The Topeka School

by Ben Lerner

Interrupt your highbrow fluency with bland sound bites of regional decency. Why do you think they elect Texans who went to Yale, Arkansan Rhodes Scholars? Anyway, deliver little tautologies like they’re proverbs. Things your Grandma Rosie used to say. Back on the farm. Back when America was America and not the plaything of coastal elites.

Yes, I was resistant to having my body disciplined by a famous analyst (famous, too, for sleeping with his students). Was that pathological? Why not analyze why he had made this small tic into a significant issue?

had refused to be trained. I refused to be a trained monkey. Or genius parrot.

What I regretted wasn’t the half pill—more of a magic feather than a therapeutic dose—but how I’d assented casually to sharing the medicine after both Jonathan and I had expressed our reservations.

The trauma was perpetual when you were left in it alone. A child on a train, in outer space, out of time.

As if the windshield were a teleprompter from which he was reading his lines at increasing speed. Why couldn’t we just go one fucking night without blurring the distinctions, crossing the wires. Between the personal and the professional. Between doctor and patient. Real doctors and fake, with their toy stethoscopes.

Americans consistently report that their greatest fear is public speaking—greater than nuclear war or flying or drowning or snakes or spiders, greater, according to the surveys, than death itself. But why, exactly? Is it obvious that it should be scarier than driving at high speeds or tearing through the atmosphere?

there are no grown-ups, that’s what you must grow up to know fully; your parents were just two more bodies experiencing landscape and weather, trying to make sense by vibrating columns of air, redescribing contingency as necessity with religion or World Ice Theory or the Jewish science, cutting profound truths with their opposites as the regimes of meaning collapse into the spread.

America is adolescence without end).

It was difficult to determine what to say to someone who may or may not hear you, could not respond (the profound opposite of talking to an analyst).

(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.)

The desire to know more and the desire to know less fought each other to a standstill within Adam, making it hard to move. He

he’d heard his own mother talk about the erasure of the clitoris from psychoanalytic theory and he’d of course heard boys and men speak endlessly of the female body

as a plaything to be wrecked for male pleasure. How to interact with Amber in a way that at once asserted his good difference as poet, proto-feminist, Ivy-bound alternative to the types without neutering himself in the process?

preparing, it seemed to me, to internalize whatever life lesson. (That particular look in a child’s eyes, a mixture of presence and absence, when she is about to be impressed, to receive an impression like wax, the pressure it places on the speech and gestures of those of us pretending to be adults.)

He was white, so there was no question of that complicated political dynamic between us, however it had inflected his interaction with the other father.

said to the boy, smiling as the father before me had smiled, but the boy, after kicking the slide some more, shouted: No, these girls are stupid, these girls are ugly, no stupid ugly girls allowed. This was to my knowledge the first time my four- and two-year-old daughters had ever been called such things. I

leave the slide to the boy (boys will be boys), that’s what you should be modeling for your girls, there is nothing to be gained by confrontation.

tried to channel my own father’s voice, a voice that somehow disarmed other men, gave them permission to act other than according to their macho scripts;

We were a couple of privileged crackers with divergent parenting strategies;

I’m the father, I’m the archaic medium of male violence that literature is supposed to overcome by replacing physicality with language.

a familiar sign of migraine and/or rage, a symbolic system breaking down inside the body.

I’ve been asking for your help in making the playground a safe space for my daughters; I recognize that my reaction to your son is not just about your son; it’s about pussy grabbing; it’s about my fears regarding the world into which I’ve brought them.

the child is father to the man, what the kids will “figure out” is repetition.

police had started to arrive from other floors, many of them sporting bulletproof vests, tactical gear. (What did it feel like to be outfitted like that only to face a singing collective of families?)

There was little chance of arrests, we’d assumed, given the babies and young children, given that nobody was trying to further penetrate the offices, but I sensed that even as seasoned a protester as Natalia wasn’t sure what the rules were, what the agents of the state were capable of, now that America was great again.

Do you have kids? Because I have no authority, is what I’m trying to say. I just have no authority over these kids. Do you have authority? Where does your authority come from again?”

The “human microphone,” the “people’s mic,” wherein those gathered around a speaker repeat what the speaker says in order to amplify a voice without permit-requiring equipment. It embarrassed me, it always had, but I forced myself to participate, to be part of a tiny public speaking, a public learning slowly how to speak again, in the middle of the spread.