The Topeka School

by Ben Lerner

the patterns dissipated under the weight of language, remained irreducibly private.

He hoped she liked the poetry he made out of it, how he wanted her to see what he saw, and to imagine seeing with or as her; the world’s subtlest fireworks announcing the problem of other minds.

He could occasionally pick up traces of Speed Stick or scented lip gloss or other floating signatures of a social order now suspended.

His strength was thinking on his feet, exposing fallacies; his cross-examinations were widely feared.

(Competitive debaters spend hours doing speed drills—holding a pen in the teeth while reading, which forces the tongue to work harder, the mouth to over-enunciate; they practice reading evidence backward so as to uncouple the physical act of vocalization from the effort to comprehend, which slows one down.)

These types of disclosure were designed to conceal; they exposed you to information that, should you challenge the institution in question, would be treated like a “dropped argument” in a fast round of debate—you have already conceded the validity of the point by failing to address it when it was presented.

Even before the twenty-four-hour news cycle, Twitter storms, algorithmic trading, spreadsheets, the DDoS attack, Americans were getting “spread” in their daily lives; meanwhile, their politicians went on speaking slowly, slowly about values utterly disconnected from their policies.

prosody.

He glanced at Coach Mulroney, who displayed a knowing smile. Finally, Senator Bob Dole appeared, the seventy-three-year-old Russell native who was less than a month away from being crushed by Bill Clinton, a landslide victory for the Democrat that would confirm that cultural conservatism was giving, had all but given, way to the reign of more liberal baby boomers. It would confirm that history had ended.

The intensity, they said, was out of control, how quick he was to rage, even if he was relatively quick to cool. He needed “strategies.”

You’ve got that wrong, this is, as you know, a group of pro-feminist friends, he’d accuse them of being a bunch of emasculated yuppies who thought floating platitudes about fatherhood made them enlightened. You guys probably should go perform improvised masculine rituals in the woods. Play some drums, stew some squirrels. The calmer his dad remained, the more furious Adam grew: fights over nothing would lead him to slam doors; twice he punched holes in his bedroom wall.

His parents were, in addition to being exasperated, worried, but not that worried; as psychotherapists, they were much less afraid of open conflict than of the prospect of a kid withdrawing, disappearing into his room, into himself, a lost boy. As long as there was language, there was processing; and when he calmed down he would apologize for his intensity, deploying his Foundation vocabulary; he would often think along with them about its causes.

The pressures of passing himself off as a real man, of staying true to type—the constant weight lifting, the verbal combat—would eventually reduce him to a child again, calling out for his mother from his bed.

!

And now to fill the void came rage and language.

!

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?

“A Man by the Name of Ziegler”

Was therapy like alchemy, or its opposite? Was Samuels, who knew about my affair with Jane, suggesting some parallel between my marital transgression and Ziegler’s reaching across the museum ropes?

if, instead of an uncritical faith in money and science, I believed, I claimed to believe, in the liberation of repressed drives and the reorganization of social forces, the contempt communicated by the statues was still overwhelming, their mockery specific to me, my hypocrisy.

Your received jargon regarding the mind and its functions; the contradiction between the normalizing force of therapy and your supposed belief in revolution; your use of your mother’s death to justify your behavior toward Rachel, behavior you’ll just repeat with Jane.

while I’m babbling on about Samuels and alchemy and cancer and kings and cars and the lies of progress and civilization that horses and statues so easily see through, while Jane, stroking my hair, tries to shut the future father of her children up.

intelligent middle-class white kids from stable homes who were fine until they weren’t: the lost boys of privilege.

Jacob would be the last person capable of such an account; if he had the language he wouldn’t express himself with symptoms.

Then speech and signifying silence could do their work.

I wasn’t interested in extracting latent content, making manifest some deeper truth motivating Jacob’s speech; my goal was to make the kid feel heard. I didn’t mind the cliché; in fact, I admired the phrase, its rightness of fit, a mixture of the somatic and semantic; maybe it explained the desire for heavy metal that registered as touch as much as sound.

How much easier it would be if when you played them slowly in reverse the lyrics really did, as some hysterical parents feared, reveal satanic messages; if there were a backmasked secret order, however dark, instead of rage at emptiness.

what could be more obvious than the fact that they did not know what suffering was, that if they suffered from anything it was precisely this lack of suffering, a kind of neuropathy that came from too much ease, too much sugar, a kind of existential gout?

“The opposite of a truth,”

“is a falsehood; but the opposite of a profound truth”—

may be another profound truth.”

It either is or is not August

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.

A quote like that can save your life.

Klaus was always joking; Klaus was never joking—what underwrote the irony was a sense of the absurdity of having survived, or the absurd suggestion that anyone survives, even if they go on breathing, or the absurdity that language could be much more than noise after the coop, after the camps.

Eating alone at a third table—his gestures unaffected, the gestures of the unobserved—a patient who almost won a Tony before the drinking got out of hand (it takes years of study to act, especially to eat, as though you’re unobserved);

And I think Sima was the first person to intuit the contours of this unknown knowledge that I carried; she helped me see that what was missing had a shape, was a piece of the puzzle of my personality, and she made the edges visible—how what I wouldn’t let myself know jutted out into other domains of my experience. And once its edges came into view, I could—in fact I could not not—confront the knowledge I’d both always and never had.

Sima made a space for me to hear that there were depths beneath what I was saying that I hadn’t sounded yet.

There was this incredible sense of relief when I let go: this language has ended in pure sound. This language has reached its limit, and a new one will be built, Sima and I will build it.

When one of the Men called, and I said hello, and he dropped into his whisper to call me a cunt of whatever variety, I would pretend that I couldn’t hear: “I’m sorry, can you speak up?” Typically what would happen is that the guy would repeat, confused, whatever he’d said a little more loudly, and while I could hear him fine, I would say, equally politely, betraying no knowledge of the nature of the call, “I’m sorry, it’s not a great connection, can you be a little louder?” And I’d just keep doing this, keep politely asking the loser to speak up.

It was subtle, but more profound for being subtle—a face you know intimately is most disturbingly altered when it’s altered only slightly;

If he were a woman or a racialized or otherwise othered body, he would be in immediate mortal danger from sexual predators and police. It was his similarity to the dominant that rendered him pathetic and a provocation: the man-child was almost fit for school or work or service, could almost get his license, finally discard the dirt bike; too close to the norms to prove them by his difference, the real men—who are themselves in fact perpetual boys, since America is adolescence without end—had to differentiate themselves with violence, Klaus’s voice.

Of course they knew better, but knowing is a weak state; you cannot assume your son will opt out of the dominant libidinal economy, develop the right desires from within the wrong life; the travesty of inclusion they were playing out with Darren—their intern—was also a citation and critique of the Foundation’s methods; if they were at once caring for and castigating Darren, they were also modeling and mocking their own parents.

Almost everybody—preschoolers, man-children, family therapists, analysts, bio-psychologists, debate coaches—agreed language could have magical effects: just ask your muscles to relax. Even if he didn’t want to be a poet, he always already was one, at least since he’d rubbed those weeds between his hands at Bright Circle. You’re a poet and you don’t even know it.

If linguistic prowess could do damage and get you laid, then it could be integrated into the adolescent social realm without entirely departing from the household values of intellect and expression.

But it was socially essential for him: the rap battle transmuted his prowess as a public speaker and aspiring poet into something cool.

He was at his most mature around his grandmother, and a help to his mother in her presence; generous, light, levelheaded.

how polish could compensate for substance as one determined the viability of a two-state solution.

The result was the formation of a new, one-on-one debating activity, Lincoln-Douglas debate, which emphasized values, its format intended to prioritize oratorical persuasion. Speakers were expected to argue from a moral framework, not an empirical one.

The baby boomers were more liberal than their parents, and Adam’s generation, however schizophrenic, was said to be more liberal still.

We were dressed up; everyone put on their best clothes to fly in those days. Like going to temple or church, touching the face of God; now you see whole families in sweat suits, pajamas, carrying those neck pillows; a form of regression.

I never heard mention of the camps or of the bombs—not in the American houses, not in Taipei International School. The collective effort of repression was tremendous, made the alcohol indispensable.