RITUALS-THE REVOLT AGAINST THE FIXED SMILE

By Melvin Maddocks

IN the spring of 1627, the Pilgrim settlement at Plymouth was scandalized when a rather different American named Thomas Morton decided to show the New World how to celebrate. At Merry Mount, which may have been America's first counterculture community, Morton erected a Maypole--80 feet of priapic pine--and by his own account "brewed a barrel! of excellent beare" to be distributed with "other good cheare, for all commers of that day." Other good cheare included Indian girls, according to "a song fitting to the time and present occasion" written by the host himself:

Lasses in beaver coats, come away, Ye shall be welcome to us night and day.

Myles Standish, that well-known non-womanizer, accompanied by America's first vice squad, interrupted the revels, which were subsequently described by Plymouth Governor William Bradford as "the beastly practices of the mad Bacchinalians." Morton eventually was busted, placed in the stocks and returned to England in a state of mortifying near starvation.

It is only simplifying history, not distorting it, to suggest that on May Day 1627, the struggle for the American soul was settled once and almost for all. Score: Ants, 1; Grasshoppers, 0. The devil had been unmasked as the imp of play, the demon who made song and dance the pulsebeat of life. And so the men in the gray Puritan suits went their unmerry way: sober, industrious, thrifty, starkly Protestant, with absolutely no use for Maypoles. For Maypoles meant not only untrammeled festivity but something of larger significance: rituals. And rituals meant not only feelings and passions but coded repetitions of the past --things that New Man had come to the New World to escape. On May Day 1627, cool, clear American voices of reason said a firm no to all that.

The no was firm, but it was not, and could not have been, final. As Philosopher George Santayana, looking at the American Puritan through half-Spanish eyes, noted: "For the moment, it is certainly easier to suppress the wild impulses of our nature than to manifest them fitly, at the right times and with the proper fugitive emphasis; yet in the long run, suppression does not solve the problem, and meantime those maimed expressions which are allowed are infected with a secret misery and falseness." Nearly 31 centuries later, the Merry Mount case no longer seems so open and shut. Not only could contemporary man use a Maypole in his blighted Garden of Eden, but he is just beginning to realize the damage caused by not having one. Consider those maimed excuses for Merry Mount that have come to serve, ever so ineptly, as its substitute. On New Year's Eve (Oh, God! A year older and what have we accomplished?) the children of Myles Standish are condemned to gather with noisemakers, paper hats and lamp shades, and out of sheer embarrassment get smashed. The stocks could not hurt worse than such gross incompetence at ritual gaiety. Every New Year's Eve, Thomas Morton is avenged.

Is this really so small a price to pay, this emptiness of heart? In between un-Mortonlike holidays--the Christmas ringing with carols to shop by, the Easter that means chocolate bunnies and an annual visit to the church of one's unfaith, the Labor Day spent dourly traveling to nowhere along clogged highways--there occur other public rites, as grimly forgettable as scenes in a bad home movie. The lady with a champagne bottle, weighed down by her furs and obligatory Fixed Smile, whacks like an inept murderer at the prow of a receding ship. The politician, equipped with a trowel and the Fixed Smile, gobs mortar on a cornerstone, or noshes his way along the campaign trail.

America's unacknowledged but cheerlessly compulsive rituals make up a montage of trivia that boggles the eye. Brother Masons shake their In-group hands. Boy Scouts extend rigor mortis salutes. Shriners vibrate their fezzes. Drum majorettes goose-step. Plastic Miss Americas and Nixon's Grau-starkian palace guard seem to pass together in surreal review, followed by that parody of Roman triumph, the Veterans Day parade--all paunch, sourly dispirited bugle blasts, and flat feet hitching to keep step. The banal, hand-held camera pans on, showing no pity. There go the Rose Bowl floats; where does the papier-mache end, where do the people begin? Here come the shaman-orators and all the Babbitt snake dancers. Dear Lord, another political convention!

The gift for ritual is not exactly prospering in the 20th century; secularity, urbanism, technology--all contrive to separate modern man from the kind of community that encourages, even demands, a sense of ceremony. But is this the best that America can do for a bill of rites? Other people's rituals tend to release them--as they should. Rituals are society's unwritten permission for civilized man to express primitive emotions: fear, sexuality, grief. Other people's rituals invite them to be more human in public--more themselves--than they dare to be in private. Greek Zorbas whirl like fertility gods, Irishmen keen at their friends' funerals or even the funerals of strangers. Americans smile their Fixed Smile: the smile as anti-smile--no pleasure, no love, no silliness. The smile that tries to hide the face of American Gothic and only betrays it. The smile that says, "I cannot be myself in public."

Lately a ghastly doubt has begun to mock us, and it refuses to go away. We aren't sure, but we wonder: Is a sense of ritual--a sense of formal, sanctified public ceremonial--the preliminary state to a special kind of wisdom, a higher seriousness of the heart than Puritan hearts can ever know? Through some hideous gaffe did the anti-Maypolers reject not the devil but one face of God? By being so busy conquering nature that they could not celebrate it, by insisting with prim spiritual pride on reason, did the first Americans cut us all off from the more chaotic but deeper rhythms of life?

When his first child is born, an American father finds how criminally inadequate it is to pass out cigars. When his father dies, an American son discovers that the national habits of grief and commemoration are even worse. A son honors his father by buying a cosmetic job from an undertaker who was a stranger to the living face. Mass-produced casket, mass-produced headstone, all-purpose prayers. Amen.

At the life-and-death occasions, the commonsense, I-can-do-it-myself American bumps up against the humbling truth: rituals teach men how to behave at the best and the worst moments of their lives. If one has learned no way to behave--or only a superficial way--the meaning of those moments, the meaning of life itself, hangs in jeopardy. The greatest of the American watchers, Alexis de Tocqueville, put his finger on the risk. No-frills rugged individualism, he warned over a hundred years ago, not only makes "every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart."

But now a new tribal generation has arrived. It knows nothing of Merry Mount because it knows nothing of history. But in its blood runs Morton's cursed inspiration. It is determined to raise a Maypole. With beads and real Indian headdress and peace symbols, Woodstock Nation wanders the countryside looking for its own Merry Mount: the perfect rock festival.

No one can begin to understand the young people--including the young people--until one astonishing fact is grasped: they are not kicking against the System because they think it has too many values, but because they think it has too few--and those too thin. In its preoccupation with doing, the System has let the big moments, the festive moments, the very bright and the very dark moments--the ritual moments--get away. The System has just hustled on past with its Fixed Smile in place. And for this, the young are not about to forgive it.

Woodstock Nation is staging a kind of reverse revolution, it may be the first young generation to demand more rather than less ritual. And despite its ignorance, despite its boorishness, the revolution of the children is becoming the education of us all. For though they have not made the fathers trust their values, they have made them distrust their own. Young and old, we are all developing a new respect for ritual. We are learning that knowledge without the ritual element of wonder is barren and self-mocking. We are beginning to understand that the need for ritual is a human constant, not just a craving of primitive Indians and decadent Englishmen, and that if good rituals are not invented, bad rituals happen.

Almost 20 years ago, Dr. Rollo May (Love and Will) speculated whether modern man, suffering "in our commercial and industrial society from a suppression of fantasy life and imagination," would seize upon "new forms of magic." His prophecy has come true with a vengeance. At the profoundest levels, as well as at the most trivial, we hunger to ritualize our everyday lives. Like a humorless orgy, the Living Theater spills its rites of the stage into the audience and finally into the street. The young read as holy writ Allen Ginsberg's How to Make a March/Spectacle. Protests against war, or even air pollution, find men in saffron robes with shaven heads carrying joss sticks and chanting the Hare Krishna. For other instructions, people consult the I Ching--including how to stage a new-life-style marriage. The mood reaches even the middleaged, who tentatively toy with beards and hair styles--the least radical forms of period costuming--and adopt sensitivity training as a kind of labor-relations device. With a fever to be relevant, priests and ministers are bringing religious services into the coffeehouse, the factory, the supermarket. More often than not, the music that enhances these mod liturgies comes from an electric guitar pulsating to a rock beat. Once again, "Make a joyful noise unto the Lord" is our collective text.

What all this suggests is that a touch of madness is in the air and Americans have, as usual, gone from one extreme to the other. In The Making of a Counter Culture, Historian Theodore Roszak protests: "We begin to resemble nothing so much as the cultic hothouse of the Hellenistic period, where every manner of mystery and fakery, ritual and rite, intermingled with marvelous indiscrimination." Rituals threaten to be the next epidemic. Consider the games of ritual that people play: group-encounter institutes, hippie communes, mate-swapping clubs--all with varied seriousness are peddling salvation to the Fixed Smilers. The medicine men are setting up their booths. You want to be yourself in public? Have they got a ritual for you! Mysticism has become a carnival sell. Right on, Scientology.

The '70s are seeing the American launched on a curiously un-American quest. He has order--the order of the machine and the punch card, the order he once thought he wanted--and he is sick to death of all the well-oiled predestination. He is off and hunting for a richer order than technology can provide, a more organic sense of meaning. Confusedly, belatedly, he is searching for something very like his soul. No one has a

right to feel very optimistic

about the prospects. If young

people associate the Fixed-Smile

syndrome with Viet Nam, older

Americans see behind all the Dionysian huggermugger the face

of Charles Manson. And they

sense that what the children

are saying to the fathers is

this: We will put the Maypole

back up, even if it kills us

--and you.

By the most insufferable of history's practical jokes, "letting it

all hang out" could produce

the same results as holding it

all in. Instead of Salem witches,

the California breed; instead of

the Ku Klux Klan, the Weathermen. If Plymouth without

Merry Mount was a mistake,

Merry Mount without Plymouth

could be a disaster. The country

that began with theocracy could

end with demonology. But such

an end would be cheap parody.

Rituals are not quick cures for

civilization and its discontents. Nor are they self-indulgence for psychic escape artists. Rituals

are ultimately the SOS of terrorized hearts trapped between knowledge of their own mortality and ignorance of the dark and quite possibly hostile universe about them. What they are desperately signaling for is a deal. They are the new compact that man tries to make with reality after the death of his illusion that he is God.

America began as a ritual of rebirth--the world's best publicized new beginning. Now the original American Dream is dying by bits and pieces, and that is our panic. Do the new rituals represent fumbling attempts to initiate a second beginning? Is all the writhing and the agony, all the violent self-division, the schizophrenia of an old self dying, a new self being born? Are we witnessing, at last, the erratic rites of America's coming of age? Of its coming to a self-awareness chastened by defeats into being more human? It is too ^soon to speculate--even to dream a second dream. One's hope is so guarded that it dares express itself only as these tentative questions. All that can be said now is that most Americans find themselves in a kind of no man's land, between Plymouth and Merry Mount, between Middletown and Woodstock. Between too much reason and too much passion. Between the impulse to act and the impulse to be.

According to Hawthorne's short story The Maypole of Merry Mount, the peal of a psalm from Plymouth would occasionally collide with "the chorus of a jolly catch" from Merry-Mount and echo in a splendid confusion of styles. Suppose a little band of displaced Americans had lived exactly in the middle, in that no man's land between culture and counterculture. Suppose they had listened to that collision of psalm and catch tune for weeks, for months. Would the double echo have ceased to be two competing sounds? Would one new sound have fallen in the ear, with a new rhythm and harmony of its own, neither hymn nor May dance: a third way?

We will be the first to know, for 343 years after May Day 1627, we have become those displaced Americans. We are the people that both sides warned against.

Melvin Maddocks

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