St. Joseph's Day at the Laguna Pueblo

     The Laguna Pueblo, located in New Mexico’s high desert, is a poor town. For every intact adobe home one or two are half collapsed. Stiff winds blow clouds of sandy dust. The mission church of St. Joseph built in 1699 (just after the Spaniards’ reconquest) is the most prominent building. When we arrived on the saint’s feast day mass had just begun. The floor of the long narrow church is pounded earth and straw. The side walls are decorated with geometric motifs signifying graves – here and there a small bird appears with a head of ripe grain. Supporting the roof are the massive vigas carried from a stand of ponderosa pine thirty-five miles away. We were told that if one were dropped on the way, it was abandoned and a new one cut. Between the beams branches of different colors are laid in a herringbone pattern. On the right wall a large and frightening painting represents purgatory. To the left of the altar hangs a representation of St. Joseph said to date from the church’s founding and behind the altar one could see the Trinity, St. Barbara, and others in Spanish/native style.
     The French missionary priest Father Hilaire served mass in vestments ornamented with an eagle dancer, speaking mostly Keresan to the accompaniment of tribal drums. At the conclusion of the service he distributed freshly blessed scepters of office to tribal leaders (including young men holding the position of war chiefs). One of the elder officials welcomed people to the feast, saying “if no one else offers you hospitality, you are welcome at my house. Everyone knows where it is, on the south side of the village.”
     The priest handed a statue of St. Joseph to these men who then led a procession by a circuitous route to the dancing ground where it was installed in a pavilion ornamented with deer (or elk?) heads and bedecked with evergreen boughs. A few minutes later the dancers and musicians arrived. As a party of male drummers took up a position in the center, a long line of dancers circled the plaza led by two older men and followed by several hundred people, men and women, old and young. At the end came many children. Everyone participating in the ceremony had hands painted white, and all wore traditional clothing: the men and boys had fox (or coyote) skins hanging from their sashes behind, the females for the most part had their legs wrapped as we had seen in old photographs. Many dancers were shaking gourd rattles, and all carried sprigs of vegetation in each hand. They danced around the plaza again and again for perhaps forty-five minutes to drumbeats and song. Four or five senior men holding white painted branches kept everyone in the correct pace and place. At times the procession would pause and everyone would turn about where he or she stood.
     Patricia was sitting next to a local woman who said that this first dance was a reenactment of the Pueblo peoples’ first migration to their present home territory. As the day wore on, we saw an eagle dance (with men wearing bird masks and great broad wings), buffalo dance (two men with bodies blackened and dark bison headdresses with horns, one white buffalo as well), deer dance (men in antlers, women in elaborate feather arrangements over their heads), and others, but we lost our original informant and asked no questions. At the start there had been far more dancers than spectators and very few outsiders. As the day progressed, at intervals there were in fact very few people simply watching, but the dances continued, one following another, always with drumming and singing in Keresan, no master of ceremonies, never a word, no applause. It was truly a community event.
     Nearby vendors had set up booths selling crafts but also baseball caps and teeshirts (“Rez Hoops”) as well as food – tamales and burritos, fry bread and “Indian tacos” (fry bread with beans, onions, chiles, meat, etc.), lamb (“20,000 coyotes can’t be wrong”), the almost spherical loaves of the local bread cooked in the dome-like outdoor hornos we saw in some dusty yards. No alcohol anywhere, not even in the hands of those who stood at their doors watching; surely it was forbidden.
     Though the day had started fair and clear, storm clouds arrived with a terrific wind that blew sandy dust into our eyes and obliged the vendors to hold the aluminum poles supporting their booths to keep them from blowing down. Rain fell as did the temperature. Route 40, the big east-west interstate by which we had come, was closed for miles in the snowstorm that followed.
     Before we headed out, we took refuge from the rain (it had not yet cooled enough for snow) in the church where we came upon a nice fellow named Albert who played the flute, at the end pointing out where one might make donations to the church and adding, as he grinned and turned an embarrassed gaze toward the ground, in a barely discernable voice, “and I don’t mind taking a little tip myself.”



I can't seem to get this on in the comment section, so I am adding it to the end of the piece. I do want to respond to my critic below.  

Thank you for your comments. I don’t doubt that you are quite right. My sketch was the impression of a passerby who spent only a memorable few hours in St. Joseph.  I don’t regard “poor” as an insult, but the fact is that the official poverty rate on reservations in America is twice the national average.
Further, symbolic hints and mythic associations have informed the travel writing I like best and the relation of description to reality is always complex.  Still, I regret having offended. I received a pleasant and civil reception in Laguna and hope to visit there again.

Transformation of Convention in Early Minnesang

Convention has been often misunderstood as a static and reductive device; thus, highly conventional works are thought to lack originality or imagination. In fact, in my experience, convention simply increases the potential for semiotic density and precision. The aesthetic text is particularly useful for the articulation of oppositions, tensions, and problematic contradictions not unlike those Levi-Strauss found to underlie myth. Because it is more conflicted and ambiguous, this aesthetic exposition is more precise than other discourses, more true to lived experience.

The poetic convention always implies its opposite and a host of other variations. By creating expectations in the reader which then may be fulfilled or disappointed the author adds another level of significance and complexity. Convention can effectively summarize known meanings and then play with them, rendering art ever more efficient and exact, especially once a whole tradition has accumulated around a usage.

The debates over the status of what continue to be called by the useful name of courtly love have raged for decades. Why would such a privileging of the feminine have arisen in a patriarchal society? Do the texts reflect actual behavior at all? If not, what did it mean to voice sentiments at odds with accepted social practice?

“Aller wîbe wünne” by der von Kürenberc seems a wholly “courtly” lyric. The poet expresses extravagant praise for his beloved (as in the opening words “most beautiful of women”); he follows the codified behavior prescribed for genteel lovers (such as communicating through love notes); and he expresses a seemly doubt about his own worthiness.

In the same author’s “Ich stuont mir nehtint spâte” the first reversal of expectations one encounters is the feminine voice. Then the persona reflects back on the text itself as she hears the knight sing “in Kürenberges wise” [style]. What could he be singing but her praises? And her response is “er muoz mir diu land rumen,/ ald ich geniete mich sîn” ["He has to leave this land before I bring him to his knees"} He must depart, frustrating love, in order to achieve it. The knights’ reaction is instant compliance. He heads off to crusade or some other war, declaring that his leaving is due to the beloved. He understands that her demand arises from the fact that he is attractive to her (“hold”), though the consequence is that she must do without his love.

In other words, the poet’s adopting the woman’s perspective generates a flood of self-consciousness and the conclusion that the way to exalt their love is to prevent its being realized in the flesh, an idea similar to Jaufré’s amor de lonh. He provides a proof that his devotion is altogether free of self-interest and thus of the very highest quality, but at the sacrifice of the muddier business of actual physical love.

Kürenberc’s intentions seem even more complex when juxtaposed to another poem of his small surviving oeuvre. “Jô stuont ich nehtint spâte” provides an inversion of convention in numerous ways, thus balancing the picture of love. Even in summary resume these four lines have more twists than a Hollywood thriller. The contemplative, slightly melancholy mood set by the opening line is deflated by the woman's sexual aggression, the power of religion is invoked not to hallow an uplifting affection, but to condemn the man for frustrating the woman’s lust, and the conventional poetic image of the falcon is replaced by the unexpected comparison of the woman to a boar, a figure generally associated with martial ferocity! Each of these tropes on convention adds to, without replacing, the courtly picture of love.

It is in the light of such structural reversals as these that one must read the medieval attitude toward love (and toward poetry). Apparent self-contradictions or mélanges such as Andreas Capellanus’ book four, Chaucer’s retraction, or the highly complicated picture of love that emerges from narrative compilations such as Confessio Amantis or Romance of the Rose are in fact integrated, albeit complex, structures of meaning at once more “true” to the dizzying variety of human experience, more poetic and more entertaining than any straightforward and simple formulation could possibly be. The psychologist would consider such ambivalence to be, not inconsistent and thus unlikely, but definitively human.

The contrast need hardly be so dramatic. In the texts associated with the name of Dietmar von Aist, similar contradictions are implied rather than foregrounded.

For instance, in “Uf der linden obene” the nature introduction sketches a scene of generative joy. The poet’s heart responds in kind, in an almost mystic elevation, he is uplifted to a place he had earlier reached, a place presumably of favor with the beloved. This transport, though, can only be understood to suggest a current loss.

The delicately oblique ending, though too discreet to be an overt complaint, can only be construed as a confession of loss, all the more eloquent for its Germanic understatement: “die manent mich der gedanke vil die ich him zeiner frouwen hân." ["which brings much to mind the thoughts that I have of a woman"]. What, then, is the poet's relation with the natural scene? Clearly one of subdued envy, of opposition rather than delight in the “prettiness” which seems to govern the poem's opening.

The image of the falcon which in der von Kürenberc’s “Wîp unde vederspil” conveys semantic elements of training, obedience, and dominance, reappears in an altogether different light in Dietmar’s “Ez stuont ein frouwe alleine” where the falcon is an image of the uncontrollable, where choice belongs to the bird alone (the choice of a roost, “einen boum der ir gevalle,” corresponding to a lover), but the persona’s worry is explicitly directed not over the bird's unpredictable flight, but over other women's influence on him (“owê wan lânt si mir mîn lieb?”).
Thus the earlier associations for the falcon have not vanished, but have merely sunk into a significant background role. It is now others whom the poet fears are “training” the bird; its independence was illusory from the start.

In this way the poet’s vision accumulates, just as lived experiences does, by observing data, paying equal attention to repeated patterns (what in literature would be meters, tropes, conventions of all sorts) and to deviations from those patterns. Each conveys information, and the complex sum of countless observations generates the individual’s consciousness. Art alone can provide a record, and in this record, as in Indian mythology every deity is accompanied by its counterpart of the opposite gender, every convention brings its opposite.

If a woman is most beautiful, might she be also in certain moments a fearsome beast? Is not the power of her beauty what allows her to cause such torment? Perhaps the “wild boar” is itself erotic in a new way, but that reaction might itself be trivialized as male fantasy, which might then in turn be viewed as an elegant, affectionate satire of male-female relations . . . And thus the wheel of semiosis turns. The poet’s task is to note the relevant psychic pitches and tighten the string of contradiction tautly enough that his lyre might sing.

IWW

Growing up in a suburb, before involvement with civil rights, student movement, youth movement, SDS, labor union activism, and demonstrating a few weeks ago at a rally in solidarity with Wisconsin public workers, I used to seek out the funky low-rent offices of Old Left organizations in Chicago. At the height of the Cold War for me the pleasures of the urban environment included conversations with radical activists, perhaps more properly labeled radical thinkers, their movements were at the time so marginal.

People of my generation or a few years older were to define the New Left in distinction from these organizations, but anyone who knew American history realized that each of these groups had been influential at critical moments of America’s past. The Socialist Labor Party was the very first revolutionary labor organization; the Socialist Party built support for such proposals as Social Security and unemployment insurance when the Democrats wouldn’t touch them; Communists were instrumental in CIO organizing during the 30s; Socialist Workers led the Minneapolis general strike of 1934. And in the late 50s and early 60s, in spite of shaky finances were and tiny memberships, they all survived in Chicago including, in offices over the Assyrian-American restaurant at 2422 North Halstead, the international headquarters of the Industrial Workers of the World. While on the ground floor, old men with a language and culture unknown to most Midwesterners ate stewed lamb with rice and pickled cabbage or retired behind a curtain to gamble, in a suite of rooms above, among decades-old heaps of leaflets and stickers and books and pictures, were the remnants of the Wobblies, old men even then for the most part, who had fought the good fight for a truly just society.

I later knew people my own age who joined (as did some of our mentors such as David Dellinger and Noam Chomsky), but the hangers-on on Halstead Street were the original crew -- Carlos Cortez, the artist who had been born in 1923, stood out as the sole younger activist. Most of these guys had spent considerable time on the road, hopping boxcars and hitch-hiking in search of work. Most had spent time in jail as well, since the group was targeted by all levels of government from the day of its creation. Though they discussed their ailments and problems with social security (apart from being radicals, they tended to have irregular work histories), they also reminisced about the days when the workers’ commonwealth seemed on the horizon.

Most of the members of this revolutionary anarcho-syndicalist union, long featured on the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations, were advanced in age, as the group’s numbers (and the repression directed against them) had peaked around the time of WWI, but they retained the apocalyptic vision of a time when, in the words of “The Internationale” “le soleil brillera toujours, c'est la lutte finale . . .l'internationale sera le genre humain.” Seeking, in the words of the Wobbly preamble “to build the new society within the shell of the old,” they imagined a community of love while fighting in the streets for their rights.

They stood out not only from their class enemies, but also from other unions and socialists in the acceptance, from the very start, of women, foreigners, and blacks. Whereas the AFL had taken the route of organizing the elite workers, those whose highly developed skills, made them most difficult to replace with scabs, the IWW invited all, with a special warmth for those on the very bottom: itinerant workers, farm laborers, lumberjacks. Most had spent time on the road and in jail.

Even more than the utopian purity of their vision, the Wobblies had my affection and that of many of my generation because of their art. Apart from their posters and the music written by Joe Hill, T-Bone Slim, Ralph Chaplin and other contributors to the The Little Red Songbook, the group pioneered street art with their encounters with the Salvation Army and their distinctive adhesive mini-posters with slogans like “for more of the good things of life” and “slow down.”

Their actual membership never reached much past 100,000, oddly, not far from the membership of the Communist Party in the 40s or of SDS just before its collapse as a mass organization. They won some hard-fought strikes such as the Pressed Steel Car strike of 1909 and the Lawrence textile strike in 1912, but found it difficult to deal with negotiating contracts and building a bureaucratic union. After all, in the words of the preamble “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.”

May we remember the highest American traditions, those who worked for abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, labor unionism, and peace, and even earlier, the “levelers” who imagined equality and started the struggles that have allowed us to secure what comforts we have.

The Formation of a Christian Rhetoric

     Surely one of the strongest of the historical categories that are employed, often with apologies, to organize a vision of the past is the opposition of the classical age to the medieval. While each interpenetrates the other with anticipations, vestiges, and continuities many of which are familiar, the moment of rupture retains a certain mystery. It is the purpose of this study to focus on the transmission of one important element of classical culture, the theory of rhetoric. St. Augustine, a pivotal figure in any account of European culture, set forth his ideas about rhetoric in a form at once undeniably derivative and definitely innovative. Since Augustine lived in a milieu only partially Christian, since he was educated along traditional classical lines and relished Latin drama, poetry, and oratory in his youth and yet developed into a bishop and one of the most important fathers of the church, his work is well-suited for a study of the processes by which the ancient world's culture became transformed into the medieval.
     An examination of the reworking of Ciceronian rhetorical theory in Augustine's De Doctrina Christiana will specify the mode of appropriation of classical learning that Augustine practiced and which was to be decisively influential in the educational institutions of Europe for the next thousand years and beyond. Augustine by no means simply passed on the pagan precepts on eloquence as he had learned them. He correctly saw that, however technical, rhetorical teaching did not provide value-free aids that could equally serve any ideology. Nor, on the other hand, did he reject them altogether or simply overlay them with Christian coloring to make them acceptable. Rather he truly renewed and recast the concepts he had learned in his youth to make a genuinely Christian discipline.
     Most typically, the process involves maintaining the Ciceronian categories while altering the value judgments associated with certain of them. While his changes are for the most part explicable in terms of the requirements of a Christian philosophical position, they also imply highly significant shifts in literary practice and criticism, and initiated trends in the writing and reading of literature that were to challenge and, in some instances, to supplant the older practices. Augustine's approach of “redeeming” the classics rather than writing them off as hopelessly corrupt must have been the result of a deliberate and difficult decision. An alternative reaction was readily available. Such writers as Tertullian, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory Nazianzen exemplify the unqualified rejection of non-Christian culture that contended with an attitude like Augustine’s in the early days of the church. [1]
     Augustine's creative restoration of vitality to a system that had been regarded as decayed into a pitiable senility long before his own time did not come about without conflict and contradiction. Every reader of the Confessions is familiar with the young man's saturation in linguistic and rhetorical studies. His love of Latin literature led him to identify with the emotions of fictive characters almost to the exclusion of his own feelings. [2] His attachments to drama, philosophy, and oratory were no less deep. Indeed, for the young Augustine the Bible deserved condemnation on the grounds of style alone. [3] Even his devotion to absolute values which began the quest that was to be fulfilled in his conversion arose from his study of Cicero's Hortensius. [4] Whereas he had previously devoured “libros eloquentiae” with an eye to his own future eminence and thus became as ventosus (“puffed-up”) in pride as the language of the most Asiatic of stylists. [5]
     When he happened on Cicero’s work, though, he changed the motives and the focus of his study, declaring that he turned then to God, though conscious of loving only philosophy. He says quite pointedly (and with a fine sense of antithesis) that Cicero is commonly loved for his tongue and not for his heart, while he himself was interested in content only, and not at all in language at this point. [6] Having earlier thought he loved Hierius whom he had never met due to his reputation for eloquence, [7] he is later indoctrinated in the details of Christianity by Ambrose whose method is equally “literary” and who corrected his original notion about the poverty of style in the Bible by explaining how to interpret the Old Testament figuratively. [8] He continues in his later writings to make copious reference to classical texts and ideas, [9] and, moreover, his own style continues to make use of the technical repertory of devices fostered in him by his training. [10]
     The tension between classical and Christian culture that defines much of the movement of Augustine's life is part of the very structure of De Doctrina Christiana. While the first three books are basically concerned with setting forth a system for reading the Bible with understanding, [11] the fourth assumes the task of constructing a Christian rhetoric so that the truths available by the methods of the previous books may be effectively communicated to others. It was clearly a difficult piece of work for Augustine — he wrote the first three books about thirty years before adding the fourth — and he clearly marks it off from the rest with a separate introduction. Having repented of his early preference of Cicero to the Bible, he finally was able to face the grounds for that taste and to attempt to lend sufficient “dignitas” to the Christian style that others may not be similarly misled. The book is explicitly modeled after the teaching of Cicero whom he “saves” for posterity by correcting. [12]
     One of the central organizing principles of classical rhetoric as set forth in Cicero is the concept of the three styles or levels of discourse. [13] For Cicero the use of the three is dictated by considerations of propriety and indeed all three are not merely admissible for different occasions, [14] but all may be used in a single speech. [15] For Cicero, though, propriety is not the sole index of value, and there is unquestionably a hierarchy of worth associated with the three levels. The genus submissum is good but not great, [16] while the genus sublime is princeps. The ideal orator can use any level he likes, while a mediocre speaker may master the low and medium style but will be unable to attain the high. [17] The middle style is described by Cicero as temperate, and moderate, [18] as one would expect, but it also includes the genos antheeron which is brilliant, florid, and polished. [19] He identifies Gorgias, Thrasymachus, and Theodorus as practitioners of the middle style and regards epideixis [20] as its method. Its end is to charm [21] while the low style is good for teaching [22] and the high for oratory proper.
     Part of the reason for his relegation of extreme stylists to the middle level is that the moral foundation of his thinking would not permit him to equate a sensational verbal texture with the expression of serious content. [23] He stigmatizes those Asiaticos who are servientes numero and thinks of their goals (placare, delectare) as inferior to the true orator’s (persuadere, perturbare). It is only a lesser speaker for Cicero who will consider a statement that is elegant alone worth saying rather than one which is true or likely as well as comely. Still, the nobility of the high style was not wholly dependent on logical development and ambitious content, as the mention of perturbare along with persuadere indicated. The high style is acer and ardens as well as gravis [24], suggesting the necessity for all three elements: truth, a serious topic, and manipulation of emotion by artificial literary devices.
     Augustine begins rather similarly, finding a place for all three levels in his system, but the function he assigns to each and the valorization do not correspond to Cicero. The low Biblical style was his original reason for dismissing Christianity; in retrospect he called himself “puffed-up.” Having learned to find things of value in what seems at first humble and mean in the stories of the Old Testament, he applies the same viewpoint to the data of experience and realizes that everything has multiple meanings, being susceptible to allegory, anagogy, and ethics, as well as to literal understanding. Thus nothing is really trivial. [25] There can be no distinction of levels on the basis of content since explicit content does not exhaust real content.
     The fundamental principle for Augustinian division is, however, based in Cicero, in the specific functions associated with each level. He agrees with Cicero that the low style is best for teaching where clarity is most required, but for Augustine teaching is not a preparation for acting a citizen's part in society, but a means of aiding the soul on its way to salvation. The middle style he associates with epideixis as Cicero had done, but for Augustine the laudes and vituperationes were meant to move the listener not to awe and appreciation alone, but to right action.
     Fond as he was of fine language and yet constrained from celebrating it for its own sake, he was able to characterize the middle style as “temperate” in the moral as well as the technical sense. The high style troubled Augustine, and he accepts Cicero's definition of its goal as persuasion -- only for Cicero this was a matter of forcibly presenting a moving, convincing case while for Augustine it is a special resource to bring to bear on recalcitrant souls obdurate to any other/appeal. [26] He agrees with Cicero that all levels may be mixed, [27] and he ridicules those who care only to elaborate their style to absurd extremes. [28]
     The most important distinctive elements of Augustine's rhetoric are the institution of truth-value as the primary criterion of worth, the denial of any inherent hierarchy in levels of discourse, and the readiness to interpret actively to construct the meaning of the text rather than accepting its apparent meaning. Brief treatment of a second point of comparison will reinforce these ideas. Cicero expounded the traditional threefold officia oratoris. To teach, to delight, and to convince seem for him to be strictly parallel in theory, [29] though in practice they tend toward an ascending series just as the three levels did. Thus the function docere is associated with the preliminary groundwork of the narratio [30], and delectare is useful mainly inasmuch as it facilitates persuadere. For Cicero the whole complex is valued as the quintessential human activity, marking off man from beast and making civilization possible. [31] The pleasure derived from listening to skillful speech is neither questioned nor is it given absolute value.
     For Augustine the problem was different. Given the Bible as the only source of truth [32] and the godhead as the only object one may properly enjoy, [33] there is a clear role for teaching and even for persuading (for hardened cases), but enjoyment is suspect indeed. The first time Augustine mentions the officia oratoris, he suppresses pleasure. [34] Later he includes it in the same sort of defensive role allowed persuasion, to aid in the ministry toward souls who must be seduced to listen to appeals that are really in their own interest. But while the image of eating that succeeds this discussion seems to concede some amusement as acceptable for mortal men, the image of the gold and wooden keys returns the priorities squarely to truth-value again so that the beauty of words is almost like a Platonic myth which cunningly uses deceit to lead people to good paths they would not select alone. Thus, though “sober ears” should be universal, there is a godly as well as a diabolical use for beauty.
     The Ciceronian orator is moral and philosophical, the finest representative of humanity and his facility in deploying the skills of the rhetorician is properly something of which he is proud. For Augustine the implied goal is invariably to turn others to God, and for that the most useful “office” is to teach. An examination of the pictures of the ideal orator sketched by both writers will complete the distinction I have been developing between them.
     The character of the ideal orator as defined by Cicero is a lofty one. The marvelous picture in De Oratore (I, 8, 30) suggests that oratory is quite simply the most excellent thing and discusses language as the precondition for social intercourse, for binding men to each other, and allowing each to assume the challenge of the responsibility for action. This is a much more radical claim than the familiar one that rhetoric prospers in democracies and suffers under autocracies. Cicero’s claim is nothing less than that language is what makes man possible. The rarity of the great orator in Cicero is not just a matter of the fact that advanced expertise requires mastering so many difficult fields of study. Rather it seems a use of the decay of learning topos to symbolically emphasize the virtually unreachable grandeur of Cicero's ideal.
     He frequently points out that the complete realization of the ideal does not exist, [38] but it is clearly a humanistic goal nonetheless. The rhetorician lays claim on realms of eternal value for Cicero because he is at once the highest sort of man (the most knowledgeable, the most artful, the most powerful), the source and protector of civilization (as a legislative and judicial functionary), and, in the capping argument, the orator has a special claim on the moral area of philosophy. [39] Cicero says, in fact, that this realm of judgment in the affairs of men, embracing both politics and ethics, is the only arena in which the orator may achieve real greatness. His preeminence in skills is a matter of degree (he must learn more than other people) except for this sole (but uniquely significant) qualitative distinction. His discipline is finest since it deals in values, and this is perhaps as close to a vision of the transcendence as Cicero can come.
     The vocabulary that he uses to celebrate the high or sublime order of diction suggests that its place at the summit of his evaluative scheme relies on just that association with “the greatest of matters”: words like grandiloquent, [40] copiosus, amplus, and gravis [41] surely refer to the significant quality of the topics being discussed rather than to greater length or any specific stylistic features.
     Far from entertaining such a glorified notion of the vocation of the orator, Augustine begins his treatise quite apologetically, with a defensive tone defining a defensive rhetoric. He justifies Book IV at its outset as a rhetoric that can protect against rhetoric, while still maintaining that he will not instruct in rhetoric per se, since it is not truth-oriented, but can equally serve truth and falsehood. He speaks in a condescending tone about the subject, commenting that anyone may rapidly learn the principles of the art, but he should not bother if he has any less trivial occupation. [42] At another point Augustine seems almost embarrassed by his professional ability to explicate rhetorical figures, [43] and he again defines his motive as wholly defensive.
     God, of course, for Augustine replaces those social or moral ideals which informed Cicero's value system, but for Augustine God has a transfiguring effect on the rest of creation, for there can be no small matters to the man who views every earthly thing with reference to divinity and judgment. With the displacement of authority from the wise orator to the Bible, the speaker's role may seem to be demeaned since he is not himself originating truth. However, for Augustine the service of the most high is precisely what allows the speaker to attain true greatness rather than simply social approval. [44]
     The model for this notion is the Biblical text which seems for the most part to use a low style, but which contains the most sacred revelations. Similarly the preacher may or may not appear to be a grand orator, but if he gain any success in his calling he will participate in a greatness of which Cicero had no idea. Thus, while the Christian orator may appear to fall below the standards set by others, in reality he rises above them.
     The vocabulary I have used in reporting Augustine's ideas seems so specifically theistic that one should take care to recall that the moral absolute is implied as the ground of greatness in Cicero and that moral qualities have been regarded as an important element in the orator's training by writers such as Isocrates (though he is theoretically coy about this) and, most notably, Plato, whose language is often quite close to Augustine's and whose view of the absolute approaches the theistic. What is more novel in Augustine’s point of view is largely stylistic, though it has moral analogues. The celebration of the low style is a striking departure from classical standards and parallels Christianity's advocacy of virtues with the same names as the styles humilitas. the quality of being submissus. As a literary idea it has perhaps its fullest fruiting in practice with the realistic novel of the nineteenth century. [46] In a writer like Balzac, themes of the gravest nature were addressed with language and characters that strove to resemble the everyday. This would have been unthinkable to the ancients who, while they were willing to concede genre effects and satire to realism could not conceive of its supporting the greatest types of literature. [47]
     The effects of Augustine's theory were no less revolutionary in terms of criticism. His hermeneutic method underlies most modern critical endeavors with their acceptance of multiple meanings and the willingness to infer apparently unlikely semantic implications in details of description or correspondences between texts. This, too/ had played little part in criticism before Augustine, but the ingenious medieval commentaries on Scripture that had seemed to some fantastically overwrought have been outdone by ever more aggressive uses of the text in recent criticism.
     In accepting Cicero's categories and terminology but rejecting his value judgments associated with them, Augustine marked a radical philosophic discontinuity, but also defined new possibilities for literature the consequences of which have been far-reaching. Even without accepting Augustine as “godfather” to Flaubert and Balzac, say, it would be difficult to exaggerate the influence of his transformation of classical rhetoric. It was the single most important factor in assuring the role of the church as caretaker and, what is more, renewer of learning.
     Without the implied imprimitur from Augustine it is questionable whether Priscian, Donatus, the Rhetorica ad Alexandrum, and the Rhetorica ad Herennium could have exercised the hegemony they did over medieval writers, critics, and educators. The very fact that works such as the De Rhetorica quae Supersunt [48] were attached to his name is testimony to his authority in questions of pedagogy and a correct approach to language. Furthermore, the style and ideas of his authentic works had prodigious progeny: Cassiodorus, Rabanus Maurus, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Hugh of St. Victor, and Peter Lombard are among those who refer directly to his rhetorical teachings, while his influence is implicit in nearly every treatise on poetics, rhetoric, education, and the arts of letter-writing and preaching throughout the Middle Ages. [49] In terms of curriculum and the eventual institution of universities with their emphasis, persisting virtually until this century, on Classical studies, Augustine is perhaps the most significant single figure in the history of education in Europe.



1. Another instructive example is Jerome whose great service in translating Scripture was possible due to a level of scholarship that made him liable to constant guilt and misgivings about his attachment to the charms of pagan authors.

2. Augustine, Confessions, edited by William Watts (London: Heinemann, 1912), Bk. I, Ch. 13.

3. Confessions, III, 5.

4. Confessions, III, 4.

5. See Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966) entry under ventosus for a series of examples of its usage as applied to both language and character.

6. Confessions, III, 4.

7. Confessions, IV, 14.

8. Confessions, V, 14.

9. Harald Hagendahl, Augustine and the Latin Classics (Goteborg: University Press, 1967) provides encyclopedic evidence for Augustine’s classical learning and his constant reference to classical authors in his work.

10. Sister Inviolata Barry, St. Augustine, the Orator (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America, 1924) exhaustively documents Augustine's use of rhetorical figures in his Sermones ad Populum.

11. It is well here to bear in mind the etymology of the word “doctrine.”

12. Confessions, III, 5.

13. Auerbach's Mimesis (Princeton, 1953) views European literature as a whole as a working out of the problematic posed by the system of the three levels.

14. Cicero, De Oratore, translated by E. Sutton and H. Rackham (London: Heinemann, 1979), Book III, 55, 212.

15. De Oratore, III, 45, 177.

16. Cicero, Orator, edited by H.M. Hubbell (London: Heinemann, 1942), 28, 98-99. It is this conventional limitation, of course, that initially made Augustine discount the Bible.

17. Orator, 29, 101.

18. Orator, 28, 98.

19. Orator, 27, 96.

20. Orator, 12, 38

21. Orator, 26, 91

22. Orator, 29, 102. Cicero uses his own Pro Caecina as an example of a "teaching" text in the low style.

23. Orator, 19, 65. The phrases quoted immediately following are also from this passage.

24. Orator, 28, 99.

25. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine (Indianapolis: Bobbs, Merrill Co., 1976), p. 143.

26. Doctrine, p. 145.

27. Doctrine, p. 158.

28. Doctrine, p. 138-9. He surely has the excesses of specific contemporary speakers in mind here.

29. De Oratore, II, 27, 115; II 28, 121; and II 77, 310 are among the places where the three are enumerated as apparent equals.

30. De Oratore, I, 53. 229; II, 27, 115.

31. De Oratore, I, 8, 33.

32. Doctrine, p. 122.

33. Doctrine, p. 10.

34. Doctrine, p. 121.

35. Doctrine, p. 135.

36. Doctrine, p, 130.

37. One might think here of the unabashed pride Cicero takes in his own powers. The boasting that had been sanctioned for the hero of the heroic age is here turned toward intellectual accomplishments.

38. De Oratore, I, 18, 78-81 and Orator 2, 7-8, 29, 101.

39. De Oratore, I, 15, 67-69.

40. Orator, 5. 20.

41. Orator, 28, 97.

42. Doctrine, p. 119.

43. Doctrine, p. 128.

44. Doctrine (p. 143) insists that the reaction of one's audience is irrelevant to the evaluation of the orator. The same contempt for the opinion of the crowd is evident in Plato's Phaedrus.

45. Doctrine, p. 123.

46. Compare the “trivial” status of classical mimes and romances.

47. It surely could not support epic or tragedy in the old sense. For a theoretician of this point of view see pseudo-Longinus’ (On the Sublime).

48. See J. Miller, M. Prosser, T. Benson, Readings in Medieval Rhetoric (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, l973), p. 6 for the fraudulent character of the attribution.

49. Further information on the influence of Augustine’s rhetorical teachings is available in Doctrine, p. xii, in Therese Sullivan, Doctrina Christiana, Liber Quartus (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1930), p. 41, and throughout Eugene Kevane's Augustine the Educator (Westminster [Maryland]: The Newman Press, 1964).

50. The fact that “rhetoric” is still taught as the basis of a liberal arts education (though the liberal arts themselves have precipitately declined) and that literature is still the primary object of its study are evidence for the continuing vitality of this tradition.

Hippie

     Even now, at the head of the page, I find the word most annoying. Though I went to San Francisco in the summer of 1967, though for some months I actually lived at the corner of Haight and Ashbury (in an apartment, though I would not be surprised to meet someone who lived in the actual intersection), though I sport beads and a Paisley vest handmade by my lover in my first passport picture, though I remain profoundly influenced by ideas of “hip,” I cannot stand that diminutive term. (The word passed into common usage after Herb Caen began using it in his column in the San Francisco Chronicle. Caen had also invented the equally obnoxious and derisive “beatnik.”)
     Not that “hippie” has no place. In my own memory, before I saw the word in print, I heard it used to describe young teens who aspired to be hip and were just becoming acquainted with the scene, not so different from the sort of person who might have been labeled a “teenybopper” in the context of musical taste. As such the word had a useful niche, but failed to describe the counter-culture in general. Despite my distaste for “hippie,” I had no good alternative. In the sixties “hip” served for some uses, though sounding slightly broad and old-fashioned. I do recall both both “freak” and “head” (referring, naturally, to “pothead”) having some currency, but neither seems really adequate.
     Born in 1946, I grew up reading the Beats, attending Paul Carroll’s poetry series at Second City, seeking out Old Leftists, and learning about Dada. In university I participated in the literary magazine and attended performance events and shows staged by friends. In spite of loose talk about “the sixties,” during my senior year at an institution with tens of thousands of students, I felt I knew the local counterculture: far-out intellectuals, dopers, artists, radicals, anarchists, yogis, sandal-makers, and singers. Virtually everything innovative seemed linked to this crowd. Forward-thinking professors and faculty artists made alliances with the hip youth. Just as Kenneth Kenniston’s studies indicated that, for the most part, student protesters were the very same who had been at the top of their high school classes, many of those participating in middle and late 60s youth culture struck me as unusually thoughtful and productive. Why, even LSD trips were assimilated only through hours of analysis based in part on Scientific American articles and anthropology studies seen in the light of esoteric Buddhism. I was taken aback just a few years later when I heard of people dropping acid to go to a concert or party.
     Thinking I knew the scene in my major Midwestern university, I was surprised and I believe I recoiled when in the spring of 1967, a crew of slightly younger celebrants tripped across the university quadrangle, blowing soap bubbles in celebration of Buddha’s birthday.
     These new folks seemed to be violating canons of cool, while on the national scene, it was obvious that Peter Max was instantly kitsch, Tim Leary at best an entertaining con man, and, late in the day, cooptation seemed fully accomplished when Hair premiered, claiming to be a “tribal, love-rock musical.” Its tunes can now be heard in elevators while the really radical grass-roots theater has vanished to limbo along with underground movies. In 1967 when I made it to the Haight, the kids who liked rock and roll and smoking pot, however genial, had little in common with the people I had known at college who preferred electronic music, Tibetan folksong, or, at any rate, down and dirty blues. Only a few months later the Diggers, who ought to have known, were to proclaim the death of hippie on Haight Street.
     Still, it certainly seemed as though the movement, however vaguely defined, had something to say about every area of life: not merely art and politics, but also interpersonal relations, cuisine, and living room design. How many apartments did I enter with a huge cable spool for coffee table, beaded curtains, and Indian bedspreads? I remember a slightly older poet’s reminiscences of San Francisco only a few years before I (and a horde of my cohort) hit town. He described how he and his friends would often get stoned and eat “phony-burgers,” made with supermarket hamburger buns, ketchup, onions, mustard, pickles, everything but the meat. A few years later no one would have dreamed of eating Wonder buns; every kitchen held brown rice and vegetables.
     I won’t aim here to define hip beyond a few sketchy outlines. Hip is a form of twentieth century Romanticism, celebrating the unconscious, the natural, the ecstatic while striking a counter-cultural pose with bohemian habits and left politics. Hip participates in the double vision DuBois analyzed in African-Americans, also evident in kitsch, camp, and other modern forms of irony. Susan Sontag located the essence of camp in her 1964 essay as occurring in the gap “between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice,” in other words, between signifier and signified.
     Authentic hipness requires the pose at least of a vision sharper and more piercing than others’. That’s what makes it so annoyingly elitist. One can always take irony around yet another turn. In contrast to this off-putting and esoteric claim, hippie was accessible to all, its wardrobe available not in military surplus or Salvation Army stores, each individual his own invention, but in standardized sets at Sears.

The Prima Etade of Literary Ambition: The Struggle to Overcome the Word in Petrarch’s Canzone 23

     Petrarch's Canzone 23 is a dizzying and dazzling tour de force of transformation. The reader is allowed no illusion of rest from the impelling dynamic of change as the narrative voice describes his passage through six corporeal forms. The poem’s extraordinary complexity derives not only from the fast-moving procession of embodiments of the speaking voice (and the way in which each of these alters and edits its classical antecedents), but also from the many cunning authorial comments which unsettle interpretations even as they suggest themselves. The poem is not best read, however, as an encyclopedic inventory of possibilities like certain epic, oracular, and visionary works — the world as a whole is not the subject for its categorizations, nor do I find love itself to be the central concern of the poem (even in the extremely generalized sense in which all human energy may be regarded as erotic), nor is it — except in a rather specific way — about the elusive definition of the ego.
     The particular sort of self the poem does pursue is the poetic self, and the canzone is a self-reflexive commentary, a meditation on the nature of language and poetry, a work of theoretical criticism. It radically questions the validity of literature and explores the fundamentally doubled structure of language. The result in the end is not, though an answer that justifies the poem by placing it in a larger scheme, rather the result is the leap necessary to the “prima etade” of literary ambition, the engagement in struggle with the word which is poetry and which within literature can have no end and no victor.
     This sounds, perhaps, extravagant, but the approach is hardly novel. Not only must every poem necessarily make critical statements about the nature of poetry and about previous poems, but the specific tradition of which Petrarch is an exemplar played explicitly from William of Aquitaine to Shakesoeare on the relationship between the poem and the lover. Moreover, Canzone 23 is full of references to speech, writing, and literary fame. Before examining these in detail, I would like to review three earlier critics’ comments on Petrarch which seem to me to approach increasingly close to the point of view I mean to set forth.
     Burling in his introductory remarks broaches the possibility of a reading of the poem as criticism by identifying the theme as “the incomprehensible changeability of the self in love” and noting three points in the text at which the author is driven to, in effect, produce poetry within the narration. Further he notes that all the myths the poem recalls concern frustrated or disastrous speech or writing as well as deception or confusion over identity. Finally, he charts the basic antinomies governing the piece as follows: dismemberment vs. integration, death vs. poetic immortality, and sexual fear causing dumbness vs. poetic creation. His comments, however, in the brief scope of the preface, lead to no conclusion more precise than that Petrarch calls attention to the “psychologically relative, even suspect, origin of individual poems and thus of writing itself.”
     John Preston Brenkman’s “Narcissus in the Text: Toward an Analysis of the Literary Subject in Ovid, Petrarch, and Yeats” examines Petrarch’s sonnets 45 and 46, mentioning poem 23 as well. In Ovid's telling of the Narcissus myth, Brenkman finds a commentary on the deceptive capacities of language. He locates the critical elements for this reading in the shapeshifting uncertainty of the story's central figures. If Narcissus partakes of some of Echo's qualities, and if the author is not wholly distinct from either, if these identities are unstable through the course of the poem, then all utterance may likewise be doubted.
     In Brenkman’s view the confusion of identity so prominent in Petrarch further problematizes the status of the speaker. Suggesting that Petrarch undermines the distinction between body and image which is persistent if unstable in Ovid, he says that as Laura becomes less like Narcissus, the authorial voice resembles him more. Thus the sum of delusion remains always the same and the text “defines its own impasse as discourse” since it leaves no ground from which to judge reality, but only the patterns of appearances.
     Marguerite Waller in Petrarch's Poetics and Literary History does a thorough and convincing job along similar lines including a substantial treatment of Canzone 23 with exceedingly insightful and suggestive close readings of several passages. For instance, she is at pains to point out that in the first six lines of the poem, Petrarch does not unambiguously identify love as the source of his difficulty. She also questions the reality of any primal state of “libertade” and of its attainability in the future. The laurel is at once himself and his beloved; he passes through changes and yet never leaves it. Waller would translate 1. 167 “nor for a new figure have I known how to leave” and would interpret it as indicating the poet's imprisonment within language. No medium other than words is available to him and so whatever metaphorical forms of his subject he produces, these “figure only that figural production” itself. “Petrarch undercuts the authority of an allegorical narrative reading, demonstrating that the first figure itself is generated in an equally figural and arbitrary structural moment: the poet becoming identical with the laurel/Laura is one dimension (that of the linguistic signifier or figure), but remaining absent or different from it in another (that of the allegorical or interpretive reading, or figural significance. In the effort to recover the self and to emerge from figural to performative discourse, he cannot be wholly successful, but “while losing the self he gains the sign. While escape from the narrative problematic is impossible, narrative itself becomes possible.
     The sort of struggle Waller traces in the poem to make a perfectly signifying work and the partial failure that makes possible a partial victory is particularly likely in light of the place the poem occupies in Petrarch’s oeuvre. A marginal gloss in Petrarch’s hand identifies this poem as one of his earliest and the attempt to write the perfect poem may be seen as the young writer's attempt to work up his arrogance into the decision to write at all by means of the fantasy of success at writing the definitive poem. It is, then, in a way a tale of the birth of literary ambition as well as erotic emergence, and it tests the margins of both realms.
     The pun between Laura and the laurel (as a literary prize) joins love of self and love of other. The writer paradoxically demonstrates love for himself and love for the whole world by devoting himself to his work, to his muse. Waller suspects there may be a pun, too, in the word penosa (l. 11; meaning “painful” but penna is pen or quill). She does not mention, though the intention is indisputable, the play between foglia (leaf) and foglio (sheet of paper) in 1. 40 or with the word piuma (feather or plumage but also quill pen) in 1. 51. Having covered himself with pages and pens successively, after dedicating himself to the pursuit of literature the poet then finds himself a stone.
     In the serial progression of literary worth I am now delineating this is the withdrawal or descent into self that potentiates poetry. His next incarnation is as a fountain which brings inevitable associations of inspiration and productivity — I would say he has here crossed the stile into the precincts of art. While the penultimate form — the Echo-like stone and voice — raises new problems, it remains for the final transformation, the Actaeon-like stag to bring a dramatic resolution.
     Before returning to these last two images of the poet, I would like to discuss the poem’s references to 1anguage and its conclusion. Though Petrarch gets his poem going by asserting that it is efficacious to reduce his pain and he brings the piece to a halt by lofting into the empyrean on poetical wings, the references between to words are almost exclusively devoted to attesting their inadequacy, their failures. Already by 1. 11 everyone is said to be tired of his carrying on; in 1. 37 he declares wit and speech of no avail; in 52-62 his wailing is continuous only because it is ineffective. Getting directly to the point he tells his reader that his subject is beyond all speech (1. 71), that his pen cannot follow his will (1. 91). Pen and ink again disappoint expectation in 1. 100 and later he says that his words have the form of a lie (l. 156).
     All of these negative comments, however, are contained between two which, as I have noted, testify on the contrary to the actual power of speech and of poetry. The last passage is at once highly conventional as a description of poetic flight and very suggestive of sexual realization. As an apotheosis of poetry, though, the poem it ends must be its justification. Further, the complaints about the shortcomings of poetry are stated only in lines of poetry and they thus have a divided content anyway since their very existence as words is evidence that the author trusts in their potency. Only if the reader should indeed find them tiresome and leave off reading long before the conclusion will they have failed, and Petrarch provides even for that case. Line 12 tells us that every valley conveys his complaints so the message is virtually inescapable.
     The erotic double-bind is then accompanied or paralleled by a linguistic one. One way in which these profound ambivalences is traced is by the opposition of life and death. In stage one the “living man” is made a tree, clearly a decline in vitality, though not an absolute one. The process continues in form 2 when his hope, the internal essence of his being, is said to be dead. As a stone he is suspended between life and death and from this egg-like latency, he emerges in the fountain which in its exhilarated flow requires no mention of death. As the Echo-like stone he calls death by name, but this is now an objectified death, outside himself. Unlike the earlier death, he is now able to name it and manipulate it verbally.
     In the Actaeon-image of form 6, the situation would seem, to be a mortal one, yet again here death is not mentioned. The poet has, in the process of the poem, not banished death, but he has made it a part of his system. After his poem is born, he entertains no illusions about the powers of language, but he understands its nature more fully and by that understanding he controls it. Although the crisis may seem to evaporate in the heavenly flight at the end, the image of fleeing the hounds is not by any means obliterated.
     It is a dramatic and compelling moment near the end when the poet says that he is still fleeing the belling of the hounds. At once the reader recognizes the gravity of the situation as it is no longer recounted by a coolly detached voice sneaking elegantly of past travails (and the tone of mastery is important throughout the poem even in the parts that would be most anguished in some common-sense relation), but it speaks of its own present. It would be acceptable to most readers to comment that the sudden grip of panic that seizes the reader’s throat at this point may legitimately be said to indicate a continuation of this elastic present into the moment of the reading in a virtual reenactment of the event described.
     But just who are these hounds and of what does their noise consist? And what are those woods from one to another of which the poet is driven? It would be a psychoanalytical reading unusually rich in self-contradiction even to begin to explicate them as emblems of passion, even a passion made up as much of ambition as lust. However, I believe they are more tellingly glossed as the meaning of language pursuing language itself. It is in this sense rather than as psychic impulses that they have outlived Pope Innocent’s hunting dogs and that they still live and pursue their quarry on the page today. They represent both the fund of energy animating language and the desperation that arises from its repeated failures. The tracks of their pursuit are evident throughout the poem.
     Images of language as a two-fold structure are very old. In medieval books of rhetoric the most frequent form for this division is simply sound and sense. Words had always been recognized as arbitrary symbols and they had usually been admitted to be not wholly explicable. The bifurcation is reflected in Canzone 23 by a series of images of containment:

1. 20 “that within me” and “I the shell”
1. 24-26 the heart and "frozen thoughts"
1. 34 himself and his garment
1. 73 heart in his breast
1. 75 the beloved in a garment that makes her unrecognizable
1. 82 the poet and the stone
1. 95 heart and death all about
1. 106 the poet clothed in darkness

     All of these images convey the sense of what is truly important, truly human contained within a more death-like outer husk which either prevents communication, deceives, or denies the importance of affect. The barrier is broken at least implicitly in all of these instances but surely the most startling and disturbing is the occult surgery the beloved performs in 1. 74. In the terms by which I have been explicating the poem each of the occasions catalogued indicates the doubled character of language which makes possible its deceit (cf . Hesiod and Umberto Eco), and this amazing violation of the boundaries suggests the possible revelation of meaning in language in sudden moments prepared by pain, though more the pain of painstaking craft than that of romantic agony.
     If the outer layer in each of my containment images is that indifferent word which in its stubborn physicality seems altogether unresponsive to the demands placed upon it by human users, the withdrawal of the heart by the muse and indeed the very existence of Canzone 23 itself and its absorbing spell demonstrate that this husk is not a final one, that it may make possible an incubation from which a sort of new life can emerge.
     The problematic of literary identity remains and the problematic of language itself: nothing can mean exactly what we would have it mean, language is not constructed to perform such a role. If it were a single verse could bring instant illumination to anyone and literary success on that order is impossible. Petrarch's interest may be in that which is (l. 71) “beyond writing,” but only if it provides him with the trajectory along which he wishes to aim, if it gives the excuse that makes him want to write. Though fated not to strike that transcendental target (and so far as the love theme itself goes, does even Norman Mailer still seek the transcendental orgasm?). Petrarch leaves behind a poem which in struggling against these limitations both comes to understand them and overcomes them only to encounter the same problems the next time he is is faced with a blank page.
     In the passage following 1. 121 Petrarch suggests these ultimate pretensions with an analogy between the soul, God, and Laura. But the soul is accessible to others only through its outward form and its outward actions, the Lady through her person and the muse through concrete poems. Likewise the maker, whether divine or human, while never equivalent to his creation is pressed in it and the word, however inadequately it conveys meaning, appropriates that very inadequacy as part of its nature. The patterns of ambiguity and deceit that characterize language in general are just those elements that make literature. It is the distance between Actaeon and the hounds, between the word and its meaning, not the congruity of the two that makes poetry, but nonetheless the chase must go on. With the ceasing of the struggle would come the collapse of language.

Nova Academy

     For several years in the late seventies, I taught at Nova Academy in San Francisco’s Sunset district. The school had been founded by Merriam LaNova to educate high school age dancers attending the San Francisco Conservatory of Ballet. There the regimen was strict and old-fashioned. Lanova had, after all, danced with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Her style was icy and stern. Her husband, though a cellist with the symphony, looked like a mobster. Leonide Massine came by on occasion to view my classes, and the Kronos Quartet sometimes practiced in an unused studio.
     The school maintained the façade of an elite preparatory school. The principal always wore a three-piece suit. The older classrooms were decorated as though they were part of some old manor, landed by accident above an urban storefront. One featured a hunting mural on one wall, another had a huge fake fireplace, a third had a ceiling of painted panels that belonged in an Italian basilica.
     The fact was, though, that, along with the dedicated dancers, Nova Academy, like other private schools, found itself accepting many students for a variety of reasons it would prefer not to admit. Some parents wanted their children in an all-white environment; other young scholars had encountered unpleasant disciplinary proceedings their parents were willing to pay to escape. Several foreign students had enrolled in preparation to applying to American universities. The dancers were, in fact, all but invisible in a larger crowd including drifters, misfits, and troublemakers.
     This reality sometimes clashed with the high art pretensions of the dance world. Among the distinguished visitors was Kyra Nijinska, Vaslav’s daughter. Once a dancer with the Ballet Russe, she now painted mystic canvases, but now and then she would come to Nova to conduct a Flamenco class. I could hear the heavy heels stomping above my room. Her manners were odd, and, to the more vulgar students, exceedingly comical. If she perceived a mocking look, she would rise up in indignation and declare, “Do you know who I am? I am the daughter of the Grrreat Nijinsky!” Before long, the students, innocent of any idea of her father’s work (or her own) were greeting each other with this line, suitably exaggerated.
     For some reason, the school seemed to define itself with reactionary tradition. Apart from the anti-Bolshevik feeling of the Russian émigré tradition, propaganda magazines from apartheid South Africa were among the few journals scattered about the office waiting area. The emphasis was, as the principal Michael Badenhausen reminded the students at morning assembly, self-discipline and hard work. But, alas, by mid-morning, the pink-faced principal was three sheets to the wind, sometimes literally lying on his office floor, passed out. If a parent came to consult him, the staff would have to think on their feet. He had been a Peace Corps volunteer in the bush of Upper Volta (as it was then called), and that experience was probably enough to explain his alcoholism, but it was not his only peccadillo. Once a well-built young friend of his appeared at the school, wearing skin-tight jeans with a chain belt and a motorcycle jacket with no shirt. Madam could hardly have approved, but for reasons best known to the two of them, she tolerated his behavior with maternal protectiveness.
     Our pay was little more than welfare, less if one includes food stamps -- $325 a month when I began, then increased to $375. In the middle of my second year of service at Nova, I began to organize. I called the local teachers’ unions who, I must say, showed little solidarity. I set out to do it myself. “They can’t fire you,” I told my coworkers, “You’re protected by state and federal labor law.” Threatening a mid-year strike, we received Lanova’s signature on an agreement giving us $425 a month and a certain position for the coming year. Then, when the term ended in the spring, the entire faculty was fired. (Doubtless individuals the administration trusted who showed proper contrition might be allowed back.) I picketed the graduation exercises in my suit and then put down my sign to enter the hall and take my seat to applaud the graduates. I filed a complaint against the school with the California Labor Commission. It was the least I could do after leading my fellow-workers down a path that proved more dangerous than I had known.
     After months had passed, I received notice of a hearing before an administrative judge. When I entered, the school’s attorney was just saying to the judge, “It’s frivolous, really,” and the judge, in an old-boy manner, responded with resignation, “Well, we must give him his day, anyway.” While I presented what seemed to me undeniable facts, their scurrilous lawyer proceeded to tell outlandish lies: that I was fired because of my obdurate gum-chewing, that Lanova would not have signed the agreement had I not been raising a fist over her in a menacing way. I was at the time young enough to be genuinely surprised at my adversary’s complete dishonesty. Needless to say, the hearing was decided against me, and, as it happened, about that time I received an offer to teach school in the Nigerian bush. Perhaps if I had prevailed over my San Francisco employer, I would never have seen the palace of the Oba of Benin nor would I have drunk palm wine from a calabash with a dozen drowned bees afloat. Doubtless, the time had come to move on.