They finished their cigarettes and went on into the school.
Then it was April.
Then it was May.
He needed something to happen, but that was irrelevant, his need was irrelevant. It was imperative that something should happen. No, it was manifest that something was going to happen. A substance was being held in a provisional vessel, and the vessel wanted to burst. He had been reading in the hope of dissolving himself in the substance so that once the vessel burst he’d be carried away with the rest.
He was made to write a paper on Aristotle’s definition of motion. The definition was that motion, or change, was the coming into actuality of a potential insofar as it was a potential. He had gotten a grade of C-minus on the paper because he skipped the insofar as clause because he hadn’t understood it.
Father Manfred had scribbled a pencil note on the bottom of the last page referring him to the end of book iii, chapter 1, of the Physics, where he could find an example of what the insofar as clause was about. He was to be prepared to defend his understanding of the example for his oral examination that spring.
The exam took place in the courtyard between the laboratory classrooms and the SJs’ greenhouse. You had to go through the greenhouse to get to the courtyard. When you got to the courtyard, you found two canvas folding lawn chairs under a tree and Father Manfred in one of them, awaiting you. He had a pitcher of fruit punch on the grass and a stack of paper cups. Yellow jackets were dive-bombing the fruit punch, and while Ciccio talked, the priest was fishing them out, crushing them between his fingertips, and dropping them into a pocket in the skirt of his cassock.
The example of a potential that Ciccio had to explain was “building material”; a block, let’s say. When you were building something with it, it was in motion because you were bringing into actuality its potential to build. But, Ciccio said, if you were, say, throwing the block at a pear tree to knock down a pear, you couldn’t describe it as having anything to do with building; you could say the block was in motion as projectile, maybe, because you were actualizing its potential as projectable. Then he interrupted himself.
“Whenever I think I’m getting him,” Ciccio said, “him, Aristotle, right away I says to myself, That can’t be right, that’s so — what’s the word — dumb, how could it be worth his trouble to say it?”
Father Manfred said, “No, but you’re right. This is how Aristotle feels. He is observation. He has a bottom. Saint Paul also has a bottom. Now, if I were to tell you that whenever I found myself believing I understood Philosopher X, I felt a pang of dread, I knew I was about to be plunged into deeper unknowing because the teaching of Philosopher X is bottomless, then I am describing whom?”
“Plato,” Ciccio said.
“Yes, and?”
“Jesus Christ our Lord.”
“Yes, and?”
Ciccio picked at a mole that had recently come to light on his chin. “You want me to say Kierkegaard,” he said.
“All right, but you were saying. You were going somewhere.”
He tried again, but he got tangled up in the insofar as clause and smacked himself on his mouth.
The priest said, “Paraphrase using a different example and without using the words potential or actual.”
Ciccio said, “There’s a man in prison. He dreams of escaping — colorful dreams, where the authorities are chasing him. Then he wakes up. He busts the lock and starts to escape, but it isn’t like the dream at all. No dogs are after him. No sirens. The guards are asleep. He’s escaping, but not insofar as he dreamt of escaping.” He added, more to himself than to the old man, “So, like a dope, he turns around and locks himself back up again.”
“I don’t follow,” said the priest absently, rattling the mucus in his throat. He looked aside. In their pink and swollen orbits, his eyes floundered, tracing the path of a zigzagging object that Ciccio couldn’t see.
“When the prisoner becomes free, he can’t dream of being free anymore,” he said. “Like as in, the dream exists only in dreaming it.”
“Little blackguard thought he could sting me!” said the priest.
One of the yellow jackets had just landed on the back of his neck, where it met its death.
“You’re going to have to repeat that. I beg your pardon. I had distracted myself,” he said.
Ciccio repeated himself.
Father Manfred said, “The attaining of the object of the quest always disappoints, you’re saying.” He made a grandly sarcastic fake yawn.
“I mean,” Ciccio said, “I might say to myself common-sensically, I long for what I long for. But, you know, the thing you longed for is never what you advertised. Obviously. And why is that? Maybe because you’d rather long for it than get it. Which is stupid.”
“You’re saying there’s something the matter with the sentence, ‘A potential is actualized,’ because the subject of the sentence can’t be what you say it is and also do what you say it does at the same time.”
“Okay, then, that’s what I’m saying.”
“Okay, but this is not at the same time. This is motion. This is change. There are miles per hour. Time is elapsing.”
“Well, I don’t like it.”
“I’m not trying to be rough with you, boy, but isn’t that too bad? Aristotle is not your enemy, motion is your enemy.”
“What are you saying, Father? I like motion.” In the space between them, Ciccio erratically waved his hand.
“All of this fills you with a terrific sense of misgiving, but you don’t know about what you have this misgiving. Tell me what you feel at the edge of your brain.”
He looked at the priest. One of the eyes appeared to be dead, but Ciccio couldn’t tell which one.
“What I feel at the edge of my brain, as in, I don’t know if I even agree with what I’m about to say—”
“Yes,” the priest said.
“—is bogus.”
“Good.”
“I feel trapped in bogusness. Every time I say to myself, Oh, look, that’s real, that over there — it turns out that it isn’t real, I just had an idea of a realness. But ideas aren’t real. Ideas are just ideas. I feel, what, double-crossed by my mind. The more I think, the more bogus everything becomes.”
“Which everything?”
“Everything. What I see, what I hope for, what I suspect.”
He looked around himself. The sky was green with twilight. There was a very fine drizzle. The tree hanging over them — he knew what it was called, it was a black locust — was dropping hundreds of tiny white blossoms onto the shoulders and the lap of the priest, who noticed this and was bemused. He plucked a few of the yellow-jacket carcasses out of his pocket and bounced them idly with some of the locust petals in the lap of his skirt. It had to be the colors he was looking at, the severity of the contrast between the deeply white flowers, his deeply black garment, and the deeply yellow and glossy stripes encircling the thorax of each lifeless wasp. Every Ohio schoolboy knows you do not call this thing a bee, you call it a wasp. The priest was clean shaven. He had the exploded capillaries at the tip of the bulbous nose that you associate with drunks.
“Let me ask you something else,” the priest said.
Ciccio said, “All right, Father.”
“What are we making you read all this stuff for, do you think?”
“When you say for, I don’t think I know what you mean.”
“Here is what I mean. I’ll tell you. Sometimes when I’m eating an ice cream, I don’t care whether it’s a real ice cream, or whether I’m really tasting it,” the priest said. “But sometimes I care very much. Now, I am a Catholic, you remember, and I believe some pleasures are better than others. And I believe I can cultivate some desires and starve out others. So, supposing I had to choose between the great pleasure of tasting an ice cream with a brain gone smooth, empty of thought, and the great pleasure of, er. . knowing that I don’t know what an ice cream is, or what taste is, and feeling the desire to know — id est, the dreadful reaching out of my consciousness toward the force that governs the world outside it — which of these desires ought I to cultivate?”