Part III The Wit and Wisdom of Archie Bunker
1 The Guardians Association Scholarship Award
There was, first, always, this unbearable production of self: Cicero’s return to the scene of the crime. The seminar room—excel too much in there and be incarcerated, be lifetime painted into the corner of your scholastic habit. Those who can’t but teach, do. Cicero preferred to get them out of bed in the morning and get on with it, so ran Disgust and Proximity in the generally abhorred nine a.m. slot. He’d become a connoisseur of their morning odor, unshowered bodies sheathed in clothes they’d worn the night before. Cicero liked to get into what would otherwise typically be the Baginstock College undergraduates’ hangover dreams, giving them the simplest reason to assassinate him on RateYourProfessor.com, sparing them the difficulty of casting around for something more esoteric. He schedules class earlier than anyone else and then berates us for being tired. This put them in a more receptive state than they knew, sleepy haters lashed to the mast of their Starbucks.
“Good morning, everyone. I think we’re all here who are going to make it here today, so let’s get under way. I intend to hijack today’s class but let us first get some of the syllabus material addressed, keep this silly bus on its course. I know we have ready among us Mr. Seligman—yes? good—with his presentation on the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology article, that along with the chapters of Aurel Kolnai and the Hilton Als formed this week’s assigned reading. You are all keeping abreast of the reading, I hope? Just now in my idle time before class I was poking around on the blog and didn’t see jack shit on the Kolnai or Als.” This elicited a ripple of nonsemantic utterances, distant moans, and choked giggles. “Are we not turning the pages or is there some other problem? Are we finding the material difficult? It’s too early in the semester for coasting to the finish line.”
“Some of it is difficult,” said Yasmin Durant, one of Cicero’s lovely defiant ones, a repeat customer. Sticking up for the groggy team, yet only as adjunct to her deeper strategy, that of positioning herself as Cicero’s echo and sister, his call-and-response partner in this room. Nominating herself for discipleship, Yasmin’s head was beginning to cultivate its own little goat-horn nubbins, dreadbumps threatening to take up some space.
“Well, you likely are understanding more than you realize. Stick with it and we’ll sort it out in here. But the more you lay down some responses, the greater your traction on the texts is likely to be. It’s just a blog, people. You’re not going to be graded on the language, I don’t care if you comment in emoticons or Harry Potter rebus, Muggle-speak or whatever, just offer some evidence of engagement. Put your footprints on the thing.” The September light fractured through tree-tops on the other side of the room’s tall windows, and across the big chestnut table, punishing those students who’d lined up on the wrong side. The slant was changed. The heat had broken overnight, breeze like a tide coming in, and where the coolest streams had touched the oak trees they were tainted with irreversible yellow, Maine’s seasonal hustle. Cicero might have only a few more weeks’ congenial swimming. After that he’d have to go in for some uncongenial swimming. It had become part of his job here, to be the ineradicable blemish on the New England horizon. In the seminar room, Cicero had to unfurl pedagogy, make something occur on a weekly basis. Other days, he taught by merely existing.
In the seminar room, an incumbency. A pregnancy, even. Cicero was here to birth something each time. A secret part of him never failed to glimpse terror in the seventy-five minutes laid before him, as if he’d not destroyed such intervals successfully at least a thousand times previous. Actually, it was not so unlike contemplating the cold sea before immersion, then stepping off to remember he belonged there, would not dissolve there, was something the damn sea had to deal with. In fact, in the seminar room he taught by merely existing, too. Cicero was adequate simply as an exhibition, a subject for contemplation, and lately he had come to consider the production of awkward classroom silence as an alternative pedagogical implement. Say less and less. Let them plummet into that abyss of the inexpressible where the truth lies, where the action is. Telling himself this, the words always then came in a brutalizing flood. He hammered their bodies with his language and as ever the seventy-five minutes were destroyed in an eyeblink. The cream of the nation’s preparatory schools limped out the door crippled by the onslaught of him again. Cicero’s silence was mostly theoretical. Fuck actually sparing them, life was too short.
“You’ll have noticed we have a visitor today. Sergius Gogan—welcome, Sergius, to Disgust and Proximity. These are my best and brightest here. Sergius isn’t a spy from the administration, people, so you don’t have to tighten up. Just an interested observer. Now, I’d like to open with a reading from the Kolnai. Page sixty-seven, if you want to follow. ‘Thus disordered sexuality represents for the sense of disgust, above all what is disorderly, unclean, clammy, the unhealthy excess of life. Even spirituality in the wrong place may to the best of our knowledge arouse something like disgust. There is something disgusting in the idea of everything on earth becoming pasted over with musings and broodings …’ Let me skip down here: ‘… there exists here the danger that intellectual dallying and raking about may itself come to form part of sexual life, on the strength of the enormous capacity for inflection and amalgamation with alien spheres which the sexual drive possesses … It belongs to the total disgust reaction that it is a matter of an essentially cumulative, infectious process, of something which lacks … restraint or hold, something which hones in on everything, something putrefied, and at the same time still undirected, undynamic, swirling about in its own dank atmosphere.’ ”
Cicero allotted a measure of gravid silence.
“Anyone going to weigh in? Too early for you? Well, don’t let it get too late. We’ll keep this passage in the background for now.” Next Cicero cued the student who’d prepared a ten-minute capsule for the others and leaned back in his chair. The text in question detailed a study in which volunteer subjects were made to confront their sensations of disgust at being asked to don a series of woolen sweaters ostensibly tainted with either physical or moral corruption. Cicero interrupted after the student’s paraphrase became unreasonably labored. “Very good, thank you, Mr. Seligman. So what’s the point? Is anybody surprised that these people didn’t want to put on the sweater that they associated with the cockroaches or the tuberculosis even if it was steam-cleaned, even if it was boiled. Who here doesn’t relate to this kind of magical contamination anxiety?”
Silence.
“What about the murderer’s sweater? Point being, is that a different reaction? They got even fewer people to put on the one they claimed came off a murderer.”
“It seems mixed up.” Yasmin again. “You can’t study moral revulsion like it was the same as fear of disease.”
“Good. Maybe it is mixed up. If so, who mixed it up?”
Nothing.
“Mr. Seligman, I was hoping you’d mention which item topped their list of aversive sweaters—the one nobody would go near even worse than the cleaned-up-shit sweaters and so forth.” His second shit. Cicero semiconsciously tallied certain utterances in seminar.
“Yeah, uh, the researchers found that the highest aversion was to a sweater they claimed had been worn by Adolf Hitler.”
“Right. So.”
Nothing.
“Adolf Hitler is an easy one, right? They were going easy on themselves. Or need I confirm this? Is there any lack of consensus among us on Adolf Hitler?”
The uneasy susurrus he got back was enough.
“Anyone thinking of some sweaters they didn’t try out? You all read the paper. Some sweaters that some people might feel as sure about as you’re sure about Adolf Hitler?”
Too much. Or the presence of the unwelcome guest, the Person from Porlock.
“Slow morning for y’all. Well, I’m letting you off the hook because I told you I had a hijack in mind. In the spirit of the Hilton Als boo
k, which we will not address directly today because I want to see some reactions up on the blog so that next week I can call you out by name, today we’re going to talk about mothers. Not mothers in books, because the real point of this class isn’t that this stuff is trapped in books. This stuff is trapped in bodies, the books are for letting it out. I mean to say your own bodies, adrift through space and time, sitting there sucking on breath mints and whatever else they’re doing right now.”
He paused. The clock told him fifty minutes remained—the customary short hour of analysis. By Cicero’s measure, nothing as yet had actually occurred. Nobody had been put on the couch. That could be okay. Let the remainder trickle, as had the first twenty-five, into the deep bank of unmemorably undisturbing classroom moments for these children of privilege—they’d meet that outcome only with a shrug of relief. What was Lookins on about today? He called us “bodies adrift”? That could be a cool name for our band. Nothing was required of Cicero in any regard. Not, except perhaps by that woman he’d encountered again in the midnight hour, voyaging through his special time tunnel, his reverse birth canal, the ghost at the soda-shop counter on Greenpoint Avenue jonesing as always for her next Pall Mall and yet with enough time to spare for fucking with Cicero, tearing him down to his turbulent quintessence. Had he talked with Rose for fifty minutes from the couch of his dark bed?
Cicero, the evening before, had taken mercy on Sergius Gogan, offering the guest room downstairs. After the two swimmers paddled in, dripping from the sea, Sergius dragged his duffel in from the rental car’s backseat and Cicero sent him to shower, had him throw the wet cutoffs he’d used in lieu of trunks into the dryer. Then told the stray to find his way down Main Street, past the campus, instructed him to go find the second-story porch of Poseidon’s Net, where he could drink a pint of beer and eat a lobster roll or haddock basket. At that, Cicero joked unhumorously, you’ll have exhausted the limits of local culture. They’ll have baseball on at the bar downstairs, he added, but you’re stuck with the Red Sox. And, fair warning, it’s also the townie pickup scene. Fresh meat gets plenty attention ’round here.
Having discharged Sergius to Poseidon’s, Cicero got into his own air-conditioned car and drove beyond the town’s limit to take his usual table alone at Five Islands Grill, there to enjoy a glass of cold sauvignon blanc, dine on a preliminary of oysters and a plate of their pretty fair foraged-mushroom gnocchi, and read a few chapters of The Man Without Qualities. The Grill, apart from department junkets with visiting speakers or job candidates, was Cicero’s preserve; his colleagues were too cheap to eat there without institutional reimbursement. Cicero felt no interest in extending any ocean conversation with Sergius to dry land. Returning to find the house empty, he tuned his satellite dish to the Mets game and, pouring himself another cold glass from a bottle in his refrigerator, deep-sixed his mass into the couch.
The Mets were improved this year. Though the names grew indistinct, the players increasingly resembling Cicero’s red-cheeked students, fandom was native and indissolvable in Cicero. It might be by now simply a matter of the colors, the scripted name with its drop-shadow, the skyline logo—rooting for laundry, he’d heard it called. Contemptuous of the pull of tribal nationalism in the human psyche and, for that matter, of Ivy League narcissism in scholars ostensibly steeped in Deleuze and Guattari’s view of hegemonic dominions, Cicero could humble himself contemplating his own irrational lifetime affiliation with the Mets. A thread of Fascist susceptibility lay in how Cicero fought the pull of sleep each summer night, blood quick to the chance of seeing men triumph in the same orange and blue that had limned Tom Seaver’s thighs. Leni Riefenstahl, alive and well on DirecTV. Still, most nights he passed out around the seventh.
When Sergius reentered and found him asleep there, Cicero grunted and heaved himself upstairs. Possibly the wrong night to have a gander at the Mets—was it that which had invoked Rose? Well, too many reasons to need to blame the Mets. He awoke in a coil of sheets, sweaty despite the conditioned air, both arms trapped beneath his body and prickly with blood deprivation, alien companions in his bed. He had to roll to work them free, then beat his palms together to gain use enough to knead his wrists and forearms to life as well. It was before six, September light just animating the lawn’s glisten where it curved to the sea. A doe and her fawn tiptoed through the window’s picture, soft-footed and surely inaudible even if not drowned by the putter of the central air.
Cicero dressed, got free of the house without pausing to find out whether Sergius Gogan might be stirring in the spare bedroom, only first jotting a kitchen-counter note suggesting his houseguest visit the nine o’clock seminar if he woke in time, and giving directions to the classroom. Driving to Drury Hall, Cicero met more deer on the campus roadways, flushed from Indian-summer woods by the cool dawn, each slender as a slice of toast. Signs and portents, or global-warming symptom? In either case, he didn’t hit them with his car. Arriving sooner than even the secretary, Cicero was left to brew the department coffee before he could hole up in his office. There he reinstated his professorial comportment with caffeine and another fifty pages of the Musil, unconcerning himself with the matter of his overnight guests, corporeal or otherwise. He glanced at the morning’s texts, selected the paragraphs from On Disgust. Checked the course blog and chest-grumbled disappointment at what wasn’t there.
Now, having blurted mother, Cicero understood he needed go through with something, even if he couldn’t know exactly what. Needed to for the sake of Rose, the midnight mover. It was she who required refutation. But Cicero should be cautious. Sergius Gogan only seemed innocuous. Turning up here in Cumbow, the unprodigal son had rattled the box of savage boredom Cicero walked around inside. Yet there were others in this room beside Sergius and Cicero and the phantom of Rose in Cicero’s head: his charges, his wards. In loco parentis and all that. Cicero’s task was to play neutron bomb, destroy them but also leave them standing.
“There’s a passage from Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City, I wish I’d brought it in, but basically, this character who isn’t Doris Lessing, or maybe is, but anyway, like her author she’s an ex-Communist—what she says is that the problem with all utopian ideologies is they pit themselves against the tyranny of the bourgeois family, and that it’s basically hopeless. It’s overreaching. The deep fate of each human is to begin with their mother and father as the whole of reality and to have to forge a journey to break into the wider world, or even to begin to understand what, beyond their parents, exists. The exact nature of the battle might be particular, with various social determinants, genetic fate, happenstance, et cetera, but the lot is universal.”
“Sounds pretty Freudian.”
Lewis Starling, among Baginstock’s media studies majors their callow post-humanist. Cicero was adviser to the kid’s jargon-slippery thesis, concerning search engines, Turing tests, zombies, contagion. Starling mouthed “Freudian” with ten-foot-pole distaste, scorning the collapse of his mentor’s critical framework into banality. Cicero could, if he wanted, byway through Heidegger or Gramsci to rebuke him. But no need to take it personally or waste the time. Instead he said, “No doubt, Freud was a major stakeholder in this matter of progenitors. Point being, what theorist with any regard for what we’re calling ‘affect’ wouldn’t be? Remember the body. Any thinker’s first sustained effort in interpretation is the same one, that of unmaking our makers. Something like Mom and Dad: A Critical Stance. Question is, whether it’ll be our last.”
“I don’t understand what we’re supposed to be talking about.” This, from Mister Just Tell Me What I Do to Get an A in This Class—Cicero had blocked the young pedant’s name. Yet for once the kid’s characteristic petition for simplification was welcome, seeing as Cicero hadn’t halfway satisfied himself. His need, equally, to wreck their evasions and his own. “Listen, boys and girls, young adults, what I’m talking about is the project we’re always already engaged in and will never conclude, that of unsuffocating our minds with the
basic falsehoods known as everyday life. Put aside your pens, quit writing down what I’m saying. Let’s talk about your mothers, fuckers.”
Fair enough. Cicero usually allotted himself at least one. A scattering of laughs absolved him. But now he’d best reel it back in a couple of notches. “Let’s remind ourselves of that term Christopher Bollas calls ‘the unthought known’—the recognitions we refuse to fully articulate precisely because they are too much with us at every present moment. Say something here you know about your mother but have never said aloud. It doesn’t have to be anything earth-shattering. Mr. Starling, you willing to open the floor?”
“I’m not sure. You want me to talk about something like catching my mother watching Internet porn? Not that I’m saying that actually happened, because it didn’t.”
“Cute, Mr. Starling.” More curdled giggles around the table. This act of defiance had required more of Lewis Starling than had the earlier chafing at Freudianism. It had also cost Cicero more, but he tried to ignore that. “But perhaps we should turn to someone else first, yes?”
Nothing but blank faces. One girl left the room. Potty break, protest, or mere indecipherable vanishing? Cicero would be lucky if he ever learned, unless he found her staking out a complaint at his office door after class. He glanced at Yasmin Durant, but his acolyte’s gaze was lowered to her lap, against the difficulty of following Cicero to this crossroads. The silence, if not deafening, was unenlivened, a baker’s dozen brains in a vacuum pack. Cicero found he was slipping down the glassy face of his own mountain, to which he had addressed himself with no grappling tools whatsoever. He refused to glance at Sergius Gogan.
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