The Interrogative Mood

Padgett Powell's book The Interrogative Mood should be out on bookstore shelves (however virtual that concept has become) around now. I got an "uncorrected proof" copy from ECCO books because they were offering them on Facebook. It is a fantastic book whose genre must I think be defined as "experimental writing" even though Powell is a well known writer of fiction, and there is a temptation to regard the book as a kind of novel. It has some of the extension of a novel, certainly, but its extension revels in the absence of continuity in plot or character, except for that of the reader who receives the questions of which the book is made. I could argue for its being a long prose poem as well. In any case, part of what's fantastic about the book is its "readability," the fact that one can sit with its sequence of non sequiturs and find oneself always asking always for more. The number of themes that get addressed at least in passing over the course of the book is enormous, but I particularly enjoyed the recurring theme of nostalgia for a variety of twentieth century landscapes, and the related one of being asked over and over to decide whether to exchange one's current existence for another (hypothetical and impossible, but somehow conceivable) one. Everyone should try reading this book.

Decision making under uncertainty

Although I made my decision to go to Johnston pretty much there on the spot, and never visited another private college to compare, I don’t think I went into the experience with my eyes closed. I find it necessary to stress this because some of what I’m examining here is the whole concept of decision-making under uncertainty as mapped to the experience of liberal education. Which is to say, one can't guarantee the good outcome of even the best possible decision.

I had been taking classes at the local community college in Simi Valley and had visited two University of California campuses, L.A. and Santa Barbara, as well as having hung around Cal State Fullerton years before when we lived in Orange County. So I was comfortable with campuses as mental geographies. And U.C.S.B., in particular, had offered a direct comparison to what was offered at Johnston, in its College of Creative Studies. Whereas the Santa Barbara version of experimental education offered an austere, apprenticeship model based on the development of gifts, Johnston College appeared to place a multitude of opportunities on offer, with further opportunities available constrained only by one’s negotiating talents. CCS was the studio or the shop; Johnston was the marketplace, or the amusement park.

John Prine

The evening’s dinner offered me a model of Johnstonian conviviality: food and conversation around common tables, then an extended after-dinner sitting around listening to guys playing their guitars. They were singing what I would later learn to John Prine songs. That the songs were ones I’d not heard before gave them a power over me they’d certainly not have had otherwise: for all I could tell, the guys performing, who had the outdoors look, moustaches and denim jackets, and had girls hanging by their sides, were singing their own songs. Psychologically, if not at the level of common sense, that’s how I must have interpreted the performance. Johnston was the possibility that I could sing my own songs, as it were, and get the girls. I was especially fixated on one particular blond-haired girl during the evening. Maybe I hoped she’d be there waiting for me on my first day of school at Johnston. At any rate, that passion was as evanescent as they all were then. She is unrecognizable in the light of present memory. It's possible I never saw her again. On the other hand, she may have been someone I saw all the time when I came to Johnston, but re-cast in the very different light of the place as my own home.

Encouragement

What I remember from my visit to Johnston as a high-schooler is not a single Johnston class, though I must have sat in on several, but discussions with two faculty and the evening’s dinner in the Commons. One of the faculty was, he revealed to me, on his way out of the school, and argued that if it was intellectual challenge I was looking for, Johnston would not be the place to find it. The other faculty was Bill McDonald, the person who then and now most represents for me the possibility of pedagogical compassion, if not rigor, at Johnston. Bill was much more encouraging than the other gentleman (who shall remain nameless because I haven’t been able to figure out his name with certainty), and presented the case for Johnston being just the place where such as I would shine, and get the education I was looking for to boot.

Of Prodigies and Pseudos

However much I might doubt the value of the SAT test, there seemed no other way for me to demonstrate my intelligence, either its current extant or its aptitudes. Thus I found myself in the fortunate position of being a National Merit scholar, with a scholarship that itself represented more money than I’d ever seen in one place, and at the same time expressing my interest in schools that offered radical critiques of the conventional educational models. To put it bluntly, I presented myself to Johnston as a young prodigy, just as I had done all through junior high and high school, ever since learning the fantastic advantages of being just a year ahead of all my classmates in math class, back in the seventh grade.

And Johnston, at least the Johnston with which I had to do on my visit, seemed quite willing to encourage my self-presentation and to market itself likewise directly to it. I use the term “market” not to evoke Madison Avenue, but simply to cast the visit as a transactional exchange of information.

Darwinian aside: I've been speculating recently that prodigies, true prodigies, may be evolutionary dead ends, or even throwbacks to earlier patterns of primate development. Any child whose intelligence appears to mature to adult levels in a small fraction of the time required by other humans might in fact be following a template of maturation closer to that of our chimpanzee cousins, that is to say our common ancestors, than the one that has proven successful so far for modern humans, which requires a maturation period as long as twenty years to perfect certain mental faculties required for life in society. Clearly, some of what has to be involved in the development of a prodigy is closely related to metabolic imbalance, even if it isn't that strictly speaking: energies that are budgeted for certain developmental purposes are in the prodigy focused to an unbearable intensity of purpose. The sociobiological question might still be asked: does the occasional outlier focusing energies in this way provide something that would be useful to a population? (I would be inclined to define "population" as a fairly small group, in terms of what we've evolved into within the past hundred thousand years: i.e., could a prodigy with some more or less random exaggeration of mental abilities, occurring very occasionally, be of assistance to a group of forty or fifty hunters and gatherers, say?)

The intermediate range

There is an intermediate range between the child who is perceived to have no special talent, and the child whose talent is such that it must be brought to the attention of a wider public. In that range I found myself, full of potential in my own eyes and in the eyes of some of the adults responsible for getting me through high school. No extraordinary efforts had been required of me. I knew no foreign languages, played no instruments, had not gone beyond calculus, had never written anything publication-worthy. But the multiple-choice game of the SAT test (actually the PSAT, and then the SAT) opened the door to higher education to me in a way no positive effort did or would have done: by virtue of my percentile ranking (which depended, obviously, on the population of willing test-takers I was one member of) I became a "National Merit Scholar." The cash award associated with that quasi-achievement was on the order of a thousand dollars, but I discovered in the process of applying for financial aid at Johnston (my parents having no more than a few hundred dollars saved for the education of any of their six children) the pleasures of "leverage": the thousand dollar scholarship translated into a full board and tuition grant at Johnston for my first year there, a multiplier of about five on the original award. The door was opened for me to a kind of experience I'd never imagined as anything but cinema.

Tutankhamen and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs

Literally golden, yes. The opulence and state of preservation of the exquisite objects in this exhibition are without parallel in ordinary experience. Their immediacy, their conveyance of three thousand years in gilt and faience applied to carved wood, are well worth the price of admission.

That said, I'm doubtful, though willing to be corrected, that any deep student of Egypt would consider the era of the boy king the Golden Age of the Pharaohs, though the exhibition does make some claims for the greatness of Tut's immediate ancestors that seems to carry some weight, even if one excludes the strangeness and utter idiosyncracy of Akhanaten when considering the unbearable continuity of dynastic being.

But the Golden Age designation offers some distraction from the fact that the Mummy nor the Sarcophagus nor any of the glorious boxes wherein Tut resides have made the trip from Cairo. Schoolkids may complain, but I found the presentation and the selection utterly compelling. The polished faux camp chair with carved wood faux hide seat is such a contemporary piece of trompe l'oeil simulation I can hardly believe Baudrillard didn't have a hand in it. Maybe there is such a thing as reincarnation, and Tut's incredible workshop studios were the last place where all the postmodernists gathered in one place -- and in that case, accomplished something of substance for the ages.

Radical influences

I first visited Johnston as a high school senior on a sleepover visit in 1974 or early 1975. My high school guidance counselor recommended that I consider Johnston specifically because she thought I would be overly susceptible to radical influences if I were to go to Berkeley, which I must have mentioned to her as one possible place I was thinking of applying to. If asked, I would have described myself as a pacifist, and if asked again as an anarchist, in my political convictions. All the result of book-reading… I was reading books on “experimental education” that ranged from liberal excoriations of the discriminatory school system to instant anthologies of high school underground newspaper writing to absolute condemnations of all forms of education in schools as such, and skating across the muddle of positions both casually dismissive of and utterly subservient to my opportunities for achievement in high school: writing angst-filled pieces in English classes, taking lit and psychology and sociology through Moorpark, the local community college, and doing what needed to be done to get my A’s in everything else I had to take.

Back from Mendocino

We spent three days at the Cottages at Little River, very pleasant and perfect for families with small kids, though not cheap. Elena enjoyed kicking a ball around on the lawn, playing at the Wiggly playground in Fort Bragg, roasting her first marshmallows at the outdoor gas grill (we bought a S'Mores kit from the office), and watching Stuart Little with us from the sofa bed as a special treat before going to bed late... Nothing memorable in the way of meals, though the service was very good at the Mendocino Hotel and at a place called Egghead's in Fort Bragg which provided some wonderful Wizard of Oz action figures for Elena to play with while we waited for our brunch.

The great forgetting

            In spite of the great forgetting, I still find attractive the idea of texts giving a kind of derivative structure to my memories.  Perhaps it is now the concept of forgotten texts, rather than the great overarching “text” I had hoped to find and read to decipher that earlier self, but the structure of history seems surprisingly unaffected by the presence of particular facts.  And obviously, I have nowhere else to look.

 

A third explanation

            A third explanation is closely related to the previous two, and seems the most likely to me as I write.  It’s that in the first place, I wasn’t really paying very close attention to much of my reading because of the richness of the fabric of the nonliterary experiences to which I was being exposed for the first time (including, during my second year, daily exposure to certain substances at times when I might otherwise have been engaged in sober thought).  And in the second place, I really didn’t do all that much reading, and little if any of the difficult variety, because much of the focus of my “academic” life at Johnston was itself experiential, consisting as it did of classes in poetry-writing, drama, and experiential psychotherapeutic exercise, with my forays into literature and philosophy confined to the lighter classes on offer.  Others at Johnston were indeed reading the Greeks and Kant, but I breathed that smoke at second or third hand.

 

 

A second explanation

            A second explanation for the library of Johnston textbooks lost to conscious memory is that the missing books really weren’t very good or important, and that this is in fact demonstrated by my inability to remember anything from them of a substantive nature or applicable to my recollection of my life at the time.  This hypothesis grants a wondrous power of judgment and discernment to the mechanics of my remembering, and gives my unformed eighteen-year-old mind the great tribute of presuming it capable of understanding anything of significance that might have passed before it on paper.

Possible Explanations (the First)

            Several possible explanations for the lacunae in my readings at Johnston as now recollected occur to me.  The most obvious is just that over thirty years have gone by, and that’s long enough to bury most memories under the sheer volume of succeeding events, even if those events consist largely of getting up in the morning, going to work, and having a couple of beers in the evening.  The hope contained in this first hypothesis is that only a Proustian catalyst is required to bring back the lost memories whole and having a freshness which the stories I’ve told and re-told myself in the meantime are wholly lacking.

Archaeology of Knowledge

            Between 1975 and 1977 I attended Johnston College, a hippie school associated with the University of Redlands which at that time had its own independent accreditation.  I dropped out of school because of concerns about money and ideas about ideals, and within a year or two after that Johnston College was re-absorbed into the University as the Johnston Center, where it has thrived ever since.  I begin with the notion that the whole account of this, my purest attempt at a “liberal education,” might be structured through the books I read both inside and outside of classes while there.

            But in setting out my list, I discover that I’ve forgotten many if not most of the books I read in classes, especially the ones that would lend this exercise a certain kind of intellectual credibility.  What remains are for the most part either books that were best-sellers in 1976 and 1977, and justified in classes either by instructors or students like myself for their “relevance,” or more abstruse works that are the most obvious displays of the period’s intellectual fashion (post-structuralism rolling steadily into deconstructionism).  I find no foundational texts, nor even rigorous surveys of the fields of my interests except perhaps for Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism.