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the Los Angeles River, where they purchased blocks of limestone and
     sandstone for carving. Pollock, who stored his materials in Tolegian’s backyard, soon
     accumulated a huge pile of stones, much to the dismay of Tolegian’s mother. Whenever
     she spotted Pollock arriving at her house with another block of stone, she would run
     to the back door and scream in her native Armenian, “What has this crazy man brought
     to my backyard?” With a chisel and a hammer Pollock chipped away at one block after
     another, and on weekend afternoons the backyard studio would reverberate with the
     sounds of his labors—the chime of the hammer as it struck the chisel, the plink-plink-plink
     of the chips as they splintered from the stone. His friends felt sorry for him, thinking
     he was no better at sculpture than at drawing. Nonetheless they recognized thepleasure he took in carving. Tolegian described Pollock as “more at ease with a rock
     than a human being.”
    In his groping efforts at self-understanding, Pollock looked to Schwankovsky not only
     for artistic guidance but spiritual guidance as well. His teacher was a friend and
     follower of the noted Hindu philosopher Jeddu Krishnamurti, who, in the spring of
     1928, had visited Los Angeles and founded a camp in the Ojai Valley, eighty miles
     north of the city. Schwankovsky, immediately impressed by the Hindu’s ideas, asked
     him to give a talk to his students, and one Saturday afternoon, amid predictable controversy,
     the “world teacher” visited Manual Arts. For Pollock, who had never attended church
     in his youth or practiced any religion, theosophy was a virtual epiphany. With marked
     enthusiasm, he visited Ojai, read theosophical tracts, and shared his findings with
     his father, who, a month after school began, assured him, “I think your philosophy
     on religion is O.K.” It is not difficult to understand Pollock’s identification with
     Krishnamurti, a gentle, sensitive heretic who, according to his writings, had been
     unhappy in his youth and determined to find a goal, any goal, to which he could devote
     himself completely. His teachings, a paean to individual rebellion, confirmed a precept
     that Pollock had divined on his own: the moment you follow someone else, you cease
     to be your own leader. Appropriately, then, a year after starting school Pollock tired
     of following Krishnamurti, bluntly informing his brothers, “I have dropped religion
     for the present.”
    Early in 1929, during his second semester of school, Pollock joined Guston, Tolegian,
     and several others in his art class in the publication of a newsletter.
The Journal of Liberty
was flagrantly subversive, exhorting the student body to “awake and use your strength.”
     Though issued only twice and consisting of a single mimeographed page, the
Journal
acquired impressive notoriety after attacking the school’s sacrosanct department
     of physical education. In an unsigned editorial the students protested the school’s
     emphasis on athletics and proposed, rather imaginatively, that varsity letters be
     awarded to “our scholars, our artists, our musicians instead of animated examples
     of physical prowess.” Pollock, one of the founders of the newsletter, attended allthe meetings and made every effort to contribute suggestions, though it was hard for
     him to talk in a group. As he confided to Charles about one occasion when he ventured
     a comment, “I was so frightened I could not think logically.”
    One morning, a few hours before school began, Pollock and his friends sneaked into
     Manual Arts to distribute
The Journal of Liberty
throughout the building. They were slipping some copies under a classroom door when
     a janitor caught sight of them and started chasing the boys down the hall. He managed
     to catch Pollock, whom he reprimanded for trespassing. The following day Schwankovsky’s
     class was interrupted by a visit from the janitor along with the school