1968: Hazy Fate of Winter

“The real job of the computer is not retrieval but discovery. Like the human memory, the process of recall is an act of discovery.”
Marshall McLuhan

Knox College winter 1968.  Photo by Kowinski

Before the spring of 1968 there was winter—a fateful winter for me as it happened.

A stranger from northern California who called himself Reverend Jim showed up on campus with a small retinue and a quantity of weed the likes of which nobody there had experienced before. (He probably came from the fertile fields of Humboldt County, just south of where I live now, although ironically enough, in the twenty plus years I’ve been here I have yet to sample the world famous and now-legal local product.)

Tokes and brownies led to long conversations about (among many others) forgotten childhood TV shows and heroes, and contemplation of multiple meanings in the latest LPs. There were those hilarious philosophical conversations when somebody said "presents" and half the group thought the word was "presence," and two parallel and finally intermixing streams of heady talk ensued. A conversation with four or five participants broke down when none of us could remember what we were talking about, but as an experiment in alleged memory-destroying effects, we collectively rewound the conversation we’d just had, backwards and perfectly.

We heard new sounds, saw new sights and seemed to see the old ones more clearly...and saw what we’d blinded ourselves to, for survival’s sake. Perspectives shifted suddenly, as when I was walking to campus on a frigid day and saw the grass below me as if from an airplane over a forest...It could have been a forest in Vietnam, where a B-52 could destroy 50 square miles on a single run.  Recall the chant at protests that year:  Work. Study.  Get Ahead. Kill.

For all the altered consciousness and raw emotions, some of us had been studying Vietnam, the war and the various political and historical contexts, sometimes with more rigor than devoted to course work, for several years. Our texts were the New York Review of Books, Ramparts magazine, the I.F. Stone Weekly and other periodicals, as well as books like Frank Harvey’s Air War: Vietnam and Raskin and Fall's The Viet-Nam Reader. So when the Pentagon Papers were finally made public in 1971, we pretty much already knew much of what was in them.

The war was heavy upon us, although heavier on some more than others. With recent changes in the Selective Service laws, I faced the imminent prospect of being drafted immediately after my senior year concluded. This was before the lottery, and when draft calls were high. There were many reasons for my resistance, but the possibility and prospect of being forced to kill others for no compelling reason was my paramount concern. I wasn’t going to participate, but what the hell was I going to do?

At the same time, I was supposed to be planning my immediate future, which given the lack of other alternatives, meant continuing my education for an at least temporary academic life.  So I was supposed to be applying to graduate schools, knowing that it was unlikely I’d even get to begin.

One of Reverend Jim's acolytes was discussing the wisdom he learned from the heaviest West Coast philosopher he knew, which was: "Life is a shit sandwich, at best."  Given all this, I might have agreed.  But I stubbornly rejected this conclusion as well.

I went to draft counselors in Chicago that year, including one who reacted joyfully when he saw the results of my hearing tests. Being deaf in one ear should disqualify me, he said. But given the high draft calls and the brutalities of the system, it wasn’t a sure thing. Another counselor told me to prepare for the worst.

There’s more to be said about my hearing impairment, which I’ve thought more about in subsequent years. It was not something that I (nor most anyone else) noticed much, but I've realized that it had its effects on daily life. It meant I had to expend more energy in listening, in sorting out sounds, and filling in imaginatively for what I didn’t hear distinctly. I got no rest from this attentiveness except in the assurance of silence, or complete control over my auditory environment. It’s part of what made having roommates so difficult without a solitary retreat, though I had that this year.  It also increased my fatigue, for which substance indulgence also likely played a role.

But day after day, confronting an array of uncertain choices and awful alternatives was forcing itself into my unwilling life. I was just beginning to learn that, even though I had various degrees of support amidst incomprehension and hostility, when it came down to it, absolutely no one around me not faced with this imminent prospect could fully understand it. In this I would be completely alone.

But I did know that my nagging, dragging-down sense of futility was shared by others. Wasn’t this show of dutifully taking courses just a useless farce, given what was to come? I remember the student who said—or howled—what difference does it make if I die with a good head?  (Ironically it was Peter Overton, who later became a pillar of Bay Area Buddhism.)

At times, the only shelter, the only safe harbor, was in the music.  From a Simon & Garfunkel single, "Hazy Shade of Winter":

Hang on to your hopes, my friend
That's an easy thing to say
But if your hopes should pass away
Simply pretend/ that you can build them again...

There was also everything going on around campus. Glancing at what I wrote and said at the time (much of it now looking less than cogent), it’s apparent that I was increasingly sensitive to the pain and confusion of other students, and anguished when nothing effective was being done to alleviate it. Over the years perhaps we’ve forgotten just how hard it all was, as apparently pampered and privileged as we were.  (A situation that is recurring apparently.)

In January I resigned my appointed position as a student representative on the faculty’s student affairs committee. I ended my frustration with those meetings—a kind of frustration that would recur over the years in similar settings—with a flourish, by giving a long interview to the Knox Student. I did so partly because Jeremy Gladstone and Peter Stetson were becoming the co-editors and this provided a “big story” for their first issue.

The interview ran off the bottom of the front page.  Towards the top of the page there is a hazy photo of a small group of us, silently protesting the Vietnam War (says the caption.)  It's very fuzzy but I'm there, wearing a borrowed hat, in my much maligned corduroy coat with dodgy fur collar, cord jacket underneath, shirt and flowered tie.  I was still getting my style points from the Beatles, though my look was more of a melange of Beatles and Young Professor.  I can't make out all the other figures, but I see Bill Thompson peeking out from behind me, Jack Herbig in the background, and Mike Shain standing to the right--I recognize him only by his scarf.  It appears to be snowing.

Leaving aside the question of how much of a jerk I was being in this interview, a key question was revealed. Reading this interview recently, especially between the lines, I notice that my complaints got more focused and emotional concerning Honor Board cheating cases. However I never got around to talking about the case that really distressed me. It would take me probably another decade before it became clearer to me what that was all about.

For sometime shortly after I’d joined the committee in my second or third year, we were called upon to decide whether a couple of students should be expelled (or perhaps suspended for a semester) for cheating on an exam. Cheating seemed to me a pretty clear-cut offense, although even the few details I remember about this case suggests it wasn’t so simple. I eventually joined in the unanimous guilty verdict.

Shortly afterward, a letter appeared in the Knox Student taking the committee to task for expelling a male student and exposing him to the military draft. (Even a suspension exposed him.) As a student representative I was singled out for my vote.

My first reaction to this letter by a student senior I knew by sight was anger that he hadn’t made this case to me before the vote. It would have made a difference.

Memory is a tricky thing. For years I was sure that this draft jeopardy wasn’t mentioned or discussed in the committee, but I’m no longer sure about that. I do know that the idea of making a moral choice based on the draft exposure jeopardy simply hadn’t occurred to me. I frankly had not conceptualized that I could (let alone should) make a decision based on this fact.  But once I heard it, I was immediately convinced.  If I had been presented with this argument, I would have argued for it in the committee, and would not have voted as I did.

It’s unlikely that argument would have prevailed in the committee, and my one vote wouldn’t have made a difference. But the consequences of that committee decision turned out to be very serious. One student expelled or suspended was drafted, he was sent to Vietnam, and he returned without one of his limbs.

 I don’t think I consciously faced this as my war crime until years later. But even that winter it’s clear I felt I didn’t want to be even ignorantly implicated in such consequence again. It added to my distrust of institutions: the military-industrial-academic complex.

Meanwhile I was also supposed to be concentrating on my studies of the moment. In particular that winter, I was scrambling to complete my “distribution requirements” in order to graduate.

Knox had extensive requirements in my years, more than it did in later years, or perhaps now. For some reason, requirements for foreign language, science and math requirements were lumped together.

I’d managed a year of Spanish and a year of math. I’d taken two years of Latin and two of French in high school, but I don’t think Latin was offered and I knew my French was inadequate for higher-level courses. So I took beginning Spanish my first year.

Our instructor—a native Spanish speaker from South America who I don’t recall seeing after that year—began the first class by saying that if we came to class and did the work, we would get no less than a C. And any girls in the class who wore short skirts and sat in the front row would get As. Was he kidding? We didn’t think so, but who knows. Anyway there were always girls in the front row.

language lab 1960

I still shudder when I think of that class. It was held in the language lab, and we spent all of our time at partitioned desks with earphone on, either listening to tapes or engaging in “conversation” with the instructor. By second semester I was losing it.  I could feel my sanity under attack.

I’m not qualified to say this system is bad for learning a language, but it was bad for me. The language lab was sterile, without human context. The language was disconnected from any human reason to learn it. I felt I was being indoctrinated, in some ostensibly friendly Nineteen Eighty-Four.

It was made worse because I wasn’t predisposed to learn a new language—as far as I was concerned, I was still learning English. That was enough for me.

Even so, I wasn’t incapable. After all, I learned enough Italian as a child to entertain my grandparents’ friends. My mother thought that I was essentially bilingual at age 4. (And of course, Italian wasn't offered.)  But I hadn’t learned to speak French in the classroom, and this was worse. There was no cultural or human context or motivation in that dark room.

I managed a C+ both semesters, but when I went to my first class in the next level of Spanish my second year—in a real classroom, with students really speaking the language-- it was apparent that I’d learned very little, and I was too far behind the level of other students to survive there. So I dropped that course.

My high school math had been spotty. I did well in geometry, mathematical logic and set theory, but poorly in algebra, and missed trig altogether due to an administrative botched experiment. But I managed to pass two semesters of math my first year at Knox, though barely. I have no idea how. I don’t remember anything about it, other than the mannerisms of the instructor, who I liked.

The only science I had in high school was biology. I wasn’t at all interested in the basic technicalities. I had been deeply interested in astronomy in grade school, and largely taught myself. So in quest of the remaining requirements in the fall of my senior year of college, I took the course known by generations of students as “Stars.”

Largely due to my early fascination with science fiction, astronomy was the one science I liked in grade school.  I kept a brown notebook in the fourth or fifth grade with all the known information about each planet in the solar system.

The Knox course was formally called “The Universe,” taught by the magisterial and well-named Dr. Priestley. I’d been tipped off that the key concept he hoped non-majors would get was that there is order in the Universe. (This was a simpler universe that science now sees.) So I made sure to get the phrase into all my papers and tests.

 And even though I sometimes showed up for class wearing a sign on my Lennon cap that said Captain Space, Dr. Priestley tolerated me, and I knew enough stuff to pass. (It was the first course I took on the new pass/fail system.)

After that, pass/fail couldn't be used for distribution requirements anymore.  However, when I took "Science and Society" in third term, which I believe was also Dr. Priestley. I got an A.

But I needed just one more course to complete my requirements. Unfortunately, several other sciences for non-major courses in the catalog weren’t actually offered. So in between these two, in the winter term, I took the only available course, Evolution.

To be continued...