The Three Christs of Ypsilanti - Milton Rokeach [72]
I ask Joseph what Leon has been talking about and he replies: “About a relic, like a symbol, an amulet.” He avoids any mention of the sexual aspect. I ask Leon to tell us again how he made the relic. Joseph still avoids any mention of the way Leon “blessed” the relic. But at this point in the exchange Joseph diverts the conversation in an extraordinary way: he balances a cigarette on his nose.
July 29. The meeting drags on; nobody wants to say anything. I prod Leon, who is chairman, to keep the conversation going. He says he’s sleepy. He believes in meditative silence. When I insist that the chairman is responsible for the discussion, Leon comments that these meetings are coming to an end, when the shaking off takes place. He hasn’t cared for these meetings, he says, since the first day. Joseph says he’s marking time too; that’s all he can do. I complain that the interest in the meetings has deteriorated.
“Listen!” says Leon. “Meditative silence is a healthy thing for a person and puts a person in their own focal point.”
—Up to a point. Too much isn’t healthy.—
“There are people who can do it for years.”
—Psychiatrists call that withdrawal.—
“There’s such a thing as withdrawal because of external influences and there’s also internal perspective because of the love of the internal perspective. Free choice of the individual—this is sound.”
As the meeting adjourns I announce that the following week all meetings will be held at 3:00 p.m. sharp in A building and will be only for those who want to come. Moreover, I continue, it’s up to the men to get there by themselves. My purpose here was to find out whether they would still come to the meetings if they had to take the initiative of picking themselves up and going somewhere else to attend.
August 1. Monday. Today is the first day that the voluntary meetings are to be held in A building. Will the three men come? I am fairly sure that Clyde and Joseph will arrive, but not the least bit sure about Leon.
At three o’clock, none of them has shown up. Not one. We go out to investigate. A phone call to the ward reveals that Joseph is still there. We drive to the store. Clyde is there, drinking a double cola. Where is Leon? We scour the area, but he is nowhere in sight. We give up. We then phone the ward again. Would the aide try to find out from the men at supper tonight how the meeting went?
We decide to continue this procedure for a few more days, and then to interview the men and try to find out more about their reactions—or should I say, their failure to react?
At supper that evening the aide asks Joseph and Leon how the meeting went. Joseph replies that he didn’t know anything about a meeting, and Leon that he did not go to the meeting but that he was represented there by the cosmic robot image.
August 4. Interview with Joseph. He says he didn’t go to the meeting at A building because he was sick, and had been keeping pretty much to himself; when he’s sick he is not sociable. He complains that he doesn’t want to work in the vegetable room because it’s not healthy.
Interview with Leon. I ask him if the men have held any meetings this week, and he says no. I tell him that we missed him at the A-building meetings, and that since neither Clyde nor Joseph came, the research assistant and I held them alone. Leon seems extremely depressed, more depressed than we have ever seen him before. He sighs. I suggest that he stand up and try some exercises. He refuses, accusing me of trying to make him misuse the palms of his hands. He says he has been told not to jump. I do not insist, but instead remind him that we provide individual meetings so that people can get things off their chest. He cuts this short by saying he gets things off his chest to the Righteous Idealed Governor, and he adds that he didn’t go to the meetings because he has his own counsel, which he prefers.
Resumption of Conflict Between Leon and Joseph
It became clear very early in the experiment