A Songwriter Within

(The author is a senior living in North House concentrating in English)

I'VE had hints cartooned in messy memories. Hints that vaguely suggest why the hell I'm here. On the third floor of Moors Hall, staring out at the garbage men and the cold sun moving across the morning. In other times there have been mornings on marble islands with a dive in the Aegean to wake me up. Mornings in Spanish fishing villages and on hot Nevada hilltops. There have been mornings with a woman which turned magically into afternoons-mornings that did kindly battle with the cynical didactic of the "Harvard Experience."

It is unpleasant here.

The day begins in fits and starts. In the thirsty morning. And all that movement stirs up the confusing perversion of dictated consciousness, and softness is gone.

Certainly there is more beyond Harvard than within it and one would be a fool not to be restless.

But living here, for whatever bureaucratically designated purpose, affords an unusual contact with a lot of wierd people (especially living at Radcliffe), and in that I find its major worth. In order to remain happy and to allow that contact, it has been helpful to balance the world of music and art with the world of Harvard-a world primarily antithetical to those things. And yet Harvard is not to be wholly damned because it does allow some room for them and, in spite of itself, some human inspiration.

Almost as much has changed as has stayed the same since freshman year. I used to brag about how little "qualified" I had been to get into Harvard. I suppose I thought it meant somehow that I was special in some more special way than the mass of brain-specialists here; and at the same time, that I possessed none of their obnoxious wizardry. I was not like these strangers who in the harsh Lamont light took on the look of glass giraffes. Yet somehow they fondled my fancy and drove me casually on through the rainy years and plunked me finally here-a Harvard senior in a world of monstrous resignations and boring assertions.

But the reverse snobbism dwindles with increased human understanding, and , for me, the lesson of these four years, is that a personal stability does not require total rejection of this place. For there is some good in practically everything on the peaceful side of experience. I feel friendly toward Harvard.

Harvard allows one to do luxuriously little of what it wants and still live with the silly comfort of getting a degree. What attention I did honestly pay to specific courses was adequately paralleled by a commitment to a vaguely decadent night club existence. Life was literally split between truck drivers and tutors, shifty club owners and sharp section leaders, drunken middle-aged divorcees and liberated women. South Boston crackers and black militant intellectuals; and between crowds trying to relax and students brutally trying to compete, between songs that often meant something to my life and papers that often argued with it. But the Harvard world is no less real than the other. In fact the complexities of individuals are amazingly the same. The legitimate realty of one world is lost only with a refusal to recognize the other.

Even at Radcliffe, joking stereotypes fade by moving in, no matter how unwillingly, and finding real live girls. The Cliffie may be called, brom a distance, the new rich bitch from the pools of Darien, wide-eyed bitch from the plains of Nebraska, bitch of bitches from the wastes of Suffolk County-and awarded the Penis Emmy for special effects in castration design. The women's lib man-caters.

But that's from fear at a distance. At the core, beyond the clutter of catch phrases and impudent imprudence, lie a bunch of people who want desperately to scrape away the sludge that covers everybody's sensitive humanity. It's no longer possible to be an English major out for a literary piece. If one does not look beyond the veneer of a "movement," one will not expand emotional contacts. And it is far easier to dump on things and people than to allow them an emotional hearing. Honest friendship allows an abandonment of the pretentious pose of self-reliance and a greater freedom to move within other people's emotional landscapes. Tenderness must be extended to the inner body. There is need in the steely eyes of a night club hooker and elegance in the bumbling adjustments of a Radcliffe freshman. Living at Radcliffe means more and more living with freshmen and sophomores and a few figity juniors. The bulk of the senior women are gone-worn and dissipated, seeking adventure in Winthrop or Mather or retreat at the Currier Hilton. And they are all women to be taken seriously, not just taken.

In fact, to be stark raving in love can be the best artistic basis. When you're in a rich, one to one love there's not much to say about it. It can't be sold or explained as seems to be the new trend. It's just generally nice. But it makes things tough sometimes because friends, like at Radcliffe, are not always just friends. The distinction can't be that concrete. Which is all beautiful except that that one particular full love resting with one person can't stand sharing. So it's one of the saddest things in the world to lose a friend because closeness puts her at a distance. Because friendship can grow on one part to something wider and more full of thick spacey potential than the other's situation could digest.

I am learning here at Harvard. But always it is through personalities on a personal basis. It is the lack of personality in the overall university structure which has kept me generally away from extreme academics. The and felt the excitement of otherwise only time I truly became a student and felt the excitement of otherwise petty intellectualizing was when I had a one-to-one junior tutorial (on Christopher Marlowe for God's sake) in which the excitement generated on a personal level. It is this distrust of impersonal programming, which makes the draft board, lurking in the wings ready to pounce off of its collective pudgy white buttocks, so despicable-even disregarding the business of hate and the wholesale murder it promotes. And it is the reason that even good or necessary action often promotes fear when labeled as a "movement."

There is a time when a change occurs, You are no longer a self-conscious bystander guiltily watching blacks and women (and section leaders) struggle for self-respect but you are part of the struggle because they are part of you. And lest that sound a bit too cosmically self-indulgent, what I mean to say is that whenever you reach a person as a true friend-the kind you can hug energy into and draw hope from-you're in the thick of it, baby! There is no longer the emphasis on a "cause"' because it sounds "just" to an American ear so carefully tuned to the omnipotence of maxims yet usually garnering only a vaguely distant "helpful" attitude. No, because when struggling people are an essential part of your whole life's definition, there is an implicit dedication.

It would be depressing to try to deal with Harvard objectively. It must be seen with the solemn reasonableness of a hooded executioner. Motion and sound is all. The picture is in the mind and there it is allowed to be what you wish. It can be beautiful if it is your own creation. Singing with the Black Flack Walbach Pack, or yakking with the nymphs of Holmes, holding firmly to love, and even firmer to an honest method of conversation with myself makes a substantial basis for potential creativity. I hope.

I'm learning, not giving prescriptions. It's a horrible thing to be followed. It makes you feel like you ought to know where you're going. But the direction is definitely away from structured school toward art. To bring people to the fullest of life, on a canvas yet beyond a canvas. True art extends in friendship. For art works back upon the artist and makes him move.

While at Harvard one must move within and beyond it. Some sort of balance would seem to be absolutely essential so as not to drown in the murky bureaucracy. For the grappling irons of post-Harvard experience do little good for a corpse of creativity left in the Charles.