With the class reconfigured and the Doob at work, Frank Lears initiated a discussion about Plato. His method was to bring up one idea after another from Plato’s work, or from Durant’s digest of it, then ask us what we made of it. That day, as I recall, he talked to us about Plato’s doctrine of the tripartite soul. He said he wanted to remind us of this rather beautiful vision from Plato, who had imagined the soul as a thing prone to the most horrible servitude. For the soul, Plato and Lears told us, was easily overmastered by passion; it then became like a chariot where the horses took over and pulled the poor rider wherever they wished him to go—often into error, humiliation, and grief.
But the good news was that the soul could escape this fate. Reason could assert itself against the passions. It could take its rightful supremacy and direct the appetites to moderation and urge the passions for violence and glory into their proper channels. By calming down, by living moderately, we could be saved from the only true enemy anyone has in this world, which is none other than oneself. For, as Plato insists, you can never do harm to a just man. It was on this point that Lears ended. You could never hurt someone whose soul was truly in order, because the only genuine and lasting pain there is in life is to suffer an ill-governed, turbulent soul.
And so, according to Plato, it is always better to receive harm than to do it. Because hurting someone means giving in to your passions, to anger or the urge for revenge, to the desire for glory (Plato is writing here against Homer and his war-thirsty heroes). And as to being harmed, well, if the soul is truly balanced, that simply won’t happen in any long-term way. The well-tempered soul knows how to deal with the loss of money and estates, the death of a friend, the prospect of dying. The just soul, knocked off center, recovers and rebalances itself.
It was likely that no one had read the book, and that if anyone had, he or she had probably understood barely a word. In fact Lears’ digest of Plato was at least partly opaque to just about all of us.
And the way he delivered it! He spoke in this queer, overrefined voice, a lilting, sweet tone that no self-respecting male would ever assume unless he were mimicking a woman or a fag. All this refinement, all this highly articulate business—sculpted sentences, architectonic verbal constructions, replete with words so remote and difficult that he might, at times, have been talking in another language: It was maddening. We phased back what little amperage we were putting out. A circle-wide brownout began. We folded ourselves into our standard schoolroom states, waking sleep, death-in-life.
But despite the almost mannered eloquence, it’s clear that this idea matters to Lears. As he talks, he’s entering further and further into Plato’s thinking, maybe without fully knowing it. This business about not doing harm, about preferring to be harmed even, moves him. He’s not near tears about it or anything. It’s simply clear from his voice that he’s touched.
Tommy Buller apparently senses this, and wakes up. Buller, in his own brass heart, was the troll king—a being who dwelled at all times deep in the earth and who, in the farthest reaches of sediment and sludge and rock, found his truth. He wrinkled up his prematurely aged face and rubbed his callused hands together and pulled at his ear, then cleared his throat, a sound in which you heard great digging implements laboring away far underground.
“Wellllll.” Buller yawned the first word. Buller’s opening words tended to be yawns, irritated yawns, as though you’d just woken him up from some highly nutritive, long-lasting dragon-sleep. He had the presence of someone who worked nights and who used the daylight hours to try to grab the requisite zzzz’s. “The thing is, that’s a stupid idea. I mean, if somebody burns your house and kills your family, then they can’t hurt you because your soul is in the right order? That’s dumb. But I’m not surprised. This Plato is an idiot, basically.”
Had Buller somehow discerned Lears’ investment in the idea? Is that part of what made him so rabid? I suspect so. A teacher, from the moment he appears in a classroom, has to understand that he brings more than his own character with him. He is himself and more than himself. For in the student’s mind, the teacher summons up, as if by some quotidian magic, the image of every figure who has ever presented himself as an authority. Frank Lears was not only Frank Lears but, to each one of us, also the whole concatenation of mentors and bullies and bosses and guides, tormentors and pseudo-angels, who’d made an imprint on us thus far in life. We not only reacted to him, we reacted to some archetypal form of authority that lived in the farther reaches of each of us.
And if the teacher awakens images of tyrants past—and for Tommy Buller, most of the authorities past were probably tyrants—then there is nothing to do but attack, try to get some of your own back. In every early encounter between a teacher and a student there are multiple beings present, multiple ghosts, many of them not beneficent.
Great teachers react differently to this fact of pedagogical life. Some of them never show their hand. They always turn the question back on the student. They never declare themselves. This is the way of Socrates, as it is of the expert therapist (Socrates is, among many other things, the first deep analyst of the psyche, the spirit), who functions as a mirror, always showing the patient her own reflection back. But there is another way of proceeding too, and it can be no less transforming. That is to expose oneself fully as a teacher, to be receptive to everything, every resentment, fantasy, affection, and hatred the student brings forward. And once those passions are alive, once they are in play, then let the student use them as energy for intellectual inquiry and thence for change. Such teachers are human incandescences—they have ideas, then the ideas have them; they promulgate theories, they burn brilliantly with them, and they are always, always right. They create disciples, smaller versions of themselves. They found schools. Freud was such a teacher. So was Plato. So, in his way, was Jesus.
What Socrates wants is rather different. Socrates wants you to know yourself and to become yourself, to pursue the good as it’s in your particular nature to realize it. So Socrates is very reluctant about voicing an opinion. His method is irony, questioning, hanging around, and being annoying. Lears, who was made for the Socratic mode, had just screwed up. He’d just laid his cards on the table and Buller had attacked. Lears was a beginner. He didn’t quite have the moves down.
Lears gives a softly regretful look and swings his right wrist, which rests on his thigh, as though he’s practicing his baseball card toss. I grew up flipping cards in games like farsies (furthest card wins), topsies (put one card atop another and win the pot; edgies don’t count), and leansies (knock down a card propped against a concrete wall and take the lot), so I knew the motion. Unlike many of his movements, this one is not tentative; it’s his standard nervous tic: He works at it all the time and has grown very adept.
Then comes Lears’ interjection, which is one of his classroom mantras: “Well all right, Thomas. What do others think? What do people think?”
What do people think? He says it all the time. The phrase has circulated through the first week’s class meetings, generally in the manner of a worthless coin, a counterfeit. Because, quite candidly, people don’t think. No, thanks. No one but Sandra does the reading assignments. No one, except maybe Sandra, could understand more than the rudiments of the rather elementary Durant text. We sit there like deaf, dumb, and blind kids. We know nothing and couldn’t care less. We’re dwelling in Plato’s cave, where people, chained in servile rows, see only imitations of imitations of life and never know enough to pine for the real thing, for Truth and Beauty. We loved the show in the cave. In fact, we wanted it displaced further, made more illusory. Give us some TV, a movie—a film strip if that’s all you can muster. Get us three removes from the real rather than the customary, disconcerting two.
If Lears’ head had burst into flames, alight with inspiration, we would have sat like painted clay figures waiting for the clock to jump and for the bell to ring so that we could get back to home-room (Lears’ was our last class of the day), then out into t
he street, where we could talk about football and beer and proms and skirts and legs and money and pool, and where life could be reignited in earnest.
So we sit, thick and dim, in the circle where Lears can see us all and where it feels strange, as though some sort of ritual is supposed to happen. When Lears turns away for something or stares down into his book, some of us come to life, the way the toys—especially the malicious toys—are supposed to do on Christmas Eve after the family has gone to bed. We throw paper balls, poke and pinch each other, crack jokes, run small-time riot, until he looks up again. Then we return to our poses, stolid and uniform as a bunch of bowling pins. We dare the sage to knock us down, even to move us around a little bit.
There are two exceptions to this rule of dead silence. One is Tommy Buller, who talks frequently, often without invitation, to say how stupid and wasteful and tedious whatever Lears is going on about truly is. He is tremendously, spectacularly rude, like a cross between Jimmy Hoffa and Nikita Khrushchev. It was easy to imagine Tommy reaching down to pull off one of his shoes, letting loose the tattery argyle’s overpowering stench, then slamming the desk a few times for order. He never did the reading; he barely knew what Lears was talking about. But Buller was one of the two most engaged students in the class.
As to the rest of us, we thought Buller was very, very funny. We’d crack up when he issued his Khrushchev ultimatums to Lears. He was a grotesque, greasy clown, to be sure, but he was doing our business for us. Rick Cirone, sitting judge of relative cool in the classroom, would smile a knowing smile, looking bemused and mildly disgusted, and speed up his production of “Wipe Out,” played with hyperactive drumming index and middle fingers on the writing arm of the chair, when Buller popped off.
The other exception to the talking-in-class embargo, the thinking embargo, with which we hope to starve Frank Lears into some kind of submission, is Sandra Steinman, the hippie girl. Sandra comes to class prepared. She actually reads the book in a more than cursory way. And, give or take, she knows what’s going on there.
Buller clearly hates her. My guess is that he has associated her from the start with everything that makes him quake internally—with money, with status, with intelligence, with bourgeois living rooms, where the couch is a work of art and the curtains are gripped back from the picture window by elegant cloth drape holders with mock-gold pins to secure them in place. But mostly, I think, he hates Sandra because she is associated with something he has heard about on TV—with hippies, and with a particularly noxious branch of hippiedom, something then called women’s lib.
For though existentially, for want of a better word, we are buried deep in Middle America—where Sunbeam bread rules and Dad soaps the car luxuriously on Saturday before heading out to get loaded and run riot with the boys, forty-plus in age that night—we are also living in Greater Boston, not far from the Boston Common, which the summer before was colonized by the hippies. They came to Boston in unwashed multitudes, like the early Christians, to hang out and to display themselves. We saw them on the channel 4 news all summer. Almost no one from Medford actually goes into Boston, unless it is to visit a doctor or go to court; TV has to do.
And there they were, the hippies, smoking dope on the sly and giving each other weary, theatrical hugs, consoling hugs, as though someone had just died, and wearing their love beads and head scarves and sandals, doing a broke-Gypsy routine, even though we knew that they were all rich as can be. They turned the Common into a kind of lazy utopia, and no one could figure out how to kick them off. The household fathers went into a rage when the hippies appeared on the screen. They hollered out to them to get a job, to cut their hair, to go home to Wellesley, to cut the shit. My father, who was nonplussed when the sons of the doctor who used to live across the street from us in Malden returned from college and started going around barefoot on their front lawn—barefoot in Malden, Massachusetts!—was, to say the least, agitated by the invaders. He was not talking about a National Guard action or a vigilante assault as some other dads were, but he was surely not pleased.
And Sandra, it’s pretty clear, has spent time with the Gypsy hordes. She walks differently than she used to, and than anyone else at the high school does. She has a dreamy, otherworldly sway to her approach, as though she’s in a mild trance, on a ship maybe, sailing somewhere delicious, guided by perfumed winds. Her movements are slow and deliberate in their grace. She is always smiling a little bit and ready to expand slowly—not burst—into a larger, more embracing smile. She may or may not be literally stoned. But her ethos, the Boston Common ethos, is to go around cloud-walking, looking stoned whether you are or not.
She is also highly intelligent. She’s articulate, modest, goes back and forth with Lears in an easy, often humorous way, simply not caring that the rest of us are enraged at her for breaking rank.
Sandra, from what I can gather, thinks Tommy Buller is a deeply annoying person but not past salvation. And by making the dismissive remark about Plato, he’s put himself in the way for what might actually be an edifying exchange.
She does not look Buller in the eye. Locking eyes with Tommy is not a wise course. Sandra is no paragon of street smarts, but she does live in Me’ford. To make contact with opposition, even if not bodily opposition, if only the opposition of one psyche to another, might send Buller into a full-blown rage. The idea of such opposition coming from a female could make him combust spontaneously. He is a seriously pissed-off individual. So Sandra, her eyes down on her book, takes the Platonic-Buddhist line and runs with it.
She says that if you hurt someone, it throws you into disorder. The uglier passions triumph over the better parts, and once they’ve tasted this kind of triumph, it’ll happen again and again. You’ll start out hurting people and things you think you hate, and before long you’ll be hurting things that are close to you, things you love. Because every faculty wants to dominate the others. Only reason knows how to dominate without suppression, stay on top without crushing the other desires.
She repeats herself (and Plato): “If you hurt others, you’ll end up ruining yourself. It’s always better to receive an injury than it is to do one.”
To which Tommy mutters simply: “Bullshit.”
And in my heart, if that is the place where such things occur, I all but second his response. On the football field, you have to deliver the first blow. You have to establish mastery, rob your opponent of his confidence, then ruin him if you can. Throw him down, send his helmet bouncing like a lopped head across the lovely grass. The latter-day Homeric warrior, the one who can hold his own with Tommy Sullivan or with Frank Ball—or with Le Duc Thanh, who is practicing busily, getting ready for us with twenty-cent shoes made from castaway tire rubber and a thousand-dollar rifle—believes that after a line has been drawn, harm’s got to be done. So I side with Buller. But.
But there is this. Walking to a class a few days later, I see Sandra sitting on the top step of a flight of stairs, looking into a book. I climb to a step or two from where she’s perched, and she looks up and smiles sweetly, with unaffected, nonflirtatious goodwill. “Hi, Mark,” she says. “What did you think of class the other day?”
I cannot answer. She is simply too much for me, in her work boots and her man’s shirt and her sitting where people are not supposed to sit, damnit. And she is asking me an inane question, asking me to take school seriously. I cannot do it. I cannot answer her. I don’t even shrug. I simply pretend that she is not there, and I walk on.
And I am aware enough to know that I have done her harm, have snubbed her—this good-humored, smart, and, most of all, kindly girl whom no one will talk to, whom nearly everyone writes off as absurd. She is against the war, and I am for it. She is a hippie; I am from Medford. (Which is no small distinction: A friend who lives down the block is picked up hitchhiking, and after a ten-minute conversation, the driver asks him if he might not by chance be from Medford. “How did you know?” “I’m not sure. I think it was the way you said ‘mother.’ ”) Given
the chance, I do Sandra harm. And for the rest of the day and for the week to follow, thanks to her and to Plato and to Frank Lears, I smart for it. And the truth is I would rather—far rather—that someone had treated me so. At least then I would not have to go around thinking myself a mean lout.
It’s better to receive harm than to do it. It is very hard to get this idiotic idea out of my mind once it’s lodged there. (But I will succeed eventually—I am determined to.) It is better to be Sandra, roundly humiliated, than to be me, the executor of the snub; better to be the Blind Girl that Paulie spins than to be prince of the poolroom; it’s better to be Franklin Lears, despised by your students, than to be one of the circle of kids, one of the knowing herd with its designated scapegoats. Very peculiar this notion, very strange. It lives for a while in me—it does—but then, wise Medford kid that I am, I will, as they say at the poolroom, smarten the fuck up. I will cast the thought, knowingly, away.
Chapter Four
MY FATHER, FRANK LEARS, TV, ME
About two months into the class, late October or thereabouts, a couple of odd things happened. The first was that my father, who never exhibited curiosity about much of anything, began to take a pronounced interest in Frank Lears and the philosophy class. The second was that we—me and Rick and Dubby and John Vincents, my pals in the course—began imitating Lears, mimicking his speech and gestures and doing it in ways that were, to say the least, peculiar.
The day when the imitation thing got into gear Tommy Buller was in a particularly foul mood, straining hard on his chain. We had begun the sitting-in-a-circle business sometime before, but whenever we entered the classroom we would feign forgetfulness about the new design and plunk down in the established rows. (Apparently, the prior class—whether it was Lears’ or not I can’t say—used the old detention pattern.) So we did on this particular day, not giving Lears the satisfaction of showing that we understood, much less welcomed, the teaching innovation he had cooked up for us.
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