Among the Intellectualoids/Agents of the New Age
Wooster, Martin Morse
AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS AGENTS OF THE NEW AGE rr he New Age movement in America 1 is hardly new. As the journalist Jay Kinney notes in an entertaining anthology, The Fringes of Reason (a...
...Other booths at the festival were harder to characterize...
...Before long, he's got his pupils sounding their own yawps...
...How, you ask...
...Keating's hero is Whitman, and he scrawls on the blackboard the famous line from "Song of Myself': "I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world...
...A few years ago, he enrolled in a course on New Age ideas, sponsored by the Air Force...
...But he was a jockey with lots to say...
...What does all this have to do with poetry...
...Stripped of its New Age rhetoric, by Martin Morse Wooster much of Ferguson's talk was quite reasonable: "The next level of joy" after personal fulfillment, she said, could best be reached by people working together to perform charitable acts, and she denied that Washington had all the answers to America's problems...
...These ideas, the project guaranteed, would be donated to the United Nations...
...By way of comparison, the Guide lists thirty-nine spas and ashrams and a mere fourteen suppliers of vegetarian pet food...
...He was introduced by his wife, Geri, who explained that Weaver had recently been building his dream house...
...We're in a shift of consciousness," Weaver said...
...Secrets of the Visionary Life...
...Passion—that's the ticket...
...He feeds them a purely Romantic conception of things: the poet as savage, as redskin...
...And at the "Heart-to-Heart Festival," which I recently attended in Washington, there Martin Morse Wooster, formerly an editor at Harper's Magazine and the Wilson Quarterly, is director of Northfield Associates...
...Fully a third of the listings in the 1989 Guide to New Age Living are political, including twentyfive environmental groups, twenty-four peace outfits, thirty-five "social justice' organizations (among them the Institute for Policy Studies, self-described in the Guide as an "unbiased center for scholars and activists"), twenty-three antihunger groups, and five animalrights groups...
...He enlisted several of his co-workers to create, by means of meditation, a "Peace Shield" that would eventually convert hawks through a "Spiritual Defense Initiative...
...For the New Left, politics was life...
...American Indians presented a peace pipe...
...rr he next morning, I attended a session featuring Ed Winchester, who has spent most of his life as an accountant for the Pentagon...
...Pentagon...
...I supported Greenpeace because there was an urging within me to heal the planet...
...She wouldn't explain what her book is about, but through her research she has compiled a large number of uplifting quotations, most of which she read to the audience...
...It is their quest to connect with "the newly rediscovered spiritual side of things," as one New Ager puts it, that has brought them flocking to environmental, feminist, and peace groups...
...We have a change in the reality around us, which is always motivated by a need...
...He boldly came out for love and against greed...
...One woman offered proof that AIDS could be cured by ingesting large quantities of watercress...
...He also accepts credit for exposing the procurement scandals last year through meditation...
...Cost: less than $3,000 ($2,995...
...The day's closing speaker was Dennis Weaver, the star of "Gunsmoke," "McCloud," "Gentle Ben," and other television shows...
...We're like snowflakes, you know," Weaver said, "all different, but we come out of the same snowbank...
...You'd react— and that's what's happening with the planet...
...Franciscan and Buddhist monks chanted...
...We are food for worms, lads...
...Although it's important to have responsible government, it really truly is the reaching out of all of us that makes a difference...
...All of the arrangements inside the Soviet Union—visits with healers, psychics, "mystical artists," and people who swim in Gorky Park in January, along with a tour of the KievPechery monastery (which holds "the remains of monks whose mummies still emanate spiritual energy")—would be handled by Intourist...
...Then came the clincher...
...There were a few more questions along these lines, in answer to which Weaver revealed that he was a vegetarian and had been practicing yoga since 1959 (when America still knew him as the humble Chester on "Gunsmoke...
...These boys are now fertilizing daffodils," whispers Keating (himself a Welton alumnus) as the camera examines one of the old photographs in extreme close-up...
...And as befits the work of a good bureaucrat, the chart didn't make much sense...
...The planet isn't dying...
...Returning to the U.S., Vernon set herself up in business as a New Age travel agent, taking nearly a thousand truth-seekers on twenty-nine missions to the Soviet Union over the past five years...
...Set in 1959, it's about a group of sensitive, intelligent, teenaged boys at the hundred-yearold Welton School, "the best preparatory school in the United States," whose enthusiastic young English teacher, John Keating (Robin Williams), teaches them not just to appreciate but to love poetry...
...And those spaces filled the room, so that there was a tide of consciousness sweeping the room...
...A lot of people say the earth is dying, that rain forests are being destroyed...
...On her tours she has met with "healers, psychics, underwater communicators, refuseniks, and dissidents...
...For he certainly doesn't teach his students any other criteria for great poetry (not on screen, at least): there's no class discussion here, no exegesis, no explication de texte...
...Then the floor was opened up for questions...
...Throughout these peculiarly conceived lessons, poetry itself is reduced to the role which Philistines have always accorded it, that of rudimentary Source of Inspiration: Keating—hovering busily over his bemused, acquiescent, and increasingly adoring boys like a neuby Bruce Bawer rotically possessive mother—tosses off isolated lines from great writers as if they were fortune-cookie maxims or desk-calendar Thoughts for the Day...
...He sounds very New Age to me," Ferguson said cheerfully...
...We don't read and write poetry because it's cute," Keating tells the boys, "we read and write poetry because we're human, and humans feel passion...
...As she spoke, her phrases began to mingle with others in my mind: "The reaching out of all of us . . . a kinder, gentler nation . . . thousands of solutions . . . a thousand points of light . . ." Was Marilyn Ferguson a Republican, I wondered, or was George Bush a New Ager...
...You see more earthquakes and tornadoes...
...If Ronald Reagan can do it," someone called out, "you can do it...
...The average Pentagon worker, he said, starts his career with a flat "awareness baseline...
...But it was not until the rise of the counterculture in the 1960s that the New Age movement took an interest in politics, although it adopted a slightly different attitude from that of its halfbrothers and -sisters on the New Left...
...Make your lives extraordinary...
...during another, he leads them into a courtyard to try out various idiosyncratic ways of walking (so that they can learn not to be conformists...
...It was the best "maybe yes, maybe no" answer I'd ever heard at a Washington conference—final proof, as if any were needed, that politics and the New Age are meant for each other...
...Earth's brightest, bravest, Power Dawn...
...Seize the day...
...She cited Thoreau, Emerson (a New Age favorite), Thomas Paine, William James, Thomas Edison, Paul Newman, her cleaning lady, and inspirational passages from Reader's Digest...
...Any chance of a political campaign...
...atently, director Peter Weir (whose previous films include Gallipoli, The Year of Living Dangerously, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and Witness) and screenwriter Tom Schulman want us to love Keating...
...the New Vrindiban Community of West Virginia sold The Joy of No Sex ("50,000 copies in print...
...At one time, Vernon led a typical New Age life, meditating daily, avoiding the world...
...Pentagon...
...It's reacting to what we have perpetrated...
...Why did you decide to work for Greenpeace...
...The first Indian gurus came to the U.S...
...Sri Chimnoy, a Bangladeshi best known for his annual peace meditations at the UN, visited Winchester and composed a ballad in his honor...
...When he enters the Universal C, the meditating bureaucrat— or "spiritual warrior" —"has no consciousness...
...a research and consulting firm in Silver Spring, Maryland was likewise a heavy proportion of leftwing groups with their own display booths: the National Peace Institute, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the Christic Institute, and many more...
...Winchester has become something of a New Age megastar...
...He's got an architect called the 'Prince of Trash,' " she said, "and he's going to stack old tires up like bricks and stucco it with old aluminum cans...
...own...
...Look back a hundred years, we had no radios, no televisions, no compact discs, no acid rain, and we never had these environmental problems...
...Pentagon...
...In Russian schools she has sung works by Joan Baez and Pete Seeger`the Soviets' great heroes," she called them—and her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Mira, has been interviewed on Soviet television...
...The lesson is plain: strive, seek, find, don't yield...
...No Alexander Pope on this reading list...
...Why, everything, of course...
...Splitfoot...
...Vernon invited us to become "citizen diplomats" by signing up for her next "transformational journey" to "bond" with the "truly kind, giving, loving, zestful, warm-hearted, spiritual" Soviets...
...To this end, they load the dice grotesquely against the opposition— i.e., the other adults in the movie...
...he said...
...The first channelers, for example, were members of the Fox family of Hydesville, New York, who in 1848 achieved national renown by communicating with the dead (most notably with a "Mr...
...Winchester claims that his meditators are responsible for the "breakthrough in the reunification process" between North and South Korea...
...And the first journal to identify itself with the New Age—the New Age Magazine—published its premiere issue in 1914...
...Which greet them, not surprisingly, with open arms...
...I don't think I'm going to have that urge, but I don't want to limit myself...
...and when the most unassertive boy in the class, Todd Anderson (Ethan Hawke), proves to be too bashful to compose and read aloud a poem of his own, Keating drags him in front of the class and agitates him into inventing one on the spot...
...The audience was deeply moved...
...He was quickly converted, and committed himself to solving the problems of national defense through yoga...
...He has a boy recite the closing lines of Tennyson's "Ulysses," with their description of "heroic hearts,/Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will/To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield...
...Seize the day, boys...
...Author of the New Age blockbuster The Aquarian Conspiracy, Ferguson has for the past six years been working on a new book she calls The New Common Sense...
...The crowd egged him on...
...Pentagon...
...Weaver paused, and gave the audience a beatific smile...
...q THE TALKIES POETRY IN MOTION Dead Poets Society is the kind of movie you want to like...
...She even held Gorbachev's hand...
...There are going to be hundreds of thousands of solutions, not one solution...
...Instead he conducts unorthodox exercises: during one class period, he has the boys take turns standing on his desk (so that they can see things from a different perspective...
...Keating declares dramatically, and bids his charges look closely at the faces of the Welton students of a century ago— innocent, hopeful faces not unlike their Bruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer...
...There was a space between his thoughts," she said...
...What accounts for the mysterious power of these Pentagon meditators...
...Thoreau, he exclaims, wrote that "most men lead lives of quiet desperation": don't let that happen to you...
...the Global Cooperation Project, combining the intellectual candlepower of Jimmy Carter, Peter Gabriel, Barbara Jordan, Ken Kesey, and Ben Kingsley, asked those attending the festival to organize "creative groups" to "brainstorm positive ideas about a better world...
...He went on in this vein for some time...
...For the New Agers, politics is therapy...
...Do you think the New Age will ever take place...
...Pentagon...
...38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1989 America's sovereign victory horn...
...I can't think of a more worthy depository...
...Swamis and gurus from all over have made Winchester's office a regular stop on their worldwide tours...
...As befits a good bureaucrat, he had a chart...
...and as she did so, "I could feel that there is a great light in the world—and it's coming out of Russia...
...Meditation, however, causes the bureaucrat's mind to leap into the "field of Universal C," C being the "coherence factor," a "measure of spiritual force," that produces the "Peace Shield effect...
...located in the plains of Colorado, it is made exclusively from garbage...
...in 1893 as part of the Chicago World's Fair...
...First, they give Welton an unbelievably cold and intractable old headmaster THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1989 39...
...The poem isn't very good, needless to say, but it's peeled straight from the gut, and (as Keating makes clear) that's what counts...
...As the journalist Jay Kinney notes in an entertaining anthology, The Fringes of Reason (a "Whole Earth Catalog" to New Age practices), "nearly every spiritual or cultural phenomenon associated with the term dates back at least several centuries...
...What would you do if someone poured acid rain on your head...
...As I watched the soldiers marching, my knees trembled with fear...
...Pentagon...
...Dozens of newspapers, including the Washington Post and the New York Times, have made him the subject of profiles ("PENTAGON PSYCHICS BUILDING PEACE SHIELD AROUND USA, " screamed the tabloid National Examiner...
...And I asked: `Where is this fear coming from?' . . . I saw that my fear was primordial, rooted in the inner society...
...This is a complaint that has been made against Pentagon bureaucrats for years...
...But the high point of her life, she said, was when she met with Mikhail Gorbachev at a "worldwide ceremony of peace' in 1987...
...She finished her introduction with a look into the future`If I don't show up next year, it's because Dennis is going to arrange to send me out on a UFO and not bring me back...
...Some of this," Winchester said with a shrug, "may sound like nonsense...
...In his talk, Winchester tried to explain...
...Himalayan military leadership...
...A trim, fit man in his fifties, he wore a sky-blue shirt with red and purple panels that made him look like a New Age jockey...
...Who knows what's in my life...
...Love—you know, that's really the answer to every problem on the face of the earth...
...Rama Vernon, director of the Center for Soviet-American Dialogue, was the featured speaker at the first "Heart-to-Heart" session I attended...
...You shatter the world's indolence-sleep...
...Here's how: on the first day of classes, he steers them into a corridor lined with photographs of earlier Welton graduating classes, and has one of the boys read aloud the first lines of the Robert Herrick poem "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" ("Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,/Old time is still a-flying...
...And Gorbachev spoke...
...But then in 1984 she went to the Soviet Union...
...She was standing in Red Square, she said, watching Soviet soldiers do the goosestep, when "I came face to face with my programmed preconceptions of the Evil Empire...
...Among the positive ideas already submitted by previous creative groups: "Harmony, trust, respect, understanding, cooperation, and ice cream every day...
...Vernon was followed by Marilyn Ferguson, a perky pixie mysteriously encased in what seemed to be a babyblue quilt...
...I seem to be quoting a lot today," she said...
...I can't help myself...
...and then Weaver himself bounded onto the stage...
Vol. 22 • August 1989 • No. 8
