IN A PUBLIC-SPEAKING class at Gallaudet College, one student has just finished a talk an international affairs and another (centre) is beginning an ana¡ lysis of his presentation. Composed of students without sufficient vocal ability, this class is limited to using the manual alphabet and the language of signs.
Gallaudet
College
by a reader. These plays attract not only deaf people from a large area but also others who appreciate the high standard of acting attained by the silent actors. Some of the plays have been produced for nation-wide television. The language of the signs is also effectively used by the college blue-robed choir which "sings" hymns at chapel services. Among other student activities are participation in literary, debating and photography clubs. Established by an Act of the U.S. Congress a hundred years ago, Gallaudet College is named after Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, founder of the first permanent school for the deaf in the United States. The college has considerably expanded in recent years. It is a residential institution, with accommodation for both men and women students. Besides classrooms and laboratories, there is an auditorium and a student union building. The well-equipped library, with more than 62,000 books and recordings, has a special section on deafness and is used not only by the staff and students but by researchers and educationists from all over the United States and foreign countries. Gallaudet's faculty, headed by Dr. Leonard Elstad, who has been president since 1945, consists of I09 members. Of these thirty-five are deaf. The college has over 600
students on its rolls at present. Admission is by competitive examination, and only those students are admitted whose handicap makes them unfit for enrolment in other colleges for students with normal hearing. A unique feature is that no student is refused admission merely because he cannot pay for his tuition. While the majority of students are Americans and come from state and local schools for the deaf in the United States, there are also some foreign students. For many years Gallaudet's Department of Education has accepted students from overseas who wish to promote education of the deaf in their own countries. One such student from India is Surya Kant Misra, of Allahabad, who has completed his course at the college and has stayed on as student counsellor while he studies for a post-graduate course in advanced education at Catholic University, Washington. Possessing normal hearing and speech, Mr. Misra, who is twenty-nine, became interested in the deaf and their problems at an early age. He had his elementary schooling at a school for deaf and dumb children established by his deaf uncle at Allahabad. Passing out of high school and continuing his studies at Allahabad University, he wrote the thesis for his master's degree on
AS STUDENT counsellor, Suryo Kant Misra, of Allahabad, confers frequently with the head of the English Department, Dr. William C. Stokoe, Jr. Dr. Stokoe is currently at work on a sign-language dictionary.
Gallaudet THE STUDENT Union building includes a recreation centre for dances and meetings. These students have got together informally for "talk" during the lunch hour. Surya Kant Misra (standing left) holds the floor.
College
Another Indian student now at Gallaudet is twentythree-year-old Ramendra Roy who hails from Digboi, Assam. He lost his hearing completely when he suffered from typhoid fever at the age of three. This affected his ability to achieve intelligible speech and even now, after many years of schooling, it is easier to let him write a message than try to understand what he is attempting to say orally. Ramendra Roy studied first at the School for the Deaf in Calcutta, and completed the high school course. at the Boys High School in Digboi. Encouraged by the principal of the Calcutta school, Dr. Sailen Banerji, who is himself a former student of Gallaudet, young Roy resolved to find the money towards his further education at Gallaudet College. He took up employment for three years as an apprentice mechanic in the Assam Oil Company where his father was a drilling officer. His savings in this job, supplemented by grants from the West Bengal Department of Education and the National Institution for the Deaf at New Delhi, enabled him to pay for his passage and his initial expenses in the United States. Ramendra Roy is receiving a scholarship from the college funds at Gallaudet to cover his tuition and board. His pocket money is earned by typing and doing sundry chores for the International Centre for Research on Deafness. After attending the Gallaudet preparatory school for
A STUDENT group dances to the vibrations of music played player. Even completely deaf students can feel these
on
a record vibrations.
a year he was recently enrolled as a regular student and began the regular college course in English literature, the German language, mathematics, social studies and chemistry. He is also attending classes in speech and lip-reading, and his instructors say that his speech will have much improved by the time he completes his studies at Gallaudet. Between them these two young men represent two complementary aspects of Gallaudet: the courage and determination of the deaf to get the benefits of higher education in spite of their affliction, and the enthusiasm of the non-handicapped to help them in every way in achieving their objective. A third Indian student who has recently been enrolled in Gallaudet preparatory school and expects to begin full college work next year is a girl-Ashraf Kazim, of Hyderabad. Prior to joining Gallaudet, she attended Little Flower School for the Deaf, Madras, and St. Mary's School of Deaf, Buffalo, New York. In the words of Dr. Elstad: "In this competitive world an education is one of the assurances we can give our deaf youth that there is a place in the world picture for them." Combining education with humanenf>ss, Gallaudet is doing its best to give self-assurance and self-confidence to the hundreds of handicapped young men and women who pass through its portals year after year .•
DRAMATICS IS a popular extracurricular activity. Plays have all-deaf casts using the language of signs. An oral reader narrates the dialogue.
RAMENDRA ROY and Surya Kant Misra enjoy a soft drink with fellowstudents in the snack bar within the Student Union building. The American boy is Lawrence Forestal, Jr., of New Jersey, president of the student body.
The Riddl e of Memory WE MOVE continually through a world of ceaseless activity, a world humming with events. Experience stirs up things inside our heads, creating barrages of brief electrical impulses that flash along nerve fibres running from sense organs to brain. Images, sounds, odours, all the things we sense in the outside world, are represented by coded patterns of impulses-living "sparks," each lasting only a few thousandths of a second. These are transient signals, signals on the move. Yet somehow certain selected patterns of information are fixed or frozen in flight as it were, transformed into permanent records among intricate nerve-cell networks. Furthermore, the records are stored with amazing compactness. It has been estimated that the brain can hold enough information to fill as little as a hundred or as much as several million volumes, each about the size of a long modern novel. Even taking a conservative, middle-of-the-road position, however, nature in creating man's memory has clearly devised a system that puts microfilm to shame. This system contains enormous numbers of memory traces, individual bits of information which represent the past as definitely as cuneiform markings on clay tablets or the stone carvings of the Mayan temples. The brain makes its own traces and, more than that, files them away systematically for future reference. We shall first discuss some of the things scientists have learned recently about memory traces, which are still mysterious but not quite as mysterious as they were a few years ago. Later, we shall have something to say about recall or retrieval, a process which continues to be exquisitely elusive. A great deal of work has gone into research on memory, and a great deal more remains to be done. But judging by recent studies many investigators feel that they are at last beginning to close in on answers to crucial questions. They are, for example, gathering facts about how long it takes to form memory traces. The first step, a kind of short-term
storage, may be illustrated by a child's learning to identify the letter "A." Experiments suggest that to retain this symbol and recognize it upon subsequent viewings the child must look at it for a total of about fifteen minutes. That may be enough to hold the memory trace for a while, for a few hours or overnight, which is roughly the equivalent of cramming for an examination. Really learning a lesson, however, holding the letter "A" or any other item of information so that it can be used and becomes an integral part of your increasing store of knowledge, is something else again. This process, known as "consolidation," may require some twelve hours or so-twelve hours of exposure on the retina or light-sensitive screen, at the back of the eye, and of signals relayed to appropriate brain centres. We have yet to discover precisely what goes on during consolidation. But learning changes the brain as surely as cultivation changes fertile soils; furthermore, it probably produces a number of different kinds of changes. For one thing, the cortex or "outer bark" of the brain is certainly affected in some way. This thin sheet of gray matter covers the surfaces of the cerebral hemisphere, contains about ten billion nerve cells, and represents the brain's most highly evolved centre. Recent animal experiments conducted at the University of California in Los Angeles show that certain so-called Golgi cells in the cortex, like the root systems of growing plants, develop more and more branching fibres as learning proceeds. Another recent study concerns learning among human beings. The cortex includes special "sensory" areas reserved as receiving stations for information from the sense organs-signals from the eyes passing to visual areas at the back of the cortex, signals from the ears to audit'ory areas at the sides, and so on. Preliminary studies indicate that among artists the visual areas contain an extra-high proportion of highly branched Golgi cells, while among musicians the auditory areas show particularly dense concentrations
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1963 by International
Business Machines
of twisting fibres. In other words, the laying down of new memories seems to involve new cell-to-cell pathways. Further evidence on the possible role of the cortex in memory comes from the classical experiments of Wilder G. Penfield of the Montreal Neurological Institute, one of the world's foremost brain surgeons. During operations on the brain, it is extremely important to avoid injuring the sensory areas. So the exposed cortex is stimulated with a fine electrode, a needlelike electrical contact which produces hallu<;:inations of a sort. Stimulate points of the visual area, and the patient "sees" dancing lights or flashes; stimulate the auditory area, and he "hears" humming or ringing. Since he is under local anaesthesia only (the brain feels no pain), he is fully conscious and can describe his sensation as his cortex is being mapped. As a result, the surgeon knows what areas to leave intact. About fifteen years ago, Penfield was conducting such tests, and reported a remarkable case of artificially evoked memory. His patient was a twenty-sixyear-old secretary whom we shall call Dorothy. During the course of an operation for epilepsy, he touched a spot on the side of Dorothy's cortex with a stimulating electrode, and the patient said, "I hear music." When the electrode was removed, the music stopped abruptly, as if a switch had been turned off. Fifteen minutes later, the contact was placed on the same spot with the same result: "I heal; music again. It is like radio." Again, the music stopped promptly when the electrode was removed. The Canadian surgeon repeated the test twenty times in all, always stimulating spots within an area about the size of a match head. Each time Dorothy heard the same tune, "Marching Along Together," in particularly vivid detail. She explained later that it was not merely a matter of imagining the tune. She seemed to hear the instruments of a full orchestra playing as they had played at some past recital. It was as if the reel ofa submicroscopic tape recorder were unwinding in her
Corporation. Reprinted by permission from THINK Magazine.
mind. Furthermore, Dorothy followed the tune as long as the electrode stayed in place. When it was removed and replaced again, even a short time later, she did not pick up from her previous stopping point. She started all over again. Apparently, that mental reel automatically rewound itself for each playback. As Penfield himself describes it, "When, by chance, the neurosurgeon's electrode activates past experience, that experience unfolds progressively, moment by moment. This is a little like the performance of a wire recorder or a strip of cinematographic film on which are registered all those things of which the individual was once aware-the things he selected for his attention in that interval of time. Absent from it are the sensations he ignored, the talk he did not heed. "Time's strip of film runs forward, never backward, even when resurrected from the past. It seems to proceed again at time's own unchanged pace. It would seem, once one section of the strip has come alive, tha t the response is protected by a functional all-ornothing principle. A regulating inhibitory mechanism must guard against
a record of the stream of consciousness. It seems to retain the detail of that stream as perceived during each man's waking, conscious hours. Contained in this record are all the things of which the individual was once aware; such detail as a man might expect to remember for a few minutes afterward, but which is largely lost to voluntary recall after that time." (This is not to be confused with the short-term storage discussed earlier and illustrated by a child's learning to identify the letter "A.") But the mechanisms of memory are not confined to the cortex, to the gray surface layers of the brain. Things are happening at the depths as well; for example, among centres located around the inner borders between the cerebral hemispheres. Brain-wave studies by Keith and Eve Killam of Stanford University and other workers show that the electrical activity of these "limbic" structures (limbus is Latin for "border") changes during learning, and clinical observations hint at the significance of the changes. Damage to certain limbic structures is believed to account for the symptoms of patients like a middleaged postman examined at a veterans' hospital in the Chicago area. Talking with him is a strange experience. He remembers events from his childhood, old friends and acquaintances, his World War II service, the details of his postal routes-all the memories .
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activation of other portions of the film. As long as the electrode is held in place, the experience of a former day goes forward. There is no holding it still, no turning back, no crossing with other periods. When the electrode is withdrawn, it stops as suddenly as it began." The "unwinding" process, by the way, is familiar in everyday experience. In trying to recall a line of a poem or popular song, you may not be able to repeat it at once. You sometimes have to go through the verses from the very beginning un til you come to the line you want. It seems that a good deal of what we remember is filed away in some sort of time sequence, like the frames in a strip of microfilm. Penfield cites Dorothy's case and a number of similar cases as evidence that we have access to extensive cerebral files: "There is, hidden away in the brain,
he had stored before the onset of his illness several years ago. But he has added nothing to his inner records of times past since then. His current recollecting span is only about three minutes long; that is, if you ask him to repeat a joke or anecdote more than three minutes or so old, he will draw a blank. His brain is incapable of forming new memory traces. There is a theory to account for what happens in such cases. New impressions may set up a kind of merrygo-round activity in the brain. That is, impulses representing an experience may travel from cell A to cell B to cell C to cell D-and then back to A again, and so on around a closed
nerveloop. These "reverberating circuits" are short-term memories, selfperpetuating "ripples." As long as the ripples last we can recall the event. But after a while the ripples die down, by which time the circulating pulses have brought about deeper changes and permanent memory traces are formed in normal brains. But for some reason these changes do not occur in the brains of patients like the Chicago postman, and when the ripples go, so do their records of the past. This sort of loss may occur in a less severe, transient form as a result of blows on the head. A number of years ago, shortly after an Army football victory, Glenn Davis, the team's star halfback, asked a teammate why a certain lateral-pass play had not been used during the game. At first, the teammate thought the question was ajoke. The play had been used successfully, and Davis himself had carried the ball for a touchdown. But he could not remember the touchdown run or most of the afternoon's proceedings. Early in the game, his head had hit the ground during a pile-up and, whatever happened, the shock had temporarily interfered with his ability to form new memories-although he managed to perform brilliantly on sheer instinct and short-term storage. Such accidents are relatively rare in football. But they occur more frequently in prizefighting, the only activity short of war in which the head serves as a legitimate primary target. Jack Sharkey once asked his manager why a scheduled fight with Jack Dempsey had been postponed, only to learn that Dempsey had knocked him out during the seventh round earlier in the evening. At this point, it might be well to emphasize the difference between not being able to form new memory traces, and not being able to get at traces which have already been formed. Strictly speaking, Sharkey did not forget anything; there was nothing to forget. The fight was a blank because his brain had failed to register what happened during the period, not because certain records were inaccessible. He remembered the past perfectly well and was continually recording details of current events. Forgetting, on the other hand, involves the blocking of pathways which lead to stored information. Often, in these cases, the information itself seems to remain intact. As a matter of fact, once something has found a firm place in our brains, the odds are that it will endure for years or decades. One of the most striking properties of memory is its persistence. Persons under hypnosis instantly recall details of actual childhood events which they are generally unable to evoke under normal
The Riddle of Memory conditions, and a hypnotist can producejust the opposite effect. Ifhe suggests that you forget everything which took place during a certain period, you will probably do just that. In some cases, pathological forgetting such as amnesia may result from blows on the head. In other cases, we have seen, blows may affect our ability to form new traces. Presumably these different conditions reflect interference with the workings of different brain centres, although investigators are not yet prepared to identify the specific centres involved. Both conditions, of course, may be normal consequences of the aging process. Elderly people not only have difficulty registering new information, but also find that records of the past may become increasingly inaccessible. More often than not, old memories linger longest, which is one reason why the good old days tend to be more vivid. The remarkable thing, however, is how effectively memory survives as a general rule. According to one estimate, an average of some 30,000 nerve cells die in the cortex every day, or, to put it another way, a person has lost more than half a billion cells by the time he reaches his fiftieth birthday. Yet he can learn almost as well as a twentyyear-old, and most of his memories are intact. For these reasons some investigators believe that the brain has a kind of built-in insurance system. Perhaps memories are copied many times over and "tucked away" in many places, so that duplicates are available in case oflocal damage. It is something like ensuring against air raid losses by making copies of vital government records and storing them in widely separated vaults. But with all our findings and inferences a basic problem, perhaps the basic problem, has yet to be solved. Precisely what is a memory trace? How do nerve cells, jellylike blobs of living matter specialized to produce electrical pulses, change as a result of experience? Such questions are easy to frame, but the search for answers confronts us with phenomena of enormous complexity. Interestingly enough, some of the most fruitful studies of these phenomena involve a series of experiments on an organism which occupies a relatively low position on the evolutionary ladder-the ordinary planarium, or flatworm. A planarium is hardly an impressive creature. For one thing, it is normally cross-eyed and measures a mere halfinch to an inch in length when fully grown. Furthermore, its brain is about the size of a pinhead, and its entire nervous system includes only a few thousand nerve cells. On the other
hand, it so happens that the flatworm has perhaps the simplest nervous system that can be conditioned in the laboratory-and this is why psychologist James McConnell and his associates at the University of Michigan have been experimenting with flatworms for the past eight years or so. For example, a flatworm swimming along in its special plastic trough and strictly minding its own business will pay little attention to the flash of a strong electric light. But like far more advanced species, it will react to an electric shock, contracting its body into a tiny ball. The trick is first to switch on the light and follow the flash with a sharp shock. If this sequence is repeated a sufficient number of times, the flatworm catches on and learns that the light "means" a shock. Eventually it will contract violently every time it sees the light, without waiting for the shock which mayor may not come. On the average, it may acquire this conditional reflex after some 150 trials. Now comes the subtle part of the experiment: If you cut the trained flatworm in half, the head end grows a new tail and the tail end grows a new head-and both new worms remember a large part of what the original worm had learned. Specifically, here is what happens. The new worms will not always qmtract upon seeing the light right away, in expectation of a shock; they usually have to be reconditioned. But the fi.'Tonditioning can be achieved, and this is the main point, in only forty rather than a full 150 trials. In other words, the new worms behave as if they had been pretrained, as if they had already gone through I 10 trials, or nearly seventy-five per cent of their condi tioning. Actually, of course, something has been retained and passed on in both severed head and tail. That "something" consists of memory traces, and more recent experiments indicate the nature of the traces. Investigators at the University of Rochester and elsewhere have found one way of preventing the carry-over of learned reactions from flatworms to their "offspring." For example, if you cut a conditioned flatworm in two and grow the tail end in water containing low concentrations of a certain chemical, it will grow a new headbut the new flatworm will not retain any record of the original conditioning. It will take just as many trials to learn the light reaction as a naive, untrained worm. The significance of the experiment lies in the nature of the memorydestroying chemical-an enzyme, a natural substance specifically designed to break down ribonucleic acid, or RNA for short. RNA is known to be a
"THE HUMAN BRAIN is capable af a great deal
more than it is ever called upon to perform. We must learn to put it to a greater, less specialized, and more satisfying use."
how does the brain do its job genetic material which plays a role in passing along hereditary traits from generation to generation. The giant molecules of this material include combinations of four basic building 'blocks, a kind of four-letter biological code. The building blocks are arranged in a variety of different sequences representing messages, coded information which instructs cell manufacturing units to produce special proteins characteristic of different species. Evidence is accumulating to show that R TA codes can be modified by experience, and much of the evidence is so new that it has not yet been published. For example, research at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York, indicates that conditioning actually changes the order of RNA building blocks among flatworms in the process of being trained. In other words, learning seems to bring about the "writing" of new RNA messages and confirms rat studies reported recently from Sweden. One of the most intriguing studies is not only unpublished, but also happens to be unproved as yet. Last summer, McConnell decided to try what may be considered the ultimate experiment. From flatworms trained to contract upon the flashing of a light he and his co-workers extracted RNA, and then injected the RNA into untrained worms. The theory is that if RNA embodies memory messages perhaps one could transmit the message directly. Preliminary results indicate that the treated worms may have indeed learned more quickly. Before we start speculating about classrooms equipped with vials and hypodermic needles as well as teachers, however, it should be emphasized that these new experiments are not considered conclusive. McConnell himself refuses to regard anything as settled. But the work is important enough to be repeated and checked, a step currently under way at the University of Michigan. One further point. Assume that RNA is involved in memory and that our memory traces are the appropriately patterned protein molecules which it produces. Now there is nothing especially permanent about protein molecules. During the course of normal metabolism, the continual razing and building up of tissues, they are scrapped and eliminated along with other body wastes. Most protein molecules are broken down within a month after being formed. In other words, most of our memory traces are continually being destroyed and replenished, new generations of memory proteins continually replacing dying generations. Such chemical breeding has certain implications. The protein molecules
of
storing?
representing things a person remembers from his childhood may thus be "descendants" of molecules originally formed fifty or more years ago, and copied some six hundred times since then. If this is how the process works, a relationship clearly exists between the accuracy of the copies and the fallibility of memory. Mistakes in the duplication of memory traces, errata and omissions in the blueprints of special protein molecules, would be reflected as false memories-traces of events that never took place. Current research suggests that our illusions as well as our records of reality-and perhaps some of our most creative and original ideas-involve the workings of RNA and protein chemistry. So considering what investigators knew only a decade or so ago, considerable progress has been made. From another point of view, however, everything the,y have learned and are likely to learn during the next few years will simply serve as preparation for an attack on even more imposing problems. We have discussed certain new ideas concerning the formation and storage of memory traces, phenomena sufficiently complex to occupy specialists for some time to come. But the problem of recall seems to be an order of magnitude more complex. Try to imagine the sort of process taking place in your brain when someone asks you a question like, "Have you read The Improbable Marquis?" or "Do you know Ronald James?" Vou will respond rapidly and probably correctly. Yet within a few seconds or less you have somehow searched through memory files containing records of thousands of titles or names (of fictitious as well as real persons) and come up with a definite answer. Do not ask scientists to explain this familiar phenomenon, to account for recall in terms of the organization of nerve cells and fibre pathways. They are not yet ready to tackle that task. We should also like to know more about other faculties involving memory. Imagination may be a kind of mosaic-building process, the "pieces" being already formed memory traces which are assembled into new patterns -similes and metaphors, scientific theories, utopias. In fact, a leading investigator recently emphasized that the manipulation and organization of such traces is at the root of many higher mental activities: "At our present stage of knowledge studies of memory occupy a special position in the field of brain research. The more we learn about how living nerve cells retain records of past experience, the better we shall understand the essential processes of thought itself.".
AN AERIAL view of the city showing in the foreground the Castille de San Marcos, oldest masonry fort in U.S.
MANY
CULTURES
IN AMERICA'S
BLEND
OLDEST CITY,
ST. AUGUSTINE A POPULAR
HOLIDAY
RESORT,
FOUNDED BY Spaniards in I565-forty-two years before the English settled Jamestown and fifty-five years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, the little southern resort city of St. Augustine on the Atlantic can claim to be the oldest European settlement in what is now the United States. Though colonial wars and natural erosion have taken their toll of ancient structures, many evidences remain of the city's storied past. In 1513, just about the time the Portuguese first landed on the Malabar coast in India, the explorer Don Juan Ponce de Leon, with a fleet of three ships, sailed into the St. Augustine harbour. This Spanish knight had accompanied Columbus on his second voyage to America and was now leading his own expedition. Gold and the "fountain of youth" were the objects of his quest. Landing here, he named the area "La Florida" ("land of flowers"), and claimed it for the Spanish crown. Turbulence and vicissitude marked the city's first three hundred years. It suffered damage repeatedly in battles between colonizing nations and attacks by Red Indian tribes. Held by Spain for nearly two centuries, St. Augustine was ceded to England with the rest of Florida in I763, but after twenty years under British rule was restored to Spain. It came under the flag of the United States in 1821. In the latter part of the 19th century, Henry M. Flagler, who had made a fortune as an industrialist, decided to develop Florida as a resort state. Delighted by St. Augustine, he built great hotels here, improved the railroad from the north and extended it southward all the way to Key West. Thus began the development of St. Augustine and the big resort cities to the south. Today St. Augustine is a popular year-round resort, its historical associations and gentle climate attracting visitors by the hundreds of thousands annually. There are boating, fishing and water sports for enthusiasts, though the water is too cool for much swimming in winter. Within four miles of the city lies a stretch of superb beach fifty miles long and five hundred feet wide. The original settlement, laid out as directed by King Philip II, had a central plaza surrounded by the governor's palace, church and other important public buildings. On the waterfront, overlooking the shining waters of Matanzas Bay, the palm-fringed Plaza de la Constitucion is still the focal point of the community. Ancient, narrow streets lead from the plaza. Many of the old Spanish houses still stand. Their wooden balconies overhang the cobblestones and high stone walls hide patios sheltered by pomegranate, fig and sweet orange trees. Among the many interesting relics are the "oldest house in the United States" and the Spanish Treasurer's House. In the atmosphere of this delightful city, where Spanish, English and American cultures blend, the Spanish Havour still predominates. In 1965, St. Augustine will celebrate its 400th anniversary .•
A STREET scene showing old Spanish houses
with overhanging wooden balconies.
The Colour of Ancient
Myth ARJUNA'S PENANCE, a detail an the south gopuram.
the gilded Vimanam under which the goddess Meenakshi rs henceforth to stay, attracted our attentron. The V.I. .Is in that area parted respectfully to let an old man with a beard and a long stick come through. He approached the ladder leading to the top of the Vimanam. It was the Shankaracharya. The old man approached with halting steps, his head turning from side to side as if he wanted not to miss a detail of his surroundings. Who was he? He has a name, he has a dwelling place, he has an age, but in fact, he is every man, and he is as old as man's ponderings. He is the man offaith who has given away all that he had and follows only his faith. He is a symbol of that renunciation which is at the heart of all religions, and which Christ himself demanded when asked, by the rich young man, "What must I do to be saved?" So here, at this time, in the temple, he is more than the most highly placed of the V.J.P. guests. With a vigour surprising in so old a man, he seizes the railing of the ladder in a long-fingered, bony hand, and rapidly climbs seven or eight rungs to a point from which he can reach the top of the Vimanam with his stick. Here he remains, a central figure throughout the ceremony. As the auspicious hour approaches, there is movement on the tops of the towers where, at those dizzy heights, the priests, bared to the waist as a sign of respect, make ready to pour the holy liquid. The approach of the moment can be physically felt as the crowd grows appreciably quieter. A second red flare suddenly rises, and on the instant the ceremony begins.
I cannot recall any ceremony I have ever attended matchmg It m wonder. ASIde from the camphor ~res atop the gopurams and the vimanams, and the glistening of the holy water as it ran down the side, the greatest experience for me was the music. This was my first opportunity to hear the nadaswaram, which are long, straight horns, of only one note, played in pairs or in threes. Three of them, tuned a half-note apart, were sounded against the rhythm of the drums and the bells, and I strained every faculty to hear it all, and to remember the remarkable effect of these horns, their atonal music very close to some of the starkest Stravinsky, and the ancient traditional rhythms accompanying them. If there is one thing, one impression stronger than all others in my memory of the Kumbhabhishekam, it is this marvelous music, traditional, ageless, yet unique in each presentation, never to be repeated exactly as I heard it any more than any wave that beats against the shore can ever be repeated exactly, though its pattern comes from and continues to eternity. That was the Kumbhabhishekam at Madurai. The last one took place in 1877, the year my father was born, and it will be another long lifetime before there is another. The figures of the gods and goddesses will have time to lose their new lustre and to return slowly to the colour of old stone, old mortar and ancient myth before the fish-eyed goddess and her bridegroom, Shiva, Sundareswara, Nataraja, the King of the Dance of Life, are again awakened to dance to the wild, slow music of the nadaswaram at another Kumbhabhishekam .•