RECOLLECTIONS FROM A UTOPIAN SCRAPBOOK: SANTA BARBARA AND THE BRAVE NEW WORLDby Christopher Wolf
Outis, utopia; no one, no placeNews of the death of Aldous Huxley on November 22nd, 1963, was overshadowed by the assassination of John F. Kennedy within hours of that time; visionary elements connecting the Santa Barbara area to these moments are worth recalling. A coincidence of endings by chance and by force, yet those histories re-invite us to a taciturn tense: Huxley as the warner, Kennedy as the warned. The well-educated and mystically intoned envisionings of a utopian adept reveal through Brave New World the lifelong preoccupations with themes of science, society, and freedom, of quis custodiet ipsos custodies, and of those misuses of elite power which enable the abuses of a power elite--repeated along with the transmissions of a specific why-and-who-by coup formula are the no less controlling incantations of a saturnine status quo that agency and anarchy are only to be elitely interpreted, and that enforcements against those historically private privileges are futile, dangerous, and not in the nature of things.
It now seems all but forgotten that Huxley was once a part of this specific coastal culture, occasionally passing time here while away from his Los Angeles homelife. Various strongly spirited political and aesthetic dreams on behalf of freedom which were quite locally active then, which were responsive to worldly events, and in which Huxley had been a participant, now are only faintly discernible.
Watching elite watchers in an electronic era is forcing the need for unprecedented terms of vigilance; the highly accelerated and far-ranging perplexities now involved require newly adaptive agilities of mind, body, and education. In direct response to threats made by a controlling few against environments and societies, the sketchings and notations of that scholar's cross-footings here exemplify the regional presence of other, often obscured, educational pursuits.
One remarkable effort, the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions (CSDI), was particularly active during the 60s and 70s. With a roster of international scholarship, and labeled as being an affluent liberal think-tank, the Center had many accomplishments with lectures, colloquia, and publications. MELVYL lists Center materials as well as articles from the Center's magazine, though they are not, oddly, all available on this campus. Huxley contributed "The Politics of Ecology: A Question of Survival," in 1963. Just a few of the many other Center works include Linus Pauling's "On Science and Peace," 1961; Elizabeth Mann Borgese's "The Ocean Regime; A Suggested Statute for the Peaceful Uses of the High Seas and the Sea Bed Beyond the Limits of Normal Jurisdiction," 1968; D. N. Michael's "Cybernation-the Silent Conquest," in 1962; "Censorship by Manipulation," "The Arts in a democratic Society," "Broadcasting and Government Regulation," "The Police," "Ecocide," "Cacotopias and Utopias," "Pacem in Maribus"; "Women in the World...," "The World Food Crisis and Triage"; and so forth.
The lack of a more common inclusion of the CSDI in current campus community vocabularies remains a conspicuous absence, and it can well be imagined what more the Center might be offering now and in the future. Discussions of recent Internet reports that Bill Gates has "quietly been buying up the 'electronic rights' to major works of art" would surely be included in a more general discussion of free speech rights, responsibilities, and censorship in the digital age.
Huxley's excursions here among the counterfunding coastal contours of local wealth, philanthropy, and fascism, represent more than just another migratory great white male sighting; they also signaled the colonial conundrum of an arriving anti-establishment beach-head by a liberal establishment. Additionally re-settling over Chumash ghostings, the mixed blessings development of a University of California campus in the Santa Barbara setting during the years which followed the second World War intensified self-conscious idealizations of this area as becoming the "Athens of the West" (in opposition to competing claims for this status by Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Santa Cruz).
Whether drawn to such a neo-Athens as a remarkable critic from one of England's most eminent scientific families who came to talk at UCSB and CSDI, as a creative writer who may have modeled Pala Island on parts of this seaside garden, as a mystic who took psychedelics and helped establish the Vedanta Temple in Montecito, or as a habitually beachwalking seeker of other experiences, this warning watcher probed sensory edges. Although Huxley suffered from a near-blinding condition to his physical eyesight and wore disfiguringly thick eyeglasses, he developed great critical vision into a century of telecommunications and its new interplays of mass media, conflicts, and tele-controls. Living and writing within close or early views of Nazism, Stalinism, and various European and Asian warfares, Huxley relocated to Southern California for many reasons, including mysticism and medical treatment of his eyes.
Further meditative regional wanderings in the footsteps of Huxley and others who were similarly motivated to seek solace and sensuality in the Santa Barbara area might lead through the Ellwood Beach eucalyptus groves, another subject of numerous forgotten environmentalist battles with oil and real-estate, where pilgrimages were made to see much larger thriving masses of migrating monarch butterflies. Isla Vista, the unhappiest unwanted local child of all, never got "streets for people." Huxley is a part of IV folklore, rumored to have resided on Del Playa, another fractured Spanish streetname there which points mostly to the carelessness of its builders. Having made fortunes for everyone other than itself, IV in those years had florists, jewelers, and affluent clothing stores. Most memorably, what is now the UCSB Isla Vista Theaters was once the Red Lion-Magic Lantern complex, which housed a fancy two-level bookstore and international newsstand, and the movie theater was one of the best art and international film venues within miles of the chain monopoly influence. The manager was involved in a major free-speech set-to over the screening of The Story of O, and during the martial-law riot occupations viewers of films, which in those years included Mondo Cane, The Devils, El Topo, or The Conversation, could feel and hear heavily booted paramilitary footsteps crunching in the gravel of the roof directly overhead. A film documenting those riots was locally made, its maker and current whereabouts still unknown to this author.
Campus visions have faded for establishing multiple professional schools, and of spreading further into local communities and terrain with longer-term mutual cultivations; an unfulfilled reflection, the pond area beneath Storke Tower, lay dryly for years. Other abandoned expressions of philosophic architectonics and architecture included a scale model proposal for the College of Creative Studies which demonstrated a near stoic format for resident student and faculty to be sited near Campus Point.
Huxley's lifeworks intended to engage definitions of freedom and contribute to a general educational effort, in direct address of which he had made urgent commentary in the chaptered essays of Brave New World Revisited, a work developed and published in the late 1950s. As with the writings of the former policeman, Eric Blair, a.k.a. George Orwell, the real possibilities of globalized, unified authoritarianism were additionally expressed in that book as having come alarmingly closer into being. Other responses to such senses were developed in this era of utopian visions and commentaries. Whether using Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth in the global village metaphor of Buckminster Fuller or surviving the complex brainwashings, conditionings, and self-confinements in the village of Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner, resources of nature and individual will for freedom hold in the balance either an optimistic future or a Silent Spring overexploited by pirates and formulators of Fahrenheit 451. Even in the realities of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, under most conditions, life sustaining re-orientations are still available in natural reference points and in The Forgotten Language of dreams.
The continuing mystique of Huxley's deathbed experience describes a legendary psychedelically assisted suicide, wherein he requested to be given, at a point near the end of his suffering with terminal cancer, a massive overdose of hallucinogenic drugs, pre-departing through the Doors of Perception in a singular opportunity for altered-state insights.
Thus the visions and political events of the time carry through Hiroshima, McCarthyism, desegregation, the Vietnam syndrome, oil spills, rock concerts, and a pleasant walk on the beach in Refugio or Summerland, somehow co-existing here in an well-worn, non-urgent reverie. Erosions of heat, light, wind, and water help to confuse smoothed and faded pieces of shattered, scattered skulls and structures, with fragments of sand dollars and pretty bits of shell, so much soothing shrapnel for the mind's fingers. Electronic tricks for the 20th-century mind have been templated on these trails, where the Doors are heard in the tides, "...learn to forget, learn to forget..."
Aldous Huxley's deathbed scenario and the historically transformative shooting in Dallas retain resonances of good dream-bad dream utopias, and the echo-locations of popular imagination can still travel with those examples when searching inter-dimensionally to perceive all possible pasts, presents, and futures. A self-questioning sense of coming to terms with well-being seems to teeter between an elective cranial implosion as an act of the private hopes of a writer and the sneak-attack explosion of presidential head as a public spectacle filled with secret meanings and anti-hope. Possibly the most replayed film in national history, the fixed image photographics of the accidental Zapruder footage indelibly splattered us all with bits of skull and brains and left this country to re-run its disorienting home movie frames over and over in doll-house-sized TV sets wherein the out-of-time re-enacting figures of one tiny woman and a small group of men perpetually re-people a slow-motion single-scene drama from a Lilliputian war.
However freedoms may be limited, it is precisely because education and transformative agency can be made more generally available that authoritarian demonstrations are used to depress, deceive, and distract from that fact. That activism does not die with activists remains with its own necessary tasks for obvious remindings; and, where history is received as the guest of life, not all conversations must be heard to mean what only certain translations tend to intone singly.