Below the Summit
Sir:
Iraq is more important than ten Berlins, but the U.S. continues to study Berlin and act as if Khrushchev's "deadline" is something like a bureaucrat's lunch hour and must be taken seriously. Berlin is the deliberate decoy set up by the Communists to distract the U.S. from Iraq. Wait and see.
HARI DHARANA Hollywood
Sir:
Can we have less playing like puppets on the part of our press? The American people are not afraid. Let our editors and press absorb some of that courage.
SCOTT W. RYALL Bakersfield, Calif.
Sir:
From this side of the Atlantic, America appears as an overendowed, immature young nation ruled by a power elite of career politicians, military top brass, monopoly capitalists and tycoon gangsters—and, as such, is every bit as dangerous as the U.S.S.R.
MARTYN BERRY Oxford, England
Sir:
I agree with Senator Fulbright, who suggests "summit conferences as a regular thing, maybe twice a year, and approach them without expecting them to settle anything" [TIME, March 16]. It is hard to see how summit conferences can make relations any worse than they are.
JOHN N. WARFIELD Lawrence, Kans.
Sir:
We give and give, and the Russians take and take. Ben Franklin prophesied it succinctly: "Those who give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
ANNA MAE GAGNIER COUMBOURAS Springfield, Mass.
Well-Raked
Sir:
After reading the Art section in the March 16 issue, with the illustration of the "masterpiece" by Barcelona Abstractionist Antoni Tapies called Grey Borders, I went out quickly to my car. On the floor I found a similar "artistic gem." I had always known my treasure as the floor mat.
MORTIMER H. SLOTNICK Eastchester, N.Y.
Sir:
During the first stage of my absorption in Tapies' tricky abstract art form, I could have sworn that his work suggested merely a "well-raked garden" in an ordinary Buddhist temple, as distinguished from a "Zen Buddhist temple," as he described it. Finally, however, I caught the subtle clue to Tapies' entire revelation. I saw that had Tapies but an ordinary Buddhist temple to suggest, he would have used only eleven parallel lines against a background of mud. Actually, he employed twelve such lines, the twelfth line, of course, signifying the Zen.
Once you get the hang of interpreting these things, it is like having a new world laid out before you. You know, for example, that 13 lines against a background of mud, colored not too dark, nor yet too light, would depict a carelessly raked garden, planted heavily to leeks, in a Tibetan lamasery.
GEORGE WOLCOTT Antigo, Wis.
Sir:
To the cry that "nonobjective art claims validity only for its mechanics, for the material with which it is made" rejecting man, his life, his visions, his future, I raise one voice in dissent. In the few directions we were able to look during the 1920s, whether to past cultures or the scientific and social myths of our own, it was sharply clear that in them lay few answers valid for a man of vision.