It is worth preserving as a remnant of that early era when there were giants on the earth. And, if it is preserved, someday someone will gaze into the old kerosene-powered receiver and cry out in astonishment in the words of the Greatest Bard:
THE PRIMARY EDUCATION OF THE CAMIROI
Introduction by Samuel R. Delany
R. A. Lafferty was a gadfly.
Paradoxically, he was never a writer I “liked”—and even today I think of him as someone I am always being asked to write about. Because he’s so smart, it’s always a compliment. (The first time, decades ago, Terry Carr asked me to blurb his novel Past Master, I felt that same way.) His works are wryly humorous—though I always realize, moments after the laughter, I am the butt of the joke.
I never met him—he was from Oklahoma and lived his life in Tulsa with his sister, while tales of his alcoholic excess at SF conventions filtered up through the SF community.
“The Primary Education of the Camiroi” is, among other things, a story about linguistic drift as human society spreads more and more widely over more and more diverse landscapes.
Among the surprises the story offers is a fictive revelation that the flowering of ancient Greek Civilization was an “incursion” (an invasion?) of the Camiroi centuries ago.
Camiroi children have to learn to read more and more slowly, rather than faster and faster. (Lafferty’s tale was written in the 1950s, when a nation-wide craze for “speed-reading” courses swept the Anglophone world, among the most popular, one from Evelyn Wood. I was a slow reader—I was someone who wondered if I would not profit by taking an Evelyn Wood course…) Every once in a while in their topsy-turvy world, a familiar idea swims by (“Can you imagine a person so sick that he would desire to hold high office for any great period of time?” One of the reasons I wanted to be a writer in the first place is so that I could observe the effects of politics without being directly responsible for them.) This is in a section of text on education that ends with our learning that the Camiroi children design and construct their own school buildings.
Lafferty had his enthusiasm—the Choctaw Indians of his local area, whom he championed in the mythic novel Okla Hannali (1972), published by University of Oklahoma Press—sadly, not a book I have read, though it comes with high praise from writers on the topic such as Dee Brown.
Diogenes the Cynic is the philosopher who suggested, during the time of Plato, that perhaps education would go better if the teachers were beaten when their students did poorly …
This is the tradition Lafferty’s tales emerge from. And one has a far better understanding of this after one has been a teacher and, perhaps, retired from the position, than before.
The last half dozen pages of the Camiroi’s “primary education” are a list of courses, decided up by year, which end with a comment on what this progression might accomplish if it were “constituted” on Earth. The comment contains three recommendations as to how to accomplish these ends. Since they include kidnapping, book burning, and the murdering (“judicious hanging”) of “certain malingering students,” the tale is both witty and troubling, in the tradition of Swift’s “Modest Proposal.”
And that is where a good bit of Lafferty’s satire originates.
One of my favorite Lafferty anecdotes (I only discovered it on Wikipedia minutes ago) comes from David Langford in the Magazine SFX (2002): “[Once a] French publisher nervously asked whether Lafferty minded being compared to G. K. Chesterton [a Catholic author whose ‘distributism’ got him compared favorably to Marx], and there was a terrifying silence that went on and on. Was the great man hideously offended? Eventually, very slowly, he said: ‘You’re on the right track, kid,’ and wandered away.”
Even while I still find the stories unsettling, Lafferty seems on the right track …
The Primary Education of the Camiroi
“Where,” we asked the Information Factor at Camiroi City Terminal, “is the office of the local PTA?”
“Isn’t any,” he said cheerfully.
“You mean that in Camiroi City, the metropolis of the planet, there is no PTA?” our chairman Paul Piper asked with disbelief.
“Isn’t any office of it. But you’re poor strangers, so you deserve an answer even if you can’t frame your questions properly. See that elderly man sitting on the bench and enjoying the sun? Go tell him you need a PTA. He’ll make you one.”
“Perhaps the initials convey a different meaning on Camiroi,” said Miss Munch the first surrogate chairman. “By them we mean—”
“Parent Teachers Apparatus, of course. Colloquial English is one of the six Earthian languages required here, you know. Don’t be abashed. He’s a fine person, and he enjoys doing things for strangers. He’ll be glad to make you a PTA.”
We were nonplussed, but we walked over to the man indicated.
“We are looking for the local PTA, sir,” said Miss Smice, our second surrogate chairman. “We were told that you might help us.”
“Oh, certainly,” said the elderly Camiroi gentleman. “One of you arrest that man walking there, and we’ll get started with it.”
“Do what?” asked our Mr. Piper.
“Arrest him. I have noticed that your own words sometimes do not convey a meaning to you. I often wonder how you do communicate among yourselves. Arrest, take into custody, seize by any force physical or moral, and bring him here.”
“Yes, sir,” cried Miss Hanks, our third surrogate chairman. She enjoyed things like this. She arrested the walking Camiroi man with force partly physical and partly moral and brought him to the group.
“It’s a PTA they want, Meander,” the elder Camiroi said to the one arrested. “Grab three more, and we’ll get started. Let the lady help. She’s good at it.”
Our Miss Hanks and the Camiroi man named Meander arrested three other Camiroi men and brought them to the group.
“Five. It’s enough,” said the elderly Camiroi. “We are hereby constituted a PTA and ordered into random action. Now, how can we accommodate you, good Earth people?”
“But are you legal? Are you five persons competent to be a PTA?” demanded our Mr. Piper.
“Any Camiroi citizen is competent to do any job on the planet of Camiroi,” said one of the Camiroi men (we learned later that his name was Talarium), “otherwise Camiroi would be in a sad shape.”
“It may be,” said our Miss Smice sourly. “It all seems very informal. What if one of you had to be World President?”
“The odds are that it won’t come to one man in ten,” said the elderly Camiroi (his name was Philoxenus). “I’m the only one of this group ever to serve as president of this planet, and it was a pleasant week I spent in the Office. Now to the point. How can we accommodate you?”