The Topeka School

by Ben Lerner

It would take Adam twenty years to grasp the analogy between her slipping from the chair and from the boat.

I dont get why he had to illuminate his very obvious device

he passed, as he often passed, a mysterious threshold. He began to feel less like he was delivering a speech and more like a speech was delivering him, that the rhythm and intonation of his presentation were beginning to dictate its content, that he no longer had to organize his arguments so much as let them flow through him. Suddenly the physical tension he carried was all focused energy, a transformation that made the event slightly erotic.

How many of his small gestures and postures in the present were embodied echoes of the past, repetitions just beneath the threshold of his consciousness? What would happen to the past if you brought those involuntary muscle memories under your control and edited them, edited them out?

But the burns were like the fingerprints of an older time—before Ziegler and his brethren decided that traditional sources of value were merely superstition. “Those thousands of generations of technical progress” obliterated ritual, emptied out all meaning, glossolalia without divinity. I decided that’s what the painted mother foresaw, that she was saying farewell to candlelight, that she knew she was trapped inside a painting addressed to the future, where it could only be, however great, an instance of technique.

“The opposite of a truth,” Klaus quoted, “is a falsehood; but the opposite of a profound truth”—pause for emphasis, sound of sprinklers, insects, push mowers, felt absence of city noise, Kenny Rogers from a passing car—“may be another profound truth.” It either is or is not August (Klaus removes his anachronistic glasses, round lenses, wipes his face, replaces them, resumes walking); if I assert it’s August when it isn’t—simply false; but if I say that life is pain, that is true, profoundly so; so, too, that life is joy; the more profound the statement, the more reversible; the deep truths are sedimented in syntax, the terms can be reversed, just as there is no principle of noncontradiction, no law of excluded middle, governing the unconscious.

Sima turned to look at me, to ask the first question, and I saw in the instant before she spoke that her face had changed. There was a coldness now, a distance to her smile, trace amounts of bitterness. It was subtle, but more profound for being subtle—a face you know intimately is most disturbingly altered when it’s altered only slightly;

the real men—who are themselves in fact perpetual boys, since America is adolescence without end—had to differentiate themselves with violence,

He wanted to be a poet because poems were spells, were shaped sound unmaking and remaking sense that inflicted and repelled violence and made you renowned, or renowned for being erased, and could have other effects on bodies: put them to sleep or wake them, cause tears or other forms of lubrication, swelling, the raising of small hairs.

that banal but supernumerary sublime of exchangeability. To be a subject here was to be spread by objects.

Such a fine line, Klaus’s voice, between memorialization and erasure).

(It wasn’t obvious what voices got in you, were implanted; it didn’t follow a hierarchy of intimacy; it wasn’t under your control.)

(How much affective information travels through the walls, even when the words are unintelligible.)

There was some kind of special power involved in repurposing language, redistributing the voices, changing the principle of patterning, faint sparks of alternative meaning in the shadow of the original sense, the narrative.

It was good to be inflicting optional damage on your bright pink lungs; it was good to be two young people tasting of Lancôme and Philip Morris, synthetic pheromones and carcinogens, to be at the point of their most intimate contact, their most interchangeable, corporate persons; clichés, types.