For several months, I got away with spending most of my school day between the art room and special math tutoring sessions.
I was doing practically no assigned work. My arithmetic had never been strong. And my parents, who were nowhere near as eccentrically progressive as the school, decided to send me to a tutor, during this time, three afternoons a week.
Amanda Kemp was a small, white-haired, black woman, who lived on the top floor of an apartment house on Edgecomb Avenue, in small, dark rooms that smelled of leaking gas.
With much good will and infinite patience, she tried to “interest” me in things that I had invested a good deal of emotional autonomy in remaining uninterested in — “Since,” she explained to my mother, after the first week, “actually teaching him is certainly no problem. He learns whatever he wants to learn all too quickly,” and she gave me a book of poems by Countee Cullen, which he had personally inscribed to her, years earlier, when they worked together in the city school system, its illustrations marvelously macabre, showing imaginary beasts of Jabber-wockian complexity, each described by an accompanying rhymed text.
The person in my math class who did get the constantly easy hundred was Priscilla. Sometime around here, I decided to write a science- fiction novel — announced my project to a group of friends in the coffee shop on the corner, where we all adjourned after school to indulge in an obligatory toasted English muffin and/or lemon coke. I actually wrote the opening chapter: twenty pages of single-spaced typing on lined, three-holed, loose-leaf paper. I brought it into school and, during one study period, asked Priscilla to read it and pass judgment.
During the next half hour I chewed through several pencil erasers, stripped the little brass edge out of my wooden ruler, and accomplished some half dozen more intense, small, and absorbing destructions.
Priscilla, finally, looked up. (We were sitting on the green stairs.)
“Did you like it?” I asked. “Did you understand it?”
“I don’t,” she said, a little dryly, “believe anyone could understand it with your spelling the way it is. Here, let me make you a list…”It was the beginning of a marvelous friendship (that, a year ago, reflowered just as warmly when I visited Wesleyan University where she is now a professor of Russian) which quickly came to include nightly hour-plus phone calls, made up mostly of ritual catch phrases (such as: “What has that got to do with the price of eggs in Afghanistan!”) which somehow, by the slightest variation of inflection, communicated the most profound and arcane ideas, or, conversely, reduced us to hysterical laughter, to the annoyance of both our parents at both our houses. Besides correcting my spelling, Priscilla also told me about a book she said was perfectly wonderful and I must read, called Titus Groan. For fourteen years, it suffered the fate of Rocketship Galileo. I only got around to reading it one evening over a weekend at Damon Knight’s sprawling Anchorage in Milford, Pennsylvania (Damon had just made some rather familiar sounding comments on the spellings in a manuscript I had given him to read); Priscilla had been right.
The last year of elementary school was drawing to a close. I had just been accepted at the Bronx High School of Science. I was sitting in the school’s smaller, upstairs library, reading More Than Human for the second time, when several students, Robert and Priscilla among them, came in to tell me that I had been elected Most Popular Person in the Class — a distinction which carried with it the dubious honor of making a small speech at graduation.
I was terribly pleased.
Like many children who get along easily with their peers, I was an incredibly vicious and self-centered child, a liar when it suited me and a thief when I could get away with it, who, with an astonishing lack of altruism, had learned some of the advantages of being nice to people nobody else wanted to be bothered with.
I think, sometimes, when we are trying to be the most honest, the fictionalizing process is at its strongest. Would Robert, Mrs. Mackerjee, Gene, Arthur, Marty, or Priscilla agree with any of what I have written here, or even recognize it? What do they remember that, perhaps, I have forgotten — either because it was too painful, too damning, or because it made no real impression at all?
Language, Myth, Science Fiction…
58. Browsing in Joe Kennedy’s Counter/Measures, I came across a poem by John Bricuth called Myth. Liked it muchly. It begins with an epigraph from Lévi-Strauss:
“Music and mythology confront man with virtual objects whose shadow alone is real…”
Then this from Quine’s Philosophy of Logic:
“The long and short of it is that propositions have been projected as shadows of sentences, if I may transpose a figure of Wittgenstein’s. At best they will give us nothing the sentence will not give. Their promise of more is mainly due to our uncritically assuming for them an individuation which matches no equivalence between sentences that we can see how to define. The shadows favoured wishful thinking.”
And from Spicer’s poem Language, in his discussion of the candle flame and the finger he has just blistered:
Just as “propositions” can be dismissed from logic on the formal side as a logical shadow in a field where we wish for light, on the informal side we can dismiss the movable predicate — x “walks” which can be moved to y “walks” and so on to the ith variable “… if and only if the ith thing in the sequence walks” (presumably true of x, y, and the others) [Philosophy of Logic, p. 40] — as an empirical shadow: It is a shadow of the empirical resolution at which we observe a given set of process phenomena that allows us to subsume them all under one word. If, for instance, all that can be referred to by “walks” is, like the word, a singular entity, then a very strange entity it is. Among other things, it is discontinuous in both time and space, since both x and y can perform it simultaneously in different locations and/or at different times! In the empirical world, however, spatial and temporal discontinuity is multiplicity of entities. And “a multiple entity” in our language at any rate is as silly a concept as “many rock.” (This, I suspect, is the practical side of Quine’s refusal to “quantify over predicates” [Philosophy of Logic, p. 28]. If we have a situation where every instance of predicate-with-every-variable can be empirically resolved into separate predicates (P), we have a situation where the existential quantifier (EP), would always have the same value as the universal quantifier (P). If there is only one q, then everything you can say of “at least one q” you can say of “all q.” Similarly, the negation of one quantifier could always be taken as the other or empty, as one liked. This gets the formal logician into the same sort of trouble as the mathematician who allows himself to divide by zero in formal algebra.)
If we have a universe composed only of real, unique objects performing unique processes, how do we order them? (Are we stuck with G. Spencer-Brown’s suggestion from Laws of Form that “equals” must be taken to mean “is confused with”?) Or, more germane: Since we do perceive the universe as ordered, can we work back to such a universe of unique objects-and-processes without contradiction?