University of California Berkeley - Blue and Gold Yearbook (Berkeley, CA)

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Michelle Manger

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Woman, age 27. She has been in Berkeley six years. I came to Berkeley in the fall of ' 67, because of grad school first of all. The move was very pragmatic on that level, but part of the choice was my interest in the Free Speech Movement. I was interested because Berkeley was sort of the vanguard of that, even in ' 67. I didn ' t stay here though. I got really claustrophobic around the end of spring quarter in ' 69, and I had to get out; it was sort of a survival measure. For a couple of years I was going back and forth between here and the East Coast, and that changed a lot of my feeling about Berkeley. When I felt like I could get out of here, then it was really nice to be here, but the first two years had a very closed feeling. In some ways, I think Berkeley was more self-contained then. There was a mythology holding it together, and there was a lot of overt action that made you feel you were in a very identified place. All of that made me need escape valves, but things are quieter and less organized and energy is more diffused now. When I first came here there was this great myth of openness and intimacy and people smiling. My house had a fire escape outside the kitchen window and people would climb up there and play their recorder into my kitchen and put flowers through the window and go through all these rituals. Well, at first they seemed to me to be beautiful and spontaneous and warm gestures, but I began to realize how tremendously lonely it made me to go through the Garden of Delights when it was in a way all cardboard. There were all these gestures and no back-up, no fire behind it. I don ' t understand what ' s going on right now since I ' m more inward than at earlier points. I take more time for myself, for creativity. I feel much less pressured from the outside now. When I first came here there seemed to be this great swallowing motion all the time. I remember sitting on Sproul Plaza at three in the morning in October during the Oakland Induction Center demonstration in ' 67 and actually there was this sound, this swallowing sound of people buzzing, talking, getting together for this all night watch to be there at six; people chanting and actually hearing that suction of a great and devouring sense of group identity. It can ' t just be discounted as mass psychology; there ' s really an important ritual aspect to it. Now, there are very few places to get that kind of level of ritual. When I first came here there was the celebration of the summer solstice and beautiful pastoral actions of people meeting together in the parks — you didn ' t know everybody but that didn ' t matter. Even demonstrations sometimes turned into a sort of pastoral action. There was a very conscious seeking of ritual on the part of a lot of people and sometimes it really worked. And when it worked, speaking for myself, it was really important to see that it could happen. It would be a shame if in this new cycle, whatever it is, that all that be lost.

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Francis Woods