Page Two
PERSPECTIVES
Page TwoPER SPECTTVF-S
Perspectives
Editor .............. Margery Wald
Associate Editors ... ....... Doris Cohen, Russ LaDue, Don Thornbury
Literary Staff:
Stan Bradshaw, Cid Corman, Don Curto, June Friedenberg,
Joan Lochner, June Miller, Dave Stewart
Art Editors .............................Marion Carleton, Leo Teholiz
Sophomore Staff
Marge Granse, Norma Levy, Doris Pfeffer, Henry Schmer
Advisory Board ... Arno L. Bader, Morris Greenhut, Allan Seager
e Mortis --
(A Metaphysical ABC)
Not, as they say, Ready
(meaning: Resigned, Prepared
But _garlanding the steady
Erne-Voices, mute and heard,
Bearing the ear glory,
Stinging the lock bright,
Bursting the lip eerie,
Flashing the heart sight.
So, for the thin Princes
and the children in Revolt -
Impartially, chores and dances
Proceed to seasonal halt.
Thence to the All (or the Nothing)
foreknown but never traced ...
The last kiss - splendid, frothing -
Is Sky's: Strange! Parent-Faced.
-Williai Gram
The Twenty-Third Elder
(The church of Moissac, France, has a carved portal over its main entrance
depicting the apocalyptic Christ with his four beasts and twenty four elders.)
I am the twenty-third elder
Of the tympanum of the church of Moissac.
Count and see--I crane my neck
Twisted to gaze upon His face.
They carved me so, the fools
And thus I sit, six centuries together,
My neck a barrel stave.
They fixed my eyes upon His own
Whence shows no love, no grace.
A rock, dumb, I pay tribute
To His pointed crown,
His fiery mace.
How my stoney eyes yearn to change
To see one flower
One willow lost in a stream
One flash, one golden gleam
Of bare, brown limbs in sunlight-
One delicate painting of Him
Bleeding on the Cross, all love, all anguish, all life-
No frozen, harsh commander
No apocalyptic revenger-
Blow sand against me, wind, and grind away my face.
Beat against my tortured legs, rain
Blind the fools who keep me in repair
Blot out my cramped pain, His
Bold face where no love is.
-Jean Reynolds
EDITORIAL
Saraband
Until the Doves call me
(which they in time will do)
above all else
I will love you.
Love you alone,
as long as the music bows
and the lean sky suffers
our private vows.
But when the grass turns alien
and the Doves begin their moan,
I ca tnot longer
love you alone.
-Willias Gram
"every fresh generation is a
new people . .
-Alexis de T ocqueville
OK ALEXIS, we have taken your
word for it-we are the fresh
generation, the new people. We have
moved more erect on our squat ends and
have bothered to assume the more un-
comfortable position of progress. And
now that we have made motions, let's
see what it is that we have put the
pencil to and ordered into print.
We have literature of no very high
order; we make no pretense about it,
though some of it is fine. We have gone
on the fallacious assumption that we
have the best writing that -the Univer-
sity of Michigan student-body has cur-
rently to offer in the way of fiction,
true-fiction, and mysterious verse. The
assumption is as false, of course. as
saying that the best writing is always
printed, for there is much that never
gets one inch beyond the author's head
and much that is lost in the fire of
mood, temperament, or chance. But we
have pulled together the best that peo-
ple have been willing to invest with us.
Such as it is, it is significant as a sign
of reawakening in the University, for
a university as much as a State needs
prodding to get its lazy carcass into
motion.
We confess our poke smells of ink;
and it must seem to many that a liter-
ary magazine of any sort is dedicated
to a particular audience, a small and
peculiar audience. It is. We are con-
cerned only with those people who
through care and thought can catch in
the writings of a new and quick gener-
ation some new insight into event and
society. We are preoccupied with try-
ing to treat the living to another birth,
for every bright eye that gathers action
and sense in its proper perspective sees
something that is worth another mind's
gathering; and this - when given - is
birth, as birth is new growth.
Someone will then hurl this rock at
us: "This is all very sweet, but if you
realize that your contents have the lim-
itations that inexperience and youth,
as well as some bit of compromising for
lack of matter, impose, o'v meaning-
ful - as regards PERSPECTIVES - is
thea bove and whatever may follow?"
But what is the situation in this light?
We have shown our aims and shall con-
tinue to do so in full awareness of our
essential weaknesses, and we shall
maintain those aims- We are unquest-
ionably the new people of a fresh gen-
eration and, with all our imperfections,
we move on and up. We recognize bet-
ter than any the boundaries that stand
high around us and stare at us forbid-
dingly, but we try nonetheless to get
as near our goal as is possible. And, if
we travel a little way forward, we shall
have made wise progress and wiser ef-
fort.
We try our hand at progress in a
sphere of writin, that is, by its nature,
round and full, of many continents of
thought. We hope to contain history as
well as art, criticism and literature,
philosophy and wit. We think they
can live together kindly.
In the midst of this world, our way
will not be the dark obscure one. But
since even editors disagree, it is likely
we shall take many roads, hoping by
some distant concurrence to reach the
forward road.
We agree though that there is a
tangle of beliefs today, that many half-
steps forward are being taken and a
quickly withdrawn, but we believe as
a body that in honoring only that writ-
ing which advances an idea clearly and
promisingly, which arrives with person-
al insight and stimulates our sensitiv-
ities, we believe we move with full steps
toward tomorrow.
And these aims and this belief are
coherent with the nature of the Uni-
versity. If we fail, it is the failure in
equal measure of the University and
the people who are part of it.
For now, we indulge in hope. But we
have stirred ourselves and if you do
likewise, we shall go a long way to-
gether toward what we shall call (at
this moment of optimism) a finer cul-
ture, one that is rich and fertile. It is
a matter worth effort for all of us,
reader and writer, editor and such, to
get up off our swollen haunches of
thought and get out of the fog, which is
only an overgrowth of dust, do a little
sweeping and sweating and then more,
and so go on.
Late Sunday
HE FEELS instinctively the certain fist of monday
beat its punchcard route through sunday's darkness: tears
have lost their use for him; he leans to midnight
for a final whiff of air: sleepy moonmoths
struggle in the closer evening of his room;
there are no lamps here behind perspiring streets:
only the dim face, unguided bugs, and outside
beside the irrepressible coffee-orange smell
of swill, two cats contend between starvation and
the body's private urge; their arguments in utter
mewl excite the nervous roots of terror in
his fertile brain (distraction is his futile menace);
he wants to soke, to hurl back time along the black
and lonely passages of night and night, but, struck
by a moth that fails the cigarette's bright target,
he quickly rubs the last stub of sunday out,
- retreats with tremulous haste into the desperate bed;
and feels likefear the fateful epithet of MAN.
--id Crman