Archbishop Mitty High School - Excalibur Yearbook (San Jose, CA)

Page 13 text:

Jon Costella :ik is .-ag J .sa ' . 75 ....--.-.. .. , t . , a r 'Q ' gsgvgr ,Q rising: ? 4 - , i-ar. K., Q lp.: L' ft .Lf d A ,. , .Q t ,,,- Ka . .. , . 5 K iv l . ' f f:'rt'f3gsff W .,., N S'-St. l7'I-- A - 5 . X X m f - Hog, :ASQ A .,. ...L . t X.-L ., s, K ' ' '. A -Qi, 2:1 X . 1 Q A .,.,....5., yt Y -- . a x 5 ,... gi . X . hs Q.. fbi V A T',f' xt: 3 R ' rift? F W 'Q i' fi. ' .. fr -'-' is M -M ' 'X' fmt A - 'T Q i S :.'2'f,,? s ' 'U ' 4' V i' ,-J' ' 39. t ' ' ..- X ' . .. .. .. ,k,. I K 'x ' - w . -' f .I.:.a,'uu rvf '-'1 ' . '1 ..f s'- V Bill Cotton N' J' . 1-yn-vs I should be all for science. But there is no more need to see nature either sentimen- tally or scientifically than there is to see paintings, or listen to music, or enjoy a game or a sport in one of those two fixed manners. And here, perhaps, there is a stumbling block particular to the American mind, with its inbom pragmatism , its demand for some immediate utility in both the object and its pursuit, and its corollary as- sumption that the more facts you know about a thing the more there is likely to be in it for you. Europeans enjoy appearances. Americans enjoy things better if they know how they work --and of course knowing that involves knowing names. This obses- sion with labeling and functioning, and the corresponding impatience with the quieter pleasure of mere experiencing, is an aspect of what an American friend of mine once described to me as the single deepest fault of the national culture. He called it a lack of poetry, and then amplified the phrase by saying. We try and turn everything into machinery. Over the years I have come to see this criticism as a clue to a great deal of what is unhappy in American socie- ty. This is not the place to discuss whether my friend is right in general. But I would choose unpoet:ic as probably the best word to des- cribe the prevailing attitude to natural life in the United States just as poetic best describes the great exceptions to that gen- eralization, the Audubons and the Thoreaus. Poetry, alas, is something you can't sell. All you can do is suggest thatit'is out there, if people will only ind the time and the right frame of mind and discover for them- selves that enjoyment does not require sci- entific knowledge. Myself, I regard nature very largely as Mark jeff Dave Tony Doug Coupens Cronin Crooks Crusco Denham t 1 x at ff-

Page 12 text:

BY TRUCK OR AUTO r-ann, Q is via 'L l ...- 1 ,Q W s be there. And they have to be taught to miss it if it isn't there, the Way they would miss electricity or the water supply if that were cut off. The kind of seeing that this requiresis much more esthetic and imaginative than scien- tific. So for a start I should like to see the scientific element in our school-teaching about nature severe ly reduced and its place taken by study of the attitudes and vision of the many great painters, poets and writers who have treated the subject. They are who we need most to copy and to learn from, not the scientists. You can always tell the man who wants to experience na- ture from the one playing at scientist. The former will have granted equality to the whole scene, both in terms of the various families of natural life and in terms of the statistical commonness and rarity of what he is seeing. He won't, in short, be blind to all but his own field. He will know that he has to observe with both the eye of the flea and the eye of the elephant, as the Indian proverb goes. We all see too much with a human eye and to a human scale. He will see the moth's uncurled proboscis and the ancient glacier bed, the smallest and the largest, and all in one glance. He will see forms, colors, structures, see personal, artistic and literary allusions, see whole poetries where the, pseudo-scientist sees only names and matter for notes. One of the curses of our times is that this poetic approach has come to be ridiculed as something rather romantic. It is true that without any scientific check, such an atdtude can lead into the turgid bayous of nature-corner sentiment or to the equally nauseating anthropomorphic scripts of the Disney nature films and the kind of com- mentary one hears at Marineland. If such cheap sentimentality were the only alter- native to the scientific approach to nature, jim . Joe Tom Bart Bill C2S1igDaI11 Cesario Ciolino Clanton Clarke . . . .st , xp i -it ' l 'ff V . ' f 3 ' A ff ' -' - 'Y J. - .' 3 L Lmqb X f' f'.hisf!4' Steve Connelly s t 1 Mike Corica. at Y as

Page 14 text:

OR BY CYCLE therapy. It is where I go to get away from words, from people, from artificial things. It is affection and friendship, too, the re- currence, the return in the cycle of the year of certain flowers, beasts, birds and insects I am fond of. It is sounds. It is cur- lew on a winter's evening, as I lie in bed. It is the sparrows that chirp on my roof each morning. Above all it is the familiar nat- ural life that lives and breeds round my house--the kind of life any rarity-hunting naturalist would not even notice, it is so ordinary. But I have trained myself, partly through reading about Zen, partly through thinking on the texts ofsuch men as Thoreau, not to take anything in my thousand-times- walked-around garden as familiar. l'm not in the least a religious person, butl suppose the process is something like prayer. You have to work at it. I once told a Bene- dictine monk that prayer was incomprehen- sible to me. Yes, he said, it was to me once. It becomes comprehensible only through endless repetition. This, I am convinced, is what practical conservation needs behind it, or beneath it, if it is to work: a constantly repeated awareness of the mysterious other universe of nature in every civilized community. A love, or at least a toleration, of this other universe must reenter the urban ex- perience, must be accepted as the key gauge of a society's humanity, and we must be sure that the re-entry and the acceptance is a matter of personal, not public, respon- sibility. So much of our communal guilty conscience is taken up by the cruelty of man to man that the crime we are inflict- ing on nature is forgotten. Fortunately there seem to be many signs in the United States that this lesser crime against natural life at last is being recognized for what it is-- not the lesser crime at all, but the real source of many things we cite as the major mistakes of recent history. You may think there is very little connection between spraying insecticide over your flower-beds because everyone else in your street does over a Viet- the same and spraying napalm namese village because that's the way war is. But many more things than we know start in our own backyards. Social aggression starts there, and so does social tolerance. ! 'A 'V V .W ' B 14 rw. y 1' Bob Mike Eric Vince john Di.Marco DiPietro Dippel Doherty Doirou D r:.:k i f K y ., .. K it 9 K , 4 .Qs K . Q A. ,Ng g V, gjfpfx f Qui pl, if Mike Dougherty 1 M v 5222 ...-fl ,ff Mark Drohman