There’s Too Many Of You Dying
Castalia
Jan. 1971
Marvin Gaye's song, What's Going On was playing on the jukebox when
I went up to the counter and bought another cup of coffee. When I
got back, the painting on the wall next to where I was sitting
jumped out at me, the same way it had done many times before. On it
was written a diatribe on creativity. It was the quote at the
bottom, though, that brought me back to this seat time after time.
In fact, a couple weeks earlier, the quote propelled me to the
bookstore where I bought Hesse's last and most important novel,
Magister Ludi. The quote had to do with infinity; it went something
like this: Think of yourself as being in that place where infinity
comes together in a point; where the infinite past and the infinite
future meet, where you are at right now. The quote was attributed to
Hermann Hesse, but I didn't remember reading it in any of the books
that I had read, so I went out and bought his most famous book
hoping to find it there. I haven't found it yet, but it didn't
matter because the book was excellent. It was the novel that won
Hesse the Nobel Prize for Literature.
In the book a place was described—Castalia—that was devoted entirely
to the pursuits of the mind. The possibility of creating a Castalia
out of CMU energized me. As I sat drinking coffee, I knew that the
first step toward creating my own Castalia was to get hired as a CMU
custodian. The more I thought about the plan, the more I felt I was
onto something big. Written in 1943, Magister Ludi was set in an
unspecified future, after the chaos and horror of the 20th -century
wars. In the book, Castalia was a place devoted to the more
spiritual dimensions of life. Castalia remained separate from
society except when both Castalia and outside world came together to
celebrate the skills of the game players, the champions of the Glass
Bead Game. Hesse gave no instruction on how to play the Game, but
the goal was to bring together the spiritual values of all ages in
an act of mental synthesis. All Castalians, on some level,
participated in the Glass Bead Game, but only a few became Masters.
The thought of creating Castalia out of CMU excited me. The reality
of getting paid to enjoy music, theater, literature, lectures, and
participate in academic discussions excited me even more. Actually,
university culture and the Castalian lifestyle had a lot in common.
Maybe the game aspect of both cultures was what they had most in
common? After all, a large part of what we called "education,"
the "life of the mind," the "pursuit of the truth," was only the
machine tooling of the young to meet the needs of various
bureaucracies, bureaucracies whose purpose was to insure that wealth
was concentrated at the top of society, with vanishingly small
shares at the bottom. In Hesse's Castalia, even if it was only a
game, at least the goals of the game were a bit more humanizing. I
guess you can't get away from hierarchy thing though. Even in
Hesse's mythical society, the good game players got rewarded, while
the losers dropped out.
As I was thinking about what to do next, I remembered
reading a book back in New Orleans that I wanted to reread now.
Roszak's book, The Making Of The Counter Culture, was about thinking
differently and acting differently. I needed to get back to my
philosophy paper, but I told myself, "This is Friday. If I pull this
off I will have many more Fridays to work on any number of papers,
for the rest of my life." Comforted by that thought, I left my
coffee on the table, and went over to CMU's library where I checked
out Roszak's book. I needed to know if he, Roszak, held out hope for
a better future, one not compromised by material values and greed. I
needed to know whether Roszak thought that a "Castalia" represented
hope or desperation. In a slightly different context, this is what
he said:
"But you are twenty-five…and there are forty or fifty years ahead
(if the bomb doesn't fall) and they must be shared with home and
family, and be buoyed up by dependable subsistence, or that future
will be a gray waste and the consciousness of life you want to
expand will shrink and become bleak. So how do you grow up? Where is
the life-sustaining receptacle that can nourish and protect good
citizenship?
The answer is: you make up a community of those you love and
respect, where there can be enduring friendships, children, and by
mutual aid, three meals a day scraped together by honorable and
enjoyable labor. Nobody knows quite how it is to be done. There are
not many reliable models. The old radicals are no help: they talked
about socializing whole economies, or launching third parties, or
strengthening the unions, but not about building communities.
It will take a deal of improvisation, using whatever examples one
can find at hand…Maybe none of them will work. But where else is
there to turn? And where else can one any longer look for the
beginnings of an honest revolution except in such "pre-revolutionary
structure-making."
Among all the urgent tasks that need to be done in the next month
and the one after that, this especially needs doing for the next
decade and the one after that: that the young who have greater
expectations of life than their elders and who are more intolerably
sensitive to corruptions should find an enduring mode of life that
will safeguard those expectations and sensitivities…And who besides
Goodman is offering much help in that direction?
From Making Do, the man considering the unhappy boy he loves: "…for
him—and not only for him—there was in our society No Exit. When he
had asked his germane question, and fifteen experts on the dais did
not know an answer for him. But with ingenuity he had hit on a
painfully American answer, Do It Yourself. If there is no community
for you, young man, young man, make it yourself." (p. 204)
It appears to me at least that Roszak and I agree that Castalia
affords hope, not desperation. It will take more than hope, however,
to make Castalia real.
No comments:
Post a Comment