The symbolic life of a person or group is that element of activity which reminds one of his identity, his purpose, and his situation. There is both a corporate and a solitary symbolic life: both individuals and groups rehearse their situation, identity and purpose periodically thereby adding self­consciousness and depth to their experience.

The corporate symbolic life of Summer 75 will begin with breakfast and conclude with late evening celebrations on the mall. Periodic injections of discontinuity throughout the day will provide the detachment necessary to corporate creativity.

There will be an emphasis this year on the solitary symbolic life. No corporate structure can finally maintain One's resolve. Interior resources are required for the long march of care.

Solitude is not loneliness: It is relationship to Mystery; it occurs amid intensified engagement; it is calling on oneself and finding someone at home, at home in Mystery. It is wrestling with the inarticulate groans of the spirit until communicable creative insights emerge. It requires discipline, practice and indirection. It's practice requires time and space and tools.

And when it comes, it emerges as prose, as poetry, as drama, as art, music, song, dance, sculpture and whatever other ways the inarticulate presence makes its way through history. This is a time for the solitary to emerge.

This summer will provide each participant with a solitary journal. It will contain a selected reading for meditation and several suggested organizing and reflective exercises issuing in creative writing. These may be used before breakfast, at lunch or in the evening, as one chooses. It is an experiment in the form of caring for oneself for the sake of caring for the earth

Campbell, MYTHS TO LIVE BY

I wonder how many of my readers saw that motion picture, 2001, of the imagined space odyssey of a mighty spacecraft of the not very distant future, a future indeed that most of those watching the film would themselves live to see. The adventure opens with some entertaining views of a community of little manlike apes a million or so years ago: a company of those apelike hominid known to science today as Australopithecines, snarling, fighting with each other, and generally behaving like any agglomeration of simians. However, there was among them one who had in his dawning soul the potentiality of something better; and that potential was evident in his sense of awe before the unknown, his fascinated curiosity, with a desire to approach and to explore.

This, in the film, was suggested in a symbolic scene showing him seated in wonder before a curious panel of stone standing mysteriously upright in the landscape. And while the others continued in the usual way of ape­men, absorbed in their economic problems (getting food for themselves), social enjoyments (searching for lice in each other's hair), and political activities (variously fighting), this particular one, apart and alone, contemplating the panel, presently reached out and cautiously felt it ­­ rather as our astronaut's foot first approached, then gently touched down on the moon. And he was followed, then, by others, though not all; for indeed there remain among us many still who are unmoved by what Goethe called "the best part of man." These remain, even now, in the condition of those pre-human apes who are concerned only with economics, sociology, and politics, hurling bricks at each other and licking then their own wounds.

Those are not the ones that are heading for the moon or even noticing that the greatest steps in the progress of mankind have been the products not of wound­licking, but of acts inspired by awe. And in recognition of the continuity through all time of this motivating principle in the evolution of our species, the authors of this film of which I am speaking showed again symbolically that same mysterious panel standing in a hidden quarter of the moon, approached and touched there by space travelers; and then again, floating free in most distant apace, mysterious still­as it has always been and must forever remain.

Hemingway, THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty­four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy's parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders to another boat which caught three good fish the first week. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks, and furled, it looked liked the flag of permanent defeat.

The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep­creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.

Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated...

The sun rose thinly from the sea and the old man could see the other boats, low on the water and well in toward the shore, spread out across the current. Then the sun was brighter and the glare came on the water and then, as it rose clear, the flat sea sent it back at his eyes so that it hurt sharply and he rowed without looking into it. He looked down into the water and watched the lines that went straight down into the dark of the water. He kept them straighter than anyone did, so that at each level in the darkness of the stream there would be a bait waiting exactly where he wished it to be for any fish that swam there. Others let them drift with the current and sometimes they were at sixty fathoms when the fishermen thought they were at a hundred.

But, he thought, I keep them with precision. Only I have no luck any more. But who knows? Maybe today. Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.

Shakespeare, SONNET 116

Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

Oh, no! it is an ever­fixed mark,

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Michener, HAWAII

The astronomers then met to read the signs, and they concluded that the storm had blown fairly steadily from the west, but apparently there had been, as Teura had guessed, a definite drift of the sea northward, for the Little Eyes were going to culminate much higher­in the heavens than would be proper were the canoe on course to Nuku Hiva; but to say specifically how serious the drift had been the navigators would have to wait until Three­in­a­Row appeared, which would not be for another two hours.

So the three plotters waited, and when Three­in­a­Row was well up into the heavens it became self­evident that the canoe was far, far north of the course to Nuku Hiva and thus committed to an unknown ocean with no opportunity to replenish stores. It was therefore a solemn group that went aft to report to the king: "The storm has carried us even more swiftly than Teroro imagined."

The king's face showed his distress. "Are we lost?" Uncle Tupuna replied, "We are far from Nuku Hiva and will see no land we know." "Then we are lost?" the king pressed.

"No, nephew, we are not," Tupuna said carefully. "It is true that we have been carried into far regions, but they are not off our course. We seek lands which lie beneath the Seven Little Eyes, and we are nearer to them tonight than we had a right to expect. If we do not eat too much. "

Even though Tamatoa had given permission to keep the sails aloft, and even though he had known that the canoe thus ran the risk of missing Nuku Hiva, he had nevertheless hoped that they would stumble upon that known island, and perhaps find it congenial, and possibly establish homes there. Now he was committed to the greater Journey, and he was fearful.

"We could still alter course and find Nuku Hiva," he suggested.

Teroro remained silent and allowed old Tupuna to carry the argument: "No, we are well on our way." "But to where?"

Tupuna repeated the only chant he had ever memorized for sailing to the north. In effect it said: "Keep the canoe headed with the storm until the winds cease completely. Then turn into the dead sea where bones rot with heat and no wind blows. Paddle to the new star, and when winds strike from the east, ride with them westward until land beneath the Seven Little Eyes is found."

The king, himself an adequate astronomer, pointed due north, and asked, "Then the lands we seek are there?" "Yes," Tupuna agreed.

"But we go this way?" and he pointed eastward, where the winds of the dying storm were driving them. "Yes."

The course seemed so improbable, to head for a promised land by fleeing it, that the king cried, "Can we be sure that this is the way?"

"No," the old man confessed, "we cannot be sure."

"Then why. . ." "Because the only knowledge we have says that this is the way to do lt."

The king, ever mindful of the fact that fifty­seven people were in his care, grasped Tupuna by the shoulders and asked bluntly, "What do you honestly think about the land that is supposed to be under the Little Eyes?"

The old man replied, "I think that many canoes have left these waters, some blown by storms, others like us in exile, and no man has ever returned. Whether these canoes reached land or not, we do not know. But some man, with a vision of what might be, composed that chant."

"Then we are sailing with a dream for our guide?" Tamatoa asked. "Yes," the priest answered.

Benet, SELECTION FROM JOHN BROWN'S BODY

Sometimes there comes a crack in Time itself.

Sometimes the earth is torn by something blind.

Sometimes an image that has stood so long

It seems implanted as the polar star

la moved against an unfathomed force

That suddenly will not have it any more.

Call it the mores, call it God or Fate,

Call it Mansoul or economic law,

That force exists and moves.

And when it moves

It will employ a hard and actual stone

To batter into bits an actual wall

And change the actual scheme of things.

John Brown

Was such a stone­­unreasoning as the stone,

Destructive as the stone, and, if you like,

Heroic and devoted as such a stone.

He had no gift for life, no gift to bring

Life but his body and a cutting edge,

But he knew how to die.

Herbert, DUNE

Stilgar squared his shoulders, stepped closer to Paul and lowered his voice. "Now, remember what I told you. Do it simply and directly ­ nothing fancy. Among our people, we ride the maker at the age of twelve. You are more than sex years beyond that age and not born to this life. You don't have to impress anyone with your courage. We know you are brave. All you must do is call the maker and rite him."

"I will remember," Paul said.

"See that you do. I'll not have you shame my teaching."

Stilgar pulled a plastic rod about a meter long from beneath his robe. The thing wee pointed at one end, had a spring­wound clapper at the other end. "I prepared this thumper myself. It's a good one. Take it."

Paul felt the warm smoothness of the plastic as he accepted the thumper.

"Shishakli has your hooks," Stilgar said. "He'll hand them to you as you step out onto that dune over there." He pointed to his right. "Call a big maker, Usal. Show us the way."

Paul marked the tone of Stilgar's voice ­ half ritual and half that of a worried friend.

In that instant, the sun seemed to bound above the horizon. The sky took on the silvered gray­blue that warned this would be a day of extreme heat and dryness even for Arrakis.

"It is the time of the scalding day," Stilgar said, and now his voice was entirely ritual. "Go, Uaul, and ride the maker, travel the sand as a leader of men."........

Paul nodded, maintaining the necessary silence, moved past the man and up the dune slope. He stood alone now on the sandy ridge with only the horizon in front of him, the flat and unmoving horizon. This was a good dune Stilgar had chosen, higher than its companions for the viewpoint vantage.

Stooping, Paul planted the thumper deep into the windward face where the sand wee compacted and would give maximum transmission to the drumming. Then he hesitated, reviewing the lessons, reviewing the life­and­death necessities that faced him.

I am a sandrider, Paul told himself......

With abrupt decision, Paul released the thumper's latch. The clapper began revolving and the summons drummed through the sand, a measured "lump...lump... lump."

He straightened, scanning the horizon, remembering Stilgar's words: "Judge the line of approach carefully. Remember, a worm seldom makes an unseen approach to a thumper. Listen all the same. You may often hear it before you see it."

And Chani's words of caution, whispered at night when her fear for him overcame her, filled his mind: "When you take your stand along the maker's path, you must remain utterly still. You must think like a patch of sand. Hide beneath your cloak and become a little dune in your very essence."

Slowly, he scanned the horizon, listening, watching for the signs he had been taught.

It came from the southeast, a distant hissing, a sand whisper. Presently he saw the faraway outline of the creature's track against the dawn light and realized he had never before seen a maker this large, never heard of one this size. It appeared to be more than half a league long, and the rise of the sandwave at its creating head was like the approach of a mountain.

This is nothing I have seen by vision or in life, Paul cautioned himself. He hurried across the path of the thing to take his stand, caught up entirely by the rushing needs of this moment.

Terkel, WORKING

Every piece of stone you pick up is different, the grain's a little different and this and that. It'll split one way and break the other. You pick up your stone and look at it and make an educated guess. It's a pretty good day laying' stone or brick. Not tiring. Anything you like to do isn't tiresome. It's hard work; stone is heavy. At the same time you get interested in what you're doing and you usually fight the clock the other way. You're not looking' for quitting'. You're wondering you haven't got enough done and it's almost quitting' time. (Laughs) I ask the hod carrier what time it is and he says two­thirty. I say, "Oh, my Lord, I was gonna get a whole lot more than this."

Stone's my life. I daydream all the time, most times it's on stone. Oh, I'm gonna build me a stone cabin down on the Green River. I'm gonna built atone cabinets in the kitchen. That stone door's gonna be awful heavy and I don't know how to attach the hinges. I've got to figure out how to make a stone roof. That's the kind of thing. All my beams, it seems like it's got to have a piece of rock mixed in it.

There's not a house in this country that I haven't built that I don't look at every time I go by. (Laughs.) I can actually set here now and in my mind see so many that you wouldn't believe. If there's one stone in there crooked, I know where it's at and I'll never forget it. Maybe thirty years, I'll know a place where I should have took that stone out and redone it but I didn't. I still notice it. The people who live there might not notice it, but I notice it. I never pass that house that I don't think of it. I've got one house in mind right now. (Laughs) That's the work of my hands.

I can't imagine a Job where you go home and maybe go by a year later and you don't know what you've done. My work, I can see what I did the first day I started. All my work is set right out there in the open ant I can look at it as I go by. It's something I can see for the rest of my life. Forty years ago, the first blocks I ever laid in my life, when I was seventeen years old. I never go through Eureka­­a little town down there on the river ~ that I don't look thata way. It's always there.

Doctorow, THE BOOK OF DANIEL

And now let me put down what Grandma herself said about her tunings in and out. Occasionally, after her death, she liked to visit me and press a penny into my palm and bless my head, and call me a good boy. And once I asked her why she felt it necessary to blow her mind in a way so frightening to children.

And Grandma said:

"In any one day, it is possible to derive Joy from your being and be nourished by it. In a filthy room with cold, broken windows and the clatter of your oppression in the streets, it is possible. And starving, with your teeth rotting in your mouth, and age like lead in your bones, and your eyes shattered with the horror of what you have seen­­all together and with the madness of your children thrown in, I call it God."

" And there is a traditional liturgy which is lovely in itself, but which reminds you too that others born and died know this feeling also. So I sing to myself in that language. And my curses are my love for them whom I curse for existing at the mercy of life and God and for the dust they will allow themselves to become for having been born. And my complicity in their being the fruit of my womb, that I could have tricked them this way outrages me. Unable to stay in their presence for my love of them which they do not understand, and my terrible fear of their blasphemy, and their tampering with all the deep, intricate solderings of the universe. Do you begin to understand?"

" I am speaking of the only form of ecstasy allowed to old ladies. It begins with the fear of not being able to breathe. And they inherit that from me, too, as you do, that excess of passion, that shimmering fullness of stored life which always marks the victim. What we have, too much life in each of us, is what the world hates most. We offend. We stink with life. Our hearts make love to the world not gently. We are brutal with life and our brutality is called suffering. We scream into our pillows when we come."

"You are a good boy, Daniel. What I mean by that is perhaps only that you have compassion, and that however much I scared you, or however bad I smelled from my asthma, you trusted me enough to accept my pennies and let me call you a good boy. Or perhaps it is that I recognized in you the strength and innocence that will reclaim us all from defeat. That will exonerate our having lived and justify our suffering."

"Now that scares me more than anything, Grandma."

"You're fuckin' right, Dan. Just remember, though, this placing of the burden on the children is a family tradition. But only your crazy grandma had the grace to make a ritual of it. Ritual being an artful transfer of knowledge. And pennies being the sum of her life's value."

Shakespeare, THE SEVEN AGES OF MAN

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.

And then the whining school­boy, with his satchel,

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school. And then the lover

Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,

Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lin 'd,

With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances;

And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,

His youthful hose well sav'd a world too wide

For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion,

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Whitman, BEAT! BEAT! DRUMS!

Beat! beat! drums ­ blow! bugles, blow!

Through the windows ­ through doors ­ burst like a ruthless force,

Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,

Into the school where the scholar is studying;

Leave not the bridegroom quiet ­ no happiness must he have now with his bride,

Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain,

So fierce you whirr and pound you drums ­ so shrill you bugles blow.

Beat! beat! drums ­ blow! bugles! blow!

Over the traffic of cities ­ over the rumble of wheels in the streets;

Are beds prepared for sleepers at night in the houses? no sleepers must sleep in those beds,

No bargainers' bargains by day ­ no brokers or speculators ­ would they continue?

Would the talkers be talking? would the singer attempt to sing?

Would the lawyers rise in the court to state his case before the Judge?

Then rattle quicker, heavier drums ­ you bugles wilder blow.

Beat! beat! drums! ­ blow! bugles! blow!

Make no parley ­ stop for no expostulation,

Mind not the timid ­ mind not the weeper or prayer,

Mind not the old man beseeching the young man,

Let not the child's voice be heard, nor the mother's entreaties,

Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the hearses,

So strong you thump O terrible drums ­ so loud you bugles blow.

Mao, POEMS

Speaking of the Long March, one may ask, "What is its significance?"

We answer that the Long March is the first of its kind in the annals of history, that it is a manifesto, a propaganda force, a seeding­machine.

Not since Pan Ku divided the heavens from the earth and the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors reigned, has history ever witnessed a long march such as ours?

For twelve months we were under daily reconnaissance and bombing from the skies by scores of planes, while on land we were encircled and pursued, obstructed and intercepted by a huge force of several hundred thousand men. And we encountered untold difficulties and dangers on the way; yet by using our two legs we swept across a distance of more than twenty­five thousand li (one li is approximately a third of a mile) through the length and breadth of eleven provinces. Let us ask, has history ever known a long march to equal ours?

Australian Aboriginal, THE SCATTERING OF MANKIND

There was a time when there were many men and women. In some parts of the earth there were very many, and they were wicked. And Pund­jel became angry. Pund­jel became very sulky when he saw that men and women were many and very bad. He caused storms to rise, and fierce winds to blow often. In the flat lands whirlwinds of great force rose, and on the mountains the big trees were shaken with strong winds.

Pund-jel came down to see the men and women. He spoke to no one. He carried with him his big knife. He went into camps with his knife, and he cut with his knife. He cut this way and that way. And men, women and children he cut into very small pieces.

But the pieces into which he had cut the men, women, and children did not die. Each piece moved as the worm, Turror, moves. Great, great storms and whirlwinds came and carried away the pieces that moved like worms, and the pieces became like flakes of snow. They were carried into the clouds. The clouds carried the pieces hither and thither over all the earth; and Pund­jel caused the pieces to drop in such places as he pleased.

In this way men and women were scattered over the earth. Pund­jel made stars of the good men and good women. The stars are still in the heavens, and the clever old men can tell which among the stars were once good men and good women.

William Shakespeare, JULIUS CAESAR

There is a tide in the affairs of men,

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat;

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures.

A. E. Housman, INFANT INNOCENCE

The Grizzly Bear is huge and wild;

He has devoured the infant child.

The infant child is not aware.

He has been eaten by the bear.

THE BIRTH OF THE SUN

Translated from the Spanish by Thomas Merton

I have invented new worlds.

I have dreamed Nights built out of ineffable substances.

I have made burning stars, subtle lights Next to half­closed eyes.

Yet never

Can I recover that first day when our fathers

Emerged, with their tribes, from the humid jungle

And looked to the East.

They listened to the roar Of the jaguar, the song of birds; and they saw

Rise up a man with a burning face,

A youth with a resplendent face.

Whose looks, full of light, dried up the marshes,

A tall, burning youth whose face was aflame:

Whose face lit up the whole world!

CAPTAIN CAT

All the women are out this morning, in the sun. You can tell it's Spring. There goes Mrs. Cherry, you can tell her by her trotters, off she trots new as a daisy. Who's that talking by the pump? Mrs. Floyd and Boyo, talking flatfish. What can you talk about flatfish? That's Mrs. Dai Bread One, waltzing up the street like a Jelly, every time she shakes it's slap slap slap slap. Who's that? Mrs. Butcher Beynon with her pet black cat, it follows her everywhere, miaow and all. There goes Mrs. Twenty­Three, important, the sun gets up and goes down in her dewlap, when she shuts her eyes, it's night. High heels now, in the morning too, Mrs. Rose Cottage's eldest Mae, seventeen and never been kissed ho ho, going young and milking under my window to the field with the nanny goats, she reminds me all the way. Can't hear what the women are gabbing round the pump. Same as ever. Who's having a baby, who blacked whose eye, seen Polly Garter giving her belly an airing, there should be a law, seen Mrs. Beynon's new mauve Jumper, it's her old grey Jumper dyed, who's dead, who's dying, there's a lovely day, oh the cost of soapflakes!

from UNDER MILK WOOD

Dylan Thomas