4 page newsletter. Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard" performance marked the beginning of Visitor's week activities. John Buchard of MIT gave a lecture on the problems of American public housing. Announcement of Miss Yella Pessl's hapiscord recital and Dr. Albert Einstein's visit to campus on April 27 and as well as a few quotes of his well wishes for the campus and community. Other announcements include lectures and new hires and college notes.
Black Mountain College Newsletter
Number 13 May 1941
Second Annual Visitors’ Week
The Cherry Orchard
The presentation of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard”, on Friday evening, April 25, marked the beginning of the Visitors’ Week activities. Black Mountain College programs are attracting people from an increasingly greater area and the audience for “The Cherry Orchard” included guests from Raleigh, Marion, Canton, and Charlotte as well as from Asheville and Black Mountain.
The play, generally considered to be Chekhov’s greatest, deals with a phenomenon he saw continually taking place around him: the death of a culture, and the failure of its members to realize that it was dying. Taking the enormous, beautiful, but completely useless cherry orchard on the Ranevsky estate as a symbol of the decadent culture of the Russian aristocracy, he shows the inevitability of change and progress. That the cherry orchard and the life about it are beautiful there is no doubt; that they must go is just as certain. Yet, as in all periods of history, the people to whom the orchard means so much refuse to understand that their era is dying, that historical change is necessary and perpetual.
The play has been called both tragedy and comedy. It is certain that there is pathos in the utter inability of Madame Ranevsky and her brother to adjust to changing times. And also in the assumption by Lopahkin, peasant turned merchant, final purchaser of the estate, that the future lies only in his new way of life, in the building of villas, the accumulation of wealth. But whether this is tragedy is debatable. For Peter Trophimov, young student who sees the world in continual change, the action of the play is no tragedy, but rather a vindication. And the outlook is an optimistic one. Trophimov says, “Mankind marches forward, perfecting his world…and if we do not see that more perfect world, what of that? At least we will have shown others the way.” There is tragedy, then, only for the Ranevsky family- and perhaps not really for them; perhaps it is just sadness, a hard awakening to realities. The basic theme of the play is not a tragic one, but rather the inevitability- the change that must come, that is necessary and good even though what seemed fine and beautiful and permanent dies in the process.
Problems of Housing
Saturday morning in Lee Hall Lobby, John Burchard, Director of Housing Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-author of The Evolving House, talked to the College and its guests on housing. Mr Burchard first pointed out the necessity for a study of housing needs and for relating these needs to American industrial methods. He indicated four ways in which it might be possible to obtain better shelter than now exists. One is through a raising of average real family income. The second is by increasing the amount of money a family is able to allocate to rent. Both of these seem highly impractical at the moment. A third method is reduction of economic rent. But the only possibly way at the present, he said, is to bring about a reduction of building costs. The reduction of erection expense for a dwelling unit from $4,000 to $3,000 would produce a far greater increase in the percentage of families that could afford such a unit than would a similar reduction in interest, land cost or taxes. The alternative is subsidy.
It must be remembered, he said, that there is no simple approach to housing; slum conditions have sociological and psychological causes as well as economic ones, and therefore may continue even after economic causes are removed.
Mr Burchard deplored the lack of variety in American public housing. He explained that the United States Housing Authority had been so compromised by the bill establishing its work that it was unable to carry on really worthwhile experiments in the field and had consequently tended merely to establish standards. These standards, while good, allow little flexibility in the planning and executing of projects built under the Authority.
He emphasized the need for greater cooperation between engineers and architects. This cooperation includes in its practical application the use of insulation against sound and temperature, and the placement of buildings in relation to the sun and to specific atmospheric conditions.
Harpsichord Recital
Miss Yella Pessl, internationally known harpsichordist, gave a harpsichord recital in Lee Hall the evening of April 26. Her program included compositions by Handel, Bach, Couperin, L’Oeillet, and Scarlatti, classical composers who wrote at the time the harpsichord was in common use, and by Martha Alter, a modern American composer.
At the close of the concert Miss Pessl gave a demonstration of the possibilities of the harpsichord, emphasizing that in everything but superficial appearance it is a totally different instrument from the piano. Harpsichord music played on a piano undergoes a change of medium that cannot but be harmful, she said, just as piano music cannot be played on the harpsichord without a loss of quality.
Miss Pessl is known as one of the few harpsichord experts in the world. Her repertoire includes much of the music written for the instrument, music she has made known through her frequent CBS broadcasts and on Victor records. Her interest in the harpsichord arose from a dissatisfaction with piano transcriptions of the harpsichord works of Bach, and a desire to hear and play them as they were intended to be played.
During her two weeks at the College she has been most generous in playing requests and in explaining her instrument to interested community members. She has given several informal concerts, alone, and with Dr Jalowetz and Mrs Trudi Straus, as well as a special concert for the community children.
Miss Pessl is at present on vacation, her activities in the past two years having included some two hundred broadcasts, a large number of formal concerts and the recording of much of her repertoire.
Einstein Visits BMC
Dr Albert Einstein, head of the school of Mathematics in the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, visited the College Sunday, April 27. He was accompanied by his son, Dr Albert Einstein Jr, who is connected with the Research Division of the Bureau of Soil Conservation in the Department of Agriculture in Greenville, South Carolina, his sister, Mrs Winteler, and his daughter-in-law, Mrs Albert Einstein, Jr. Dr Einstein came to the College to visit his former assistant, Dr Nathan Rosen, now of the College faculty, and to get a first-hand impression of the College.
After having lunch with several members of the faculty, he joined community members and guests at Lake Eden, where he inspected the building. Later he spoke briefly to the community, “I want to congratulate you upon the work you are doing. You are here as a little community to work with your hands and with your brains, which is a good thing for you. I have never seen anything like this done in Europe. Also, you are in such close contact with nature here. You are getting near to science in a way it should be generally done.
“What is done out of pleasure is much better done than what is done out of duty. If you had to climb mountains out of duty, you would not mount these high mountains. I think that is also true with the high mountains of the spirit.
“I wish you a good fulfillment and years of success.”
College Concert
The second Visitors’ Week concert was given on Sunday night, by the College Orchestra, the Madrigal Group, Jane Mayhall, soprano, and Maude Dabbs, pianist.
Jane Mayhall is a former student at the College. This year she has been studying voice in Boston with Madame Ola Averino, opera and concert singer. Next year she plans to return to Black Mountain to continue work with Dr Jalowetz. Her selections at the concert included music by Debussy and Schoenberg. Maude Dabbs, a senior division student majoring in music, played two groups of impressionistic pieces by Bela Bartok.
The Madrigal Group, under the direction of Dr Jalowetz, sang a series of mediaeval madrigals, and the orchestra played a prelude by Bach on the chorale “Aus Tiefer Not”.
“Permanent Values in a World Crisis”
Dr Gilbert Chinard, Pyne Professor of French Literature at Princeton University spoke to the College community Monday evening, April 28, on “Permanent Values in the Present World Crisis.”
He stressed the need for historical perspective in trying to understand and meet the present world crisis. We are often told, he said, “that we do not know where we are going…. This may be the principal evil from which we suffer…. We do not know where we are going and we do not know where we are perhaps because we do not care enough to ascertain where we are coming from.”
He continued: “No panacea can be proposed to cure at once all the afflictions of the modern world; but I should like to suggest that one of the obvious remedies lies in a revival of the humanistic spirit. The humanities, whose province is the spiritual and intellectual history and experience of mankind, are especially concerned with the present crisis which is essentially a spiritual one, even if we are too readily inclined to consider mainly its social and economic aspects and its political implications. It is their chief function to fortify the human spirit, for if we were more aware of our collective past, we would not abandon ourselves to counsels of despair. Because of a lack of proper perspective, we boast too much and too loudly of our mechanical achievements, while we are too easily discouraged by temporary set-backs. In our pride and ignorance we speak glibly of situations without precedents, of trials and sufferings which have never confronted the human race before. How much more comforting and wholesome would be a truly humanistic attitude of mind which would make us aware that our rapid and comparatively recent scientific progress is not due solely to our own discoveries, but that these discoveries of which we are so proud were made possible by the constant, slow, and unrewarded search and labor of countless generations and that we are reaping today the profit of their efforts.
“In the present crisis, the young people who, in ordinary circumstances look so eagerly towards the future, seem to be discouraged and disconsolate and wonder what life has in store for them. The humanist cannot give them bread and he has no right to promise them happiness. Perhaps he can to some extent restore their courage and confidence, develop in them a sense of relationship, make them aware that they are ‘involved in Mankinde’ in retracing with them and for them the long and arduous march onward of the generations of old. Perhaps, also, he can point out to them that the problems of the day are the products and results of our ‘human condition’, that there is very little that is unprecedented in our trials and experiments, but that in its blundering and groping way, mankind has always managed to survive and that on the whole civilization has progressed.”
Faculty Appointment
Dr Paul Radin, author, anthropologist, and historian, has accepted an invitation of the Board of Fellows to become a member of the Black Mountain College faculty beginning next fall.
Dr Radin is best known for his ethnological studies among American Indian tribes; he has been especially interested in the place of literature and religion in primitive society. Born in Poland, he was brought to American in infancy. He was educated at the College of the City of New York, at Columbia University, and at the Universities of Berlin and Munich. He began his anthropological career while studying in Germany, and continued it under Franz Boas at Columbia. He has taught in England and Germany, held fellowships from Columbia, Harvard, and Yale, and positions at the Universities of California and Chicago and at Fisk University.
His Indian research has been conducted under the sponsorship of the Bureau of American Ethnology in Washington, the Canadian Geological Survey, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, and the University of Michigan. For many years he was supervisor and director of a government survey of the National Minorities of California.
He visited the College during the week of March 5 and in a formal lecture and a series of informal talks and discussions brought out several of the theories his research has formulated. “Civilized Society” according to Dr Radin, is far less civilized in many ways than the cultures of the so-called “primitive” tribes. For in almost all of these primitive societies all members of the group have equal right to the necessities of life in so far as the group finds it possible to supply them. And he emphasized that the status of women, often used as an index of civilization, is almost uniformly high in primitive society. More so than our society, that of the primitive tends always toward the well-being of every person within the group, regardless of caste barriers, economic advantage, or sex.
Dr Radin branded as a fallacy the common belief that because the “savage” has not the technological advantages of our western society, he is necessarily on a lower plane of intelligence and culture. His research has shown that primitive peoples have a literature, often unwritten, as rich as that of any society, and that their emotional, aesthetic, and intellectual experiences are no less complete and satisfying than our own. Their language is often infinitely more flexible, expressive, and subtle, than English. We fail to realize this, he believes, because we are continually bound my mores which are, on objective examination, often superficial; because habits and ways of life have developed along different patterns.
Out of his great fund of personal experience have com a number of important books- important because they offer a fresher, non-chauvinistic approach to the study of primitive societies, and because they are written in a style interesting enough to appeal to the layman. They include: Myths and Tales of the Ojibwa of Southeastern Ontario; El Folklore de Oaxaca; The Sources and Authenticity of the History of the Ancient Mexicans; the Winnebago Tribe; Crashing Thunder: The Autobiography of an American Indian; Primitive Man as Philosopher; the Story of the American Indian; Social Anthropology; The Method and Theory of Ethnology; The Racial Myth; and Primitive Religion.
Dr Radin will probably teach courses in Anthropology and History at the College next year. His wife will come to Black Mountain with him.
Greek Mathematics
On Match 14 and 15, Dr Jacob Klein, Tutor at St John’s College, spoke to the College on “The Concept of Number: Greek Arithmetic and the Origin of Algebra”. In his lectures Dr Klein showed how, in the course of history, the great and true problems concerning numbers have gradually changed their meaning, and how these problems have, in a sense, become invisible as the techniques of dealing with numbers have become more familiar and more complicated. Today we take calculating with numbers as a matter of course; usually we do not give any attention to the metaphysical and epistemological problems underlying all arithmetic.
Going from modern science back through history, Dr Klein developed the problems which puzzled the Greeks when they began to deal with numbers. While modern man is too easily inclined to despise, somewhat jovially, past times, Dr Klein showed how actual and up-to-date these classic problems remain and how the Greeks attacked them with a fresh and immediate approach. So the way backwards through history proved also to be the one toward the fundamentals.
The founders of modern algebra and arithmetic in the 16th and 17th centuries- men like Ramus, Gosselin, Vieta, Stevin, Descartes- continued and developed- but also distorted- the mathematical concepts which were formulated for the first time, as far as we know, by a small group of Greek mathematicians: Proclus, Diophantus, Eudoxus, Euclid, Theaatetus, Plato, and finally the Pythagoreans.
Dr Klein asked the same questions that the Pythagoreans asked, such as “What are numbers if they are not numbers of specific things?”, “What is the relation of the one to other numbers?”, “How can numbers like two or three be units if their elements are ones?” at the beginning of his talk Dr Klein had told the audience that he would prove that of all the people who use numbers only a very few understand the meaning and the complexity of the concept of numbers. at first the audience was surprised at this statement, but later had to concede that it was no exaggeration: it is easier to deal with numbers than to answer the elementary questions about their essential character.
Dr Klein explained Pythagoras’ graphic arrangement of numbers; the individuality of numbers: prime, even and odd; and the Pythagorean table of opposites. He also discussed the discovery of irrational numbers, that is, numbers belonging to lines of incommensurable proportions,- for example, the diagonal in relation to a side of a square. He ended the first part of his talk with a demonstration of Plato’s inquiries into numbers: the unity, the relation of one and many, and the relation of numbers to the pure one and the pure two.
By his skilful presentation of the philosophical problems of arithmetic the audience was enabled to follow in the lecture of the next day the course forward in history. Choosing characteristic examples Dr Klein showed the lines connecting ancient and modern times. Concepts, unlike monuments of stone, do not preserve their shape unchanged throughout the centuries. New questions arise which order the concepts in a new system. Gradually they change their meaning until they reach an interpretation which is quite removed from the original. This was the fate of the concept of numbers developed by the Greeks. The main differences between the Greeks and the modern view may, according to Dr Klein, be summarized by saying that for the Greeks numbers were concepts of something, while for us they are used as if they were things; our idea of infinity based on magnitudes considered as numbers, which therefore appear as continuous, while numbers were, for the Greeks, discontinuous. As the understanding of order corresponds to an interpretation of numbers, it is because of this change in the interpretation of numbers that modern science became possible. For the Greeks, order meant order in space ruled by a “first”, a principal. They understood the world as a cosmos, that is as an orderly arrangement of things which remain what they are. The whole was ordered and the elements within it. In the modern view, order is conceived as regularity of changes. While laws of nature rule individual events, the order of the whole is chaotic.
By special request Dr Klein agreed to deliver a third lecture on “The Possible Goals of Mathematical Physics”. This provided another opportunity for him to contrast the modern and Greek views; he based this comparison, which revealed the intrinsic relation of all physics to metaphysics, on a dramatic interpretation of Plato’s Timaeus.
College Notes
On March 20 George W Hendrickson was graduated from Black Mountain College in the field of Dramatics. Samual Selden, Associate Professor of Dramatic Art at the University of North Carolina, conducted the examinations.
Mr Hendrickson left Black Mountain in March, 1939, to work with Xanti Schawinsky on the Pennsylvania exhibit for the World’s Fair. The next fall he entered the Yale School of Drama where he has been specializing in stage design. There he will continue his study for the degree of Master of Fine Arts.
The Black Mountain College Players twice won first acting honors at the annual festival of the Carolina Dramatic Association at Chapel Hill. The production of “Where the Cross is Made”, a one-act play by Eugene O’Neill, won first place in the Senior College class. Mendez Marks’ original one-act play, “So Proudly We Hail”, was first in the Senior College contest for original plays. The programs for Black Mountain College plays for the last two years, printed in the College printshop, also won a first prize at the festival tournament.
With the coming of spring weather and the approach of the end of the school year, the work program has been accelerated. At a general meeting held shortly after Visitors’ Week it was decided to cancel the proposed production of “Julius Caesar” and reschedule other classes in order to free more students for morning work at Lake Eden. Under the new work assignments, the concrete mixer and the two college trucks are being kept busy all day. Excavation for the second wing of the building is under way, and a new building for the kitchen workers has been started.
It has also been decided not to operate the Lake Eden Inn this summer. Instead, the property will be the site of a work camp with two sessions, one from June 30 to July 26, the other from July 28 to August 23. The work camp project is more fully described in the picture bulletin which accompanies this issue of the Newsletter.
Plans are now being made for the moving of college equipment and property during the last week in May. Much built-in equipment in Lee Hall will have to be removed, as will such cumbersome items as the looms, and the printing shop presses and type cases.
Former students who have visited the college in recent weeks include Dick Andrews, Barbara Beaty, Loraine Creesy, George Hendrickson, Lisa Jalowetz, Charles Kessler, Bela Martin, Jane Mayhall, Claude Monteux, and Hope Stephens.
Faculty Notes
Robert Wunsch has made several trips during the spring semester in the interests of the Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools for Negroes. The study being made by the Association of sixteen Negro high schools in the south includes surveying and possibly reorganizing the curricula of the schools. The purpose of the study is to help to point a way for correlating the individual departments in each school to the school as a whole, and to make departmental education more nearly fit the needs of the adolescent. Mr Wunsch will be a teacher in the summer workshop of the Association at Hampton Institute this summer.
J Richard Carpenter, John RP French, Jr, Charles Lindsley, Nathan Rosen, and Erwin Straus attended the meetings of the North Carolina Academy of Science held at Chapel Hill in April 25 and 26. Papers were given by Professors French, Linsley, Rosen, and Straus.
Nathan Rosen was one of the speakers at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society held in Washington on May 1, 2, and 3. He described a theory he has been working on during the past year which concerns the gravitational field in the special theory of relativity.
Necklaces of hardware materials executed by Anni Albers and Alex Reed are being exhibited this month at the Willard Gallery at 32 East 57 Street, New York City. The keynote of the exhibition is expressed in a quotation from Picasso (from Space, Time and Architecture by S. Giedon, published by the Harvard University Press): “The artist is a receptable for emotions, regardless of whether they spring from heaven, from earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing face, or from a spider’s web. That is why he must not distinguish between things. Quartiers de noblesse do not exist among objects.”
