The Only Good Fight There Is

“if you’re going to try,/ go all the way./ there is no other feeling like that./ you will be alone with the gods/ and the nights will flame with/ fire./ do it, do it, do it./ do it./ all the way all the way./ you will ride life straight to/ perfect laughter, its/ the only good fight there is.”

—Charles Bukowski, “roll the dice”

On Monday Aylee presented her project on Bronson Alcott and the “Fruitlands” community. Before you laugh about a place called Fruitlands, you have to know that it was actually a pretty amazing place, situated near Boston during the height of the Transcendentalist Movement in America. The founding of Fruitlands itself is evidence of the human willingness to break away from society and try to live life in absolute accordance with one’s values; and also a demonstration of the virtues and difficulty of living in such an extreme manner.

Bronson Alcott, Lousia May’s father, has been ridiculed in time’s backward gaze. (A lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking if you ask me). Alcott was an amazingly high-principled man. First, in “The Dial,” a literary magazine central to the Transcendentalist movement, he wrote his “Orphic Sayings.” Some of us might take a cynical view of the scribblings of a religious ecstatic; on the other hand, if we are open-minded and non-judgmental, who could not be inspired by a man who said: “Love designs, thought sketches, action sculptures the work of the spirit. Love is divine, conceiving, creating, completing all things. Love is the Genius of Spirit.”

Then he started the Temple School, a radical experiment in education. He believed that his students had genius in them, and his job was to find it. Unlike other teachers of his time, he didn’t practice corporal punishment on his students; he even had students hit him when they were bad. In accordance with his values and the values of the Temple School, he admitted an African-American child into the school. When parents protested, rather than back down, he held firm; however, the school then fell apart.

From Aylee’s presentation, we saw how miserably his next experiment, Fruitlands, failed. They ran out of food and had to disband the community within seven months. However, they were going to try and, to borrow Bukowski’s words, “go all the way.”

Sometimes going all the way like that means one will be alone with the Gods, or simply desolately alone. We weren’t sure if they made it to the place where they were alone with the gods, but they did go “all way all the way.” Aylee asked us if we would have wanted to live there. Many of us said yes, it would have been a great chance to see an alternative way to live, but that living like that has drawbacks. One view held that if you go that far way from the society of which you are a part, you no longer have the input of conflicting ideas. On the other hand, going all the way to live out one's highest intentions also could mean that one has found the core of one’s deepest ideas and no longer needs the input of outer society. The question then became: do we want to live in a society, or a classroom, that is filled with conflicting ideas and opposing thoughts? Or do we want to live in a purely harmonious place where we all agree in our core beliefs and in the way we each live out our lives?

Bryn wrote: “I think I would love to be free of society and the life that I lead here. It would be a chance to live away from the world, but together with people who wanted to be free too. To try to be different and to step away from the earth for a while, to know how to live with nothing, but to try to find what is in that nothing. To find truth in the smallest, hardest things is actually what I want to find.”

On Wednesday Sarah presented her project on the life of Henry David Thoreau, who said what we have been proud to think about here this year: “There is no remedy for love but to love more.” She told us about his childhood, his schooling, his teaching, and his “going to the woods to live deliberately” at Walden. We read aloud two children’s books, “Henry Builds a House” and “Henry Hikes to Fitchburg.” She sketched out his life, his ideas, his influences, the list of those he influenced, and his critics. At the end of the project she sent us outside to be Thoreau-esque, to go sit in the woods and contemplate a single small thing. Everyone scattered into the woods to contemplate what he or she could find. When we all came back in, we brought back a pinecone, a pine-cone seed, a piece of bark, a leaf with droplets of dew, a green fern leaf, a dead fern, a red berry, a pebble, a beech leaf, and, in the palm of Bryn’s hand, a seed-weed flower-pod thing. Sarah asked us: What do the small things we brought in from the woods have to do with Utopia? What does Thoreau’s life have to do with Utopia?

Each student put into words his or her understanding of what Sarah had told us and had us do. Get to bare essentials. Make small things “be what we need.” He did not think or talk about it, he did it. He believed in looking at the things he had, not what he thought he needed to get. He looked at things outside of the normal “groove. Going “away” to look a things. Look at something insignificant to see more, to see how much more can be seen in a small thing. HDT showed us how to look better. “Television” for him was nature. He took his self out of the complex world. A showed how a “room full of people crowding and talking at once is not as important as a room of two people where the words have room to bounce around to be heard.”

He made his own utopia in the woods and in his mind, and he inspired others to see and try to replicate the process. He was a patron saint of original thinking. He did not try to organize a squad to do his action, he just did it. A how-to guide for a minority to oppose the system. He found the god in little things. He left life to live. Focused on one single fragile thing. One can understand something by getting away from it or by living in the absence of it. He cold not change the way things were, but he changed the way he looked at things. Or, as Rider put in the terms of the little objects we brought in from the woods: “This pebble is not just one thing, or one color, it is many things, and many colors.”

I don’t know if Bronson Alcott or Thoreau rode life straight to perfect laughter. But we are trying to learn that there is always something else better than we could imagine. Finding it means mostly learning how to look better. Looking better, and going all the way.