The Ancestors Step out of the Dreamtime and Back into the Palm Court.

The Ancestors Step out of the Dreamtime and Back into the Palm Court.

(Illustrations deleted: if you want an illustrated version write me and I'll send it to you by e-mail)

David B. Schwartz, ‘66

The Australian Aborigines speak of jiva or guruwari, a seed power deposited in the earth. In the Aboriginal world view, every meaningful activity, event, or life process that occurs at a particular place leaves behind a vibrational residue in the earth, as plants leave an image of themselves as seeds…As with a seed, the potency of an earthly location is wedded to the memory of its origin.

In the Aboriginal world view, every event leaves a record in the land. Everything in the natural world is a result of the actions of the archetypal beings, beings whose actions created the world.

-Ellie Crystal

We sat on the wall, old friends, just as we had done in the sixties when the Palm Court and New College were new. Except that now we were in our sixties ourselves, our deep familiarity and sense of ownership of this place conflicting with hesitancy over intruding upon the commons of the students who now made this home. There were forty entering classes between our time and theirs. The complete student body had changed ten times; ten generations from us. Many of us had children older than these students. Yet sitting on the wall it was still undeniably our home, the soil from which our original tribe had sprung, and all generations of the tribe since that time.

When I drove into the funky old Lido Beach resort that was our reunion base, my heart leapt at all of the familiar faces sitting around the second floor balcony, outside the room with the keg that John Daugherty had set up. My closest friends, of course, were immediately familiar. We had spent the intervening years in close contact, getting married in each other’s houses, being informal aunts and uncles to each other’s kids, holding each other as we went through traumatic divorces. It’s been that movie The Big Chill, on a larger and longer scale. When our old friend Roger Peters was dying of melanoma in Durango, Colorado, John Hart and I flew from the Northeast into Albuquerque and rented large motorcycles, so we could blast up his driveway just as we all used to do at his place at the North end of Longboat Key. It was, he said later, as if his New College youth came, kicking gravel, back into his life.

There in the Palm Court we dedicated a memorial brick to him, with an injunction he had once directed at a campus cop who objected to him pulling his Volvo P118 into the walkway between the wall and third court: “Touch that car and I’ll call a real cop!” We toasted him with Slivovitz, a Yugoslavian plum brandy/airplane fuel for which we had once shared considerable enthusiasm. I forget why.

Other friends and classmates I didn’t recognize initially, until the first word was out of their mouths. Our gathering out on that Lido balcony was an instant re-tribalization of the group who had arrived when there was not much college to speak of. Sitting there feeling a blissful and complete acceptance greater than anything I have known in the intervening years, it was clear that pretty much everyone was feeling the same thing. I leaned over to Charity. “What is this that we are all feeling?” I asked her. She looked back at me and replied simply. “It’s unconditional love.”

The Creation Myth

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What astonished me as we sat on the wall that once was ours was that the current students actually wanted to talk with us. They were keenly interested in who we were. In fact, we could connect immediately. We spoke the same dialect. It was clear that I could connect with an 18-year-old first-year student more readily than I can connect with 98 percent of all of the people whom I meet. We had a common language, a common culture. And the students were deeply curious about the origins of that culture. They were full of questions:

Did you have Walls and PCP’s? (Palm Court Parties)

Is it true that you went to class naked?

Is New College as good now as it was then?

And, finally, and movingly: “Are you proud of us?”

All tribes and cultures have their creation myths. Margaret Mead herself had visited and pronounced New College not a college, but a tribe. It was, in fact, more than a little Samoan. I realized that here an extraordinary event was happening. While the ancestors of aboriginal tribes are lost to the mists of time, here we ancestors of the tribal village of the Palm Court were stepping out of the mists solid and alive. We were the ancestors, come to earth. They could ask us about the creation myth and we could tell them how it actually was. We were there.

We could remember when the palm trees were young, and so were we. We recalled when the Pei dorms stood as an island among scrub and old WWII barracks, when we walked or raced our Honda 50s over to College Hall for dinners, watching the sun set through the windows as dolphins swam along the shoreline. We remembered the first-year “core” program, which everybody had to take. Back then the academic year was eleven months long, and you graduated in three years, except if you were male and could be rewarded for early graduation by being drafted and sent to Vietnam.

I suppose I knew in retrospect that we students had in fact co-created the academic philosophy and structure of the college, along with the founders and the faculty. But it had not occurred to me until I talked with students this time that we alone had founded the unique student life of the college. We had come up with a certain way of living together, imaginatively unique, that has reached full flower today. It could have been different: we could have been dropped into those Pei dorms in the middle of sleepy Sarasota and come up with Lord of the Flies. But it didn’t happen that way.

From our rude scratchings back then, a vibrant jiva culture had taken root, winding around and up the palm trees for generation after generation of students. No, we didn’t have “PCPs;” we didn’t even know what the term meant. In the beginning, we had just hung out and danced in the Palm Court. Maybe somebody would put some stereo speakers in the window of the corner third court room. There weren’t many of us back then. These early spontaneous gatherings had grown into the Walls and PCPs: the major and minor tribal feasts around which the seasons revolved.

Like aboriginal landscape, each element of the campus, especially the Pei dorms, was etched with the communal life of the first inhabitants. Around this symbolic topography the tribal rituals of New College students have continued to flourish. The vibrational residue of our life together so long ago still persisted in this place.

The students’ question: “Is it as good now?” stuck in my mind. We are used to the nature of creation myths, which can so often point back to a simpler and purer time than the corrupted present. The sixties and the early years of the college were a heady and exciting time, it was true. It is one of the great blessings of my life to be part of it. But the romantic way we can tend to view the past can obscure the fact that, for pioneers of any new activity, life by definition is hard.

The first class hadn’t even the Pei dorms. The college was yet unaccredited. Just outside the bubble the administrators maintained for us the school was on the verge of going broke. We thought of ourselves as liberated, but in fact we were children of the fifties. So, like the 1967 “Summer of Love,” the New College experience for us was as unimaginably distant from our prior experience as an acid trip is from a martini lunch. In this vast sea change some of us just didn’t make it. There were a lot of casualties – probably many more than in current times, when there are so many safety ropes and staff guides to keep students away from the deeper crevasses. We had the Moolah of the Vietnam War hanging over our very lives. Friends got sucked up and perished. The country approached the beginnings of what felt like incipient civil war. “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” the saying went then.

We were twice thirty now, but the students seemed to somehow trust us.

The morning after sitting on the wall with the students, we talked about what we had seen. Somebody pointed out that the students seemed to have a lot of self-confidence. “How different from our own experience! We had zilch in that department, “ somebody said. I also noticed that every conversation had been initiated and led by women. It seemed natural, and good. But the women gathered with us at this reunion pointed out how different it was from our own time. “They take for granted things we couldn’t even imagine” said Kathy, a feminine force who played second banana to no man, even in 1964. It was all true.

When students asked us if the college was still essentially as we remembered it, I asked them: “Have you ever seen a multiple-choice test at New College?” They all laughed. What a ridiculous question! And there was another event. Emeritus professor Dr. Knox, upon spotting John O’Neill, who had dropped out without finishing his thesis in the late sixties, practically grabbed him by the lapels and demanded, “John, when are you going to get that thesis in?” Everyone laughed. Then somebody asked Dr. Knox – “”Hey, they wouldn’t still take it after 40 years, would they?” “Sure we would,” Dr. Knox replied. Where else could such a thing even be possibly true?

The most memorable moment for me came when a knot of students – clearly close friends – came up to a group of us ancestors, friends since the Creation. “The wonderful thing,” I explained to them, gesturing to our little group, is that we have remained close friends for all of the years since we were here.” I reached out and gave John Hart a one-armed hug. They all looked at each other. “Do you mean,“ a young woman said hesitantly, that we might all still be friends in forty years?” “Yes,” I replied. The students almost trembled with the thought. They all hugged each other excitedly, and ran off to whatever adventure might be next. I could just guess.

How can we be ancestors? I still feel about twenty years old in the core of my being, truth be told. Especially when I’m around my fellow grey-haired ancestors. There is a line from Coleridge I have kept since I left New College for the “real world:”

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke – Ay! And what then?

Holding my flower tightly, I boarded a jet home for Ithaca, that oasis of the sixties where old hippies rule and where I feel most at home, save one vibrant Palm Court in Sarasota, Florida. For there is where the ancestral tongue is still spoken and the dreamtime periodically surfaces out of the creation myth and treads at night on Welch tiles under an orange-juice sky.