SCRAWLING GRAFFITI

Nietzsche, misanthropy and "Elvis is cool."

Students don't take spray paint to Harvard's ivy and red brick, but in bathroom stalls and secluded study carrels closet graffitists make their statements.

The stuff is diverse. Anguished lit majors scribble attacks on Derrida. Inarticulate crammers write obscenities on nearby walls. And the simply lovesick bemoan humanity.

Take Cabot Science Library. In the bowels of the building is a netherworld of wooden desks known as "pre-med row," where the future physicians of America bury themselves in their schoolwork.

Nurturing must come later in medical training. The general tone down here is typified by a scrawl in one of the first carrels: "Die of AIDS faggot before I smash your head."

Anti-gay, sexist, and generally misanthropic, these comments portray a pretty bleak world-view. "Some days you're the bug," reads one of the more articulate enunciation. "Other days you're the windshield."

"It's nothing that's very deep or profound," says David D. Hebb, a history research assistant, flipping through a book in one of the Cabot carrels a few days ago. "Their concerns seem to be quite limited."

He points to a scribbled "Fucking Nazi assholes" on the wall to his right. "This is pretty typical."

On the other hand who can blame these scientific slaves toiling beneath the earth? "What am I doing?" queries a delicate script. "I have no life. It's nice outside and I'm rotting in the basement of a library."

"That's it!" reads another. "I'm switching my major to government. So long Cabot--hello LIFE!"

In Cabot and elsewhere, cries of anguish mesh with political statements and the occasional metaphysical musing.

"God is dead'--Friedrich Nietzsche.

"'Nietzsche is dead'--God."

And beneath that, in bright blue marker: "Give the Palestinians a state--like New Jersey."

Graffiti, inherently an anti-establishment phenomenon, has been given different explanations by sociologists.

Boredom and fanatical politics spur some to take up a pen. But often graffiti is a way to say something of which one might otherwisebe ashamed.

Indeed, graffiti's anonymity is its greatest attraction, says Todd Heatherton, assistant professor of psychology

"It's an opportunity for people to say very socially unacceptable things in a place where they're sure other people will see it," Heatherton says. "Its really hard to get caught writing graffiti."

"We are fairly politically correct here," Heatherton adds, "and people who don't go along with that may feel they're being censored by the community. This is their form of aggression."

But some students just have something to say and no one to listen. In the pages of books on reserve at Lamont and Hilles, for example, readers carry on an intergenerational chatter.

"Down with democracy, eh Morgan?" reads a forthright late-1950s script in a copy of Edmund Morgan's The Puritan Dilemma, on reserve at Lamont.

In his history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Morgan praises the "efficiency of despotism" and champion Puritan John Winthrop over his rival, Thomas Dudley.

In impassioned marginalia, Morgan's long-ago reader sided with Dudley. "As I sit here, looking into the Governor Thomas Dudley Memorial Garden. I feel that history has vindicated Dudley," his faded block capitals read. "After all, the only Harvard landmark named after Winthrop is a JOCK HOUSE."

A more recent reader disagrees with the indictment. "We can't all be coordinated, can we?" he writes underneath in blue pen.

Librarians trying to keep discipline in their realm, can't be happy about this form of graffiti.

But while she discourages comments in the margins, Hilles and Lamont librarian Heather E. Cole says she understands the motivation behind them.

"Some people see books as friends--that they talk to," Cole explains.

And this form of graffiti can occasionally be valuable, Cole says. Houghton Library, for example, contains books once owned by famous writers.

"Those books have marginalia that is interesting to scholars studying the author," says Cole." There is no reason why the comments of an undergraduate student reading a work of scholarship might not be just as interesting."

Still, the College doesn't recognize book scribbling as an authentic form of scholarship yet.

Harvard graffiti is an interactive pursuit. People respond to others' comments, tracing spidery lines of print down a wall's edge.

Often the dialogue ends with some sort of Marxist summation. In pre-med row, for example, a spiral of obscenities draws this comment: "Manifestations of anger in response to an oppressive university and society."

And in the Yenching Library women's bathroom, a debate on lesbianism ends with an attack on bourgeois society. "Wise up Harvard! Sexuality is the recreation of the leisure classes. The poor and homeless are too constrained by fatigue and lack of shelter to make sexual preference such an important is sue."

Commenting on society seems to be an age-old need. "It's not new," says Professor of Sociology James A. Davis. "There's medieval graffiti and there's Roman graffiti--it seems to be something about human nature."

Just what about human nature remains unclear. "Almost by definition, we don't know," Davis says. Maybe, he suggests, graffiti artists are "expressing passion, resentment--or trying to get a date Saturday night."

Bathrooms house some of the most passionate graffiti. Writers work through gender issues and deal with emotional crises in language of varying subtlety.

"My experience in men's bathrooms around the world is usually it's quite smutty," says Davis.

Others agree. "Often it's not even sexual, it's just perverse," says Daniel E. Smith '95. "They're sometimes just wacked out. Seriously, wacked out."

But the graffiti is still enticing. "I always read it," says C. Morgan Schmidt '94, who adds that he's occasionally tempted to upgrade the general tone.

"The only time I've ever been driven to write graffiti was when I though I could write good poems on bathroom walls," he says, leaning back speculatively in his chair. "I'm not against defacing things for a reason."

In the age of Robert Bly and the men's movement, macho grafitti displays may seem passe. Where's all the writing from the new, sensitive males? Not in Harvard bathrooms, evidently, where men tend to discuss sex and sexuality with violent overtones.

Comments in women's rooms usually are more affirming. The same issues--distress, sexual identity, relationships--are phrased in more gentle terms.

"I've been sitting here crying for 40 minutes," reads a wispy notation on the wall in the Yenching Library women's room. "I hate Harvard. I'd rather be any place else in the world. I know I'm whining about privilege but I don't care, I hate it. I want to go home. I hate it."

Other women rally to the cry. "You are not alone," one respondent writes. "I feel this way often. Good luck." Two other women suggest Room 13 as a source of support.

Men get a bad rap on these bathroom walls, where boyfriends tend to be viewed as oppressive.

"How does a woman maintain self-respect and be involved with a man?" one person writes.

In black, scratchy script, someone offers an ambiguous answer. "It is only by having respect for yourself that allows you to respect another."

Others sidestep the quicksand of emotional angst entirely. "I spent my summer as a life-guard," writes a peppy purple pen just below these outpourings, "and it was really fun!"

Both angst-ridden comments and happy reports of summer frolics help to humanize an often impersonal world, says Sarah T. Kuehl '92-'93, who is writing about graffiti for her senior thesis.

In the modern era, that may be graffiti's most important function. All we can do is inscribe our thoughts, anonymously, for others to read--at least until Harvard repaints the walls.