Whether or not the forms of expression to be found within the covers of this magazine con actually be said to be characteristic of an author, the new name seems, to us, appropriate. The Antioch Community being, however, by its own definition, an experimental democracy anxious to adjust to each new situation, the change will undoubtedly come as a shock. It need not, for it is just a minor revolution, of the word only, and we have much bigger things to worry about, what with the Administration plotting against us night and day, endeavoring to take away our precious freedoms and the like. It is difficult to say if the change was occasioned more by the vacuity of the old name or the suggestiveness of the new one. Cracks about roses and how they small under other names are perhaps relevant, perhaps not; what is relevant is our consistent at- tempt, as editors, to meet the definition above, We hove tried to reveal the moanings of Antioch, to catch the community in its mainly expressive mood: and to capture the flavor of things here, sweet or sour.

 

A modern psychologist Maslow) has noted how in our culture the instrumental spirit tends to overtake even the end experiences: love ("It's the normal thing to do"); sport ("Good for the digestion"); education ("Raise your pay"): singing ("It's good for chest development"); hobbies ("Relaxation improves sleep"): beautiful weather ("Good for business"); reading ("I really should keep up with things"); affection ("Do you want your child to be neurotic?"); kindness ("Bread cast upon the waters ..."); science ("National defense!"); art ("has definitely improved American advertising.") This community, no matter how much its members like to think of themselves as a race apart, is not unaffected by this tendency.

 

Nor are we, children of our culture that we are, for we are continually finding ourselves engaged over a beer in defining and defending the "function" of the magazine. It is therapeutic, we say ("...nothing better for the ego than seeing your name in print"), it is good public relations ("Parents love to see their little dears as artistes"), fulfills the Antioch "whole man" ideology ("... balances the div dance and other such frivolous entertainments"), helps the co-op program (" Ö extremely valuable as editorial training"), boosts CG (" ... gives people a chance to participate who might not otherwise"), maintains our prestige as a center of culture ("... every college has a literary magazine."), and, contributes our little bit to keep America great (" ... gets the Camel company's message to the people.")

 

What we want to do here is to resist this trend of thought, both in ourselves and the community as a whole. What we wish to insist upon is the value of the magazine as an end product of Antioch culture, as a perhaps vain attempt to freeze Antioch in her better moments, intellectually, creatively, emotionally. We want to find a young poet in the act of coming to some sort of terms with his experiences here, on artist in whose lines something of the flexibility and rhythm of Antioch life can be seen, a critic in whom the weaker spots of Antioch take a constructive form, and a fiction writer able to portray the attitudes and values we carry around with us under our skins.

 

When Yeats died, Auden wrote:

 

... poetry makes nothing happen; it survives.
In the valley of its saying where executives
Would never want to temper; it flows south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs.
Raw towns thet we believe and die in; it survives
A way of happening, a mouth.

 

That is what we, as editors, wish to be: a mouth. We wish to moke nothing happen--we only wish to give voice to those among us best able to articulate our raw towns, to make them clear and bright in the tongue peculiar to us as a community. In short we wish to take small steps toward the creation of a really accurate and expressive Antioch IDIOM.

 

THE EDITORS (= Clifford Geertz & Hildred Storey-Geertz)


 

source: The Antiochiana Archive, Yellow Springs, Ohio (hardcopy sent by Nina Myatt - thanks!!)

 


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