough into a Utopia more noble than Plato’s Republic or Bellamy’s Looking Backward. But we are also, perhaps for that very reason, at the point of breakdown. Perhaps we are past it. Perhaps we are sliding irreversibly into incurable chaos and the time has gone when we could salvage ourselves and our civilization.
It is certainly not the profit system or socialism, democracy or dictatorship, that is to blame. We are all in the same Niagara-bound boat together.
I think I know what it is. All over the modern world people have lost any sense of personal identity. They look inside themselves and they don’t find any self there at all. For the person who doesn’t suffer from this anomie, this depersonalization, the tragedy can never be completely real. Dozens of people have come to me in recent years and said, “I’m breaking down. I don’t know who I am. I can’t find any center from which I operate. I can’t find any me. Am I going insane?”
Gabriel Marcel, the Roman Catholic “Personalist” philosopher and playwright, calls it “enucleation.” The lens is gone from the eye and the eye is no longer an eye. The hidden vital center of the cell, with its chromosomes that ensure its perpetuation and its mysteriously arranged molecules that preserve its integrity — the nucleus is lost, it has drained away somewhere when no one was looking. Nothing is left but some shapeless, irritable jelly that twitches under the blows of its environment.
More and more people, in a world of two billion souls, are becoming simply vehicles of despair. It is despair that loots liquor stores in Harlem or murders Hindu or Muslim in India. As long as he is alive, man has a driving force, a demand for life, that persists even after belief in life is gone. The fuel still drives the car after the ego at the wheel has died. Empty vehicles of catastrophe, vessels of wrath, they sweep down the streets of all the Baghdads, dragging by the heels the dismembered criminals who have defrauded them.
Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP, has a career, a life of influence and dignity. He can’t understand rioters. The point is not that they may have been instigated, whether by provocateurs paid by Southern bigots or Red Chinese. The point is that they were instigatable. They were empty, and hate and despair poured into them like gasoline into a Molotov cocktail.
Mr. Wilkins is somebody, and I don’t mean that ironically. He is a valuable and dedicated member of the community. Have you ever seen a riot? A lynch mob? I have. Rioters are nobody. There is nothing there to dedicate. There is no more community than there is in the atoms being battered around in a cyclotron.
It’s not just rioters, illiterate adolescents in America’s worst slums. There are computers and cyclotron operators who feel that way, stenographers and maybe generals, Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Parker, Dylan Thomas, the four-time loser in the gas chamber and the most photographed belle on the society page. Most of the people in the world still probably don’t, but the percentage who do grows daily.
They too are creeping towards some sort of breakthrough point. Into what?
The Depersonalized Campus in Berkeley
If it had no other virtues, the campus of the University of California used to be, 50 years ago, spacious and gracious. Back then, the poet Witter Bynner was invited to give a series of talks. His classes were small. It was beautiful weather. He took them out on the lawn.
The faculty never forgot. To this very day you can find snowy-haired emerituses toddling about in homespun tweeds who will tell you, “Had a poet here once. Name of Winter, think it was. Took the students out on the lawn.”
About 30 years ago, a friend of mine came to teach. He was from Harvard and was by no means hired as a member of the junior faculty. A great pedagogue, inspired by the examples of Copey at Harvard, Gauss at Princeton, Merklejohn at Wisconsin and Wittgenstein in Britain.
At the end of the semester the head of his department told him, “Hear you’ve been fraternizing with the students. We don’t do that at Berkeley. If you want to stay here, you’d better stop it.” He didn’t want to stay.
Things have improved little over the years. Berkeley is still the most impersonal and depersonalizing of all America’s fog factories. The issues for which both sides are deadlocked are not worthy of so violent a conflict. What has broken down, however, is the essential educational relationship, a great educator sitting on one end of a log and an inquisitive student sitting on the other end.
Broken down? Except for a few rare souls, it has never existed. I know several members of the faculty committee that have spoken in defense of the students and against the chancellor. They are of all faiths and political opinions, but they function as “faculty liberals” for one very simple reason. They are each one distinguished by a talent for genuine rapport with their students. As teachers, they can reach their students with learning, and the students can reach them with all the troubles of youth.
It is most unwise to put all this rumpus down to childish truculence urged on by Reds. Every student organization concerned with ideas and principles is in revolt. This includes the Catholic, Jewish and Protestant organizations, and for all I know, the young Buddhists. But as Cardinal Newman said long ago, a university is concerned with ideas and principles, but it is also concerned with persons and is essentially a complex of personal relationships.
On the weekend the papers said, “Student leader says Clark Kerr has never met with students.” I have been entertained hundreds of times at the homes of Berkeley faculty. Never once has there been an undergraduate student present, except as “girl help.”
What our state educational system needs is something far more fundamental than what the students are rioting about. It needs a totally different philosophy of education. Intellectual gum machines are not enough and they are bound to break down.
Intelligent Life on Mars?
As two balls of competing ideology race towards Mars, Free Enterprise off to an early start, but People’s Democracy hustling right along behind, what do you suppose is going on on Mars?
Swift, in Gulliver’s Travels, described the two moons of Mars, both close to the planet and very small, one circling the planet backwards, so to speak. One hundred and fifty years later, this fantasy was discovered to be true in fact. However, Asaph Hall, who discovered the two moons in 1877, had scrutinized the planet carefully at its last opposition, in 1862, through the same 48-inch telescope, and had seen no moons.
Josef Shklovsky, the Russian astronomer, believes Hall didn’t see them because they weren’t there. He thinks they are artificial satellites which were shot up into orbit in the intervening years. He points out that the inner moon, Phobos, is spinning in a rapidly decaying orbit and will descend in a comparatively short time. It follows that it cannot have been in its present orbit for a very long time, either. In addition, its behavior is most easily explained on the assumption that it is hollow.
In 1955 the Japanese astronomer Tsuneo Saheki reported four occasions subsequent to 1937 when the Osaka observatory saw a pinpoint of light flash out from one of the dark areas on Mars and linger from eight seconds to five minutes, leaving behind a peculiar cloud. Neither any volcanic action nor nuclear explosion with which we are familiar would be on such a scale as to be visible at so great a distance. However, some device similar to our Lasers and Masers, yet very different, might have produced such an effect.
As everybody knows, astronomers have been arguing about whether there are canals on Mars ever since Schiaparelli saw them almost a hundred years ago, and, of course, if there are, whether they are natural phenomena or the work of intelligent beings. If the canals (actually the vegetation lining canals) do exist in anything like the profusion and mathematical elegance with which they were mapped by Percival Lowell, the inhabitants of Mars are far more intelligent and cooperative than we.
If the Martians have saved the living creatures on their desert planet with its sparse atmosphere, at the best an environment as inhospitable as the top of Everest, by constructing and operating such tremendous engineering works — why haven’t they come to us, rather than waiting for us to come to them?
Maybe they have. Maybe they know exactly what goes on on the earth and have for thousands of years. It is easy to see why they would want no part of it.
We may discover, as we probe deeper and deeper into the universe, that our probes fail, blow up, send us back obviously false information. We may discover that we have been quarantined by the actually intelligent beings all around us.
After all, speeding towards Mars are two satellites, representing the two most powerful groups on earth, whose very satellite programs are part of a preparation to exterminate each other and everybody else, simply because they can’t agree on how to distribute the riches of this overabundant planet.
A comprehensive biography of Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982) can be found at The Poetry Foundation.
(Editor's Note: The complete columns — more than 760 of them — that Kenneth Rexroth wrote for the San Francisco Examiner can be found as a separate section on Ken Knabb's great website, The Bureau of Public Secrets. My thanks to Ken for permission to reprint this selection.)
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Three More Columns from the San Francisco Examiner of 1964
Riotous Despair
The City of Brotherly Love spends a week under control that differs little from martial law, after days of rioting. Vietnam breaks down once again. The Congo stays broken down. Riots come and go in a half dozen American cities. Mods and Rockers enjoy a riotous summer in Great Britain. They even have riots in Moscow and Stockholm. India, the creation of Gandhi, seems to manage some kind of riot somewhere in its vast expanse every 24 hours. Disorder spreads over the world like an illimitable corrosive stain.
It is not due to race. Blond Nordics riot with each other in Sweden. Mods and Rockers are both lily white. It is not due to poverty. The drive-ins in Marin County, the beaches in the southwest corner of San Francisco are in a chronic state of mild riot, night after night. The rioters drive sports cars and hot rods. They are the ultimate achievement of the Affluent Society.
Very few people are willing to face what is happening all over the world, in Russia, in Rumania, in Rochester, New York. It’s like death. The fool in his heart has said, “It can’t happen to me. I’ll beat the rap, somehow.” Yet all the time in every living being death moves nearer, second by second.
The very people who dispose of the dead, who were once called grave diggers, now call themselves a variety of foolish ambiguous names and thrive on providing the survivors with a highly specialized service. What service, really? A carefully processed illusion that nothing has happened. Nothing to worry about, anyway. Even the people who exterminate your aged pet dog talk an obscenely evasive gobbledygook.
So it is with what is happening to modern civilization. We are just at the point of breakthrough into a Utopia more noble than Plato’s Republic or Bellamy’s Looking Backward. But we are also, perhaps for that very reason, at the point of breakdown. Perhaps we are past it. Perhaps we are sliding irreversibly into incurable chaos and the time has gone when we could salvage ourselves and our civilization.
It is certainly not the profit system or socialism, democracy or dictatorship, that is to blame. We are all in the same Niagara-bound boat together.
I think I know what it is. All over the modern world people have lost any sense of personal identity. They look inside themselves and they don’t find any self there at all. For the person who doesn’t suffer from this anomie, this depersonalization, the tragedy can never be completely real. Dozens of people have come to me in recent years and said, “I’m breaking down. I don’t know who I am. I can’t find any center from which I operate. I can’t find any me. Am I going insane?”
Gabriel Marcel, the Roman Catholic “Personalist” philosopher and playwright, calls it “enucleation.” The lens is gone from the eye and the eye is no longer an eye. The hidden vital center of the cell, with its chromosomes that ensure its perpetuation and its mysteriously arranged molecules that preserve its integrity — the nucleus is lost, it has drained away somewhere when no one was looking. Nothing is left but some shapeless, irritable jelly that twitches under the blows of its environment.
More and more people, in a world of two billion souls, are becoming simply vehicles of despair. It is despair that loots liquor stores in Harlem or murders Hindu or Muslim in India. As long as he is alive, man has a driving force, a demand for life, that persists even after belief in life is gone. The fuel still drives the car after the ego at the wheel has died. Empty vehicles of catastrophe, vessels of wrath, they sweep down the streets of all the Baghdads, dragging by the heels the dismembered criminals who have defrauded them.
Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP, has a career, a life of influence and dignity. He can’t understand rioters. The point is not that they may have been instigated, whether by provocateurs paid by Southern bigots or Red Chinese. The point is that they were instigatable. They were empty, and hate and despair poured into them like gasoline into a Molotov cocktail.
Mr. Wilkins is somebody, and I don’t mean that ironically. He is a valuable and dedicated member of the community. Have you ever seen a riot? A lynch mob? I have. Rioters are nobody. There is nothing there to dedicate. There is no more community than there is in the atoms being battered around in a cyclotron.
It’s not just rioters, illiterate adolescents in America’s worst slums. There are computers and cyclotron operators who feel that way, stenographers and maybe generals, Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Parker, Dylan Thomas, the four-time loser in the gas chamber and the most photographed belle on the society page. Most of the people in the world still probably don’t, but the percentage who do grows daily.
They too are creeping towards some sort of breakthrough point. Into what?
[September 6, 1964]
The Depersonalized Campus in Berkeley
If it had no other virtues, the campus of the University of California used to be, 50 years ago, spacious and gracious. Back then, the poet Witter Bynner was invited to give a series of talks. His classes were small. It was beautiful weather. He took them out on the lawn.
The faculty never forgot. To this very day you can find snowy-haired emerituses toddling about in homespun tweeds who will tell you, “Had a poet here once. Name of Winter, think it was. Took the students out on the lawn.”
About 30 years ago, a friend of mine came to teach. He was from Harvard and was by no means hired as a member of the junior faculty. A great pedagogue, inspired by the examples of Copey at Harvard, Gauss at Princeton, Merklejohn at Wisconsin and Wittgenstein in Britain.
At the end of the semester the head of his department told him, “Hear you’ve been fraternizing with the students. We don’t do that at Berkeley. If you want to stay here, you’d better stop it.” He didn’t want to stay.
Things have improved little over the years. Berkeley is still the most impersonal and depersonalizing of all America’s fog factories. The issues for which both sides are deadlocked are not worthy of so violent a conflict. What has broken down, however, is the essential educational relationship, a great educator sitting on one end of a log and an inquisitive student sitting on the other end.
Broken down? Except for a few rare souls, it has never existed. I know several members of the faculty committee that have spoken in defense of the students and against the chancellor. They are of all faiths and political opinions, but they function as “faculty liberals” for one very simple reason. They are each one distinguished by a talent for genuine rapport with their students. As teachers, they can reach their students with learning, and the students can reach them with all the troubles of youth.
It is most unwise to put all this rumpus down to childish truculence urged on by Reds. Every student organization concerned with ideas and principles is in revolt. This includes the Catholic, Jewish and Protestant organizations, and for all I know, the young Buddhists. But as Cardinal Newman said long ago, a university is concerned with ideas and principles, but it is also concerned with persons and is essentially a complex of personal relationships.
On the weekend the papers said, “Student leader says Clark Kerr has never met with students.” I have been entertained hundreds of times at the homes of Berkeley faculty. Never once has there been an undergraduate student present, except as “girl help.”
What our state educational system needs is something far more fundamental than what the students are rioting about. It needs a totally different philosophy of education. Intellectual gum machines are not enough and they are bound to break down.
[December 9, 1964]
Intelligent Life on Mars?
As two balls of competing ideology race towards Mars, Free Enterprise off to an early start, but People’s Democracy hustling right along behind, what do you suppose is going on on Mars?
Swift, in Gulliver’s Travels, described the two moons of Mars, both close to the planet and very small, one circling the planet backwards, so to speak. One hundred and fifty years later, this fantasy was discovered to be true in fact. However, Asaph Hall, who discovered the two moons in 1877, had scrutinized the planet carefully at its last opposition, in 1862, through the same 48-inch telescope, and had seen no moons.
Josef Shklovsky, the Russian astronomer, believes Hall didn’t see them because they weren’t there. He thinks they are artificial satellites which were shot up into orbit in the intervening years. He points out that the inner moon, Phobos, is spinning in a rapidly decaying orbit and will descend in a comparatively short time. It follows that it cannot have been in its present orbit for a very long time, either. In addition, its behavior is most easily explained on the assumption that it is hollow.
In 1955 the Japanese astronomer Tsuneo Saheki reported four occasions subsequent to 1937 when the Osaka observatory saw a pinpoint of light flash out from one of the dark areas on Mars and linger from eight seconds to five minutes, leaving behind a peculiar cloud. Neither any volcanic action nor nuclear explosion with which we are familiar would be on such a scale as to be visible at so great a distance. However, some device similar to our Lasers and Masers, yet very different, might have produced such an effect.
As everybody knows, astronomers have been arguing about whether there are canals on Mars ever since Schiaparelli saw them almost a hundred years ago, and, of course, if there are, whether they are natural phenomena or the work of intelligent beings. If the canals (actually the vegetation lining canals) do exist in anything like the profusion and mathematical elegance with which they were mapped by Percival Lowell, the inhabitants of Mars are far more intelligent and cooperative than we.
If the Martians have saved the living creatures on their desert planet with its sparse atmosphere, at the best an environment as inhospitable as the top of Everest, by constructing and operating such tremendous engineering works — why haven’t they come to us, rather than waiting for us to come to them?
Maybe they have. Maybe they know exactly what goes on on the earth and have for thousands of years. It is easy to see why they would want no part of it.
We may discover, as we probe deeper and deeper into the universe, that our probes fail, blow up, send us back obviously false information. We may discover that we have been quarantined by the actually intelligent beings all around us.
After all, speeding towards Mars are two satellites, representing the two most powerful groups on earth, whose very satellite programs are part of a preparation to exterminate each other and everybody else, simply because they can’t agree on how to distribute the riches of this overabundant planet.
[December 16, 1964]
A comprehensive biography of Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982) can be found at The Poetry Foundation.
(Editor's Note: The complete columns — more than 760 of them — that Kenneth Rexroth wrote for the San Francisco Examiner can be found as a separate section on Ken Knabb's great website, The Bureau of Public Secrets. My thanks to Ken for permission to reprint this selection.)
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