Longer Views (68 page)

During the term of Chinese and Indian history, we were also given a French class; our regular Natural Science teacher was taking a year off to devote himself to sculpture, and no replacement could be found. His works were on exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, where my parents took me once to see them. Our art teacher (whose works were occasionally to be seen at the Whitney) used to say of his, while swinging her long arms back and forth against her gray apron: “Well, I don't think they're very good—too formal, too congested. But it has something . . .”

With a yellow pointer wielded in chalk-whitened fingers, Madame Geritsky, shorter than most of her pupils, made us memorize pages of French prose, which we had to recite alone and in unison, our
u
's,
r
s, and
Fs
constantly corrected.

I was never a good language student: but I was a bold one. Years later, when I actually spent time in other countries, I found that, armed with the all-important sentences well memorized (“How do you say
that
in Greek/Italian/Turkish . . .”), I could pick up in weeks, or even days, at least temporarily, what took others months to acquire.

We reconstruct from memory a childhood that, as adults, we can bear. I think of mine as one in which I liked many people and was liked in return. If I
was
as happy as I remember, one reason is that I went to a school where athletic prowess and popularity were not necessarily synonymous. Among the three classes of ten to thirteen that formed our grade, there were only three boys I recall as particularly good at sports. And two of these used to vie for position as Class Bully. Everyone cordially despised them.

In gym, three mornings and three afternoons a week, we indulged in an amazingly sadistic game called “bombardment”: two teams hurled soccer balls at one another, taking prisoner anyone hit. Our gym teacher, named (I kid you not) Muscles, had several times pulled Arthur out for purposely hitting another player so hard with the ball he brought the boy to tears.

During one of my early lapses with Robert (was I seven? eight?), Arthur tried to pick a fight with me on the school roof. He was a head taller than everybody else in the class, possibly slightly older. As he was
shoving me back into the wire fence at the roof's edge, I said to myself: “This is silly!” So I announced to him that, indeed, it
was
silly of him to push me around: I was his friend. So he should stop. After the third time I said it, he looked perplexed and said, “Oh.” I straightened my clothes and suggested we play together. For the next two weeks I went regularly to his house in the afternoons, invited him, regularly, to mine, and spent inordinate amounts of time helping him with his arithmetic homework.

Finally, I got bored.

He was not bright; he was lonely; he was belligerent. Friendship with Robert did not cut me off from friendship with anyone else: Robert was just strange. Friendship with Arthur did: Arthur was actively antisocial. Because he was ill-practiced in keeping friendships going, it was extremely easy to maneuver my way out of it, by being otherwise occupied here, too busy there, all the while counting on the fact he valued me too much to protest. In another week, without any particular scenes, we were no longer even speaking.

Anywhere outside the gymnasium, Arthur was subjected to a needling harassment that certainly fed his belligerence and, in its way, was much more vicious than that first day's attack on Robert. Robert's attack lasted minutes. Arthur's, practically without let-up, went on for years.

Arthur had committed some particularly annoying offense. A bunch of us got together and decided we must teach him a lesson. We agreed that, for the rest of the week, no one in the class would speak to him, or acknowledge he was there in any way. After a couple of hours, he hit a few people. They scooted out of the way, giggling. An hour after that, he was sitting on the hallway floor by the green book-box, leaning against it, sobbing. The teachers finally realized what we were doing and demanded we stop. So we did—while any teachers were around.

On the last day of this treatment (and there were others, dreamed up for him practically every month), Arthur managed to confront a bunch of us in the narrow, fenced-in enclosure in front of the school. He yelled at us angrily, then began to cry. We watched, mild embarrassment masked with mild approval, when, in the middle of his crying, Arthur suddenly pointed to me and exclaimed: “But
you're
my friend! You're
my friend!
”

Had it not been the last day, I would have stayed with my group. As it was, I spoke to him, left my friends, and went with him to the corner where he caught his bus home. I may even have explained to him why we'd done it. But I doubt, at this point, if he either understood or cared.

I think, however, this was where I began to realize that such cerebral punishments teach the offender nothing of the nature of annoyance, injury, or suffering he has inflicted: They teach only the strength of the
group, and the group's cruelty—the group's oblivion to the annoyance, injury, and suffering it can inflict—the same, basic failing of the offender.

I didn't consider Arthur my friend. After walking him to the corner, I made no other efforts to be friendly. As other harassments came up, I was just as likely to be party—except that I now stayed more in the background to avoid being called to witness. But in gym class, Arthur no longer hurled at me his bombardment ball.

At six and seven, Arthur was a bully. By eleven or twelve, he was class clown; last in his school work, still incredibly aggressive in sports, now, whenever there was any tension between him and any teacher or classmate, he would drop his books all over the floor, belch loudly, or give a shrill, pointless giggle. We, at any rate, laughed—and despised him nonetheless. Our harassments had been effective: He was no longer likely to hit you. Frankly, I'm not sure that his earlier reactions weren't the more valid.

I am sure, however, that given another time, another place, another school, and children from families that had indulged different values, Arthur might have been the well-liked, admired student while I, an eccentric weakling of a different race, who lived half his life in another world, might have suffered all the harassment I so cavalierly helped in heaping on him.

Dalton prided itself in its progressiveness and courted an image of eccentricity. (The bizarre elementary school in Patrick Dennis's
Auntie Mame
is supposedly Dalton.) The eccentricity went no further than the headmistress announcing to each class, at the beginning of each year, in a
very
guarded tone: “If you
really
have something worthwhile, creative, and constructive to do, then you
may
arrange to be excused from regular classes.” The announcement was made once and
never
repeated, though, in the Dalton brochures, this aspect of the school's individualized approach to each student was made much of. To my knowledge, I was the only student from my year who ever got to wheedle his way out of some of the more arduous classes: I developed an incredibly complex art project that involved paintings, sculptures, and electric lights, and announced to my math teacher that I wanted special instruction in calculus, and wanted it
now
.

For several months, I got away with spending most of my school day between the art room and special math tutoring sessions.

I was doing practically no assigned work. My arithmetic had never been strong. And my parents, who were nowhere near as eccentrically progressive as the school, decided to send me to a tutor, during this time, three afternoons a week.

Amanda Kemp was a small, white-haired, black woman, who lived on the top floor of an apartment house on Edgecomb Avenue, in small, dark rooms that smelled of leaking gas.

With much good will and infinite patience, she tried to “interest” me in things that I had invested a good deal of emotional autonomy in remaining uninterested in—“Since,” she explained to my mother, after the first week, “actually teaching him is certainly no problem. He learns whatever he wants to learn all
too
quickly,” and she gave me a book of poems by Countee Cullen, which he had personally inscribed to her, years earlier, when they worked together in the city school system, its illustrations marvelously macabre, showing imaginary beasts of Jabber-wockian complexity, each described by an accompanying rhymed text.

The person in my math class who did get the constantly easy hundred was Priscilla. Sometime around here, I decided to write a science- fiction novel—announced my project to a group of friends in the coffee shop on the corner, where we all adjourned after school to indulge in an obligatory toasted English muffin and/or lemon coke. I actually wrote the opening chapter: twenty pages of single-spaced typing on lined, three-holed, loose-leaf paper. I brought it into school and, during one study period, asked Priscilla to read it and pass judgment.

During the next half hour I chewed through several pencil erasers, stripped the little brass edge out of my wooden ruler, and accomplished some half dozen more intense, small, and absorbing destructions.

Priscilla, finally, looked up. (We were sitting on the green stairs.)

“Did you like it?” I asked. “Did you
understand
it?”

“I don't,” she said, a little dryly, “believe anyone could understand it with your spelling the way it is. Here, let me make you a list. . .”It was the beginning of a marvelous friendship (that, a year ago, reflowered just as warmly when I visited Wesleyan University where she is now a professor of Russian) which quickly came to include nightly hour-plus phone calls, made up mostly of ritual catch phrases (such as: “What has
that
got to do with the price of eggs in Afghanistan!”) which somehow, by the slightest variation of inflection, communicated the most profound and arcane ideas, or, conversely, reduced us to hysterical laughter, to the annoyance of both our parents at both our houses. Besides correcting my spelling, Priscilla also told me about a book she said was perfectly wonderful and I must read, called
Titus Groan
. For fourteen years, it suffered the fate of
Rocketship Galileo
. I only got around to reading it one evening over a weekend at Damon Knight's sprawling Anchorage in Milford, Pennsylvania (Damon had just made some rather familiar sounding comments on the spellings in a manuscript I had given him to read); Priscilla had been right.

The last year of elementary school was drawing to a close. I had just been accepted at the Bronx High School of Science. I was sitting in the school's smaller, upstairs library, reading
More Than Human
for the second time, when several students, Robert and Priscilla among them, came in to tell me that I had been elected Most Popular Person in the Class—a distinction which carried with it the dubious honor of making a small speech at graduation.

I was terribly pleased.

Like many children who get along easily with their peers, I was an incredibly vicious and self-centered child, a liar when it suited me and a thief when I could get away with it, who, with an astonishing lack of altruism, had learned some of the advantages of being nice to people nobody else wanted to be bothered with.

I think, sometimes, when we are trying to be the most honest, the fictionalizing process is at its strongest. Would Robert, Mrs. Mackerjee, Gene, Arthur, Marty, or Priscilla agree with any of what I have written here, or even recognize it? What do
they
remember that, perhaps, I have forgotten—either because it was too painful, too damning, or because it made no real impression at all?

Language, Myth, Science Fiction . . .

58. Browsing in Joe Kennedy's
Counter/Measures
, I came across a poem by John Bricuth called
Myth
. Liked it muchly. It begins with an epigraph from Lévi-Strauss:

“Music and mythology confront man with virtual objects whose shadow alone is real . . .”

Then this from Quine's
Philosophy of Logic
:

“The long and short of it is that propositions have been projected as shadows of sentences, if I may transpose a figure of Wittgenstein's. At best they will give us nothing the sentence will not give. Their promise of more is mainly due to our uncritically assuming for them an individuation which matches no equivalence between sentences that we can see how to define. The shadows favoured wishful thinking.”

And from Spicer's poem
Language
, in his discussion of the candle flame and the finger he has just blistered:

do they both point us to the

grapheme on the concrete wall—

the space between it

where the shadow and the flame are one?

Just as “propositions” can be dismissed from logic on the formal
side as a logical shadow in a field where we wish for light, on the informal side we can dismiss the movable predicate—
x
“walks” which can be moved to y “walks” and so on to the i
th
variable “. . . if and only if the i
th
thing in the sequence walks” (presumably true of
x, y
, and the others)
[Philosophy of Logic
, p. 40]—as an empirical shadow: It is a shadow of the empirical resolution at which we observe a given set of process phenomena that allows us to subsume them all under one word. If, for instance, all that can be referred to by “walks” is, like the word, a singular entity, then a very strange entity it is. Among other things, it is discontinuous in both time and space, since both
x
and
y
can perform it simultaneously in different locations and/or at different times! In the empirical world, however, spatial and temporal discontinuity
is
multiplicity of entities. And “a multiple entity” in our language at any rate is as silly a concept as “many rock.” (This, I suspect, is the practical side of Quine's refusal to “quantify over predicates” [
Philosophy of Logic
, p. 28]. If we have a situation where every instance of predicate-with-every-variable can be empirically resolved into separate predicates (P), we have a situation where the existential quantifier (
_E
P), would always have the same value as the universal quantifier (P). If there is
only
one q, then everything you can say of “at least one q” you can say of “all q.” Similarly, the negation of one quantifier could always be taken as the other
or
empty, as one liked. This gets the formal logician into the same sort of trouble as the mathematician who allows himself to divide by zero in formal algebra.)