Night Soil

by Dale Peck

  Within a year of Marcus’s death a third of the faculty—eleven of twenty-nine—had deserted the school. They were scientists, after all, not academics. They didn’t want to teach. They wanted to discover and make, register patents, and collect royalties. And if they did want to teach, they didn’t want to teach freed slaves, or the sons of slaves, or any other black people. Then, too, instruction was challenging when half the student body was illiterate and the rest could parse little more than a bill of lading. I’m pretty sure most of the founding masters only made it through the first decade because they were too afraid of Marcus to quit.

  At the same time, however, Master van Hooyster, who took over as chief arborist after Master Castell Davis absconded in 1900, believed that rote memorization by students who didn’t understand what they were learning was precisely the way to discourage the kind of “extension” that he, like Marcus, considered an impediment to true knowledge. Master van Hooyster had suffered a brain injury when he was eight (“Ice hockey on the Mohawk—dangerous stuff”) that left him with what appears to have been agnosic alexia, which is to say, he could write words, and recognize them when they were spoken aloud, but couldn’t read a letter, let alone a word or sentence, including sentences he himself had just put on paper. He compensated for this handicap by developing a memory so prodigious that he had all of Linnaeus by heart by age twelve. He could recite full entries from the Encyclopædia Britannica with no more than a page number or phrase as prompt and identify the location of any of the conservancy’s 261,079 trees (the tally was his own, and no one ever attempted to prove him wrong) from one of Master Castell Davis’s five- or seven- or nine-year-old sketches. Master van Hooyster didn’t allow slate and chalk in his classes, and instituted the program of mnemonic proficiency that persists in the recitations required to pass between forms. Literacy, he liked to joke, was an obstacle to the natural sciences (although he’d also admit that, failing an audience with Theophrastus or Avicenna, he was dependent upon a succession of head boys who read to him for two hours every evening before tucking him in).

  Nevertheless most of the first novices did learn to read by the time they left the school, and in 1902, when Hugh lowered the age of admission from fifteen to five, he brought in a team of a dozen “basics masters” to teach a fairly standard core curriculum, albeit in less than standard fashion. Newly christened first-formers were taught letters and words but weren’t allowed to pass to second form (or, more to the point, read sentences) until they’d demonstrated an active vocabulary of twenty thousand words. Painting lessons were given not from life but from memory, and the upper third take all their art classes blindfolded to boot, and aren’t allowed to pass into fourth form until they’ve executed a recognizable depiction of one of sixty “foundation trees” in the conservancy, as well as a randomly assigned facade of Stammers Hall and a self-portrait. Gaius (by which I mean my mother) notoriously drew his (by which I mean her) blindfold into his (her) upper fourth picture, and gave up art after discovering that he (she) wasn’t the first novice (sister of a novice) (incestuous brother-fucker) to do so.

  More relevantly, three of Hugh’s basics masters were themselves Academy graduates, and all but one of the twelve was black, which appointment led to the defection of nine more masters. Hugh seems to have anticipated this, and within three years all nine positions had been filled by alumni, a trend that continued until the last of the original masters, Winfred Pieg (who was in fact referred to as Master Winnipeg), retired in 1926, at which point all forty-four members of the faculty were Academy graduates, and remained so until the turn of the millennium. None was what you’d call a scholar. Certainly they were proficient. Could, depending on their field, recite the Old Testament in its original Hebrew and Aramaic or build a model of Brunelleschi’s dome in 1:50 scale from homemade bricks or execute a technically perfect rendition of the Chaconne from Bach’s Partita No. 2 on a violin they’d constructed themselves, which in addition to harvesting and shaping the spruce for the soundboard, maple for the ribs, ebony for the pegs, and rosewood for the chinrest also required slaughtering a sheep for the strings and several rabbits for glue and mixing up six ounces of varnish from the resin of K. lacca, a colony of which survived on the grove of jujube trees Great Grandpa Marcus had planted in 1857, under the mistaken belief (apparently occasioned by the doubled “jew” syllables of the tree’s name) that their fruit was the manna of Exodus. Marcus was said to have liked his pickled.

  But however impressive or esoteric these practices seemed to outsiders, they were less knowledge than the regurgitation of the autist or brainwashed. If you’d asked Master Ngugi how Plato defined wisdom in the Apology, his answer would be the same as his predecessor Master Arrowleaf’s, and Master Noklindt’s, Master Smith’s, and Master Unferth’s before them, each of whom would have replied, “I neither know nor think that I know.” Which is of course Socrates’s answer—or, rather, one of several that Plato tells us Socrates gave his accusers. If you pressed them, they’d have said, “I am called wise, for my hearers always imagine that I myself possess the wisdom that I find wanting in others.” And again: “He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing.” If you’ve read the Apology, you know they could’ve kept this up all day, and at almost any other educational institution such gnomism would have been an impediment to advancement. But Academy pedagogy was steeped in Marcus’s mines, or more accurately Marcus’s miner’s soul, which, like the soul of the critic (as opposed to the soul of the artist) seeks to reveal rather than invent, to amass rather than create. The masters took Marcus’s “From nothing, take nothing, make nothing” to mean that the secrets of the universe will never be amalgamated by the collective efforts of generations of scientists and/or philosophers. That, rather, the nature of reality is already manifest, and we have only to look to see it. Looking is meant in its physical sense: with the feet, to bring you closer to distant objects, and the hands, to remove obstruction, and only latterly with the eyes, to observe dimension and duration, chroma and texture. Cognition, such as it is, is rooted in recognition rather than synthesis, and further exploration or invention, far from increasing our understanding of the world, only piles more dirt atop it.

  And note that I didn’t write “our understanding of our place in the world.” To the Academy way of thinking, this is the first wrong turn: not the creation of art or the accretions of culture, nor even the metaphysical isolation of consciousness from the body that houses it and the material universe of which that body is a constituent part—i.e., the transubstantiating soul—but consciousness itself, which the Academy sees not as the kernel of selfhood but mere projection of language. A kind of seigniorage, no more immanent—no more valuable—than the image of Caesar’s face stamped on a few grams of silver; no more us than the actor is Antigone or Hamlet.

  It’s against God’s nature to lie, Socrates tells us in the Apology; and “to God,” Heraclitus taught, “all things are fair and good and right, but men hold some things wrong and some right.” Of Heraclitus, Socrates was said to have judged, “The parts I understand are excellent. I think the parts I don’t understand are excellent too, but it would take a Delian pearl diver to get to the bottom of them.” At the very least, though, we can infer that division itself must be untrue, and that the way to return to grace is not by making more judgments, more divisions, but by giving them up. A more practical person might point out that this isn’t the only thing that distinguishes humans from their creator. We need to eat, for example, and piss and shit, and foul weather has this nasty habit of killing us if we can’t find shelter, and so perhaps our concerns are more tangible than God’s. But as with their notion of change, the masters respond with the on-high view, namely, that the kinds of divisions we make between edible food and poison, or friend and foe, aren’t the ontological hierarchies with which Heraclitus is concerned. To outsiders, the Academy’s educational program was nothing but division and class
ification: the isolation of a forest into its individual pines and oaks, a tree into its bark, branches, leaves, and sap, its hierarchy of genus, class, kingdom. (A much-repeated charge ran that if a novice was asked to account for the Great Wall of China he would have gotten stuck computing the number of bricks and blocks in the structure, and never gotten around to the Hsiung-nu, or the Ch’in for that matter. The apparent contradiction between doxa and praxis irked people like the critic who discovered my mother, who wrote: “Lake Academy’s illusion of ahistorical holism is rooted in a fantasy of eternal infancy, cupidic yet carnally innocent lips clamped to the maternal teat from which milk pours forth like the springs of Mt. Helicon, and blissfully ignorant of the soiled nappies in which they wallow.” The critic grew up in Colorado Springs and her use of “nappies” is about as authentic as my use of “dunno” and “prolly,” by which I mean that the contradiction was hers rather than the masters’, who, for all their rigidity and renunciation, were neither monists or nihilists. They never went so far as to say that change was impossible à la Parmenides, or motion an illusion per Zeno. They argued only that change is part of space and time as a foreleg is part of a running horse, and to focus on one leg at the expense of the other three—and the thorax that connects them, the head and neck, the mane and tail and the turf it runs on—is to stare at nothing at all, because the animal will have long since escaped you.

  Which is to say: time passes. Even if we were confined to Plato’s cave we’d still sense its progress in changes to our own body—sweat, gray hair, rickets, what have you. As it happens, the masters also rejected the distinction between the world of shadows and the world of forms, or, more specifically, reposited the material world as the real world, whereas the world of forms, far from being a divine or eternal reality, was just Plato’s invention, or humanity’s, a folie à tout made all but irresistible by thousands of years of cultural accumulation. You could argue that this makes God the human invention ne plus ultra, the collective fantasy that raised us out of our animal state and gave us a conception of past and future as well as present—something to learn from, something to live for—and thus reject the Heraclitean premise upon which the argument rests. The masters wouldn’t have disagreed. But they’d have also said that metaphysics is as misleading as the object of its contemplation, and places human beings in a false relationship with time and, even more, with matter. As Marcus’s resurrection of the Magic Mountains and the White Woman Creek demonstrated, any attempt to unwrite history only creates more history, and not even the masters were idealistic enough to think culture could be “corrected,” let alone perfected. Instead they opted out. On January 1, 1900, the Academy announced “the end of history,” and in a move that suggests they were aware of the performative nature of their declaration, backdated the development to “March 32, 1896,” a.k.a. April 1, which in addition to being All Fools Day, was also the day of Great Grandpa Marcus’s revelation. Though history might continue to pass outside the school and the conservancy, within Marcuse the masters and their charges wouldn’t deign to notice it. The lamps would remain oil- or gaslit, heat would come from coal or wood. Horsepower would be measured in Percherons and Clydesdales rather than watts. Sentences would be Jamesian rather than Joycean, the psyche a single mechanism whose parts worked in harmony rather than Freud’s bickering triumvirate.

  There remained the problem of physics, of course, by which I mean not the discrepancy between the Newtonian and Einsteinian universes, but the more tangible manifestations of hunger and weather, desire and decay. Deciding not to read a book written after April 1, 1896, is one thing, or eschewing technologies developed after that date, but the body still needs to be fed and clothed and sated, and these needs can’t be met without carefully coordinated activity, both individual and collective. The masters’ response was to tie these activities to the gardens behind Stammers Hall in a regimen that, superficially at least, resembles the environmental movement of the second half of the twentieth century and presupposes more contemporary notions of sustainablity and bioregionalism, which gave it an unanticipated (and unwanted) relevance at the dawn of the Internet age, before it was abruptly snuffed out. Novices grew all their own food, animal as well as vegetable, made their own shoes from leather they flensed and tanned and robes from wool they sheared, carded, and wove, their paper, pens, and ink, their brushes and paint, their dishes, their sports equipment, their weapons. To emphasize the transitory nature of all these objects, they were referred to as “intervals,” and, even more importantly, were destroyed after whatever lesson or technique they were meant to teach had been concluded—although not destroyed, of course, but reused or returned to the earth in a neverending cycle, from the paper on which the novices had recorded their lessons to their food, which ended up as night soil in the fields in which their next meals were growing. Furniture and books were passed from one class to the next, but all originated in the Academy’s workshops, and when they wore out they were repaired and replaced there as well, including the dishes they cooked and ate with, metal pots as well as ceramic plates and bowls (though my mother always insisted that she didn’t learn pottery at the school).

  But even more important than the frugality with which their biological needs were met was the care with which they maintained everything else in as unchanging a state as possible, i.e., Stammers Hall and the other buildings on campus, and of course the vast folly of the gardens, from the eidetic replantings of tens of thousands of annuals each year to the individualized care regimens for thousands more trees. For twelve years the novices fertilized, mulched, pruned, and braced the trees each according to its individual need. They pored over them from root collar to crown edge in search of gypsy moths and ash borers and longhorn beetles, released nonnative insects to facilitate pollenation of dozens of exotic species, and snipped flowers from same because their pollen is poisonous to local bees. When a disease did take root or when a tree succumbed to age, it was removed in the dead of night, every log carted to the woodshop, every leaf and fleck of sawdust raked and mulched, the root bole dug up, and the fallen tree replaced with a substitute whose trunk and limbs had been trained for the previous three or four years to mimic the decedent as closely as possible. It’s not that the gardens were held up as some kind of ideal. Quite the opposite: as “Botanica Balbi” suggests, everyone knew the gardens were as ridiculous an example of profligacy as could be imagined. Yet they were there, and to attempt to replace them with something “better” would only be a different form of self-indulgence. The trick wasn’t in thinking you could perfect the world, but in realizing that the world cared not a whit for the changes men make to it. That, in fact, the things we create are only material simulacra for an internal malaise that can no more be cured by treating the symptoms than syphilis can be eradicated by rubbing balm on a chancre. Change itself—particularly biological change, the aging of bodies and growth of trees—couldn’t be halted, but it could be subsumed in ritual, freeing the mind to go within, wherein lay the only answers to the questions it was constantly asking itself. Like most acts of self-abnegation that look to outsiders like self-absorption, Academy practice was one of those things that only had meaning in the doing. The critic who discovered my mother went so far as to say that her potting technique owed a lot to Academy regimen. For once I can’t disagree with her, yet the only comparison that ever really resonated with me was to the Vedic practice of transcending the flesh by honing it into a fluid invisibility that appears effortless to observers, but in fact requires total concentration to pull off. The masters took this off the yoga mat, as it were, and extended it into all of life. And whatever else you could say about their ideas, you couldn’t deny the effectiveness of their methods. In the hundred years the Academy existed after the masters declared the end of history, no novice—not even the most harried townie—failed to graduate. Thirty-two students came in each year as four- or five-year-old individuals and, despite their secret maroon societies and TV sets hidden in the
attic of the Foundry and clandestrine trips to the arcade in Wye, emerged twelve years later as identical in their relationship to the material universe as Marcus’s mountains and my mother’s pots. In lieu of a diploma, the masters placed a coal pebble in each graduate’s palm. The pebbles were the masters’ only acknowledgment of the futility of their project, the only thing they allowed to leave the conservancy while it was under their stewardship—thirty-two pebbles and thirty-two novices a year, who spun out into the void like samaras, to wither or grow as they would.