April 1988

SPAN 2 Mahabharata Plays in New York

by Robert Hamburger

7 Everyone's Second Language

by Jacquelin Singh

10 Of Gules, Jacinth and.Spangle

by Gary Jennings

12

The Salzburg Seminar

15 The Workshop of Democracy A Revi4w by Peter Conn

16 Flight of the Dragonfly

by Richard Wolkomir

21 Visions of Inner Space

by Lee Mullican

26 Focus On.••

28 Taking the Itch out of Poison Ivy

33 The U.S. Committee System Congress at Work

by Walter Kravitz

38 Return of the Family Physician

by Laurence Cherry

43 On the Lighter Side

44 Victors All

45 India's Special Athletes

46 Sports for the Disabled

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Photo Editor

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Photographs: Front cover-Martha Swope. Inside front cover-Vinod Virkud: l-Avinash Pasricha. 2-5-Martha Swope. 6-Avinash Pasricha, 7-eourtesy G&C Merriam Company, Springfield, iviassachusetts. 9Yale University Press. l5-Avinash Pasricha. 16-K.K. Agrawal.

18, 19 left and top right-Paul Chesley; right center-K.K. Agrawal; bottom-Alok Kavan. 21 bottom, 22, 25 bottom-Avinash Pasricha, 26 top left-Jim Wallace, Duke University Photography; top rightR.K. Sharma, 28-Bruce Coleman. 30-U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service. 38-41-Richard Frishman. 45~ourtesy Special Olympics India. 46 top left-Moray Wheels/Adaptive Scuba Association; rightcourtesy The Institute For Outdoor Awareness, Inc; bottom-Jay Lurie/Black Star. 47 top left-James Balog/Black Star; center~ourtesy National Association of Sports for Cerebral Palsy; right-Leslie A. Moss, courtesy Disabled American Vets; bottom-Shelly Katz/Black Star. Inside back cover~ourtesy Special Olympics India. Back cover-eurt Beamer/ Sports & Spokes magazine Š Paralyzed Veterans of America.

Published by the United States Information Service, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S, Government. Printed at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana.

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Front cover: Indian dancer and actress Mallika Sarabhai as Draupadi in Peter Brook's Mahabharata, which played to packed houses in Los Angeles and New York late last year. See pages 2-6.

Back cover: Players reach for the ball during the U.S. National Wheelchair Basketball Tournament, one of the several sports events organized for disabled athletes in the United States. See stories on sports for the disabled and Special Olympics beginning page 44.

This will be the last of my letters to SPAN readers. Alas, my time in India has run out and I must return home. The four years I have been here have been extraordinary years for your nation and rewarding ones for me personally. An important characteristic of that period has been an improved understanding in Indo-U.S. relations. We do not seem to be preaching at one another any longer. We understand India's worldview and we think that India has a better understanding of our view of this part of the world. The relationship has also improved in concrete ways: More American and Indian businessmen are starting up joint ventures; the United States has become not only India's best trading partner but also its largest source of foreign investment and technology transfers; there has been an incredible amount of traffic of Americans coming here and Indians traveling to America; India's sons and daughters now total about 18,000 at our educational institutions; and we have a vibrant, successful, articulate Indian community of some 600,000 people in the United States, many in leadership positions. In the area of scientific research, both basic and applied, American and Indian scientists are actively cooperating on projects beneficial to both countries. And on the cultural side, of course, there was the extremely successful Festival of India in America, which did import~nt things for the image and understanding of India among Americans, and continues to do so.

In addition, exchanges of people in museums, art and music are expanding greatly, television executives from both countries are looking at possible co-productions and tne recent creation of the U.S.-India Fund assures the continuation of a wide variety of science, technology, education and cultural exchange programs over the next ten years.

On the political side, there were the two visits by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to the United States and the first visit by an American Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, followed a little more than a year later by a visit from his successor, Frank Carlucci.

As I prepare to leave India, I am aware of all I shall miss: 'Ihe rich panoply of life, the vast variety in groups and activities, the ways of doing things and organizing work, the many, many different intellectual approaches to life, the richness of conversation, the magnificent vibrance of the free Indian press. I shall dearly miss reading all those Indian publications and watching the contention of differing , views played out before the public in a way that speaks well of the richness of your democracy. I am also fascinated by the tremendous improvement in communications. Four years ago, it was not easy to call Bombay, Calcutta or Madras from Delhi; now it is instantaneous. The same is true of calls to the United States, and communications between our two peoples as a result have increased enormously. When I arrived here we were using telex to contact our branch posts; we now use computer-to-computer telecommunications over an Indian data network. That is an extraordinary change and we have only begun to scratch the surface.

Someone out, here resources pace. It

asked what I will tell my friends at home about India, and I said, "Look comes India:" India is moving, it has the infrastructure, its intellectual abound and it is beginning to adopt and produce technology at an accelerating will not be long before much software bears a "Made in India" stamp.

I came here thinking that I would be known as the Director of USIS India, but I found that most people said, "Oh yes, you are the Publisher of SPAN." And because of my respect for SPAN magazine, I take great pride in my association with it. It is a magazine that is probably unique as a government publication. No one has ever called or written me from our offices in Washington suggesting that we put this article or that photograph in SPAN. All of those decisions are made by the SPAN staff (one American and 12 Indians) here. I think that is what gives the magazine the richness and "breadth that attract readership.

I leave to take up a senior management assignment with the federal government in Washington, which will provide India with another well-placed friend and well-wisher in the Washington bureaucracy. I hope to visit again and again. I know I will find many changes with each visit. But I also know something that will never change--the warmth and friendliness of the Indian people. Namaste.

tJAaJLabJLarataPlayยง ill8Vew %r~ After its successful run in a number of European cities-Avignon, Paris, Lyons, Barcelona, Madrid, Athens-Peter Brook's Mahabharata played to packed houses in Los Angeles and New York last year; 50,000 Americans saw the Indian epic performed by an international cast.

Clockwise,from left: Ganesha and the Boy Listener; Kama endures the worm that bores into his thigh, while Parashurama sleeps; surrounded by a ring offire, Duryodhana,

Dushassana and Kama seek a vision of Arjuna's whereabouts; Drona instructs the young Panda vas and Kauravas in archery; and Kama shows Kunti his magic lance.

GE

or three months at the end of 1987 Americans had the opportunity of seeing Peter Brook's ninehour production of the Mahabharata.

The play arrived with great acclaim from European critics and audiences: "Enthralling," "one of the theatrical events of the century." These were the expectations it raised. And why not? Over the past 40 years, Peter Brook has proven himself to be one of England's most brilliant directors.

In the early 1970s his productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Peter Weiss's MaratjSade galvanized American audiences. For the past 15 years Brook has lived and worked in Paris where he heads the Centre International des Creations Theatrales, his instrument for exploring theater as "a ritual expression of the true driving forces of our time."

Brook's dedication to expioring universal elements in great works raises matters of particular interest to me. This past year I taught American studies in India. Though I think r was reasonably successful in sharing American literature with Indian students and scholars, still I believe that every literature has a falling off point: where textual glosses and background information cease to reveal the inner life of a selected text; where only firsthand experience of the culture, or exceptional intuition, can "complete" the work in question.

With this issue in mind, I was eager to see how Brook managed transposing the Mahabharata from India-where it holds a central place in the thought and fantasy of an entire culture-to America, where few people have even the sketchiest notion of what this epic is.

Since most readers of SPAN know the Mahabharata far better than either Peter Brook or myself, it would be pointless to recount the story or toss off glib speculation as to its meaning. What follows are my observations and reflections as they occurred during Brook's production.

1 p.m. The show begins with a bustling spirit of "let's get down to business." Vyasa walks on stage with a young boy and declares he will tell the lad the story of his forebears so that he may learn the message of dharma. Vyasa requires a durable scribe: Ganesha appears. Ganesha is a laugh-getter, a fussy listener (to Vyasa's narrative) whose zealous determination to do his job well leads to periodic interruptions in order to get the facts straight. Ganesha and the Boy Listener will be our representatives: a marveling on-stage audience whose reac-

Bhishma on his bed of arrows bids farewell to Dhritarashtra.

tions are calculated to cue our own responses.

The boy asks Ganesha how he got his elephant's head. "It's a long story," Ganesha replies.

The audience chuckles in recognition of its own epic undertaking.

It will be ten hours before we all leave the theater.

Twenty-five minutes into the story, Bhisma infuriates Amba by his vows of celibacy. Sotigui Kouyate, the man who plays Bhisma, is virtually incomprehensible. His homeland is the African nation, Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta). He is one of several cast members who had to learn English for this production.

Nonetheless, the audience is keenly attentive. Even in this short period of time, they have been drawn into the narrative.

The Mahabharata is not so complicated, it seems. Or, at least, not this Mahabharata.

Fairy tale, legend, myth, parable, romance, heroic quest-all forms of storytelling rolled into one varied narrative. There is no need to tax ourselves searching out content.

We are invited to enjoy what is before us: the movement of lives, the shifting pageant that passes before us on the stage.

All the Mahabharata's dramatic events are played on a surface of packed earth. At stage-front there is a semicircular pool.

Before the evening ends people will gather there, rise from its waters, drink, fight, sleep, have visions, discuss dharma, make love and die beside it. This bit of water is the unblinking eye of the universe-attentive witness to all that happens in the poetical history of mankind.

Running across the rear of the stage is a narrow stream traversed by a low bridge. This strand of water suggests a border-over which messengers will pass, exiles depart and strange travelers arrive.

And that is it. Beyond these topographic features, the stage is unfurnished.

Each scene-and there are hundreds of them-is given its character through shifts in lighting, musical accompaniment and occa-

sional props b}ought in by the actors themselves, such as mats, swatches of colorfuL fabric, cushions, screens, bamboo lashed tog.ether into grids, masks, pennants, colored powders, torches, chariot wheels, various weapons and, of course, dice.

It is wonderful to see Peter Brook's inventive spirit at work. As an ecclectic innovator drawing upon theater, dance and ritual from around the world, he is unrivaled. Vivid spectacle emerges from his ingenious use of everyday materials. All this suggests an underlying philosophy that this is a "people's theater"-a determined effort to extricate the essence of drama from high technology and high production costs that threaten to turn theater into a costly diversion of the well-to-do. Indeed, the program notes inform us that Brook's company has performed before migrant workers in the farm fields of California; on "a huge carpet that he dragged from village to village across Africa"; and even "under a tree at the edge of the Sahara."

Apparently, it is insignificant that a ticket to the Mahabharata costs $75-so long as Brook's heart is in the right place.

Gandhari's entry, an event which will yield the hundred fractious Kaurava sons, is a fine example of what Brook can do. A great din of trumpets and exotic horns heralds her procession. Then, a burst of vivid, royal red as Gandhari's retinue enters, bearing the queen-to-be on a litteraccompanied by a flourish of bariners, as well as a draped awning hoisted six meters aloft on long poles. A mere six people-yet Brook has created this glorious, regal scene.

Duryodhana's terrible birth is another such moment. He enters in a frenzied roiling tangle of bloodred cloth, slicing across the stage on a sharp diagonal course. The red robe flies open to reveal Duryodhana's body: every muscle tensed and trembling, as though in some seizure. He lets forth a ghoulish shriek. All this is accompanied by eerie cries and long ominous shadows that

evoke Macbeth's encounter with the Three Witches-an apt allusion given the evil, power-besotted schemes that lay ahead for Duryodhana and his clan.

Such exquisite moments compensate for the production's flaws. Given the conception of the Mahabharata as the poetical history of mankind, there is an obvious and admirable rationale for the international composition of Brook's cast: comprising actors and actresses representing 19 different nations. But in practice this raises problems. For one thing, it turns the stage into a veritable Tower of Babel. Though everyone speaks in English, I often have the impression I am attending the U.N. General Assembly without the benefit of simultaneous translation. Another distraction is the casting itself: roles. are sometimes assigned in a way that creates a discomforting subtext emerging from our awareness of the actors' race and national origins. For example, there is a scene in which Drona (played by Yoshi Oida of Japan) tests the Pandava brothers' prowess at arms. Bhima (Mamadou Dioume, a strapping black man from Senegal) rushes wildly at Drona, who easily dispatches him with a simple display of oriental martial arts. The audience laughs at this farcical manipulation of stereotypes: the cunning Japanese Zen master versus the headstrong black.

2:30 p.m. A few seats away from me, one woman's eyes are closed. Several people rest their heads on their partners' shoulders. But most members of the audience are clearly enjoying the production. They have settled in. After 90 minutes they have been persuaded that this elaqorate Indian epic will not be too difficult to follow. They are being entertained. Peter Brook has won them over.

I still find myself irked by this matter of accents and casting. Krishna, Vyasa and the Boy Listener all speak the King's English, which is to say that the essential Deity, the Narrator and the Recipient of the message of dharma are all Westerners speaking the privileged language of the play. There is an inadvertent "colonial" ambience to this. Peter Brook may well be "color blind" but his audience is not, particularly when many dramatic moments are subverted by murky accents that can make legendary heroes seem more like ordinary men.

Tuncel Kurtiz, who was born in Turkey, plays Shakuni. When the Game of Dice occurs we see a cagey Eastern European operator reduce the unknowing Yudhi-

shthira to poverty. It is like the credit card ads that ran on American TV sometime ago, where youthful American tourists find themselves lost and money less amidst the confusion of some teeming bazaar, where everyone has a slightly wicked accent.

3:30 p.m. "Nothing is worse than losing oneself. For when one has lost everything, freedom is the one thing that remains."

With this bite-sized portion of wisdom, the Game of Dice draws to a close.

The audience is absorbed, attentive, with few signs of restlessness. The woman who had been dozing next to me shot up in her seat to Duryodhana's cries of triumph.

The Kauravas ask Bhisma a question relating to their corrupt schemes. "I am troubled," Bhisma replies, "the question is obscure."

A sprinkling of laughter amongst the audience. Bhisma's command of English makes everything he says obscure.

After a half-hour break the play's second section, "Exile in the Forest," commences in theKaura va palace. Everyone is beset by bad dreams. "Even sleep's been bilnished!"

Gandhari exclaims in another of the playscript's frequent allusions to Macbeth.

"Calm down!" Duryodhana's nonShakespearean reply draws a sprinkling of laughter.

Jean-Claude Carriere, the man responsible for the script, is one of Europe's most distinguished screenwriters. But there's no distinction to language here. No doubt he has performed a remarkable feat of compression to sort out the Mahabharata's storyline and organize it into a coherent, well-paced drama. But the language of the play is jarring, frequently flat and occasionally-as in those periodic attempts to dole out palatable helpings of Indian thought-it is fatuous.

Amba appeals to Bhima in his forest exile and asks him to avenge Bhisma's insult to her. Bhima looks her over, amazed to find she is still beautiful. "It was 40 years ago!" he marvels. "Hate keeps me young!" she replies. The audience laughs.

Now Arjuna departs for India's northern frontier. "I know you'll miss him," Yudhishthira says to Draupadi, played by the well-known Indian dancer Mallika Sarabhai. "When your time came to be with him, your eyes had a special glow."

This presumably poignant parting is greeted by laughter.

More laughter comes when Bhima sires the demon-child Ghatotkatcha. Ghatotkatcha spins onto the stage in a loincloth,

dreadlocks flying-teetering on wobbling legs like a marionette with severed strings. I suspect that Brook is drawing upon movements from shamanistic ritual, culled during his theater experiments in Africa. In some ways the image is perfectly appropriate to the demon-child's exotic origin. Even so, I suspect that what amuses this New York audience is not the aptness of Brook's reference but rather the unintended stereotypical image of yet another black person running about in extremis.

5 p.m. Looking around I spot several people catching quick nods. Others fight off fatigue: eyes ease closed, heads jerk back fighting off the tempting spell of sleep.

As the Pandavas' 12 years of exile draw to a close, there are several speeches prophesizing apocalyptic destruction. All Order-political, social, moral, ecological and spiritual-will fall in disarray. No doubt, this is right there in the Mahabharata. Still, I can't help but feel that someone has hoisted a banner and is flapping it in my face. THISISRELEVANT TO THENUCLEAR AGE,the banner reads. PLEASE TAKeNOTE!!!

6 p.m. They seem to have turned off the heat in the theater. Cold air shocks everyone to a state of keen attention.

Once the Pandavas find asylum at the court of King Virata, the tone lightens considerably. Now the audience laughs with the play instead of at it. Brook's theatrical invention continues to astonish and delight. In one episode Bhima comes to Draupadi's aid by crushing the lecherous Keechaka, visibly pounding him into a little ball. Brook manages this as a breathtaking coup de theatre that leaves us all oohing and aahing like children

Arjuna, Bhisma, Amba, Shikhandi. Memwatching a magic show or a circus. bers of the audience whisper back and These are the moments of Brook's forth-trying to decipher what's being Mahabharata that work best-like splendid frames in an enormous, immensely said. entertaining cartoon. I hasten to add that With Bhisma gone, it is Drona's turn to this is not as dismissive as perhaps it may assume leadership of the Kaurava forces. sound. As a child, comics played an essen"Duh wee-uhl stops un me. Eeet is muy tun tial part in the shaping of my imagination now," Drona declares. and the nurturing of my love of literature.

The audience titters. Portentous writing Most Americans of my generation recal1 a and poor English diction have turned the period in their childhood when they scene to mush. dwel1ed within the world of Classic Com9:15 p.m. Krishna has just destroyed ics: lively 52-page renditions of masterJayadratha by using his disk to produce a pieces of world literature-works we false sunset. The audience settles low in would not read in their bulky originals their seats. After eight hours in this theater, until many years later. And when I arrived they have lost their sharp edge of attention. in India last year, with my skimpy knowlYet they have been absorbed within the edge of Indian history, I supplemented my Mahabharata-like sleepy children being reading with as many Amar Chitra Katha lul1ed to rest by a treasured bedtime story. comics as I could get my hands on.

10:15 p.m. Krishna attempts to instil1 Comics are superbly suited for visual1y Arjuna with new resolve. The Boy Listener tel1s Vyasa, ''I'm tired." Lots of weary narrating our favorite stories. But they are chuckles from the audience. not equipped to capture whatever wisdom and poetry great literature provides. With Looking around me, I see many heads propped on hands. People watch the Great its heady pace and wondrous theatrical moments, Brook's Mahabharata has the Battle with glazed eyes. virtues as wel1 as the limitations of a living Bhima slays Dushassana and tears out classic comic. his entrails. It ought to be a moment of 7 p.m. When Kunti tel1s Kama of his ghoulish horror in the Grand Guignol spirit of Jacobean tragedy. But Brook's origins, the audience is hushed. Jeffery Kissoon, the dashing young man who plays staging is merely sil1y. Bhima buries his face Kama, is one of the few truly outstanding in his rival's bel1y-then he rises with what actors in the cast. He speaks English beaulooks like red licorice stuck between his tiful1y. His presence elevates the drama to a teeth. "My enemy's blood is far sweeter heroic/tragic level, which is rarely susthan my mother's milk!" he declares.

The battle rages. Arrows spray across tained in his absence. In these few moments we catch a glimmer of what BrooÂĽ: ~.1ight the stage like so many toothpicks. Stagehands must be heaving them by the have achieved: a Mahabharata with emoarmload. The end is fast approaching-for tional and philosophical resonance. both the Kauravas and the audience. The 8:15 p.m. Dinner break. People rush out fel10w next to me jerks to consciousness to neighborhood restaurants while many every few minutes. Others have already others sit down on the lobby floor to enjoy drawn the final curtain: they are peaceful1y picnic lunches.

I do some eavesdropping. Many people asleep. Stil1, for those of us who cannot • take our eyes off the stage, there are unexfind the acting uneven. And the playscript pected (and unintended) moments of impresses no one. "It's like mediocre laughter. "He has the same feet as you," Shakespeare done by a great director," Bhima says to Kunti as he examines someone comments.

Kama's corpse, "I often wondered why .... " Yet, in spite of these objections, most A few minutes later, an exhausted people are having a good time experiencing Yudhishthira appears at the gates of paraBrook's Mahabharata. dise carrying a dog in his arms-a bit of Now the terrible battle is about to begin. black fluff thrown over his hand. It looks The great moment comes when Arjuna hesitates and Krishna stirs him with a like a dusting mitt or a child's puppet. It certainly does not look like the sort of thing lengthy lecture on resolute thought and you would defy the gods over. action: the Bhagavad Gita. I time it on my At last al1 is resolved. Yudhishthira, watch. The Bhagavad Gita section takes Vyasa and Ganesha-survivor, narrator, just three and a half minutes. and historian-scribe-have the stage to The slaying of Bhisma brings together themselves. some of the cast's most grating accents:

"This was the last il1usion," Vyasa observes. Ganesha agrees, "This was the last il1usion."

What wil1 Peter Brook and the Centre International des Creations Theatrales do for an encore? After the Mahabharata, taking on Dante's Inferno, Milton's Paradise Lost, or Proust's Remembrance of Things Past would be mere child's play. Of course, Brook might consider Balzac's La Comedie Humaine, the complete works of Louis L'Amour, Isaac Asimov, or the Waverly novels of Sir Walter Scott. A man of Brook's talents could probably create memorable theatrical moments using the telephone directory for a script.

But would it be worth the effort? That is the question I have after seeing the Mahabharata.

On the one hand, there is something intrinsically worthwhile about the fact that Western audiences have beEn exposed to India's fundamental imaginative text. On the other hand, there is not much resonance to the banal compression of religious and philosophical thought that the playscript apportions to us in periodic bland doses.

Nevertheless, we do get the main narrative lines, we do get the story of the Mahabharata presented as a dazzling succession of incidents and memorably framed tableaux.

That is not al1 the Mahabharata has to offer, but it is just about al1 we get from Peter Brook's production. If there is something disappointing in this, it is never so discouraging as to make us forget that we are in the presence of greatness: both Brook's own prodigious talent and, of course, the Mahabharata itself.

0

Robert Hamburger, who recently spent a year in India as a Fulbright senior lecturer in American studies, is the author of Our Portion of Hell (an oral history of the civil rights movement in Fayette County, Tennessee), The Thirties, A Stranger in the House (personal narratives from black household workers) and All the

Lonely People: Life in a Single Room Occupancy Hotel.

Everyone's Second Language American English usage, coinage and interpolations in the past 200 years have vitalized this hoary tongue and given it a vibrancy the world has found hard to resist.

Noah Webster (1758-1843), lexicographer and compiler of the first American dictionary, which revolutionized English spelling, is seen in the picture above.

The world today may be divided into East and West, North and South, but about 420 million of its inhabitants-on six continents-share a mother tongue that has no borders. Almost as many more use it as the language of international shipping and aviation, of business and trade, of science and technology. Seventy-five percent of all telexes and telegrams are written in it. More than half the world's newspapers and 80 percent of all the computer data appear in it. English is, in short, the most widely used language there ever has been.

And, since World War II, American English has become the most influential and far-flung of all varieties of the spoken language. Next to British English, it is also the oldest.

American English got its start in 1607when Captain John Smith and a small group of settlers landed at Jamestown, in what is now the state of Virginia, and founded the first successful English colony in America. Among the resources they brought with them was the magnificently rich, resourceful, fluid and flexible Elizabethan English of William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe.

The next oldest outpost of the English language on Earth is India, where, in 1640, the first permanent agency of the British East India Company opened for business. However, English became a language of consequence in India only after the collapse of the Mughal Empire, while it has enjoyed a continuous and uninterrupted existence in America where its speakers have conservatively clung to some of its Elizabethan features. This preserving of the archaic is a linguistic phenomenon that commonly occurs when languages are transplanted. At the same time, British English has digressed and diverged from 17th-century forms.

Although English is part of a vast family oflanguages (including Dutch, Welsh, Pashto, Hindi, and many others) derived from a common ancestor called "Indo-European;" it has only really been

identifiable as "English" for about 1,500 years, since the time that several Germanic tribes invaded Britain from Europe. Their native tongues were the basis of a new language, similar in sound and structure to its Germanic ancestors. Old English, as it is called, was spoken from about the mid-fifth to the mid-12th century and is largely unintelligible to modern English speakers.

Then, in 1066, after the battle of Hastings, more than William the Conquerer invaded Britain; the language of the privileged and powerful-French-nudged English aside for a good 300 years, at least in official circles. The language of the masses, however, continued to be Old English, which absorbed thousands of French words, often without displacing their Old English predecessors.

The result was a rich blend, partially accounting for the bountiful vocabulary that English speakers enjoy today and that makes possible the expression of highly subtle nuances. The mingling of French and Old English gave rise to Middle English, the language of Chaucer.

English as we know it did not come into being until the mid-15th century. This time the change was brought about not by political or military events, but by linguistic forces that even experts do not thoroughly understand. The so-called "Great Vowel Shift" slowly and inexorably occurred, affecting the way people pronounced virtually every accented vowel in every word: "name" (pronounced "NAH-meh") became name; "wryting" (pronounced "Ree-ting") became writing, and so on. It was this modern English in its full flowering that came to North America with the first British settlers at Jamestown who had sought adventure and fortune.

They spoke English with the broad Devonshire accent of the West Country from where they came. It is characterized by the nasal "twang" and stressed "r" heard today in the speech of

people living on Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay and other isolated communities on the mid-Atlantic coast, a variety known as "Tidewater" English.

Sir Walter Raleigh-who had earlier and unsuccessfully attempted to establish a colony on Roanoke Island off the North Carolina coast-spoke with a broad Devonshire accent. This upper-class, 17th-century Englishman would have pronounced the following in much the way a modern American speaker would: "The calf came down the path to take a bath." Yet, as recently as 1791, what passes as the current upper-class British-English pronunciation of the same sentence The cahf came down the pahth to take a bahth was considered vulgar by language "authorities" of the day. Ironically, its origins are cockney, the variety of English spoken in and around London by the working class. Over the years it has quietly conducted a steady invasion of the Queen's English.

Soon after the founding of Jamestown, Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts was established by a new kind of settler. Religious freedom, not adventure, drove these newcomers from more than 30 locations in East Anglia to New England. Even today New Englanders, and Bostonians in particular, drop the "r" after a vowel in the manner of speakers from East Anglia. They say "baa" for bar; "caad" for card; "staa" for star. Besides, Americans everywhere tend to use older terms like "fall" instead of autumn,

Americans tend to use older terms such as "fall" instead of autumn, "mad" instead of angry and "guess" for think long after British English made the change. "mad" instead of angry and "guess" for think long after British English had made the change. Similarly, the archaic form of the past participle of "get" (that is, "gotten") remains in use in American English, while British English simply uses "got."

Even more influential contributors to American English were the ancestors of ten percent of America's present population, the Scots-Irish from the Scottish lowlands and Northern Ireland.

They landed in great numbers on the mid-Atlantic coast in the 1720s. A lusty, adventurous lot, they brought with them long rifles, fashioned hats of coonskin for themselves, and indulged in wild proverbs and tall tales. They were the Davy Crocketts who followed the frontier scouts through the Cumberland Gap, over the Appalachian Mountains, "a-huntin" and "a-fishin" and (sometimes) "a-feared." As they led the expansion into the valleys of the West, their accents leveled off, but they contributed such enduring terms to American English as "hang fire," (wait) "half cocked" (unprepared) and "flash in the pan" (promising, but worthless). They, like the contemporary hillbilly speakers from the Appalachian Mountains, said "hit" for "it" in stressed syllables, as "hit don't make 110 difference." Singers of country music today from Tokyo to Tashkent, from Hong Kong to Halifax, imitate their drawl.

English has always been an insatiable purloiner of words from other languages, which is one reason for its durability, and no sooner had 17th-century English colonists landed in the New World than they borrowed, in violently distorted form, words from the American Indian languages to describe the abundance of

strange new "things" in their surroundings, such as "woodchuck," "tomahawk," "raccoon" and "moose."

American English was quick in turn to borrow from the 18thcentury French explorers and trappers in the New World such terms as "prairie," "crevasse," "chowder" and "toboggan," and from the more permanent Spanish settlers, who had established themselves in the regions of the Gulf of Mexico and west of the Rocky Mountains, words having to do with their Spanish ranch culture, such as "peon," "hacienda" and "adobe"; with their culinary delights, as "chile con carne," "taco" and "tamale"; and such institutions as the "siesta" and "fiesta."

Borrowings from Spanish were heavy-and greater than the combined borrowings from the American Indian languages and French. Most words coming in from other languages (or loan words) are nouns-which simply name things-a linguistic fact that testifies to their superficial status. However, when adverbs and verbs such as the Spanish "pronto" (quickly) and "savvy" (understand) and such morphological items as prefixes and suffixes are adopted as well, it indicates a deeper influence. Spanish has notably contributed the suffix "-eria," conveying the idea of self-service as in "cafeteria."

Dutch is another language that contributed to American English in colonial times. The Dutch may have given way to the British colonists when New Amsterdam became New York, but their words "coleslaw," "cookie," "waffle" and even "Yankee" (according to some authorities) have stayed on. While the Dutch words that came into American English are fewer in number, they are in much wider general use today than loan words from Spanish or French.

Subsequently, waves of immigrants during the 19th century brought their languages with them adding to America's gathering store of new expressions. Germans contributed "hamburger" (and at the same time the ubiquitous suffix "-burger"), "beer," "semester" and "seminar" to the New World, while Africans brought with them "voodoo," "gumbo" and "juke box." The borrowings go on.

Thus it is the preservation of an earlier form of English, along with the linguistic inventiveness of the frontier experience and its hospitality to words from the languages of successive waves of immigrants that characterize the American language today, a language that made its debut on the world scene in the closing days of World War II. It was foreign correspondent Edward R. Murrow's radio broadcasts from Europe at that time that ushered the new forms in. In fact, when the British Empire faded, America gave the English language a new life.

Since 1970, a great and universal hunger for information has made the world a true global village served by increasingly sophisticated media, and English has become everybody'¡s second language if not their first. World trade and world English have taken off together. "Japlish," or Japanese English, uses 20,000 English words. In Singapore, Chinese and Indian immigrants and natives of Singapore all speak to one another in English, at work and in the marketplace. Most of the vocabulary in use today has its source in America, words and expressions such as "airport," "hotel," "jeans," "bar," "soda," "cigarette," "sport," "golf," "tennis," "stop," "OK," "know-how," "sex appeal," "telephone," "no problem" and "fast food." Some non-English-speaking governments scarcely welcome this linguistic invasion, and the French, for example, go to considerable pains and effort to keep French "pure." However, it may be that French (and other) cultural

traditions are under threat not so much from the words themselves . as from the foreign concepts and practices that they describe.

India, on the other hand, has become a major center of higher education for students from Third World countries, and the language of instruction is English. Even 40 years after the British left, English continues to be a major language of the subcontinent.

Professor Braj Kachru of the University of Illinois points out that inasmuch as English is nobody's native language in India, it enjoys a "neutral" status and is therefore useful: No one feels that one particular group has an advantage over another in using it to communicate.

Although the growth of the American language has taken place alongside its growth in economic and political influence in the past 40 years, its continuing readiness to assimilate words from other languages and its ready adoption of slang also account for its durability and liveliness. William Safire, an American language expert, says American English "sings a little," it "flexes its muscles," "it's slangy." Indeed, American English welcomes slang and always has.

In the 1980s the center of gravity of American English has shifted from the East to the West coast of the continent, and what the world is getting flooded with is slang and new terminology from California, where almost everything happens first-from the

latest fads in relIgion and lifestyles, to the latest developments in computer science and technology. The huge energy of California's brand of American English overflows language boundaries. Some of it is highly transitory, in vogue one year, forgotten the next. This is particularly true of teenage slang, perhaps because teenagers eventually grow up and give way to successive waves of newcomers who disdain anything handed down-even words.

In an attempt to find new words for the adjective "good," for example, American teenagers have borrowed or invented many slang words, including "cool," "neat," "far out," "in" and even "bad"! When used like this, words actually mean very little. They simply express the speaker's general approval of the thing or person he or she is talking about.

Surfing, the great California teenage sport, is the source of much of their slang. A couple of years ago, expressions like "the max," "rad" and "narly" (all meaning, roughly, "good") enjoyed a brief but vigorous tenure. "Tubular," which originally described a particular kind of wave that is dangerous and exciting to surfers, quickly traveled inland from the coast to nearby San Fernando Valley shopping malls where the "Valley Girls?-'"made the scene."

Soon, "tubular" was used to describe anything great or "awesome"-in short, "the max."

Although slang is often vacuous, it sometimes expresses a

have not assimilated the features of standard English as the others have. Critics of black English charge that the dialect encourages racial segregation-that its speakers use it to denote their separateness from the white population and even from other blacks who live and work with white Americans. Others say the opposite is true-that their segregation in inner cities perpetuates black English.

When the question of English comes up, the differences that exist between the British and American varieties inevitably surface. Non-native speakers of English are quick to notice these differences.Everyone recalls the quip made by Oscar Wilde on the subject: "We [the British] and the Americans have much in common, but there is always the language barrier." The two languages do indeed go their separate ways in many instances, in pronunciation (American "dance" is British "dahnce") vocabulary (American "subway" is the British "tube") and spelling ("r" and "e" in words like "theater" and "center" are reversed; and words such as the American English "check" and "plow" are simplified versions of British "cheque" and "plough").

Wilde's view was shared by many American scholars, most notably by Noah Webster, the great early 19th-century lexicographer who revolutionized English spelling, and H.L. Mencken, the early 20th-century author of The American Language. They both believedAmerican and British English were diverging. Although it may have seemed to be true in the past, it is clearly no longer so.

Changes can be noted by comparing the various vocabularies having to do with communication. Before 1776, sailing terms were practically identical in both British and American English, but once politically independent, Americans chose to go their own ¡way. "Railway" became "railroad"; "goods train" became "freight train"; and railway "sleepers" became "cross-ties." Now technical vocabularies are coming together again in aerospace and About the Author: Jacquelin Singh, a frequent contributor to SPAN, is a Delhi-basedfree-lance writer. She has written several educational books and one novel for children.

after the gem of that hue. Happily for me and my novel, Mexico does and did know the jacinth gem, so my narrator could legitimately use that word for that color. As I recollect, it appears only twice in 750-some pages of Aztec, so you may be thinking that I went to an ungodly mountain of labor to produce such a negligible mouse.

Maybe so. But it makes my novels the way I want them. In one of my earlier books, set in the 1830s,I had some character refer to something as "a dud"-until I discovered that the usage wasn't coined until World War I. At work on my latest novel, Spangle, part of which involves the "American War Between the States," I referred at least once to a wartime "profiteer" before I checked the Oxford English Dictionary-and learned that that word was another World War I coinage. I settled for changing the word to "gouger"-though, dammit, it just doesn't have the same sneer to it.

computer terminology. America's "program" and "disk" have replaced Britain's "programme" and "disc."

Indeed, the current convergence of British and American varieties of English stems mainly from Britain's adopting American usages. The American pronunciation of "suit," "lute" and "absolute" has almost replaced the standard British pronunciation with its "y" sound after the "s" or "1." American vocabulary, too, has quietly invaded the British Isles. Words such as "babysitter," "teenager," "commuter," "striptease," "brainwash," "streamline," "lean over backwards," "fly off the handle," "call the shots" and, surprisingly, even "stiff upper lip" are all of American origin.

The traffic is not all one way, however. "Weekend" entered the American language from Britain before 1900. In contemporary times, "miniskirt," "opposite number," "hovercraft," the "Establishment," "smog," "brain drain" and "gay" (in the sense of homosexual) have all been British exports.

Faster communications in the future are likely to override language changes in times to come, so that the current tendency for British and American English to converge is likely to continue.

This does not mean that British and American English will ever become indistinguishable; but they are not likely to become mutually unintelligible, either. At the same time it is predicted that Indian English will remain widely comprehensible outside India's borders and that its role in providing higher education through the English medium for its own students and those from the Third World will continue.

As for American English, William Safire feels that it's growing, that it's more responsive and more accepted around the world than ever before.

Robert Burchfield, recently retired chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, declared in a recent BBC documentary on the English language that "American English is and will continue to be the major global form of English into the indefinite future." 0

There was yet another expression that I had to dig to find for Spangle. What is now called "combat fatigue" was called "shell shock" during World War I, but what was it called during the American Civil War? I did ferret that one out, though now I forget where. The military medics of those days called it "soldier's heart."

Of course, innumerable words, or new usages of them, have come into the English language recently enough that most historical novelists know better than to use them in stories set in olden times. I doubt that any responsible novelist would use the word "sophisticated" to describe, say, Beau Brummell-though that character was, in the sense of worldly, urbane, refined. However, "sophisticated" did not begin to be used in that sense until sometime late in the 19th century. In Brummell's time (1778-1840), the word meant false, adulterated, impure.

"Contact" became a popular verb only during this Age of Flight (and under my roof it

never will be a verb). Even if only from old movies, you'll remember how the mechanic flipped the propeller and the aviator in the cockpit yelled "Contact!" to announce that his ignition was switched on. But in some movies, you'll hear such howlers as, "Hasten, centurion, and contact your legion in Gau!!"

I am not being frivolous or facetious. I contend, most seriously, that there is a real need for a good, thick, complete-as-possible dictionary of "What People Used to Call Things." The compiler jauthor of such a work might not have an immediate best-seller. B~t he or she would assuredly have a steady seller-if only to generation after generation of historical 0 novelists.

About the Author: Gary Jennings is the author of several books including World of Words: The Personalities of Language, the Journeyer and The Treasure of Superstition Mountains.

The Salzburg Seminar The author describes her experiences as a fellow at a seminar on American Law and Legal Institutions at one of the world's most prestigious centers of intellectual exchange.

T

here are hundreds of seminars in the prestige-conscious firmament of academe, " Newsweek has 0 bserved, "but few can rival the eminence of the Salzburg program." A former vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, Lord Eric Ashby, has declared that the "Salzburg Seminar is the best thing America does in Europe." The Salzburg Seminar is "a private, independent nonprofit educational organization, responsible only to the spirit of free inquiry." Established in 1947 by students at Harvard University, it was sponsored initially by the Harvard Student Council. The seminar has its own board of directors, with both European and American members, a European advisory council composed mostly of alumni of the seminar, and a business advisory council. Though it is incorporated in Massachusetts, all its sessions are held at Schloss Leopoldskron in Salzburg, Austria.

If few of us in India have heard of the seminar-I hadn't till I was invited to apply for it last year-that is mainly because it is prohibitively expensive. But more about that later. The purpose of the Salzburg Seminar is the study, at the highest level, of contemporary international issues as well as significant aspects of American society. It provides a unique forum for the frank exchange of ideas and informed opinion.

For 1987, the seminar offered ten sessions, lasting from one to three weeks, each on a different subject and with different faculty and fellows. The fellows the seminar brings together are young professionals of prominence or promise in their fields and are primarily from Western Europe, Eastern Europe, North America and sometimes from developing countries. The 40 to 50 fellows selected for each session represent a diversity of professional viewpoints and experiences. They work with a distinguished international facuIty, all serving without monetary compensation.

The more than 12,000 alumni of the seminar includes current and former prime ministers, members of parliaments, ministers, am-

Above: The setting for the Salzburg Seminar is the picturesque Schloss Leopoldskron, better known as the castle where The Sound of Music wasfilmed. Above left: The author, Seita Vaidialingam (secondfrom left), with (from right) Justice William Brennan of the U.S. Supreme Court, Mrs. Brennan and Turkishfellow Ezra Ekmaci at a banquet held during the seminar at the schloss.

bassadors, mayors and leaders in various fields.

The session I chose to attend was entitled "American Law and Legal Insti'tutions." Held every year, this session has the maximum duration (three weeks), and is among the most sought after, with the longest waiting list.

The tuition fees for the seminar are 40,000 Austrian schillings (about Rs. 40,000). In addition, there is a per diem charge of 300 Austrian schillings for boarding and lodging for 21 days. Then there is, of course, the cost of the to-and-fro air ticket and money for personal expenses. Once in Austria, there are additional optional expenses for sightseeing trips organized by the seminar, music concerts, cultural shows, the opera-and anywhere else one may want to go. .

Fairly prohibitive, as I said, but there are scholarships available, particularly for applicants from the Third World. I learned this from Thomas Dove, who was then press attache with the Embassy of the United States in Delhi. A former deputy director of the seminar, Dove asked me to apply for the 1987session. The seminar has on its staff of directors at least one U.S. government official.

The directors and former directors are expected to recruit fellows for the seminar.

Along with my application form, I handed Dove recommendation certificates from the then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of India, P.N. Bhagwati, and the then Chief Justice-designate (present Chief Justice of India), R.S. Pathak. A few months later I

The Schloss Story If the setting for the Salzburg Seminar seems more fit for a king, it is because the schloss is a castle.

Built between 1736 and 1744 for Prince Archbishop Leopold Anton Freiherr von Firmian, the schloss was restored to its original splendor by Max Reinhardt, Austrian impresario and cofounder of the Salzburg Music Festival. It was Reinhardt who built the massive library that today contains more than 10,000 volumes on every subject that the Salzburg Seminar addresses itself to. The schloss has been seen on celluloid almost worldwide; The Sound of Music was filmed here. In fact, the locals refer to it as "the Sound of Music Castle."

The schloss is owned by the Salzburg Seminar, thanks to the generosity of Reinhardt's¡ widow

Helene Thimig. One day in 1946, Viennese-born Clemens Heller chanced to meet Thimig on a subway in New York City. He told her excitedly of a plan he and two other Harvard men had to establish a seminar in Europe. "But," he said, "we have no place to hold it."

"Why, you must hold it at Schloss Leopoldskron!" she replied. Thus, in 1947, what became the Salzburg Seminar came to Salzburg-and to the schloss.

The intention of the young proposers of the seminar was to bring together European students, who had been unable to talk to each other for almost a generation because of the bitterness created by World War II, in a friendly, intellectual atmosphere. The subject of American culture was chosen because it aroused curiosity in Eu-

received a letter from the seminar informing me that I had been accepted as a fellow and also been granted a full scholarship, including exemption from per diem charges.

As required, I arrived at Schloss Leopoldskron a day before the seminar began. The delegates stay at the. schloss and all seminar activities too are held here and at the adjacent Meierhof.

My first glimpse of Schloss Leopoldskron left me simply spellbound. It was the kind of fairy tale castle one reads aboutand here I was not just visiting but living in it. The interior of this three-story palace has stone floors and huge winding staircases, enormous portraits of founder Prince Leopold everywhere, a chapel in the basement, a huge hall on the ground floor with a piano, a terrace overlooking a man-made lake, bush gardens and trout-filled streams. On the first floor is the Marble Hall-an enormous room replete with chandeliers and the inevitable por. traits of Prince Leopold. This was the dining room where the fellows and faculty met three times a day for sit-down meals.

The faculty comprised Robert A. Gorman, a professor oflaw at the University of Pennsylvania, who was the chairman of the seininar; Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., of the U.S. Supreme Court at Washington, D.C.; Roger Errera, counsillar d't etat in the French Council of State; Harvey J. Goldschmid, a professor of law, Columbia University; Herma Hill Kay, a professor of law, University of California at Berkeley (I was assigned to Kay's seminar group on Family Law) and Ronald L. Olson, a partner of the law firm Munger, Tolles and Olson in Los Angeles. All of them had come with their spouses and some had brought their children along too. The times I spent with the faculty members and their families were among my happiest memories.

The day began early at the schloss. A gong went off at 7 a.m. (Bob Gorman called it the COWbell)and its resounding peals could be heard in every nook and cranny of the schloss. I simply must put in

rope at that time and because, being relatively neutral, it would not unduly arouse old antagonisms. At first the founders, two Harvard students and a young faculty member, tried to persuade Harvard University to sponsor the project, but the university refused: the project was "too idealistic, too impractical, too premature," they were told. Undaunted, they persuaded the Harvard Student Council to sponsor it, scrounged food from Switzerland and furniture from surplus U.S. Army stock, and assembled an extraordinary faculty, all volunteers, such as Wassily Leontief, later a Nobel economist; anthropologist Margaret Mead; and the literary historian F.O. Matthiessen. Since that day no faculty member in 250 sessions has been paid more than expenses.

The first session in 1947, which brought together 102 fellows from Europe and North America, was such a success that the experiment was repeated the next year. In 1950, the seminar was incorporated in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the 1960s, its scope was broadened to include international topics, ranging from unemployment and industrial policy to health care, computers, literature, media and urban development.

The settlement of the Reinhardt estate made it possible for the Salzburg Seminar to purchase the schloss in 1959 from the City of Salzburg, which owned it briefly.

Inquiries about the program may be directed to the Salzburg Seminar, Schloss Leopoldskron, Box 129, A-5010 Salzburg, 0 Austria.

a word about the food served at the schloss. It was super. A menu was never repeated in all the three weeks I was there. But what I found really strange was having dinner at 6:30 p.m.-with the sun still blazing-and that too in a grand hall full of old portraits and chandeliers!

Nine a.m. sharp every morning sawall the fellows and faculty in the conference room in the adjoining Meierhof for lectures that were of an hour's duration each. Gorman's topic was Intellectual Property and Trademarks; Justice Brennan's, the American Constitution; Errera's, Human Rights; Goldschmid's, Corporate Law; and Kay's, Family Law. Everyday a faculty member spoke on his or her chosen topic and after a short coffee break there was a discussion on the lecture till lunch. In the afternoon, we were broken up into smaller groups-with ten fellows to a faculty member-to discuss the topic of the day in greater detail, and the fellows spoke on the systems prevailing in their own countries. I had some very interesting discussions about the Bhopal gas tragedy and the law of tort with Goldschmid, on surrogate parenting with Herma Hill Kay and about foreign arbitration awards with Olson. In fact, my discussions with them have helped me solve some knotty issues in a few important cases on coming back to India. But on the whole, I found the lectures extremely basic and far too simple. I said as much to the directors and the faculty members. The lectures just traced the broad outlines of each subject and at the seminars the propositions in the case law were elaborated and we were questioned on what the trial court had held in each case-the arguments put up on behalf of each party, the reasoning of the appellate or trial court and how it had been arrived at. As a lawyer practicing for more than 15 years, this is the sort of thing I do daily, almost as a routine.

In fact, even academically and intellectually I found the entire seminar sessions a walkover and felt somewhat overqualified. The

Law Faculty at the University of Delhi, from where I took my law degree, imparts legal education on the American case law method.

This, combined with the fact that I had studied American history in school and college, gave me a distinct edge over other participants. Besides, most of the European fellows had a language problem-English was for them a second or a third language and not the medium of instruction at school and college as it had been for me. Most of them were also unfamiliar with the American legal system coming as they did from countries that have entirely different systems. The Indian legal system is broadly based on the common law of England, which is also the basis of the American system. Besides, American case law is an important reference point in the practice of law in India. Thus I went to the schloss's well stocked library for pleasure in between sessions and not to slog as the other participants did in their attempt to keep up with the lectures and the case law.

One of the more interesting events at the seminar was a mock court at which I was the chief juror. I had to deliver the verdict of the bench with detailed reasoning. It was a criminal trial with Justice Brennan presiding. One of the Italian fellows, Nello Pacini, was "charged" with having entered the room of a female fellow from Turkey, Ezra Ekmaci, at night and of having "committed" theft. Not being used to the jury system, it was quite a novel experience for me to listen to counsels' arguments, arrive at a reasoning in consultation with other jurors at a closed door meeting and deliver the verdict as a recommendation to the bench ("Not guilty").

At the Family Law seminars, under Kay's supervision, I was called upon to speak about the role of women in modern India, the family setup here, divorce and its impact on Indian society, the maintenance of children of separated parents and the plight of deserted wives. I was specifically asked about bride-burning over and over again.

I answered more questions about India almost every day after dinner, as we sat on the schloss terrace, chatting and watching the swans on the lake. The faculty and fellows were curious about my bindi, the caste system, the surviving impact of British colonial rule after so many years of independence, the status of women. I was an unending source of amazement to the fellows and faculty. They found my having been educated in a British-run convent and college in south India and still remaining staunchly Hindu a contradiction. They could not reconcile to the fact of my having had the freedom to study, to work and to travel on my own with the segregation of the sexes that exists in India, especially in the south.

Many of them told me individually that on the one hand I appeared very cosmopolitan and obviously knew my subject well, but on the other hand that I came across as someone very vulnerable and reticent whom they felt compelled to protect. The result of all this was that the men treated me like they would a fragile object and the women offered to chaperon me at the drop of a hat! In fact, once when I mentioned to a faculty member's wife that a male fellow had invited me to town for coffee and cake, her immediate response was, "Let me also go with you. You are not familiar with the dating ways of the West."

While I was in Salzburg; the Indian presidential results were declared. Dr. Caroll Brodsky, Herma Kay's husband, brought me . the International Herald Tribune which had carried the news and everybody wanted to know what caste the two candidates-R. Venkataraman and V.R. Krishna Iyer-belonged to (both were

south Indian Brahmins like me) and the mode of electing a President.

Justice Brennan was also very interested in the Indian judicial system and the procedure for appointing judges here. When I told him that judges in India lived in government bungalows and had government domestics waiting on them, he wanted to know if there was a vacancy in the Indian Supreme Court that he could apply for! He listened engrossed to tales about my father and grandfather who had also been judges.

I, in turn, along with others, was keen to hear Justice Brennan's experiences. We all heard the tape of a radio interview with him on his life and experiences as the American Supreme Court's oldest, most experienced judge. In many ways, I found the after-dinner talks more informative than the seminar itself.

But, of course, not all evenings were spent in discussion. I simply loved the occasional jaunt into town for a concert, or for cake and coffee at Tomaselli's, or to the cafe Glockenspiel where they served many varieties of rich coffee resplendent with whipped cream and cognac, and huge wedges of pastry studded with Erdbeer, Heidenbeere or other exotic sounding berries and fruit, or the famous Austrian Topfan Strudel (slabs of fresh cheese cake wallowing in a warm vanilla sauce) or ice creams of various flavors and textures, or Mozart Kugeln-the famous round bitter chocolates of Salzburg filled with marzipan and hazelnut nougat.

To talk of Salzburg and not mention music would be a sacrilege.

I went to several operas and piano and violin recitals. Many an evening a fellow or a faculty member would play on the grand piano on the ground floor hall of the schloss and there would be dancing and parties till the late hours of the night. Other nights there were intense intellectual discussions over beer, wine and cheese at the Bierstube located in the basement of the schloss.

One evening we watched The Sound of Music in the schloss itself-the film was shot at the schloss. We also saw some good Italian opera on Austrian TV and watched videotaped recordings of how a judge is appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court after being vetted thoroughly by the Senate. One morning George McGovern, who had contested Richard Nixon for the presidency in 1972 and now lives in Europe and lectures at European universities, came by and talked to us about the American political system.

We had a terrific open-air barbeque on the schloss terrace, a concert at the schloss followed by a cocktail party, house parties at the director's apartment, a dance and weekend picnic trips to the Lake Districts of Mondsee, Wolfgangsee and Badischal. Then there was a glittering farewell banquet at which I was asked to propose a vote of thanks to the faculty.

I have now been back several months. Friendly letters of remembrance have been arriving from the faculty and fellows, bringing back memories of one of my loveliest summers in one of the world's most beautiful cities.

Some weeks ago Jerfy Prillaman, cultural attache of the U.S. Information Service, hosted a party of the Salzburg alumni in India in honor of the Salzburg Seminar Deputy Director Bill Stevens and his wife Erica during their recent visit to India. For one more evening I was once again able to re-live the Salzburg Seminar, which seems to touch the lives and attitudes of its participants in a very special way.

D About the Author: Seita Vaidialingam has been a practicing lawyer of the Supreme Court of India since 1972.

This is the second book in James MacGregor Burns's planned three-volume history of the United States. The first volume, The Vineyard of Liberty (see February 1987 SPAN), took the story from its beginnings to the eve of the American Civil War. The Workshop of Democracy moves from the Civil War to the early years of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The author of biographies of John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Burns has been studying American history and institutions for half a century, and he continues to find the American story inexhaustibly exciting. So, while the tale he tells is more than twice-told, he addresses it with energy, verve and a sense of discovery. He is interested in more than mere narrative in these books, but his narrative achievement in both volumes has been high.

Each of his chapters adroitly combines statistics, anecdotes, contemporary quotations and exposition to create a vivid sense of particularity-what Henry James called "a solidity of specification."

Burns's rendering of the Civil War, to give one example, captures not only the sweep of the struggle, its unfolding and grand strategies, but also something of the daily life of the common soldiers, the grinding tedium of their routine and the interludes of confusion and terror that overwhelmed them on the battlefield.

The book is divided into five large sections that carry the story forward both chronologically and thematically.

The pressure of concentration is palpable in every line. After all, a volume of more than 600 pages, no matter how densely packed, is brief when measured against the author's ambitious reach.

He wants to incorporate all of America here, the political, economic and intellectual life of the entire nation during the course of 70 tumultuous years. Along with that, he wants to convey the main currents and crosscurrents of high, middlebrow and popular culture, and he wants to memorialize the experiences of ordinary citizens, in particular the histories of forgotten and dispossessed Americans.

Coverage on this scale brings problems, to be sure, among them a staccato, sometimes breathless pace, the multiplication of perfunctory transitions and ocFrom The New York Times Book Review. Copyright Š 1985

by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.

The Workshop of Democracy

by James MacGregor Burns, Asian Books, New Delhi, 1987, 671 pp., Rs. 135.

casional shapelessness and disorientation. For example, Burns moves his narrative ahead so quickly that a discussion of the ideological disputes within the union movement and among blacks in the early 20th century finds itself squeezed into a section called "Women: The Progressive Cadre."

More generally, while Burns tries to be attentive to all his myriad subjects, he is predictably best on what interests him most. His accounts of the U.S. presidential elections of 1896 and 1912, for instance, and of Woodrow Wilson's losing battle for the League of Nations are brief but superb. The fluid narrative typically manages to be encyclopedic without seeming cluttered.

The title of this book announces the leading theme. The years following the Civil War witnessed the industrializing of America. From a thinly populated, agrarian society, the United States was transformed in the late 19th century into an urban and technological civilization, the leading industrial power on Earth. To those who lived through them, the rate of change in those years seemed staggering.

Henry Adams had little enough in common with most Americans, but he found a suitable image when he spoke of historical necks being metaphorically broken by the new machines.

Burns charts this profound industrial and economic shift, and the multiple shocks that attended it. This focus, which is in fact rather familiar, gives him a way

to order his huge quantity ofinformation.

In addition, it provides entry to what he considers the paramount issue of the period-the dangers of concentrated corporate power for America's pluralistic democracy.

The author argues that for two generations the major intellectual issue facing the American people "was the compatibility of a rapidly centralizing system of corporate capitalism with an old-fashioned, divided constitutional system- a republic that institutionalized civil liberties, a broad electorate, checks and balances, and minority vetoes. The key political question was which system could better satisfy people's wants and needs, expectations and demands."

This is the contest that absorbs Burns throughout the book--ehoice against determinism, mastery against drift. His subject here, as it has been so often in his other books, is leadership. The power of material circumstances--Qf ec.:momics, caste, color and gender-is not denied or scanted in this book. But the power exerted by ideologies and personalities and free choices is acknowledged as well.

Ideas, as Burns several times points out, have consequences. And there were competing ideas in abundance in the decades surveyed in this study. Though strong forces were at work in America's collective life in those decades, the distinctive qualities ofthe men and women who tried to meet each challenge remain profoundly relevant.

Thus the seven decades the book covers shape a double movement. The period opens and closes with the two greatest crises in America's domestic history-the Civil War and the Depression-but it opens and closes as well with the two greatest leaders America has produced since the Revolution-Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Here is the source of Burns's careful optimism.

Without denying the scale of modern crises or the consequent long odds faced by the constitutional system, Burns ultimately affirms leadership's ability to sustain an admittedly fragile democracy.

The larger title of this three-volume history is The American Experiment. In James MacGregor Burns's view, it seems, the experiment has so far been successful.

0 Peter Conn is the author of The Divided Mind: Ideology and Imagination in America, 1898-1917.

Flight of the Dragonfly

While aeronautical engineers try to take the bugs out of airplanes, Aerospace Professor Marvin Luttges of the University of Colorado believes it is bugs that can help make the airplane safer and better.

F

rom its perch on a pondside cattail, a green dragonfly rises like an elevator straight up into the sunlight. It hovers, then shoots bulletlike over the water. It makes a right-angled turn. It flies backward. Whizzing back to the cattail, it sinks straight down, alighting like a feather.

The dragonfly poses with its four translucent wings outstretched in the Rocky Mountain sunshine, as if awaiting applause for its trick flying. Instead, a University of Colorado aerospace student bags it with a butterfly net.

Half an hour later, the dragonfly is flying again, but now in a vast underground laboratory beneath the university's Engineering Center. The insect, tethered inside a wind tunnel half the length of a football field, flaps heroically in an artificial gale. An aeronautical engineer wearing sneakers, jeans and a T-shirt fingers a computer keyboard as he peers at the insect through a plastic window in the side of the wind tunnel. Smoke begins streaming past the dragonfly, eddying and whirlpooling over its beating wings, roiling behind. A strobe flashes like lightning, a camera whirs and, helped by the tiny superflier in the wind tunnel, humanity moves another step toward an altogether new technology of flight.

The godfather of dragonfly studies, University of Colorado Aerospace Professor Marvin Luttges (rhymes with clutches), says the insects show that the way today's airplanes fly is not necessarily the best way. One day, he declares with confidence, mankind may thank dragonflies for airplanes that are far safer, quieter, more economical,

require only tiny runways and fly like archangels.

Studies of dragonfly flight began in 1980 when Luttges, a large former American football player, began pondering one of the hottest new subjects in aerodynamics: unsteady flow.

Today's airplanes rely on a steady flow of air moving smoothly over and under their wings to create buoying lift.

However, air sometimes flows unsteadily in a swirling, eddying vortex. And such unsteady flows are packed with energy.

"Nature is full of unsteady flows-gusts of wind, micro bursts, tornadoes, hurricanes," Luttges says. Until now, unsteady flows have been mainly aerodynamic pests.

"We found, for instance, that unsteady flows play havoc with helicopter blades," he says. Each blade produces vortices in the air that buffet the next blade, and after a few hundred hours of service the metal begins to fatigue. But Luttges wondered, whether there might not be a brighter side: "We thought, maybe we can do something to extract some of the considerable energy from unsteady flows."

Among aerospace researchers, Luttges is an oddity: he is a neurobiologist. And so, his natural instinct was to use a socalled "biological model" to study unsteady flow. "There's a whole bunch of frustrations in trying to answer questions about how insects and birds fly," he says, "but you. don't have to be really bright to guess that they generate lots of unsteady flow."

Luttges started studying bird flight and constructed a simplified aluminum model of a bird's wing, even simulating

feathers with fibers. In wind tunnel tests, his team discovered the wing to be dramatically resistant to stalls-loss of liftcompared with conventional airplane wings. "But we were really doing the wrong thing," he reflects. "A bird has a highly developed nervous system. It can deploy feathers, change the shape and extension of its wings...a darting hummingbird or a swooping swallow is just too complex to study." There had to be an easier way.

While horseback riding one day, Luttges began pondering insects, much simpler flying machines than birds. He remembered his childhood in Dixon, California, near the Sacramento River delta, where he would spend hours admiring dragonflies as they darted after mosquitoes. Now he began to watch the dragonflies hovering and swooping over the plains near his home on the outskirts of Boulder, Colorado.

"I decided to study the flight of dragonflies ...and then ¡1 reasoned out why," Luttges says. Dragonflies cannot fold their wings, suggesting simple muscles and neurological systems. "Also, their wings have no deployable devices," says Luttges. And dragonflies have a long service record.

Their design has changed little since they first began darting over the Earth's wetlands some 260 million years ago, millennia before the first dinosaurs crawled out of the Permian muck. Those early Paleozoic dragonflies were as big as sea gulls, ace aviators of the giant fern forests, while today's models have shrunk to the size of pencil stubs. But they still have four wings, sometimes gorgeously smoked or tinted with red, blue, black or green. And they are still wonderful fliers. "Any design that has worked so well for so long is worth studying," Luttges says.

He began making expeditions into his yard armed with a high-speed camera to photograph the insects in action. "I'd been watching dragonflies for the better part of my life, but I found that I'd never really been seeing them," he says. "For instance, I thought their wings made only a slight flutter, but photos showed their flying motion is a deep flap."

The next step was learning how to capture the dragonflies.

Luttges discovered that a startled dragonfly always shoots forward, up and away at a 45-degree angle. He found he needed only to hold a butterfly net in front of the insect, startle it, and it would fly into the net. "The truth is, they're kind of stupid, which makes it easy," he says.

The dragonfly study has now grown to include two other professors and a platoon of 18 graduate students at the University of Colorado. Because it is a prerogative of professors to occupy their minds with grander thoughts, it falls to the students to net the required two or three dragonflies per day (during the summer dragonfly season; during winter, the researchers focus on such tasks as watching wind tunnel films). "The insects make regular rounds, patrolling their territory, so we wait for them with the net and then put them in a coffee can, with a reed for a perch," says Mark Kliss, a doctoral candidate in aerospace engineering. "A fisherman watched me netting dragonflies one morning, and then he asked, 'Son, didn't you ever get interested in bicycles, women or cars?'"

In 1982,when Luttges began the dragonfly flight studies in the laboratory, all the techniques had to be invented. For instance, to determine how much lift a dragonfly generates in various stages of its flight, he learned to cool a freshly

captured specimen into temporary quiescence. Luttges then would attach its shell-like carapace to a toothpick with a dot of glue. He attached the opposite end of the toothpick to a force balance, a complicated device that looks vaguely like a dentist's chair for elves and measures minute pressures deflecting its sensitive arm.

"We found that a dragonfly generates lift amounting to seven times its body weight, so we thought we were doing something wrong," says Luttges. After all, he says, airplanes with the highest performance generate only 1.3 times their weight in lift. To check their results, the researchers tied small brass weights to dragonflies. Shocked, they watched the insects hoist the loads with aplomb. Dragonflies, it turned out, are indeed prodigious generators oflift. The next . task was to find out why.

Luttges put the dragonflies, connected to force balances, into wind tunnels. By sending streams of smoke past a flapping insect, he could see-and photograph-the airflow over its wings at various stages of flight. It was clear that the cellophanelike wings create swirls of "uneven flow," vortices that glide across the wings. It is these vortices that give the dragonflies their exceptional powers of flight. Discovering exactly how the process works, however, demanded many hours of wind tunnel tests. That presented a problem, at first, because the smoke usually used in the tunnels was toxic.

"One night I was at a campus theater watching Macbeth when I noticed that smoke was billowing all over the stage, and I began to wonder how they did it without asphyxiating the actors," Luttges says. He discovered that theaters use an insect fogger containing a compound called "Roscoe Fog Juice." Now, the university'S wind tunnels use a new nontoxic smoke, compliments of Shakespeare and the unknown Roscoe.

Many flights through the fog juice later, the tests are continuing. "We're still studying the vortices' effects on dragonfly wings," Luttges says. "We're trying to gather such information as all the forces at work at each point in every wing-beat cycle." The job should be done soon, representing a considerable technical achievement. "A collection of data like this has never existed before on the flying characteristics of any organism," he says.

Interesting as the data may be biologically, however, the aim of the research is to build better airplanes. In fact, since 1983 the U.S. Air Force has been funding the dragonfly research. Thus, the scientists must learn not only how the insects generate uneven flows over their wings, but also how their muscles and nerves control the vortices and put them to work. "We're trying to learn what information the dragonfly collects in deciding how to change the pitch of its wings and the frequency, stroke and phasing of its wing beats," says Christopher Somps, an aerospace engineer with an interest in biology.

Somps's neurobiology team works in a lab jumbled with computer screens, homemade electronics, oscilloscopes, refrigerators and enough gadgetry to fill a TV repair shop.

Using incredibly tiny needlelike probes, team members monitor the firing of specific nerve cells, a kind of eavesdropping that teaches them how a dragonfly operates its superb flying equipment. "One thing we've found is that the up-anddown motion of the wings is really not critical for flight-it is

American aerospace scientists are looking with fascination at the dragonfly's amazing versatility to hover, rise straight up, make right angle turns and fly backwards. If one day airplanes can be designed to emulate this wonderful flyer, they will be infinitely safer, quieter, more economical md will need just a tiny patch to land.

Attached to a toothpick. a dragonfly (left and above) fights through streams of fog in a wind tunnel at the University of Colorado to give scientists new insights into its wing structure and how it is used to advantage in unsteady air flows. Thefog and a flashing strobe light allow cameras to capture the vortices wafting over the insect's wings. which give the dragonfly remarkable lift. Sensor cells in

its wings let the insect detect and utilize the vortices for lift, as the front wings feed them to the back.

Researchers visualize a day when airplanes will similarly flex their wings. Right and middle right: Two views of Indian dragonflies. Top right: Professor Marvin Luttges (left). godfather of dragonfly studies, demonstrates a model of the insect's wings that he built with the help of student Dan Sarharon.

subtler motions that give the dragonfly its control," Somps says. "Also, dragonflies have sensor cells that stick up like hairs along the large wing veins, which sense the airflow, and other nerve cells that gauge the bending of their wings."

Luttges watches a wind tunnel film of one of his winged proteges valiantly flapping its way through the fog juice.

"Look!" he says, as a vortex forms like a black blister atop a front wing. "The front wings feed vortices to the back wings." On the screen, the vortices bounce to the rear wing, slowly sliding from the leading edge to the trailing edge, and then disappear in the roiling wake.

Dragonflies, the studies show, tap the energy in such vortices for lift. In a vortex, the swirling of the air drops the pressure at the vortex's center, much as the air pressure is lower inside a hurricane. Thus, a vortex moving across the top of a wing lowers the pressure of the air pressing down on the wing, increasing its lift.

Tomorrow's airplanes, in Luttges's vision, will be masters of vortices. The secret will be "smart" wings, studded with sensors to detect vortices forming in the airstream (electronic analogs to the dragonfly's wing neurons). The wings, controlled by computer, will change their shape to match air conditions, milking the vortices passing over them for lift.

"You might even have lasers that point out from the wings' leading edges, 'looking' at the incoming flow of air for vortices," Luttges says. "The wings will be continually flexing and reconfiguring, and when the pilot calls for a climb or some other maneuver, the computer will decide the best wing shape."

Indeed, team members are already experimenting with technologies that would allow airplanes to emulate dragonflies. For instance, they have found that the rate at which a wing pitches up and down provides a degree of control over the formation and character of the vortices. "Previously, these unsteady flows had been thought to be unpredictable, uncontrollable," says Luttges. "The problem with relating control to pitch rate, though, is that an airplane might rip off a wing, so we've been fooling around with vortex genera tors."

He demonstrates one such device: A thin metal strip on the leading edge of a model wing, flush with the wing's skin, that pops up like the feathers on a bird's wing. "This creates nice vortices, and it gives you lots of lift enhancement," he explains. A later version, he says, uses a pulse of air from nozzles in the wing rather than a metal strip on the leading edge to create vortices.

"More recently, we've found that different wing shapesdelta wings, say, or wings that are swept back or forwardhave an effect on vortices, for better or worse," Luttges says.

"For example, vortices generated at the wing tips can wash inboard and hurt the lifting characteristics of the inner wing.

But if you put something like feathers on the wing tips, it destroys the cohesiveness of those destructive vortices."

Northwest Orient Airlines will soon install special tips on the wings of some of its airplanes to cancel vortices. "Now we're looking into the possibility of different wing tips to use all the energy from uneven flows," he says.

The Colorado scientists are not alone in their attention to uneven flows. Researchers at Flow Research Company in Kent, Washington, the Illinois Institute of Technology and

nearly 60 other organizations around the United States are now looking into the aerodynamic possibilities of vortices, with much of the research being funded by the U.S. Air Force.

"Behind all this is the Air Force's interest in the next generation of fighters, which will be supermaneuverable," says Mohamed Gad-el-Hak, an engineer at Flow Research.

"The data we're gathering from basic research will eventually help designers create new kinds of airplanes that can carry out extreme maneuvers, such as supertight turns, without losing lift."

According to Gad-el-Hak, aerospace corporations such as Boeing already are incorPorating the unsteady flow research into designs for new ultrahigh-tech fighters, perhaps flown by computers responding to voice commands from the pilot.

He expects that the first of this new breed of aircraft will be in the skies, looping and zooming, in a decade or so.

Luttges holds up a model of a Grumman experimental airplane, the sleek X-29, as an early example of where airplane design could be heading. Something like the fourwinged dragonfly, the airplane has two stubby winglets"canards"-in front and two main wings that sweep forward. The X-29 is so hard to fly that pilots need help from three computers. So far, the airplane has not used all of its capabilities. "Those canards can wiggle and generate vortices, but they're not using that configuration yet," Luttges says. "We have one researcher finishing up his doctorate who flew F-4s for 12 years and who is now specifically interested in finding ways for the X-29 to exploit unsteady flows."

Meanwhile, Luttges is already planning to move beyond dragonflies, and has his eye on uncharted entomological territory. "Our next step will be to look at a more complex insect, the hawk moth," he says. "It's a marvelous flier-you can mistake the hawk moth for a hummingbird. And it has two continuous wings-much more complex than the dragonfly's four wings-that distort in all directions as the moth flies.'"

Marvin Luttges leans back, obviously pleased with his thoughts about dragonflies and moths. Overlooking his desk is a photograph of a palomino horse, its lips curled back in a mocking horse laugh. But Luttges sees nothing amusing about applying lessons from the entomological world to the aeronautical realm, where computerized, multimillion-dollar Mach 2 machines are everyday fare.

And so, the last laugh may not be the palomino's.

Airplanes, held aloft by the energy in vortices, may one day flit through the sky, their smart wings constantly flexing and changing shape as the airplanes take off almost vertically, turn on a dime, speed faster than bullets, slow to a virtual hover and land on a postage stamp, feather-light.

We have seen the Propeller Age give way to the Jet Age. Now we may be entering a new era in aviation-the Age of the Dragonfly and Hawk Moth.

0 About the Author: Richard Wolkomir is a Vermont-basedfree-lance

writer whose work has appeared in Smithsonian, Reader's Digest, Omni and other magazines. In 1984 he received the Westinghouse award of the American Association for the Advancement of Science [or distinguished science writing.

The dimension that counts for the creative person is the Space he creates within himself..This inner space is closer to the infinite than the other, and it is the privilege of a balanced mind ...to be as aware of inner space as he is of outer space. If he ventures in one, and neglects the other, man falls off his horse and the equilibrium is broken.

Visions of Inner Space In 1985 I helped organize an exhibition of neo-Tantra painting in conjunction with the Festival of India in the United States for the Wight Gallery at the University of California at Los Angeles, which was intended to reveal a commitment to exploring the spiritual and meditative realm in contemporary Indian painting.

We were subsequently invited by the IndoU.S. Subcommission on Education and Culture to select an exhibition of contemporary American painting that would open at the Wight Gallery and then be sent to the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi.

We chose a concept that we hoped would be of interest to both India and the United States and that would celebrate the cultural exchange between the two countries.

From the beginning the word mystic, although difficult to define, seemed to describe a common concern shared by the neo- Tantra artists and the American painters included in this exhibition. The word spiritual was also present. And as a painter I had long known of a tie between action and the open mind. It seemed relevant in this exhibition to explore an exercising of the depths of the mind that would help reveal those "visions of inner space" that so many cont~porary painters find of interest.

Mark Tobey suggests that the dimension that counts for the creative person is the space he creates within himself. In a recent letter about this exhibition, Morris Graves gave us a rallying cry: "Objective is Subjective." In 1957

"Visions of Inner Space:" Gestural Painting in Modern American Art," an exhibition of 60 paintings by 17 artists, was recently shown at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi. The exhibition is largely the inspiration of Lee Mullican (here seen in front of one of his paintings at the exhibition), a professor at Art College, University of California, Los Angeles.

Sam Francis titled a painting Towards Disappearance III. Gordon Onslow Ford, through late surrealist automatism and the influence of "pure psychic automatism" introduced by Andre Breton in 1924, has, in his writings, lectures and exhibitions, given us theories of "painting in the instant," where the artist

disappears and then reappears in the painting.

These painters help us form an idea of inner space and how it can be used.

This exhibition can give us even greater discoveries, as focused on in the varied techniques and ideas of the artists chosen. There is the action, the instant, the meditative surface; the mind is challenged to come up with a form of universal energy from the unknown. Are these artists the seers of our time? Perhaps.

Can paint manipulation help show us the way to the inner world? A new multiplicity of space and dimension appears with these artists. The paintings in the exhibition reach inner space through an employment of mental layering in a search for essence, distillation and intuitive order.

We are not looking for a common stylistic procedure; yet within this new visual experience that we call "inner space" there is, I believe, a purification of elemental forces. It moves imagination toward the subjective, giving a more precise example of intuition and, away from the traditional, the illusionistic.

Many of the artists represented in this exhibition have discovered a space not rendered by perspective. Formal action reveals itself through varied techniques, many of which are endemic to the painter of the 20th century and are a part of that compendium that has allowed us to work our way through cubism, surrealism, constructivism, abstract expressionism, and other forms into the quiet dynamism of the artists in the exhibition. Here we find a mastery of the inner subject that

comes forth from formal techniques producing canvases of power and inventive subjectivity. What are the clues to this inner depiction?

Certainly action is an important element: action comes from automatism, be it slow or racing.

Most of these painters have been influenced by automatism. Many will recognize nature as primordial; yet, certainly for most there is a creative unconscious-an inscape-that defies the pictorial and the use of deep space.

The subjective sense is in an objective frame.

There is a dynamism in the possible, said Wolfgang Paalen.

Mark Tobey, with his interests in "inner space" as demonstrated by his use of white writing, has helped show us the way.

Morris Graves, with his interests in Zen and .

Hinduism, suggested long ago that it was important to let the inner surface bloom. In the early 1940s, Graves's inner-eye birds became world famous.

At that time Ford was working his way out of surrealism into a new subject in a 1948 exhibition at the San Francisco Museum.

It is important to consider artists who could not be included in the exhibition and whose absence leaves a gap. Among them are Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Pollock, with

Lee Mullican (right) and art critic Keshav Malik at the exhibition in New Delhi.

Left: Richard Pousette-Dart, Black & White Quadrant, 1979-80, acrylic on linen, 228.6 x 228.6 em. Right: Ed Moses, untitled, 1986, oil and acrylic on canvas, 198 x 167.6 em.

his swinging arcs of dribbling paint, leaves an orderly composition that challenges the eye and invites meditative and spiritual excitement. The airspace above the canvas, which rests on the floor, is the arena in which the essential creative action occurs.

In comparison, Rothko proceeds at a slower pace. And yet it is the automatic action of his early works that allows his major late period to achieve its eloquence of inner beauty. Panels and sections of color fall into place with silent, automatic precision.

Among the artists represented in this exhibition, Onslow Ford does his calligraphy in an instant. It exists in the air. The painting drops into place, swings into eternity out of action and the mindful, open experience of a master of the inner world.

Richard Pousette-Dart is another pioneer of the inner-action. He has given us a continuous lifetime of one canvas after another, brought forth through mindful stroking and

layering of paint and idea.

Tobey writes with his brushes. Strokes, textures, surface and color follow his spiritual intent into an inner display of personal vision.

Charles Seliger gets at the heart of a mineralgem world created with an intimate, persuasive and careful vision that challenges action as all-seeing and all-knowing.

Jimmy Ernst worked with an almost scientific precision and an action that defies timing, yet the construction of his world presents us with a classic, finite vision of the infinite.

There are three inner-expressionists in the exhibition. Francis is ever the master of his space which he creates with spills and constellations of color that confound examination. His is a true synth~sis of the uncemscious.

With Ed Moses, line and color are transfixed in organic swings that eventually weave themselves into patterns, active and aggressive, far from the predictable.

In his recent works, Emerson Woelffer gives us the ultimate in spatial complexity, centered with an action line that defines again the instant with a remarkable minimal referential'vocabulary.

From the Creation Group surrounding Ford, Richard Bowman invades his space with chemical color and an action induced by

Richard Pousette-Dart

Max Cole

Art is a thingless thing,

My paintings

never a knowledge

linear systems consisting

beforehand,

always filled with surprise.

are composed

of complex

vertical marks which are perceptually create a subtly resonant

The brush in the hand

horizontal

of minute hand-drawn cumulative

has a life of its own, creating a

Max Cole, Mirage, 1986,

breathes

and in'teracts with light, reflecting

dance or a form following

ink on canvas, 172.7 x 205.7 em.

allusions

of the infinite and natural

-

the inner spirit and expression

~

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,

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c,

Into the whirlwind

and =

quiet of difference I move,

.

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of our infinite relationship to the universe.

and

energy field which shifts,

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of haunting

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beauty and drama of the universe.

Ed Moses

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I think that man discovered 6

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that he existed through awareness

of his own traces

left by a footprint, a bloodstain. ritualized ideographic

i

a handprint,

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these markings

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images to

invoke magic.

natural imagery as full as a blossoming tree, or as sparse as a winter branch. Jack Wright patterns the world in sections beyond dimension where each dot or stroke helps build a visionary order. John Anderson realizes a fallout in an active inner-outer dimension.

Racing line and frozen dreams exist here, eliminating the material world. He is one of the true space explorers of our time.

Ynez Johnston has created a personal world of mark and line that repeats itself in exotic patterns and subjective nonsense that is a delight. Ever spontaneous, she is her own pictographic frame in a continuing celebration.

Lita Albuquerque's work meets our definition and need for a mystic wheel, turning, inventing, a minimal-surface field as an intense vision of the time-continuum.

An affirmation of the poet.

Max Cole's connection to this group is perhaps not obvious at first glance. On close examination, however, we become aware of a mindful and automatic process evolving from free-hand automatism where each canvas is given a presentation of order as meaningful as architecture in our sense of inner space.

Peter Young paints with consummate skill.

He emblazons the mirror image with action.

He gives us the Rorschach [after Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922); a technique for appraising personality by an analysis of the subject's interpretation of a standard series of ten ink blots of varied design] defined as mark in impenetrable space. He has long been in search of inner identity and with these recent paintings he culminates the mystery.

These are the artists. While they do \l1ot share a common stylistic vocabulary, within this visual experience that we have delineated as inner space, there is, I believe, a purification of elemental forces that informs the work and moves with astonishment and intuition toward surprise and imagination.

We will want to return to the action, the stroke, the dot, the spill, the flood, the storm, the deluge that mirrors a tangle with myth, the grain of sand, the glyph, the molecule, the mark.

The most important element in painting is

mystery.

It is enough then to say, see and perceive.

We know.

We do not know.

It is there.

Is it here?

The Vision is.

Emerson Woelffer Some elements and states of being that provoke

my work:

Chance

Time

Black

Memory

Silence

Music

Humor

Poetry

The Accident Obsession

Anger

Night

Automatism Sorrow Chaos

Irrationality

The Unknown.

Order

Love

Passion

Intuition

J.e. Wright

Richard Bowman

Painting is a compulsive

Spontaneity is an essential

activity, partially spontaneous,

part ormy work. For almost 40

and partly intellectual. At

years I have not used a

any rate there are mysterious

sketch or preplan for a

forces involved, and

painting, except on rare

mysterious results. Each

occasions. Since my concept,

painting is an adventure, a

conceived in 1943, concerns

voyage to strange lands.

the energies in nature, the

True spontaneity is a

"spark" or "explosive

matter of time and attention

character" of the paintings has

of non thinking, not always

best come about through an

easy. Careless alertness.

The bare canvas stands

automatic beginning. In recent decades, I began with a

ready. The painter's hand

blank canvas and dripped or

moves swiftly-first

squeezed paints onto it, or

dark

blue like the night, then gray,

began gesturally brushing

like the dawn, and then

colors onto the surface.

from all angles lines of black,

Consistent symbols usually

shimmering. Reds and

evolved, such as the circular

ochers make their appearance.

shape of the sun and kinetic

The center glows white,

"energy" lines.

each dot increasing the tension.

The quality of fluorescent

The pattern becomes a

colors also gives a "vital spark"

mosaic, the entire canvas full

to the work, and

and complete. The painter

implements fully my energy

steps back, amazed. The glow

concept of nature.

fills the room, saturating everything with light and color.

JimmyErnst I prefer to think of my work as a thought or an idea which exists or fails without the necessity of elaboration or definition. Like all personal imperfections each painting is bound to create another question which can only be answered by another work.

Richard Bowman, Dynamorph 84, 1973, acrylic and fluorescent oil on canvas. (Dimensions not available; this painting was not part of the exhibition.)

Lita Albuquerque

John Anderson

...The Inner Vision ...closing

Spontaneity is a word like

my eyes, responding to what is

love. Everyone knows what

inside ...the arm to hand to

you mean by it, but defining

fingers to brush to canvas or to

it always leaves out essential

pigment to earth ...the hand

elements of what it is. Like

as a direct means of expressing

love it is best understood as an

the inner movement waiting

experience.

to be freed in the outer.. ..

My expression of my responses renders the visible

your breath and do

invisible....The personfmef

nothing, you will see that life

artistf receiverfcond ucto r

goes on without your

closes my eyes and looks in at

efforts. You are a part of a

that constancy that infinite

spontaneous happening,

space in there and my hand is

being life.

moved ...moved to express

~

If you sit quietly and align your mind and body with

Spontaneous painting

the movement of constant

over a long period of time can

space out there ...and in

show you which marks and

there ...spontaneously like

structures are peculiar to you.

breath.

A few marks and images

Me the artist then dances

will-grow, many will die off.

and responds ...creating marks

Those which expand choose

to reflect the heartbeat of

you. They are your water and

the movement of the moment.

sun; you are their garden.

And because you bow to them, they will show themselves in all their radiance.

25

Assisting India in its Drought Efforts

An electronic inspection system that can reveal any hidden flaws in highway bridges before they become dangerous is being developed by Mrinmay Biswas, an associate professor of civil engineering and director of Duke University's Transportation and Infrastructure Research Center, and his colleague, Eric I. Pas. The computerized Duke system, which works in much the same way as an electrocardiogram (ECG), is based on dynamic tests performed on a bridge. "The ill health of a bridge can be a degradation of its structural system or any of its components," Biswas says. "It can be in the form of fatigue cracks, corrosion, freeze-thaw or accident."

Current bridge monitoring methods, which rely heavily on visual inspections, can't probe the total health of a bridge. "The system we are working on should be able to detect the onset of any impending structural failure," he adds. "The structural health of a bridge is reflected by its dynamic behavior, or how it shakes naturally. These behavioral characteristics can be electronically measured and recorded as the bridge's unique frequency signature."

A frequency signature resembles an ECG appearing as a series of peaks and valleys on a computer monitor. But unlike medical specialists, who must interpret ECGs to determine the health of a heart, users of the Duke system will rely on a computer-driven artificial intelligence program for their interpretations.

Although highly sophisticated, the bridge inspection system has at least one old-fashioned feature. To get a frequency signature, an inspector pounds one end of a bridge with a sensor-tipped hammer. At the bridge's other end is a small cylinder that also contains a sensor. It picks up the vibration induced in the bridge by the hammer. If the vibration hits a major Structural flaw, the frequency signature will show a change.

Since both the hammer and the sensor are wired to the computer, it can quickly compare and analyze the two frequencies and point out any flaws-and where to look for the fault.

Using four clay flowerpots to show how the inspection system works, Biswas picked up a small metal rod and tapped one of them. It produced a dull thud. A close look revealed a hairline crack in the pot. The other three pots produced high-pitched rings when struck, indicating that they had no cracks. "We can't hear a bridge ring," Biswas noted, "but we can listen to it electronically." ,Born in Calcutta in 1939, Biswas graduated in civil engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in 1961.

At a function held in New Delhi on February 23, Ambassador John Gunther Dean formally handed over $25 million to the Secretary of Finance, S.Venkitaramanan, to help India meet some of its foreign exchange needs as a result of the country's drought last year.

The amount represents the second accelerated disbursement of funds already committed to India by the U.S. Agency for International Development under a bilateral program. In December 1987, the United States released an initial $25 million. These transfers will be augmented with additional accelerated disbursements of

funds up to $100 million.

The United States already has given over 5,200 tons of butter oil-the sale of which is expected to net the equivalent of about $7.7 millionto assist India's drought relief efforts.

In addition, the two governments signed an agreement on February 10 in Washington, D.C., providing forthe shipment of 100,000 tons of corn, worth $8.59 million, to India as a first installment of 400,000 tons of maize that the United States will give to India for drought relief. The corn is part of an extensive food-aid package offered by the Reagan Administration last fall.

Each year, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., honors American artists for their lifetime achievement in the performing arts. The recipients of the tenth annual awards for

1987, presented recently, were (seated from left) violinist Nathan Milstein, actress Bette Davis, actor Sammy Davis, Jr., (standing from left) choreographer Alwin Nikolais and singer Perry Como.

That is what 16-year-old Chetan Nayak has done. A student at Peter Stuyvesant High School in New York, Nayak has topped the list of winners of this year's Westinghouse Science Talent Search for American high schools. Nayak, who gets a $20,000 scholarship, is the second Indian American to win first place; Arvind Srivastava of Fort Collins, Colorado, was first in 1973.

Another Indian American

'to

The event

annual Westinghouse is America's oldest

high school science competition and offers the largest unrestricted science scholarships to all the finalists. The total value of the 40 awards is $140,000.

Nayak

was

awarded

first

place for his complex analysis of the interaction between gravitational and electro mag netic

also figures among the top ten.

fields. He sought a quantum version of the "already unified field theory" developed by oth-

He is Vijay Satyanand Pande of Langley High School in McLean, Virginia, who ranked

ers, because, he said, the interaction between gravitational and electromagnetic fields on a

fourth and receives a $10,000 award. (Second place honors and a $15,000 scholarship went

quantum level has not been analyzed with much success.

Nayak's interest in science

Nayak's classmate, Janet Tseng. Benjamin S. Abella of

and mathematics

Chicago won the third place and a $15,000 scholarship.)

The winners were selected from 40 national finalists out of a total field of 1,339 students from 589 American high

Nurturing talent: What works and wlwt doesn't

led him last

geometry at year to study Columbia University, where he conceived the idea for his award-winning project. He is captain of mathematics

his high school and academic

schools by a panel of eight scientists following interviews

Olympics team and was on the U.S. team in the 1987 International Physics Olympiad.

designed to evaluate the students' scientific creativity.

Pan de's simulated based laser ballistic

spacemissile

defense was a dynamic computer simulation which, unlike other treatments, fully accou nts for round Earth, mobile missiles, cu rved trajectories and free allocation of satellites (see "Focus On," SPAN March 1988).

Pande

A voracious reader, plays the violin with

great dexterity and is holder of a National Guild of Piano Teachers "superior" rating.

On hearing ,of Nayak's success, his physics adviser Abraham Baumel remarked, "When I read popped

his paper, my eyes out. If he doesn't wind

up a Nobel laureate, I'll be surprised."

Echoing similar thoughts,

Richard Plass, chairman of biology and Earth science at Stuyvesant, said, "What some of these kids are doing in labs rivals the work that won Nobel Prizes not many years ago."

Going by the record, the Westinghouse wizards are clearly achievers. Of the nearly 1,900 finalists since the competition's start in 1942, seven of every ten who are old enough have earned a PhD or an MD; five have received the Nobel Medal

Prize, two the Fields (the math equivalent of

t~e Nobel) and eight the coveted MacArthur Foundation Fellowships for research in the physical

and life sciences.

In 1971, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a prescription skin cream, Retin-A, as a treatment for acne. However, doctors soon observed a dramatic reduction in the number of wrinkles and skin blemishes on some older patients using the cream, which has a chemical (retinoic acid) related to vitamin A. Now research by a team of scientists, headed by dermatologist John Voorhees, at the University of Michigan Medical Center in Ann Arbor, confirms the drug's ability to remove wrinkles.

It also helps the treated skin to grow new tissue. The photos show the before (above) and after views of a test subject using the skin cream.

While doctors are of the view that much additional testing must be done to determine the long-term effects of its usage, Retin-A is being hailed as the beginning

of a new age in skin care.

Taking the Itch out

of P~!~2!1 Ivy Beautiful to look at, especially in their autumn hues, poison ivy (left), poison oak and poison sumac are the dread of gardeners, hikers, campers and forest fire fighters. These plants cause rashes, swellings and painful blisters.

However, American scientists are now developing a vaccine to blunt their sting.

In the summer of 1977 parched slopes of the Los Padres National Forest near Monterey, California, were torched by lightning. For three weeks the U.S. Forest Service battled the flaming brush and trees.

But the Marble Cone Fire eventually spread to cover 725 square kilometers of mountainsides and the situation became desperate.

"We were trying to fight one of the worst fires in memory and we couldn't keep a full crew on the fireline," recalls one forest engineer. "Guys were streaming out of the hills with their eyes running. It was California's second largest wildfire, with high risks of going completely out of control, and almost a third of our men had to leave the line with injuries caused by poison oak!"

Poison ivy is found in most of the United States, the relatively rare poison sumac in the East and poison oak in the West. (There is also a southeastern species of poison oak locally known as Eastern poison oak.) Wherever they occur, these plants are the nightmare of gardeners, the scourge of hikers and the curse of campers. At least 110 million Americans are clinically sensitive to the chemicals they contain; some 23 million are so sensitive that after even brief exposure they require a doctor's care. For millions of Americans these innocent-looking, rather attractive plants have made the outdoors a place of menace. To avoid contact, they have been forced to abandon their gardens, give up on picnics and avoid the summer woods like the plague. Others venture out swathed in protective clothing, as if going off to battle, and on becoming casualties spend day after itchy day smearing their bodies with brown laundry soap or other home remedies. For all of these sufferers relief-at least in part as a result of the Marble Cone Fire-may be in sight.

Unrelated to normal ivy or oak, the plants are members of the cashew family and are related to the cashew itself, the mango, and the lacquer tree of Asia (lacquer is a varnish made from its poisonivylike sap, which can also cause a rash). Native to the United

States, Asia and Central America, these plants are almost unknown in other parts of the world. In the last century, for example, English visitors were amazed at the beautiful fall colors of poison ivy and took some home. Because it is called "ivy~" they planted it.

Soon thereafter a British medical journal reported a new disease contracted only by women, who did the gardening, and concluded that it was a "hysterical rash."

All parts of the United States except Hawaii, Alaska and some of Nevada contain poison ivy or oak or poison sumac. Poison oak is actually one of the most widespread shrubs in California. Deer, cattle, goats and 'other herbivores browse the nutritious foliage without apparent ill effects, but most humans touch the plants at their peril. And fire fighters fear these vines and shrubs more than almost anything else. Breathing smoke from burning poison ivy or poison oak can cause fearsome effects: head-to-toe dermatitis, fever, horrendous lung infections, malaise and even death when the throat swells shut. Moreover, fire fighters cannot avoid the plants. At night, they cannot see them and, besides, firelines must be cut whether or not any patch of vegetation is in the way.

Jerry Oltman, a project leader for the Equipment Development Center at Missoula, Montana, was not at the 1977 Marble Cone Fire; he lives 1,300 kilometers away. But his office designs and builds equipment for the Forest Service, and he decided that it should do something to avoid a repetition of the doleful experience. "Poison ivy and poison oak cause ten percent of all the Forest Service's lost-time injuries-almost twice as many as cuts, abrasions and contusions combined," he says. "I figured that if we could find a way to reduce these injuries by even a small percentage, it would pay for itself many times over."

Initially he tried to encourage federal agencies and pharmaceutical companies to lead a broad-based effort to develop a skinpatch test kit for sensitivity to the plants as the first step to reduce injuries. None showed any interest. To them, extensive poison ivy

research seemed neither a national priority nor a commercially . enticing prospect. So Oltman, a forester who has never had a poison ivy outbreak in his life and who lives in one of the few parts of the United States that has none ofthe poison plants, took on the daunting task himself.

First he approached William Epstein, America's most experienced poison oak researcher. A dermatologist at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco, Epstein is perhaps the only person in the country who speaks enthusiastically about these plants. His exuberance bursts out in lively staccato: "Poison ivy and poison oak are by far the major cause of allergic contact dermatitis in the United States; more people suffer from them than from all other allergic skin diseases combined ....No one counts the number of cases, but there are probably at least ten million a year nationwide. Poison oak and poison ivy are possibly the greatest cause of workmen's disability in the nation; each year may bring more than 140,000 cases in the workplace, causing perhaps more than 152,000 lost workdays!"

Poison ivy, poison oak and poison sumac all contain a heavy oil called urushiol (pronounced oo-ROO-she-ol). It is clear, gummy, so incredibly reactive that a pinhead amount can cause rashes in 500 sensitive people, and so long-lasting that botanists have received serious dermatitis from plant samples stored away for more than a century. In one reported incident, lacquer from a Chinese jar, which had been buried for about a thousand years, caused dermatitis.

With a contract from Oltman, Epstein and his colleague Vera Byers developed a test for determining a person's sensitivity to urushiol. "Most people actually don't know how reactive they are because the last time they had a dose was in childhood," notes Epstein. "But the sensitivity changes with time: as some people get older they get less reactive, particularly if they never encounter the plants. It works the other way, too. People used to wading unscathed through patches of the plants can suddenly break out."

The skin test is similar to the one used for detecting TB exposure. A small, standardized drop of dilute urushiol is placed on the arm. Seventy-two hours later, depending on the person's reactivity, there will be nothing, a red spot, a n..dspot with swelling and itching, or a red spot with blisters. It is simple enough for anyone to do, it comes with a little tube of cortisone gel to take away the rash and the amount of urushiol is so small that the rash will not spread.

"For the first time we are getting baseline information on just how sensitive people really are," reports Epstein. "Between 15and 25 percent of us are essentially immune, 25 percent are mildly sensitive and don't normally develop severe reactions, 25 to 30 percent are moderately sensitive and break out significantly with the amount of urushiol found in one leaf, and ten to 20 percent are so exquisitely sensitive that less than one leaf produces intense dermatitis. " In 1984, the Forest Service used the skin-patch kit to advise its fire fighters on their susceptibility. "One day you might see it in sporting goods stores," Epstein speculates. "People going fishing, hunting or whitewater rafting could find out how sensitive they are Left top: Poison oak. Left: Poison ivy. Right (clockwise, from top left): Illustrations show characteristic shape of leaves, berries and detail of flowers of poison ivy, poison sumac and poison oak. Berry stalks of poison sumac are upward at first, droop over distinctively in the late summer and autumn.

before setting out, and companies could identify and provide special protection for workers most likely to suffer massive dermatitis in the woods."

The test kit doesn't help once an exposure has occurred, but advances in conquering the reaction are coming from immunologists. Urushiol, despite the plants' names, is not a poison; it causes an allergic reaction. As with other allergies, people are born without any sensitivity to urushiol. Babies, for instance, rarely get the dermatitis. Between the ages of five and ten, however, most children become sensitized, and from then on their immune system is reactivated whenever they again come in contact with the plants, even ifit is 20 years or more later. (It is not known how many exposures will cause the first response, but from then on mere traces will again trigger the reaction.)

Within minutes of contact, the oily urushiol penetrates the outer skin layers and begins chemically binding itself to skin cells. The body sees the combination of an urushiol molecule piggybacking on a skin cell as a foreign intruder. The immune system rushes large white cells called macrophages and T-Iymphocytes to destroy the affected skin cells.

Of the myriad home preventives and cures against poison ivy, drinking milk from goats that have grazed on poison ivy is one folk remedy that probably works.

"It's the body's own overreaction that causes the complications," explains Epstein. "In sensitized persons the area fills up with the white blood cells and they release so much celldestroying toxins that they tear apart even the skin itself. That's what produces the blisters and suppurating sores."

However, the fact that urushiol generates an immune response gives researchers a chance deliberately to suppress the body's response. And this has now been accomplished experimentally.

Mahmoud EISohly, a chemist at the University of Mississippi, has created a "masked" form of urushiol that binds less to the skin. Experiments with guinea pigs show that it can be safely swallowed. When it is absorbed from the digestive tract, the liver strips away the chemical disguise, thereby releasing urushiol into the bloodstream. This causes an entirely different kind of response from the immune system. Sensing the invader, the immune system may manufacture suppressor cells and chemicals, and those that remain in the blood desensitize the person so that upon later contact with poison ivy or poison oak the body's response is muted.

"Urushiol is released where it is effective," explains EISohly.

"We can use fairly large doses; there appear to be few side effects, and the immunity is developed quickly." But the procedure is still experimental; clinical trials with humans at Epstein's laboratory in California as well as in Pennsylvania have not yet shown the effectiveness of this vaccine at safe doses.

Epstein and his colleague Vera Byers are developing their own poison ivy vaccine in a related way. They use a modified form of urushiol that is unreactive on skin (and so doesn't have to be chemically masked), but that creates an immune response when

small amounts are swallowed. "It desensitizes animals," noted Byers. "Now we're preparing to try it in humans."

Poison ivy pills that immunize adults for a year and children for the rest of their lives might seem like the ultimate solution, but there is also hope for other forms of relief against the plants.

For instance, a scientific team at the Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland has developed a set of chemicals that shield the skin from urushiol. "We think people would appreciate something like a suntan cream that could be applied before going into the woods," says team member Susan Orchard. "Already we have found a preparation of organic salts that protects all test subjects from dermatitis for eight to 12 hours when droplets of urushiol were taped onto their skin with a patch. It also protects about one-half of the volunteers for 48 hours."

With all this progress in research, some hoary myths are being debunked or confirmed. For example, scientific evidence now indicates that it is impossible to contract dermatitis just by standing near the plants. Urushiol is a heavy oil that does not vaporize. Moreover, it is in canals inside leaves, stems and roots; an undamaged plant has no urushiol on its surface.

The leaves are easily bruised, however, and insects chewing on them can produce spots of urushiol on the surface. Moreover, direct contact with the plant is not a prerequisite for getting the dermatitis. Shoes, clothing, tools, pets or golf balls that have been through the rough can all transmit the sap to people. And they may cause rashes days, months or possibly years after they touched the plants.

Today, the myriad of preventives and cures that have been proposed in the past can be better assessed. Home remedies, patent medicines and "guaranteed" cures of the past have included bathing in horse urine or bleach; cleaning the skin with gasoline, morphine, gunpowder, buttermilk, marshmallows or strychnine; drinking photographer's hypo; or rubbing on ammonia, mustard, hair spray, clear nail polish, meat tenderizer or toothpaste. All are probably useless, some even dangerous.

Drinking milk from goats that have grazed on poison ivy or poison oak has long been claimed to give immunity. (Goats have such an appetite for all parts of the plants that, given time, they can eliminate them from a pasture.) "This is one folk remedy that probably works although it never has -been tested," says Byers.

"There's something magic about oral doses of urushiol oil, and goat's milk probably has traces of it. If you drink goat's milk you're probably doing about the same thing we are in our vaccine work."

Although researchers are now getting such practical insights into this affliction, Harold Baer of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration-himself a longtime poison ivy researcher-eautions against too much optimism. "There have been innumerable remedies proposed in the past, and few have withstood the test of time." What is different today, however, is that researchers have designed experiments that provide fundamental and reproducible information under controlled conditions. With that, more reliable weapons are being forged.

"The poison oak story is beginning to make more and more sense," says Jerry Oltman, who now looks back on the Marble Cone Fire with a different perspective. "Very little of it is science fiction anymore."

0 About the Author: Noel Vietmeyer is a researcher with the National

Research Council of the

u.s. National Academy

of Sciences.

COngreSS THE U.S. COMMITTEE SYSTEM

at Work

The U.S. Congress is unique among democratically elected legislatures in the complexity and extensiveness of its committee system, which determines what legislation reaches the floors of the House and the Senate.

Someone-probably George Bernard Shaw-once remarked that the British and Americans are two peoples separated by the same language. Most epigrams exaggerate for effect and this one is no exception. But it is, nevertheless, undeniably true that some commonly used words mean different things in these two cultures, and this occasionally breeds misunderstandings. In discussions of governmental systems, the semantic confusion sometimes makes it difficult for those steeped in the British tradition of parliamentary government to understand the vital role committeesplay in the U.S. Congress.

The confusion arises not only from definitional differences but also, and in a much more troublesome way, from profoundly differentassumptions and underlying philosophies. Consider that seemingly simple term-"the government."

To parliamentarians trained in British terminology, "the government" means the cabinet: a group of the legislature's own members, chosen by it to devise public policies, manage the legislature's major

activities and exercise executive powers. It is, in effect, the legislature's leadership committee writ large in both legislative and executive matters. And because it is chosen by the legislature it is responsible to that body for its actions. In theory at least, "the government" continues in office only so long as it commands the support of a majority of the legislature. Losing that support, it may be turned out of power at almost any moment. And under some parliamentary systems, when "the government" is turned out the whole legislature must also be turned out and go to the country for re-election.

When people in the United States say "the government" they mean something quite different. To them, it connotes the whole governmental structure--executive, legislative, bureaucratic and judicial. And rightly so, for in the U.S. governmental system there is no neat and tidy focusing of responsibility as there is in most parliamentary systems. Americans assume a situatiqn in which the executive and legislative branches are deliberately separated and in which the powers of each check and balance those of the other.

Presidential powers: Thus, the President, in whose hands the U.S. system places the executive power, owes neither his election to that office nor his tenure in it to the legislature. He is chosen (indirectly) by the people, not by the U.S. Congress---except under most extraordinary circumstances. Nor may the Congress remove him from office during his fouryear term except by most extraordinary and never yet successfully accomplished means-impeachment by one House and conviction by the other. The support and confidence of the Congress is certainly useful to the President, but its absence cannot deprive him of his office and his tenure. It is not at all unusual, for example, for the American President to be of one party while another party holds majorities in one or both Houses of Congress-the House of Representatives and the Senate.

In short, the President is not "responsible" to the Congress in the sense that parliaments understand that word. He is largely independent of the legislature, and it of him.

Members of Congress are also elected by

the people, but from individual districts and states rather than the nation as a whole; votes cast for members of Congress are separate from those cast for the President. The tenure of the legislators does not depend upon the President; their terms, too, are fixed by the U.S. Constitution.

Furthermore, the President's formal role in the legislative process is relatively limited. True, the President recommends policies and legislation; indeed, Congress and the nation have come to expect him to present a comprehensive program. But while the Congress listens to him more or less re~pectfully, it is under no obligation to adopt or even to consider his suggestions.

Indeed, since the American President may not simultaneously be a member of the legislature (nor may any other officials in the executive branch), he may not even

"Congress in its committee rooms is Congress at work."

-President Woodrow Wilson

introduce bills; he must persuade a member of Congress to do so on his behalf. Usually some member will, whether out of conviction, support, loyalty, friendship, or as a matter of courtesy, but it is not the President's right to have his bills introduced. And it is certainly not legally incumbent upon Congress to consider those bills even when introduced, although the legislature usually pays the President the courtesy of giving at least some consideration to most of his proposals.

Essentially, the American President's formal role in the legislative process is limited to recommendations and to his power of the veto, but even this may be overridden by a united Congress. Ordinarily, no Act of Congress may become law without the President's signature. However, if the President exercises his veto by withholding his signature, it may be overcome by a two-thirds vote in each of the two Houses.

In the realm of executive powers the President's mandate is large. But it is not unchecked. Through its basic control of legislation, especially over the purse, and its power to investigate, the U.S. Congress may intrude not only upon the way in which the executive branch makes policy, but also upon the way in which it implements policy.

Hence, instead of executive-legislative unity, the U.S. system insists on executive and legislative separation. Instead of fostering executive-legislative cooperation, the U.S. system, by giving each branch intrusive powers into the sphere of the other, tends to encourage executive-legislative conflict. While the President has vast powers and may influence congressional actions by all sorts of political means, it is nevertheless profoundly true that, in most policy matters, while the President proposes, the Congress disposes.

All of this may be familiar, but it bears repetition and emphasis because these circumstances provide a most significant part of the context in which the American congressional committee system must be understood. Before considering its consequences, however, we must deal with a second significant difference between the U.S. and parliamentary systems. This concerns the concept of "political party."

Political parties: For parliamentarians reared in the British tradition, a political party connotes a political group relatively cohesive in ideology and disciplined in action. Perhaps William S. Gilbert's satiricalline in Iolanthe that members ofparliament "vote just as their leaders tell 'em to" is not as accurate as it once was, but it is still close enough to the mark.

In contrast, the major U.S. political parties are vast, sprawling, decentralized conglomerations of varied ideological positions whose members do not at all feel obliged to vote as any leader tells them to.

There are many complex reasons for the decentralized and undisciplined nature of U.S. parties. Suffice it to note, in the context of our immediate concern, that most members of Congress credit their electoral victories not to the influence or assistance of national parties but rather to their own individual efforts and those of their local supporters. Their basic loyalty, therefore, is to the constituents who elected them.

Consequently they come to Congress as independent entrepreneurs, willing to go along with party policy-however and by

whom that may be defined-only to the extent that it does not conflict with what they perceive to be the wishes and interests of their constituencies.

Party leaders in the U.S. Congress understand this very well. They understand that they have few coercive powers with which to whip party members into line.

Party whips in Congress are misnamed; they do not whip. They dare not attempt to dictate to members how they shall vote; they ask, they persuade, they plead, and sometimes they beg.

Thus, political parties in the U.S. Congress are relatively undisciplined organizations. They are very useful for organizing the legislature, for determining who shall control important positions. But their control over the voting behavior of their members on matters of public policy is variable and often tenuous.

The committee system: These, then, are two of the principal elements of the environment in which the U.S. congressional committee system has evolved and to which it responds: a constitutional structure that deliberately pits the executive and legislative branches against each other, making them suspicious of each other's actions and jealously protective of their respective prerogatives; and a party system whose individual members are unabashedly independent and indifferently constrained by party discipline.

With what consequences?

If only as a means for division of labor, most legislatures find it at least convenient and usually essential to establish some sort of committee system. What sets the American congressional committees apart from those in parliamentary systems is the nature of their labor.

The U.S. Congress does not understand its function to be that of supine compliance with legislative proposals submitted by "the government." It views itself as at least an equal partner in the development of policy. Consequently, congressional committees are not merely panels for technical review and minor perfection of legislation.

They have been described as the "nerve ends of Congress-the gatherers of information, the sifters of alternatives, the refiners of legislation," but even this does not do them justice. They are the legislature's major weapon in its unending confrontation with the executive branch. They are the chief instrument for the critical review of executive branch proposals and

of proposals from many other sources as tributes subject matter somewhat differwell. On behalf of their parent bodies, the ently among its committees and gives some committees winnow out what is and is not of them different names. Nevertheless, acceptable, burying proposals that are not, both have standing committees on Approand modifying, often quite extensively, priations, Taxes (named Ways and Means whatever remains. Sometimes they identify in the House but Finance in the Senate), public problems overlooked or ignored by Armed Services, the Budget, the Judiciary, the executive branch and develop propos- Agriculture, Foreign Relations (called Foreign Affairs in the House, which gives als for dealing with them.

In addition, congressional committees rise to some ribald remarks on occasion), serveas the legislature's watchdog over the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, executivebranch. They are responsible for Education and Labor, Veterans' Affairs, "oversight" of the organization and opera- Government Operations, Energy, Envition of the executive agencies: how effi- ronment and Public Works, and Rules. ciently and effectively those agencies Every standing committee has its network perform their duties, and whether and how of subcommittees among which its subject they are carrying out the intent of the laws jurisdiction is further subdivided. The enacted by the Congress. number varies among committees and inIn Woodrow Wilson's succinct sum- deed from Congress to Congress dependmary, "Congress in its committee rooms is ing upon perceived needs.

Congress at work."

The variance in the sizes of the two Performance of these functions requires Houses also accounts for differences in the a very extensive and massive committee respective sizes of their committees. In the structure. In a large and complex society, Senate, some standing committees curtherange of public policy issues is vast, and rently have as few as ten members, while all must be encompassed within the struc- Blioget and Finance have 20 each, and ture. Hence, the congressional committee Appropriation, always the largest, has 28. system is composed of a large number of Most Senate committees, however, have units; the total for both the U.S. House of about 15 to 18members. The largest House Representatives and the Senate is 55 com- committee, Appropriations again, nummittees and about 300 subcommittees. bers about 50 to 55 depending upon the This reflects not only the extent of the circumstances; the smallest is Rules with subject matter but also the attempt to 16. Most of the others run to something foster specialization, which Congress re- between 35 and 45. quires to a considerable degree as it atScholars have devised numerous typolotempts to achieve some reasonable parity gies for classifying and analyzing the roles in expertise with the executive branch. of different types of committees. One.parMembersare encouraged to develop exper- ticularly significant difference naturally ditisethrough long association with particu- vides most committees' into authorizing (or lar subject matters. Therefore the system legislative) panels and appropriating must and does consist overwhelmingly of groups. Under the rules of both Houses, standing committees that continue from governmental activities require two types session to session and from Congress to of statutes: one to authorize the existence Congress; an ad hoc committee system will of the activity; the other to appropriate not do. Furthermore, the development of money for it. Only one committee in each expertiserequires relatively stable commit- House may report general appropriation bills-the Appropriations committees. To tee memberships.

Because the Senate has fewer members all the other committees falls the task of than the House of Representatives-l 00 as reporting authorization bills for the activicompared with 435-it has a somewhat ties and programs within their jurisdictions. smaller committee structure. As of early As public problems have grown more 1979,the Senate had 15 standing commit- and more complex, committee memberstees to the House's 22, five select and who, after all, have other duties to perform special committees to nine for the House in addition to service on committees-have and about 110 subcommittees compared found it difficult, even with this kind of withapproximately 175in the House. There structure, to match the expertise of the werealso four joint committees, some with executive branch's vast specialized resubcommittee structures of their own. sources. Hence, and especially since World Differences in size and in internal needs War II, the U.S. Congress has built up a account for the fact that each House dis- large support staff for its committees: pro-

fessional, administrative and clerical. The numbers vary from committee to committee; in February 1988 the total for all committees was approximately 3,700.

Because even this has not been deemed sufficient to the need, Congress has also created several staff agencies in the legislative branch to provide additional support to the committees. The Congressional Research Service, a department of the Library of Congress, provides information, research and analysis to all committees on virtually all subjects. It has a staff of some 850. The General Accounting Office devotes 1,719 of its 5,730 staff to assisting congressional committees in their oversight activities. In 1974, Congress created for itself an Office of Technology Assessment whose staff of 143 provides committees with analyses of the impact of technology on public policy problems. The Congressional Budget Office was formed in 1975; its staff of 212 provides committees with specialized fiscal analyses and cost estimates. Its chief responsibility is to the Budget, Appropriations and Tax committees of both Houses. In addition, each House has an office of legislative counsel that provides committees with specialists in the drafting oflegislation. And each House also has a growing technical staff devoted to developing computer and other technological information and analytical systems for the Congress, including its committees.

All of these staff support resources, it should be noted, are under the exclusive control and for the exclusive use of the legislative branch. The theory is that while Congress receives considerable amounts of information, analysis and advice from the executive branch-and also from numerous private sources-it must have its own dedicated support staff to deliver untainted, unbiased, independent expertise.

All this, and more, flows in whole or in part from the posture of the U.S. Congress vis-a.-vis the executive branch. To understand other features of the congressional committee system, we must consider the impact of the American style of political parties.

When that independent entrepreneur we call a member of Congress first arrives in the institution, he finds a committee system pretty much tailored to the realities of the party system and therefore to his individual characteristics and needs. Just as the party system is decentralized, so is the congressional committee structure. The committees divide the universe of policy areas

among themselves, and each reigns supreme, or nearly so, in its kingdom. Under the rules of both Houses, each committee has the near absolute right to have referred to it all introduced measures within its subject jurisdiction. Furthermore, each committee has the near absolute power to dispose of those measures as it pleases.

Committees are seldom required to report any of the measures referred to them back to their parent bodies; they may, and for large numbers of bills do, refuse to act, and thereby kill those measures. To discharge a committee, that is, wrest out of its grasp a measure it does not want to report, is extraordinarily difficult and rare.

Congressional party leaders exercise about as much control over committee voting behavior of their colleagues as they do over voting in the chamber. That is, committee members tend to follow leader-

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ship suggestions only so long as those suggestions do not run counter to the individual member's convictions and perception of his constituency's interests.

The influence of standing committees extends beyond initial control over the fate of legislative proposals. More so in the House of Representatives than in the Senate, but to a considerable degree in both, floor procedures give special rights and privileges to the committee managing a measure that is up for consideration. The committee's members enjoy priority of recognition in debate and in the offering of amendments. Moreover, the committee's prestige and reputation for expertise will often, but not always, incline the House to support its amendments and to reject those it opposes. Incidentally, this puts a premium on committee unity. A committee that presents a common front in the chamber is much more likely to carry other members with it than a committee whose ranks are broken and divided.

For various reasons, not all committees

have the same reputation for expertise. A not be removed from it without his conhigh reputation is a precious asset. No sent. * Exceptions occur only for the most member can be thoroughly familiar with all egregious offences, such as publicly supmeasures brought to the floor. Each must porting the other party's presidential nomilook for cues on how to vote on an im- nee or, in the House of Representatives, mense range of subjects. Sometimes the voting for the other party's nominee for member seeks such cues from his party's Speaker. The remainder of the seniority leadership, perhaps even from the Presi- code decrees that newly appointed memdent. Often, however, he will look to the bers of a committee go to the bottom of committee of jurisdiction for guidance, and their party's roster on that panel. As those especially to his party colleagues, ideologi- higher on the list leave the committee-by cal friends, and state and regional asso- transfer, death, or failure to be re-electedmembers rise in seniority until they become ciates on the committee.

The influence of a standing committee the most senior. At this point, iftheirs is the does not end with passage of a measure by majority party, they become chairpersons. its House. If differences between the two Not too long ago, seniority accession to Houses exist on that measure, these will chairpersonships was virtually automatic. usually be resolved by an ad hoc conference In recent years, the parties have eroded that committee made up of members from both practice somewhat by requiring party elecHouses. As one might expect, the commit- tions for chairpersonships. The result has tees of jurisdiction dominate the member- been essentially the same, although in 1975 ships of the conference committees. House Democrats did replace three com- .

Through control of this mechanism, the mittee chairpersons with less senior committee may even regain what it may members. have lost in its own chamber. Here again Some committees are more sought after the committee enjoys procedural advan- than others because of their broad national tages, for even though both chambers must powers, influence and prestige. In both approve the conference agreement they Houses, the Appropriations and Tax commay not amend it. mittees fall into this category and in the Finally, after policies and programs are House of Representatives the Committee enacted, it is the committee of jurisdiction on Rules does also because it exercises that exercises oversight over their imple- significant control over that chamber's mentation. The committee thereby wields floor agenda. The Democratic Party in the considerable influence within the responsi- House considers these to be "exclusive" ble executive agencies. committees; members who serve on them It is a hallowed custom of the Congress may not serve on any other committees. to give the minority party representation Either by party rule or by the rules of the on every committee roughly proportional chamber, each House sets limits on the to its strength in the chamber as a whole. number of committees and subcommittees Both the Republican and Democratic par- on which members may sit and also on the ties usually try to give their newcomers number of more important committee asassignments that will help them win re- . signments a member may hold. election, unless more senior members are Membership on the committees with competing for those seats, or if their states broad national powers brings with it not or regions are already appropriately repre- merely the opportunity to influence signifisented on those committees. Sometimes cant national policies but also considerable committee sizes are enlarged to accommo- leverage within the U.S. Congress. Since date the urgent demands of members for the jurisdictions of those committees affect positions on them. If a member does not the interests of every representative's disreceive the assignment of his choice the first trict and every senator's state, it is not time, he may try again in subsequent terms. surprising that other committees tend to Only at this stage of initial assignment to listen carefully when members-specially a committee do the party leaderships of a senior members-of the prestigious comHouse have leverage with their members. mittees request other committees to report Thereafter, the seniority system, that un- or bury certain pieces of legislation. written but rarely violated code to which Some members choose not to seek posiboth parties in both Houses adhere, pro- tions on the prestige committees, preferring tects each member's committee rights. The to remain on panels of more particular basic precept of that code holds that once consequence to their constituencies. Thus, appointed to a committee a member may members from rural districts and states

tend to gravitate toward the Agriculture committees, those representing inner city areas to the committees with jurisdiction over labor and welfare programs, those from the western states containing large tracts of public lands to the committees that deal with such matters, and so forth.

For committees of this kind there often develops an interesting web of relationships with the executive agencies that administer programs in the relevant policy areas and with the public groups and constituencies affected by those programs.

Each of the three corners of this triangle tend to become solicitous of the needs of the others. The ties of mutual interest and pressure that connect the three corners sometimesbecome so strong that even the AmericanPresident, nominally the master of all executive agencies, may find it difficultto control the particular agency without great effort and political cost.

To recapitulate, the fundamental characterof the U.S. congressional committee system has been shaped by these basic conditions: a government of separated powersand a decentralized and permissive party system. One should not infer from this,however, that the system is static.

There was a time, for example, when manystanding committee chairmen dominated their panels to an extraordinary degree.Protected from removal by rigid and automatic enforcement of the seniority rule, they reigned over their panels and wieldedits powers like autonomous dukes.

The inevitable reaction to this state of affairsbegan to gather strength in the mid1960s.Within a decade, a series of rules changesin the chambers and in party caucusesdiluted chairmen's control over committeeproceedings, relaxed the rigidity of the seniority rule insofar as it pertains to chairmanship selection, and shifted control oversubcommittees from the chairman to themajority party membership of the committee. Today, committee chairmen are still formidable in the affairs of the U.S. Congressbut far less so than heretofore.

One consequence of this minirevolution has been a shift in influence from the full standing committees to their numerous subcommittees. Significantly, the major thrust of the reforms has been in the direction of further decentralization. Instead of About the Author: Walter Kravitz is a senior specialist in American government and public administration with the U.S. Congressional Research Service.

a score of powerful chairmen in each chamber, the American President and the party leadership now must deal with several hundred loci of influence.

From time to time, discontent arises over the jurisdictional structure of the committee system, that is, the distribution of subject matter among the committees. As new public policy issues gain prominence, complaints are heard that jurisdiction over them is spread among too many committees, inhibiting the development of coherent and consistent policies and fostering internecine warfare among the involved panels. One U.S. congressional committee that examined the problem in the mid1940s concluded: "There is nothing sacrosanct in the present arrangement of our committees ....As 'the workshop of Congress,' the committee structure, more than any other arm of the legislative branch, needs frequent modernization to bring its efficiency up to the requirements of the

A hallowed custom gives the minority party representation on every committee roughly proportional to its strength in the chamber as a whole. day." Consequently, each House intermittently attempts to restructure jurisdictions, but this is easier said than done. Resistance is usually formidable, as each committee battles to protect its domain. Therefore, restructuring efforts meet with variable success. The last comprehensive revision of jurisdictions in both Houses occurred in 1946. A major restructuring of House committee jurisdictions recommended in 1974 after considerable study received acceptance in the House only after it was substantially diluted. A similar move in the Senate was somewhat more successful in 1977.

The remarkable explosion of staff support for the committee system since World War II, mentioned earlier, is another example of change in the system. From a cadre of some few hundred before the war, the number of staff directly and indirectly responsible to the committees has swelled to well over 4,000. Members tend to view this development with mixed feelings. On the one hand, they recognize the increasing need for expert assistance as the problems confronting them grow both in number and in complexity. On the other, there is widespread uneasiness about what some

perceive to be inappropriate but increasing staff influence over the substance of policy decisions. Some members of both Houses also argue that larger staffs tend to generate larger workloads. This is no minor problem in an era in which the already existing congressional workload is straining the capacity of the institution to perform its functions effectively. In addition, staff create space problems and raise congressional costs to levels that are objectionable to some members.

This portrait of the U.S. congressional committee system admittedly is painted with broad strokes. Many details, subtleties, variations, exceptions and provisions have been omitted. Nevertheless, it should be clear that this is both a decentralized system and one possessing immense powers. Committees in the U.S. Congress virtually control the agendas of their parent chambers. Which is the master--{;ommittee or parent chamber-is a question to which there is no simple answer.

The U.S. governmental system is rooted in a fear of tyranny. From the dimming past, the specter of George III still hovers over American sensibilities; hence a structure that attempts to limit and check the growth of possibly tyrannous power in any single branch of the government. American society is bewilderingly diverse in its ethnic, economic, geographical, cultural, religious and political composition, and its political system inexorably reflects and accommodates itself to those conditions.

The congressional committee system is a response to American circumstances. Visitors from parliamentary countries are invariably horrified by a system in which no single focus of power can be held responsible for policy decisions, but they are also invariably fascinated by the influence and prerogatives of individual committees in the U.S. Congress. How lovely it would be, some of them think, if they could have such influential committees with hordes of staff in their parliament. It may be that some features of the U.S. system are adaptable to parliamentary situations. Nevertheless, the possibility that the two conditions described above are the two sides of the same coin should dictate caution.

D *Another exception exists only in the House of Representatives where, since 1977, Democratic Party Speakers have been empowered by their party to remove Democratic members of the Committee on Rules, subject to approval of the party caucus. As of this writing, that power had never been exercised. Occasionally, junior minority party members may be bumped off their committees after an election in which the party's proportionate strength in the whole chamber has been drastically reduced.

"I like people more than diseases. I like to treat the whole person," says. Dr. Paul Buehrens, explaining why he opted for family practice. A family physician in Kirkland, in Washington state, Dr. Buehrens owns and operates the Lakeshore Clinic along with six other physicians. He is also a medical director of a convalescent. nursing. home and on the staff of a general hospital. This

photo essay shows Dr. Buehrens's hectic schedule and the wide range of medicaf care he provides. Ona typical day, he answers a Plltient's questions (1), performs a minor ear surgery (2), checks a patient's blood pressure (3), removes stitches (4), inspects a young woman's ear (5), teaches a 90-year-old woman to use a walker (6) and measures an infant's reflexes (7).

Return of the Text by LAURENCE CHERRY Photographs by RICHARD FRISHMAN

Medical science has surged ahead dramatically-leaving the personal touch far behind. But the increasing popularity of family physicians in the United States today signals the return of warmth and individual care.

Not long ago it seemed that family physicians, who offer general medical care rather than specialized treatment of one organ or a single type of patient group (such as children or women), were becoming a vanishing breed in the United States.

A half-century ago fewer than one of five American physicians was a specialist, but by the 1950s that situation had changed dramatically. Family doctors were increasingly perceived as being outmoded, lacking advanced medical expertise. A host of medical innovations after World War II-new surgical techniques, drugs and treatments-gave other specialties more prestige. Medical students shunned general practice in favor of more glamorous and lucrative branches o( medicine, such as surgery or cardiology. Some experts predicted that traditional family medicine soon would be completely displaced.

"Our numbers began to dwindle throughout the 1950s and 1960s," says Dr. Robert Higgins, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians. "For a time, the outlook for U.S. family medicine looked quite bleak."

One way to keep this kind of health care from becoming extinct was to make it a specialty, like other fields of medicine, and thus attract medical students toward it. This was done in 1969 when family practice officially became U.S. medicine's 20th specialtyone composed, somewhat paradoxically, of doctors who preferred not to specialize. They were now called family physicians (or family practitioners) instead of the old term of general practitioners.

Family medicine remains devoted to the concept of continuous comprehensive care of the entire family, but standards have been raised considerably and a new rigor imposed on its practitioners. New

rules required them to update their medical education continually and pass exacting examinations every six years to be recertified in the specialty. Formal residency training programs in family medicine were established for students who had completed medical school but were not yet ready to begin practice.

Today, a student in the United States who wants to become a family doctor must, like all aspiring physicians, complete four years of study at a university and another four years at a medical school. Then he or she-nine percent of American family doctors are women, compared with about 12 percent in other areas of medicine-enters one of the family physician residency training programs at hospitals around the United States, receiving three years of intensive training in six areas: pediatrics, obstetrics-gynecology, internal medicine, surgery, psychiatry and neurology.

Although family physicians in the United States earn three to four times more than the average American worker, their income still lags behind that of most other physicians. In 1985, the average family physician earned $71,900 a year, about half as mucl1 as most surgeons and radiologists. Nevertheless, the field is becoming more popular among medical students; more than 7,000 now choose to enter family practice each year, making it one of the fastest-growing and the largest medical specialty in the United States. There are some 60,000 family physicians in the country (out of a total of 500,000 physicians).

One reason for the trend is a surplus of physicians in many specialties-a phenomenon often called the doctor glut. (The total number of physicians in the United States rose by almost 50 percent in the past 15 years.)

Dr. Buehrens enjoys the variety and challenge of his work at the clinic, nursing home and hospital. While most of his day is spent at the clinic, he visits the Evergreen General Hospital to attend to his patien~s who require hospitalization and to help in the administration. His house calls are limited to the elderly and the newborn. On these pages, the camera follows Dr. Buehrens as he talks to a

woman recovering from surgery (J), discusses infant care with a young couple (2), assists in surgery (3), advises a patient on her diet (4), catches up with the news (5) and relaxes at home with his wife, pediatric psychologist Laetitia Ward, and son Thomas (6).

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Surgery and neurology are already overcrowded and the American Graduate Medical Educational National Advisory Committee predicts that the same will soon be true of obstetrics, cardiology, pediatrics and diagnostic radiology. Medical students who once might have planned to become surgeons or child disease specialists now realize that they may find more opportunities in family practice. Also, the federal government and many states now provide financial incentives to medical schools to encourage training of more family physicians, in the belief that they can provide better health care to the general public at a more moderate cost.

Family medicine also appeals to some medical students because of its emphasis on total care and close involvement with patients and their families. "When 1 was in training more than a decade ago, we heard specialists talk about the 'gall bladder' case in Room 304, or 'breast cancer' in Room 501," says Dr. Clement Landonna, a family physician in rural Fishkill, New York. "I wanted to deal with patients as entire human beings, not just as diseased organs or interesting illnesses. At that time 1 was in a very definite minority; today, 1 hear many more students in medical school saying exactly the same thing."

Family doctors were among the first physicians, as a group, to emphasize the importance of prevention in health care. "Most specialists see patients after they have already developed an illness," says Dr. Jane Carswell, who practices in the small city of Lenoir, North Carolina. "Our patients recognize that we are as interested in keeping them well as in treating them after they have become sick."

To illustrate the importance of this factor, family doctors cite the U.S. National Academy of Science's report stating that half of the mortality from the ten leading causes of death in the United States can be traced to the effects of personal lifestyle and habits-for example, smoking, excessive alcohol consumption and stress.

"Treating several family members can give you an excellent idea of the risk factors in your patients' lives," says Dr. Carswell. She points out that family physicians, unlike most other doctors, regularly make house calls. "You begin to notice certain clues, and then general patterns. For example, you may see that young Johnny is under the weather, and his mother's ulcer is flaring up again, and you get a clear sense that something is wrong in the family environment. You diplomatically ask the husband some questions and learn that he has been drinking, because of which everyone in the family is under terrific strain." Counsel-

ing often can help solve such a problem.

Preventive care also means monitoring family members long before a health problem develops. In the department of family medicine at Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, for example, if a patient is diagnosed as having very high cholesterol levels, his family doctor usually will arrange to check his relatives as well. "Very high cholesterol levels seem to run in families," says Dr. Richard Sadovsky, director of the hospital's family practice residency training program. "If we find that the relatives' levels also are high, we talk to them about modifying their diets. We believe this may reduce their risk of developing coronary disease or other illnesses in the future." (More than half of U.S. hospitals with 150 beds or more have departments of family medicine similar to that at Downstate Medical Center.)

Teaching patients medical self-care also is a . high priority with most family physicians.

"We were probably the first medical discipline to remind patients that good health is something that they have to work at themselves," says Dr. Carswell. "It means moving from a passive role to a much more active oneeating right, exercising regularly, knowing how to identify the danger signs of diseases such as cancer. Much of our daily family practice involves such patient educationbasically teaching our patients how to listen to their own bodies."

Dr. Carswell points out another advantage of family medicine to patients: "Coming to a family physician often eliminates the need for them to locate, and pay for, several different specialists." It also can prevent an all-toocommon problem-a drug prescribed by one doctor counteracting a drug prescribed by another doctor for a different condition. "All too often in medicine, the left hand isn't aware of what the right hand is doing," says Dr. Carswell. "Having one doctor, such as a family physician, responsible for care can avoid that."

Making an accurate diagnosis obviously is a crucial step in proper treatment. Although 51 percent of American family doctors practice alone (the rest are in groups or in hospital departments), almost all have ready access to hospitals or clinics with the latest diagnostic equipment. Computer networks are beginning to give even the most remotely situated family physicians access to the latest medical information.

Sometimes a diagnosis indicates a medical problem that the family doctor cannot adequately treat himself. "Our family physician training teaches us to recognize our individual

strengths and our weaknesses," says Dr. William Gillanders, who oversees the health care of most of the residents of the small town of White Salmon, in Washington state, as well as two surrounding counties.

But when a family physician refers someone to a specialist, he remains what the American Academy of Family Physicians calls "the patient's advocate." This usually entails contacting the appropriate specialist, discussing the case (and the specialist's subsequent findings), as well as the patient's reactions to the new physician.

If the patient must be admitted to a hospital, the family doctor usually continues to coordinate his care. "You can help make sure that he isn't bothered by unnecessary examinations, procedures or personnel," says Dr. Bruce Bagley, a family physician in Latham, New York. "On the other hand, when a procedure is necessary, you can often

"Most specialists see patients after they have already developed an illness. Our patients recognize that we are as interested in keeping them well as in treating them after they have become sick."

explain the need for it better than the specialist himself. The patients have learned to trust you and listen to you more readily. For many of them, a hospital can be a frightening place and the sight of a familiar physician can be wonderfully reassuring and even helps to speed their recovery."

This is especially true of people in nonurban areas. In fact, family doctors are the backbone of health care in America's small towns and villages, where there simply are not enough patients to attract most specialists. A survey done a few years ago by the American Academy of Family Physicians revealed that almost half of family physicians graduating from residency training programs choose to practice in rural areas. Largely because of family physicians, 98 percent of America's rural residents live within 40 kilometers of a doctor.

Dr. Richard Bargen, for example, practices family medicine in the arid, starkly beautiful

desert region of central Nevada, and journeys about 1,100 kilometers a week to see patients scattered throughout the 200,000-square-kilometer area. Using a battered truck or a small Cessna T-210 single-propeller plane, Dr. Bargen and a nurse have supplied health care since 1980 to miners, ranchers, tourists and residents of a remote American Indian reservation. "Some people on that reservation are almost 100 years old," says Dr. Bargen.

"Before, they had to travel nearly 200 kilometers to get to a public health clinic."

Family physicians often are also the only doctors readily available in the poorer sections of large urban centers. Many residents here, often immigrants from developing countries, are not familiar with the U.S. medical system and wary of using public clinics. "You have to deal with these patients with a special sensitivity," says Dr. Sadovsky. "Their concepts of illness, and healing, may differ from standard American ones."

No matter if their patients are immigrants in large cities or farmers in isolated areas, family physicians usually cite the same satisfactions and vexations with their profession.

"Sometimes you have to do everything from set a broken bone to patch up a family quarrel," says Dr. Gillanders. More accessible than most specialists, family physicians can establish a warm rapport with their patients.

"We don't cloak ourselves in mysterious aloofness, the way some other doctors do," says Dr. Carswell. "For most family physicians, their patients are neighbors and friends." Many of them see more than 100 patients a week. The constant need to listen, advise and become involved in family emergencies can create weary stress. ,But, undeniably, there are rewards too. "A patient you've helped may bake you a surprise cake," says one doctor. "Or another may stand a little taller, look a little livelier, because of the reassurance you've given him.

There are days you feel you've made a real difference, and then you feel great." Despite the stresses so marked in their particular field, most family doctors agree they reatly would not care to be in any other specialty. Being on the front line, acting as medicine's gatekeepers (as several regard themselves), is what they enjoy most. "Some people claim modern medicine is all gadgets and gizmos," says Dr. Robert Higgins. "Family doctors daily prove that it has a concerned human heart as 0 well."

About the Author: Laurence Cherry is a New Yorkbased free-lance writer specializing in articles on science and health.

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Reprinted with permission from The Saturday Evening Post Society. a division of BFL and MS. Inc. Š 1987.

"Now is the time to show your courage and leadership, Your Majesty. This isn't the time to decide you don't want to be king anymore."

"I'm sorry, but you didn't jill the editor's slot. However, they've decided to add your unbelievable resume to their fall fiction list and wonder if you have any ideasfor a sequel. "

You couldn't avoid the spirit of the event. Everywhere you turned it hit you like a fist. In South Bend, Indiana, the scene of the Seventh International Summer Special Olympics for the mentally handicapped, the parents of Special Olympians raised glasses in thankful toasts to their children and to God for giving them their children. Crusty coaches and former athletes assembled in watering holes to recall that this was how sports used to be: played for fun, for enrichment, for the intrinsic value of competition.

The spirit did not spring from the Olympic trappings-the flags and pageantry and medals-or the dignitaries, television cameras, celebrities! 16,000 volunteers on the campuses of the University of Notre Dame and St. Mary's ColIege, or the 325,000 people who attended the nine-day meet last August. It came from the athletes themselves. The 4,717 Special Olympians from 72 countries, miracle workers that they were, stole their own show.

There were dozens of memorable moments-no, hundreds, thousands. A swimmer with Down's syndrome panicked during her 25-meter freestyle heat and grabbed the divider that separated her lane from the next. Had she advanced herself by using the divider, she would have been disqualified. The crowd quickly caught on and encouraged her, exhorting her to swim, long after the other competitors had finished. The panic ebbed. Suddenly the little girl beamed. I have never seen such a smile. She released the divider and swam to the end of the pool, touching just as the 1,000 spectators rose to their feet and cheered.

Emiliano Gomez, a swimmer from Paraguay, calIed home to tell his family that he had won the 50-meter backstroke. Cradling his medal in his fingers, he tapped it gently against the phone. "You hear it?" he said. "It's gold."

With less than 12 minutes to go, Team California was trailing Australia 8-0 in a soccer match when it scored a goal. At the opposite end of the field, California goalie Dan Speckman let out a whoop: "Whooey! We finally got one!" He shook his hips in a sort of victory shimmy, then turned to address the five or six spectators who were watching beyond a fence. "At least we got one!" he shouted, raising his index finger. "We only need seven more. I think we can do it." Hope is a theme of these games, and Speckman's reservoir was vast. "Let's get nine more! We'lI win.

Come on, buddies!" Australia won the game, 9-1, and the gold medal. But Speckman's spirit prevailed.

The soccer match between the Georgia state team and Belgium was as dramatic a sporting event as the spectators are likely to see at any time. After 70 minutes of regulation play the score was 0-0.

The teams then played two seven-and-a-half-minute overtimes.

These, too, were scoreless, though Georgia came close before failing to convert a two-man breakaway. So the match would be decided by penalty kicks. Georgia, which had not alIowed a goal during the entire tournament, lost the shootout 3-1. Thejoy of the Belgian team, juxtaposed with the anger and disappointment of

This article is reprinted courtesy

the Georgians, created a haunting moment. The Belgians sang, in English, "We are the champions," and carried their goalie on their shoulders. They ran the Belgian flag around the field and blew kisses to their fans. The coaches wiped tears from their eyes. One of the game's referees, who had brought a camera, posed for a picture with the youngest player on the Belgian team, 12-year-old Victor Lecomte, the Belgian star who had led his team with II goals in the tournament.

The Georgian team, meanwhile, watched silently, waiting to shake hands with the winners, angry not at the Belgian celebration but at themselves for what they perceived as letting down their coaches and their goalie. They proved resilient, however. A quarter of an hour later, as the Georgians received their silver medals, they were laughing, trying to cheer one another up.

"You know, I stand there at these awards ceremonies and cry," said a bystander. "It's not a question of feeling sorry for them. It's a feeling of happiness, and that somebody cares."

It was impossible not to care and to cheer and to marvel at the lessons these athletes had for us and for each other. Lessons about trying, about lack of pretention, about real adversity compared with what most of us call adversity. "They tell us more about ourselves and our deficiencies than they do about their own," said Steve Evangelista, the director of Rhode Island's Special Olympics program.

It was an apolitical week, devoid of nationalism in a way that the regular Olympics never are. Said one Mexican woman whose son had befriended a fellow Special Olympian from Korea: "They talk, and I don't know what they say, but they understand each other, these boys. They have a language all their own."

The Special Olympics have come a long way since 1968, when the first international games were held at Chicago's Soldier Field.

Conceived by Eunice Kennedy Shriver (sister of the late President, John F. Kennedy), now the chairman of the Special Olympics, and originalIy funded by the Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation, the games were an offshoot of a backyard summer camp that Eunice and her husband Sargent Shriver held in the mid-1960s for the mentalIy handicapped. "There was a tremendous sense of isolation back then," says Eunice, whose sister Rosemary is mentally retarded. "There was so much ignorance. They didn't think the mentally retarded could play team sports, because in team sports you have to make judgments, and be quick and share-all the things you don't do in the lOO-meter dash."

Almost 1,000 athletes afflicted with mental retardation congregated in Chicago for those inaugural games. They came from 26 American states and Canada to participate in three events. No more than a few hundred spectators attended the opening ceremonies. Almost none of them were parents. "If there were 20 parents there, that's generous," says Herb Kramer, the assistant to the chairman of the Special Olympics, who has been with the program since its inception. "Parents had not yet learned that they could be proud of their mentally retarded kids."

The scene in South Bend was a little different. Fifty thousand people shoehorned into Notre Dame Stadium for the opening ceremonies to see American celebrities Whitney Houston, Barbara MandrelI, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Maria Shriver, William Hurt, Susan St. James, Oprah Winfrey, John Denver, Marlee Matlin, Don Johnson, Mary Lou Retton and Bart Conner host what became a nationally televised two-hour extravaganza.

The intensity of effort is overwhelming. Juan Alberto Duarte of Paraguay ran the 3,000-meter race so laboriously that at first it

of Sports Illustrated

from the August

17, 1987, issue.

Copyright Š 1987,Time Inc. "They Came Up Roses" by E.M. Swift. All rightsreserved.

Sports for the Disabled Taking part in sports is more than just fun for disabled athletes. It is a form of therapy, of building self-confidence and it opens the eyes of the athletesand the world-to their tremendous potential to take on challenges. In addition to the Summer Special Olympics for the mentally handicapped, there are also a number of sporting events in the United States for the physically disabled, some of which are shown here.

Below left: A quadriplegic diver enjoys the beauty of the underwater world in the company of two professional divers. Below: Blind and disabled climbers hike in Colorado as preparation for their assault on Mt. Rainier in

Washington state. Bottom: Participants at the American National Wheelchair Games speed toward the finishing line. Right: A double-amputee mountain climber with artificial feet takes a break on her way to the top.

Below: A friendly soccer game organized by a local chapter of the U.S. National Association of Sports for Cerebral Palsy. Below right: A new form of skiing (sitskiing) is meant for people who have lost the use of both legs.

A mono-ski elevates the skier-a double amputee-off the snow as two outriggers help maintain the balance. Bottom: An athlete demonstrates that his skill at waterskiing has not been affecte.d by the loss of a leg.

views with some of the Bombay participants.

"I was not scared or nervous at all," recalls 21-year-old Harish Gehi, his face assuming the concentration of an athlete about to start a race. Gehi swam his way to fifth place in both the 25-meter and the 50meter backstroke and sixth place in the 4 x 50-meter freestyle relay.

A student of Canossa Special School, Gehi learned to swim at the age of 18. Says his father, "I was told by a psychiatrist that swimming was out of the question for him.

But Harish was bent on it. So, without my permission and knowledge, he started learning to swim at the Mahatma Gandhi Swimming Pool which is near our house.

"Swimming," his father continues, "has helped Harish tone up his body and gain a lot of body control. And that irritation and frustration he felt because people could not understand him is gone."

Special Olympics has given a tremendous boost to his confidence. He is now more assertive, self-assured and travels all over Bombay without any assistance. It has also given him a sense of recognition among his relatives, friends and acquaintances. Says Gehi happily, "They told me, 'Harish, you did a good job. We never thought you would participate in the Olympics.' " Recounting his experience at the games, Gehi says, "The opening ceremony was very nice. People were clapping".they were cheering us."everywhere people were cheering us." During recreation time, he went shopping and bought a pair of jeans and a watch. "I can adjust my swimming timing on this watch and yeah I chose it myself...yeah, yeah, yeah," he says with his new American accent. He made a lot of friends with whom he "exchanged clothes, caps and ribbons."

Seventeen-year-old Kailash Gholap has an endearing smile which he constantly flashes when he talks to you. Gholap took part in the softball throw, the 100 meters and 4 x 100 meters relay, winning a bronze each in the last two events. "I felt very good."but I did try very hard for the silver," he says. His mother, a domestic help, has been his encouragement all along.

Gholap's visit to America and his participation in Special Olympics have made him more hoshiyaar (clever and confident), she says happily. And, of course, he enjoyed hi.mself tremendously.

Cleophas Pereira is 17 years old but, says his father, "his mental age is much below that." Pereira is shy, quiet. But mention the

words Special Olympics and he unwinds. "I love America," he enthuses, "I enjoyed the games very much." Unlike a majority of youngsters with mental disability, Pereira participated in sports long before his involvement with Special Olympics. "He was lucky to have neighbors and siblings who did not exclude him from games because of his handicap," says his father. "Special Olympics has increased his self-esteem.

Though he was never really looked down upon by family and friends, he was not considered capable of any significant achievement.

His participation in the games has made us all think otherwise.

Now he has the confidence to travel alone, which he never did earlier."

Pereira lost the third place in the standing longjump by a narrow margin. "I cried a lot," he confesses. "But I was very, very happy when I won a bronze medal in the 4 x 100 meters relay." He aspires to represent India again and return home with "maybe a silver or a gold medal." Because next time he plans to do something he forgot to do this time-"say a small prayer on the field."

Sixteen-year-old Sujata Chavan comes from a lower middle-class family. It wasn't until she was 12 that she was identified as a

borderline mental case and admitted to a school for the handicapped-Jai Vakil, Bombay. When her school adopted the Special Olympics program, she became a keen participant.

Her parents noticed a slow but sure change in her. "She began to appear less dull and more lively," they recall. When she made it to India's delegation to the 1987 games, her family was jubilant. "We never believed that 'such children' could participate in organized sports and we never dreamed that sports would ever be organized for them at such a level," says Sujata's father.

Although Chavan's faulty speech doesn't allow her to give lucid verbal expression to her feelings, the tone of her voice, the sparkle in her eyes and the enthusiastic hand gestures convey her message clearly-she loved every minute at the Seventh Summer Special Olympics.

The Chavans have observed a definite streak of confidence in their daughter since her return from the United States. "She also talks more now," they say. Because now Sujata, like the other Special Olympians, has a lot to tell the world.

0 About the Authors: Shahin Syed and Francesca Ferreira are Bombay-based free-lance writers.

Special Olympics India In 1978,The Association For The Welfare Of Persons With A Mental Handicap in Maharashtra introduced the Special Olympics movement in India. However, it was only in 1982that Special Olympics in India was upgraeed from a mere one-day sports meet to a regular yearround program of physical fitness, sports training and athletic competition for mentally retarded children and adults. The moving spirit behind the Indian program is Hyacinth deSouza, director, Special Olympics India.

Says deSouza, "As a teacher in a suburban special school, I always desired to do something for these children who can't help themselves. I noticed that no one thinks of the fun aspect of their lives and that sports is for them too." A sports enthusiast herself, she not only volunteered her services as an honorary worker of the Special Olympics movement when she heard of it, but even offered a portion of her house in Bombay as its head office.

In 1983, for the first time India sent a team to participate in the Special Olympics International Summer Games, held at Louisiana. The four-member team returned with two golds, one silver and two bronze medals. Soon the movement gained momentum and spread all over India. Today, it has enthusiastic participants in

big and small cities. Any mentally handicapped child or adult can participate in the program.

Every town or city that incorporates this program, according to the Special Olympics charter, must hold a yearly local meet. The gold medalists of these regional meets participate in the annual All-India Special Olympics. Contestants for the international summer and winter games are selected from among the gold medalists of the national meet.

Each country's quota is determined by the headquarters in the United States on the basis of its success in implementing the Special Olympics program. The fact that, within four years, the Indian quota has quadrupled bears evidence to the way Special Olympics has grown here.

"And it is still growing," smiles deSouza.

"It is the hundreds of thousands of volunteers who form the backbone of Special Olympics," she says. "Whether young or old, they help the movement in many ways-serving as games officials, chaperons, huggers, organizers, publicists, entertainers and fund-raisers. They provide sports facilities, equipment, lodging, transport, meals and other 'in-kind' contributions."

But, she adds, "Special Olympics has a lot more to do to reach out to all the 22 million mentally handicapped people in India."

D

One Day USA At 12:01 a.m. on March 20, 1985, thousands of amateur and professional photographers in more than 200 American cities started clicking their cameras. Twenty-four hours later, they had created a collective portrait of one day in the life of the nation. The best of these photographs have been reproduced in a book that "celebrates the United States."

Mayor Clint Eastwood Clint Eastwood has been playing the lead role in the small California resort town of Carmel- by-the-Sea for the past two years. Elected mayor in 1986, the Hollywood superstar has impressed citizens and the eagle-eyed media with his dedication to the $20D-a-month job.

America's Best Pro Schools Which American schools provide the best education for America's future doctors, lawyers, engineers and business executives? U.S. News & World Report magazine recently carried out a survey to find out the answer to this and related questions.

The World of Superconductors Trains that levitate; smaller, faster and more powerful computers; wires that can carry electricity great di~tances without any loss of energy ...all these may one day become reality with the discovery of more inexpensively accessible superconducting materials. These materials, which become superconductors at 90 degrees above absolute zero (- 273 degrees Celsius), are so easy to make that IBM scientists in the United States even have students whip 'them up in school labs.

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INDIAN PARTICIPANTS AT THE SEVENTH INTERNATIONAL SUMMER SPECIAL OLYMPICS, SOUTH BEND, INDIANA, 1987 1 and 6. Sanjay Gomes throws the softball ...and is thrilled at winning the silver medal. 2. Georgina Rebello with her gold medal for the standing long jump event in which she set a new Special Olympic record. She also won a silver medal at the Games. 3. Melville Gomes (right) in the l00-meter run which won him a silver medal. 4. Murtuza Ladiwalla on the starting block for the 200meter freestyle swimming event; he finished in fifth position. 5. Hammershield PariidI throws the softball; he won the silver medal in the event. 7. Parikh is congratulated by his coaches and his father (standing behind him) after winning a gold medal in the standing long jump. 8. The Indian athletic team with coaches R. Nigli and R. Krishnan.