The Professor and Other Writings

by Terry Castle

  We had entered a new and somewhat spongiform reality. And thus we dallied, on the way to supper, taking it all in: the brand-new plastic seats and pristine industrial carpeting, the businessmen carrying garment bags, the See’s chocolate kiosk. At a certain point, as if yielding to yet another King-of-the-Fairies fancy, Keith took me by the arm and plopped me down in a row of seats in front of a large wall panel composed of randomly pulsing colored lights. The panel was the size of a small billboard and the lights, several hundred of them, flashed on and off like bulbs blinking on an old-fashioned switchboard. The thing appeared to be a high-tech artwork of some kind. Whatever. (As one’s students are wont to say.) The light patterns were psychedelic and I was soon mesmerized. Keith sat down next to me and, as always, smiling agreeably, began watching, too.

  After a while (five minutes? fifteen minutes? an hour?) he leaned over, took hold of both my arms, and placed them carefully and symmetrically on the armrests of my seat. Almost as soon as he touched them, the appendages in question began to feel more like flippers than arms: floppy, uncanny, and still at least a million years away from evolving anything useful like hands, let alone fingernails or opposable thumbs. Getting a manicure would have been impossible. The lights went on blinking hypnotically. He was now going to do something amazing, Keith said—if I trusted him, that was, and he thought by this point I did. The amazing “something,” it turned out, would involve the all-important alpha waves—mine and his, mysteriously working together. Once he counted down from ten, he said, I would no longer be able to lift my arms up from the armrests or my feet up from the floor. It would be as if the world’s strongest glue were holding them down. I would not be able to BUDGE. I couldn’t wait; it sounded fantastic.

  And in turn, hardly had the promised countdown begun than I felt myself yield, as much to the magical aura Keith seemed to diffuse around him as to the hypnotic suggestion (utterly irresistible) in his voice. By the time he reached “one” I was thoroughly petrified: stiff, euphoric, arms stuck to the armrests, my feet grafted to the floor. I resembled an Egyptian tomb effigy, some butch lady-pharoah immobilized on her massive throne. I had that total Hatshepsut thing going on. The only items missing were the square headdress and false beard.

  The sensation of paralysis was dizzyingly pleasurable. Millennia seemed to pass. Yet like a cosmic hum the pleasure continued. Periodically, Keith and I gazed down together at my motionless hands and feet and giggled conspiratorially. Every now and then I’d try to wiggle a digit—unsuccessfully—and we’d giggle some more. As the hung-over dharma-diarist would put it the next day:

  We were doing it as one impulse, one concern, and we rejoiced in that unity…. He was giving an instruction to me, about my own body, but I was agreeing to, consenting to, the instruction, AT THE SAME TIME, simultaneously with its offering. Terms, manipulation and passivity did not apply to our activity.

  Take that, boring dodos. In the end Keith must have released me from my position and helped me up; for my next memory is of the two of us in the restaurant, drinking wine and gobbling down huge forkfuls of orange Coho salmon and baked potato over candlelight. I remember marveling to myself—as if I’d entered the realm of Heideggerian Dasein—this is the most exquisite baked potato I have ever eaten. The butter pat, the sour cream, the freeze-dried chives: every luscious explosion on the palate seemed a new ontological token, a guarantor of Absolute Being.

  At the same time, as a student of shamanistic encounters, I knew I had been absorbed into Baked Potato–ness—interpolated into the Absolute—for a reason. Shortly after we had finished and our plates had been whisked away, I was hardly surprised when my wizard-companion, now rakishly sucking on his corncob pipe, articulated the Deeper Purpose of Everything with a charming, half-playful grin. Would I like to go back with him to his hotel room for more wine and pot? He liked me oh so much; he was getting off on imagining how it all was being in my shoes. It would be such a great honor for him; he cared for me—me Terry—so very much. For a moment I was jubilant. I loved his gentle Brother Sun–Sister Moon face, his curls, and his pinkness—everything in fact about him. I felt I had known him forever, as if he had given birth to me in some primal act of couvade, like one of those tender androgynous male mothers in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness. A great singing began. He was beautiful—as rich and miraculous and fruit-bearing as a woman. I was tempted.

  Yet at the same time, in some odd reflexive fashion, I also knew that I had to decline. I knew he would be kind about it. He was a Loving not a Savage God. He looked rueful for a second then gave me a big smile and didn’t press me further. And I, with my usual stunned-ox obliviousness—the certainty that I had to refuse being unrelieved, in the moment, by any real understanding of why I was doing it—was happy enough to shrink politely back into my lovely, lonely, calcareous shell:

  I said I’m sorry it’s hard for me to do these eye-contact things, and he smiled and crinkled up his face saying he understood, folded his hands on the table, and looked up at me now and again like a funny animal, a cat or a dog, making me laugh in spite of myself. I felt a depth of love in myself that was tremendous, like a great cleansing, and a deep beauty.

  A deep enema, I should perhaps have written, for though we parted soon enough—regretfully on both sides—this was hardly the end of the story. With a courtly wave Keith vanished back into the alternative dimension from which he’d come. In a trice Karen had suddenly rematerialized and as if rounding up a lost sheep, began walking me back to the parking garage. I told her what had happened in a sort of glossolaliac loon-burst. (I was still fairly druggy.) I’m sure I must have sounded completely insane, as if I’d been chloroformed and stuffed in a car trunk for two hours and yet claimed to have found the experience more delightful than anything that had ever happened to me. Karen was plainly disturbed—both by my story and my strange gabby-glorified state. She tut-tutted audibly, looked suspiciously around in the back seat before unlocking either of the car doors, and to my dismay, said she found it “terrifying” that someone with Keith’s “mystical power” was wandering around incognito in the Sea-Tac airport. It reminded her, she said, of those archdevils, the Jesuits. Was I sure he’d been a wholly benign presence? I remonstrated indignantly until I beat her down and made her change her tune. Okay, she said—well, maybe he was a good spirit, after all, a version perhaps of the Alchemical Androgyne, like that character in Cocteau’s Euridice? Eutebus? Some name like that. It was possible, anyway. Placated for the time being by this hypothesis, I continued to rave about Keith and his marvelous doings almost all the way home, until I finally conked out, there in the passenger seat—mushroom tights askew and head lolling forward, like that of a Hogarthian wastrel after a debauch.

  The denouement was swift and crushing, though again I didn’t grasp the finer points for some time. Various people wanted to know how the Dog Food Fellowship interview had gone and I was happy to tell them—including one of my fellow students, a poufy-haired, platform-heeled gay guy named Arthur, who, as it happened, was also competing for graduate fellowships. The personal situation, as I should have seen, was potentially flammable: Arthur was a moody disco-queen in the making (though none of us knew it at the time; Saturday Night Fever was not to be released until 1977) and I was clearly the more successful young scholar. Yet blind to the possibility that Arthur might be less than pleased by my visionary adventures, I had babbled on excitedly about Keith and the airport and the dope, the Sufi parable, the blinking lights, and the sheer sublimity of it all. The treacherous Arthur—but who on earth could blame him?—at once told one of our professors, a decent, upright, uptight fellow named Fred, who promptly summoned me into his office for interrogation.

  At this point the whole affair seemed to morph into one of those sinister varsity “coming of age” dramas in which everyone ends up getting betrayed, committing suicide, or joining a nunnery: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, or A Separate Peace, perhaps, or better yet, Donna Tartt’s scabrous Secret
History. Fred wasted no time: he asked me point blank about the hash-smoking and the hypnosis business. Had Keith handed me a marijuana cigarette? I was as stunningly forthright in response as I was about everything in those days. For what had I to be ashamed of? It had been an Utterly Transcendent Experience. Keith was totally cool—Fred wouldn’t know about that, obviously—and besides what was the fuss about? It was 1975, after all.

  Fred was clearly still worried, however, and asked me if I wanted him to follow up in some way with the Dog Food Foundation. The whole thing remained highly irregular. Absolutely not: I was fairly squittering with self-righteousness by this point. But what if I didn’t get a fellowship because of the way Keith had handled things? Whether I got a Dog Food Fellowship didn’t matter, I replied in a huff; the point had been the encounter itself. That’s fine for you, Fred persisted, but what about other candidates, any of whom might have gone in your stead and had a more conventional, possibly fellowship-winning experience? I didn’t care: Fate had not ordained it thus. Outraged by his tired old busybody ways I demanded that Fred definitely not pursue the matter officially—a demand to which he reluctantly acceded. I was stern—like a Pope with intellectual leanings, laying down a particularly blood-chilling encyclical.

  I didn’t get a Dog Food Fellowship. A letter informing me came a few weeks after the talk with Fred. While I sometimes wondered what Keith had said about me in his report—for I found that even though no prize was to be mine I had been “named to the Honorable Mention List of Applicants”—I was not especially upset. I figured that Keith, no-bullshit ace-guy that he was, had probably told the Dog Food Foundation about my lesbianism—maybe even said that I’d announced it during the interview. (Very courageously, I now thought.) The fellowship committee—no doubt a bastion of prejudice and hypocrisy—had likely repulsed my application for that reason. Pfah! When Fred and my other professors tried, gingerly, to commiserate with me over my lack of success, I was scornful; all I would say was I had revealed a piece of possibly incriminating “personal” information during the interview and that it had obviously been used against me by some hostile and primitive moron.

  But it was true I didn’t really care. My own weird little projects, like the now-chaste affair with Karen, went on afoot; my graduate school plans seemed unaffected. For no particular reason other than I was curious about a part of the country I had never seen (though in truth I hadn’t actually seen any part of the country besides the West Coast at that point) I had decided to go to one of the big Midwestern state schools for my Ph.D. I was alone in this somewhat whimsical decision: neither of my divorced parents, British expatriates both, had gone to college; nor had either of them any knowledge of American universities. I hardly saw them, anyway. I hadn’t been back to San Diego for over a year. (I wouldn’t go back for another year either.) Through all of this period my mother was largely immersed in her own concerns (depressive-fractious husband, sociopath stepson); my ever-distant father, now married to his third wife, remained conspicuously aloof whenever the question of my educational career came up. To judge by his few, and grudging, comments on the matter, he seemed to resent the fact I had academic ambitions at all. When I’d graduated from high school, he had wanted me to get a secretarial job and take night classes at the local junior college. Though presumably well off—he was a highly skilled aeronautical engineer—he had seen fit not to fund any part of my higher education. It wasn’t part of the divorce settlement.

  So that was the lay of the land, parent-wise. I was used to it, though, and even more used to winning grants and scholarships—which I proceeded to do in short order. The Dog Food decision was moot in the end: when it came time to decide which big Midwestern school—and they all seemed pretty interchangeable to me—I had my choice of fellowships and funding packages. It was simply a matter of pinning the tail on the donkey. I opted for the one that offered me the best stipend. Reinforcing my decision: One of the radical feminist magazines I doted on was published in the city in which the school was located; that too, seemed a promising augury. Between the financial aid I was to receive and the fact I knew I would still be able to get food stamps—I had drawn them all through college (thank you, Lyndon Baines Johnson!)—I believed I was indeed pretty well set up. A month or so after my college graduation—a ceremony ungraced, apart from Karen, by friend or family member—I left for the heartland and the unseen institution, selected more or less at random, on my way to what seemed to me a delightfully cushy berth in another universe entirely.

  Yet though I’d left the scene, the fellowship imbroglio continued to sputter on. Someone wrote to me later that fall (Karen? Davy?) to say everybody was talking about it: amid a swirl of rumors, the Dog Food Foundation had abruptly relieved Keith, my quondam interviewer, of his position as its regional representative. He was in official disgrace. I too was in some sort of disgrace-by-association, it seemed; the story now was I hadn’t received a fellowship because the people in charge thought I had shown appalling bad judgment. Arthur was apparently exultant. I was horrified: someone higher up than Arthur—some malicious professor, I feared—had obviously snitched in turn.

  My first urge was to apologize—in a sort of abject panic—to Keith himself. Admittedly, I wanted to exculpate myself; given all the embarrassment, I figured he must be infuriated with me. But far more important, I remember thinking, I cared about him. At the first news of his humiliation, my feelings for Keith had become as tender and protective as Joan of Arc’s for her feeble Dauphin. I wanted to kneel before him in my chain mail, pledge undying troth, and stanchions unfurled, lead his troops to victory once again—all in the name of God, Holy France, dope, and blinking lights.

  Not knowing how to contact Keith—such things were unfathomable in those pre-Google days and besides, I wasn’t altogether sure of his last name—I had to make do with Fred, whom I strongly suspected of being the Vile Snitch. I still have in my possession copies of two long typewritten screeds I sent Fred that fall and winter, my first in the Midwest. They are fluent, principled, full of aggrieved expostulation, and as pompous and callow as one might imagine. In the first, written soon after I heard that Keith had been dismissed, I blasted Fred for his deception: he had tricked me that past spring, I complained, into revealing incriminating details about the Dog Food interview; then, against my wishes, had used the confidential information to calumniate my pot-smoking, orgone-channeling hero:

  The incident [i.e., the hash-smoking interlude] in no way represented part of an intellectual seduction or Mephistophelian maneuver—it came at a time when we were just two people relating in a certain way to each other, unofficially and completely privately. I explained all this to you, and reiterated my absolute confidence in [K.]. I noted…that I felt he had accommodated his interviewing techniques very effectively (and professionally) to my own personality and needs at the time.

  Once I was launched, it became hard to stop. “What grieves me most of all is to think that there has been a horrendous mix-up of values in the whole business,” I railed:

  I thought, over-idealistically perhaps, the point of the Dog Food enterprise was to make for a more humanistic and humane spirit in the academic world by aiding those people who expressed concern for such values. [K.] embodies this “Dog Food effort” in his whole approach: he was above all a humane interviewer, concerned for me as a person (which is more than I can say for my college “trainers”). His courtesy and compassion were evident to me; and my judgment in this is neither naïve or “schoolgirlish.”

  While I am glad to see that in classic anxious-autodidact fashion, I had learned enough at this stage in my scholarly life to know that “judgment” was spelled with only one e (or that that, at least, was the more elegant spelling), it is not clear I possessed any great portion of the faculty in question.

  My second letter—composed after the turn of the year—was worse. Fred had replied to my first one, I see from my journal, with a heated (now unfortunately lost) “philosophical cannonad
e.” I was full of self-pity and world weariness by this time, discouraged by the fact that he and the other teachers had ignored my all too justified plaints. I thought of myself as officially sadder but wiser. And though I conceded that the whole experience was one I would “probably have to think about more,” I claimed to be determined, in martyr-like fashion, not to hold a grudge against rank double dealers like Fred. (“What am I supposed to do now—kick myself for being grotesquely naïve? shut up entirely from now on? stop trusting people?”) At the end of this second missive—to which I don’t believe Fred, sensibly enough, ever replied—I gave a bemused, quasi-valedictory account of my doings, now that I found myself, in the flat dead of winter, amid “the miles of snow plains.” Ominously—or so it appears in retrospect—I see I was still “reading up on Sir Thomas Browne, alchemy, Jung, and Neumann.” The Great Mother still had me gripped, blind and mewling, in her cavernous inner spaces. Yet there were other elements to freeze the spirit—if only, again, in hindsight. “I am also finding an outlet and support for my poems in Your Mama Wears Army Boots, a local feminist magazine,” I wrote proudly. And yes, though I didn’t record the fact anywhere other than in my journal, between the first letter to Fred and the second I had met Her: my smiling and savage Professor.

  The Professor

  AFTER ALL THE BUILDUP, I confess I find it a struggle to recapture, amid the glints and wipes and warp zones of memory, every aspect of the Professor’s supercharged allure. I had to work so hard to forget her—to escort her out of the building, so to speak—that it is difficult to go back now and take note of her magnetism: to allow her her rightful nimbus, her full, devastating share of importance in my life. No doubt certain once-charmed memories were banished long ago out of psychic necessity; telling details have blown out to sea. The Professor seems at times curiously effigy-like to me now: straw filled, hypothetical, more mannequin or puppet-form than real woman. And when it comes to the quotidian details that impart life and breath and romance, it is safe to say I know my cat Theo far better than I ever knew her. Easy enough, were this essay called The Kitty Cat, to vamp at length about the latter’s digestive likes and dislikes, fey psychic quirks, and the usual breathtaking feline heartlessness. I have enough dope on Theo, moral and otherwise, to plot future trends. Should I suffer a fatal collapse one day and my corpse lie undiscovered for weeks, decomposing on the kitchen floor, she’s exactly the sort of kitty, I realize—dainty and impervious—who would happily feed off it for the duration. Not much sentiment there. I’ve had Theo for fourteen years (long before B. and I got the dogs); I knew the Professor for barely six months.