Tarot, page 37
By what right did the college decree that everyone except the person most concerned should know the details of his education? There was an inherent unfairness in that which should be manifest to any objective person. By what irony were the educators themselves blind to this wrong?
Yet he knew from his experience that educators were human too, with human assets and failings. They did not see right and wrong with perfect clarity. And why should they? Their purpose was to enable the students to grow; if they succeeded in this, they had met the requirement of their office. Could God himself demand more of them? Probably it had been the college administrators, not the instructors, who had classified the documents.
But again: why? So the students could not complain? Why should any student complain about the simple record of his progress that he himself had helped write? Something was missing…
He remembered his encounters with Exec and with the Vice Squad. Secrecy had been the hallmark of illicit dealings there. Secrecy was so often invoked to protect the guilty.
Was it the simple record? Or was there some sinister secret buried in this folder, known to all except him? Brother Paul recalled the frustrating joke about the man who was given a message written in a foreign language. Each person to whom he took it, who was able to read that language, refused either to tell him its meaning or to associate with him further. Thus the man remained forever in doubt. Was this college transcript like that? Surely he should find out!
He reached for it—but his hand hesitated. Did the end justify the means? The end was enlightenment, but the means was the violation of someone’s trust. The college was a mere institution, true—but trust was trust. It did not matter what dark secrets lurked within this folder; the unveiling of them would be a personal sin, an affront against morality, lightness, and justice.
“Ah, but the flesh is weak,” Paul murmured, opening the folder.
Soon he wished he had not. Yea, Pandora! he thought. Pandora was the girl who had opened the box (was she merely another incarnation of Eve?) and thereby loosed all things upon the world, retaining only one: hope. Paul had now let hope itself escape. For the cherished ideals of his college days, that had survived all the buffeting of campus politics, flawed faculty members, and a questionable suspension, were now revealed as delusions.
First, this transcript had grades. Straight letter grades, A, B, C, of precisely the type the college never used. Oh, there were paragraph evaluations too—but each was followed by its translation into the letter, the kind that computers could manipulate for numeric grade point averages, just as at any other school. But at other schools the grades were posted openly; each student knew exactly where he stood. Here they had been posted secretly so that not only was the student not advised of his rating, but he did not even know that he was being graded. Thus he was at a competitive disadvantage in the remainder of his life. As though he were playing poker and every other player could see his hand, but he could not. Brother Paul understood poker all too well, and the analogy tortured him. Here was his message in a foreign language, and of all the parties who could have revealed its content to him, only one had done so: the Holy Order of Vision. Thus he had broken the terrible geas more or less by luck. Yet its prior damage could not be undone. “Alma Mater, how could you!” he cried with a sensation like heartbreak.
At the beginning of the transcript was a note saying that the college preferred not to use grades, but owing to outside requirements had had to do so. Another note cautioned the reader against allowing the subject to see this record. No wonder!
Paul had traveled more or less innocently through the curriculum for four years without thought of grade or competitive standing; that had been the beauty of it. He had learned eclectically, for the sake of learning—and now via this hypocrisy it had come to nought.
No, no—that was an unfair verdict. The gradeless environment had forced on him a peculiar discipline. It was so easy to sink into stagnation, deprived of the goad of tests and grades and the printed-letter esteem they brought. A number of students had done just that and in due course washed out of the program. But others considered it a challenge—to learn, profit, and grow without a formally structured stimulus. And a few, like Paul, who were well able to compete for grades if that were required, had discovered instead the sheer joy of knowledge. Knowledge of things was one route leading into knowledge of self. A grade in itself was nothing; it was, at the root, the attitude that counted.
The process had hardly been complete when Paul left college. He had had serious problems when he departed that protected environment, as his experience with the drug mnem had shown! But the foundation had been laid, and in time he had built upon it, and now he was learning more and growing more every year than he ever had in college. This was no denigration of that educational system; it was the fulfillment of it. Learning to learn—that was real, though the system turned out to be false.
From good must come good, and from evil, evil, he thought, remembering Buddha. Instead, he had encountered a set of statements, one saying the other was true, the other saying the first was false. A paradox. Good, somehow, had come from evil.
“If only you had believed in it yourself, O College Administration!” he murmured, more in regret than ire. “You wrought so much better than you knew, had you but had more faith!”
Yet they had made the letter grades under protest and hidden them under this shield of secrecy. So it was a partial lack of faith on their part, rather than a complete one. The flesh of colleges, too, was weak.
Paul looked at the individual grades for the courses—and received another shock. They were not the correct ones!
He delved more deeply, reading the evaluations. Slowly it came clear: these were his grades—but not as he had understood them. For they hardly reflected his own one-third opinion or what he had known of his counselors’ opinions. (He had had three faculty counselors before Will Hamlin.) They were the opinions of the course instructors—just as at other schools. Thus the courses having greatest impact on Paul’s thinking and development were marked by B’s and C’s—and the course dearest to the heart of a particular instructor was marked A. That last had been completely worthwhile—but so had the others, receiving lesser marks. The variation had lain not so much within Paul, but within the instructors. Thus the evaluation system, too, was false.
On top of that, Paul had been given no credit for some of the courses he had taken; they were not even listed. Drama and music, where he had learned stage presence, voice projection, and artistry of sound—all supremely important to his later development—gone. By error or design—quite possibly the latter, as they were considered “minor” courses, heedless of their impact on the student—those parts of his college growth had been excised. Neatly, like a circumcision. Had he known, he would have protested. But the veil of secrecy had prevented him from knowing.
Was there ever justification for secrecy? Or was the seeming need to hide anything, whether physical or informational, an admission by the hider that the thing being hidden was shameful? Surely it was the act of hiding that was shameful! That would bear further meditation.
Yet the inadequacy of this sorry record could not take away the fact of his learning. Paul had profited, and at this institution.
Wasn’t that the real point of education? The college by distorting the transcript had not really denigrated or deprived him; it had merely diminished its own estimate of its impact upon him. If he failed in life, that had not been warned by the transcript; if he succeeded, the transcript showed no prediction. As with so many conventional transcripts, distorted by conventional factors, this one was largely irrelevant. The college had cheated itself by publishing a document of mediocrity instead of the document of accuracy it should have. The good the college had done him would never be known though the transcript.
Paul completed the transcript and closed it, bemused. It was not after all a work of the Devil, merely of fallible people. Perhaps its greatest failing was its subtlest: in all the welter of statistics, test scores—yes, there were some there!—and comments, the authorities had somehow succeeded in missing the essential him. A stranger, reading this transcript, would have no idea of Paul’s actual nature or capability. In this print he was nondescript, possessing no personality and not much potential.
He had known at the time that a number of instructors (including, to Paul’s regret, Will Hamlin) had not seen in him, Paul, any particular promise. Perhaps even today they would not consider his present course as representative of “success.” He had suspected at the time that this was because they had not made any real effort to know him—and that had they made this effort, they would have lacked the intelligence to complete the job. The Vice Squad matter had shown their level of comprehension of human values. Paul was intelligent in nonconventional ways and indifferent in conventional ways. He was not easy to measure by a set standard. This transcript confirmed this: it represented them, not him.
“Transference,” he said.
“What?” Carolyn asked.
Suddenly he was back in the present, such as it was. He had thrown a complex concept at the child. “Transference. That is when a person attributes his feelings or actions to someone else. If he dislikes someone, he may say ‘that person hates me.’ If he feels tired, he says ‘They made these steps too steep.’ It is a way of dealing with certain things that he doesn’t want to recognize in himself. He simply shifts the burden to someone else.”
“Like Voodoo?” she asked brightly.
“Uh, no. You’re thinking of sticking pins in dolls, and the person the doll stands for hurts?”
“Yes. Maybe the doll hurts too. Mine would.”
Naturally she had sympathy for the doll! How hard it was to avoid falling into the same trap he had rehearsed here, that of failing to know the learner, and so misjudging his (her!) progress. “That’s not really the same. Then again—” Then again—wasn’t that whole transcript basically a voodoo doll? The college administration—and institutions of similar nature all over the world—thought that by calling this document “Paul” and sticking the pins of their secret opinions into it, they could define what he was. Well, perhaps it had satisfied them at the time. Next year new students had come, and he had been forgotten, buried in the office files. The irony was that his case was no doubt typical not only of the students at his college, but of the students in all colleges and universities. The great majority of them surely remained unknown. No status for any of them—or for their institutions. And people wondered why the educational system was failing! Straight Voodoo would be better than this. “It’s close enough, sweetie,” he told her.
Father Benjamin had never inquired into Paul’s decision about the transcript. He knew the experience sufficed. It was not what Brother Paul had done, but how he felt about it that counted. He had to answer to no one, ultimately, except himself—and God.
But now he was returning to the college after twenty years with his daughter. For despite the erstwhile opinion of the administration, who had seen fit to suspend him and deceive him, he had succeeded in life. Now the college wanted him back, as a kind of authority in his field, to participate as a consultant for a weekend conference.
It was no laughing matter—but wasn’t the last laugh his?
The little airplane dropped, bringing his attention to lower levels too. Now Brother Paul’s ears hurt. Suddenly he appreciated precisely what his daughter had gone through.
“Blow your nose, Daddy!” she recommended solicitously. She understood!
He blew, but only the right ear cleared. The left remained blocked. It felt as though his eardrum would burst. He envisioned it bulging inward with the intolerable pressure of the atmosphere. Still the craft descended, as it were into Hell. Where could he find relief?
Finally, as the plane touched the small landing strip, he blew with such desperation it seemed his brain was squeezing out through his inner ear—and with an internal hiss of frustration, the pressure equalized. Lucky he hadn’t caught a cold!
“I like Pandora,” Carolyn remarked. “I would have opened that box too.”
14 • Will (Future)
Rationale of the Dirty Joke, by G. Legman, makes many points that apply to much more than dirt or humor. For example, the child in the Western cultures soon learns that sex is handled in a hypocritical manner. The same acts that adults practice are forbidden to children, merely because they are children. Or perhaps because they are too little to defend their rights: thus sex becomes a symbol of the dominance of adults. Even information about the sexual interaction is systematically hidden from children. They must learn that there is one law for the big folk and another for the little folk, and that it is dangerous even to be curious about sex. Thus their real education, as they grow up, is not really about sex but about power.
They walked across the strip and entered the small terminal building. It was empty. Already the airplane was putt-putting back into the clouds.
“Who was supposed to meet us?” Carolyn asked.
“A man named David White,” Paul answered. Had there been a foul up?
Then a tall young man, bearded and informally dressed, hurried up. “Father Paul?” he inquired, extending his hand.
“David White?” Paul inquired in return, taking the hand, recognizing Lee in another role. He was relieved to have this confirmation that this was an Animation; any alternative explanation would have been most disquieting in its implications. “This is my daughter, Carolyn.”
“Sorry I’m late. I saw the plane coming down—”
They hustled to David’s small car and piled in their handbags. Carolyn clambered into the back seat with enthusiasm, clutching her little handbag and big octopus doll. The car zoomed out of the airport.
On the way to the campus they chatted about inconsequentials, getting to know each other. David was a senior student, on leave to serve in the Admissions office. He was not satisfied and planned to complete his degree, then seek employment elsewhere. His program at the college, appropriately, was just twenty years later than Paul’s. Here, in certain respects, was Paul—twenty years ago. Half his life ago! He was glad David was likeable for this purely private, selfish reason.
The college, he learned, had grown from less than a hundred students to almost two thousand, though the majority did not reside on campus. And that campus had expanded; what had been forest to the north was now a collection of dormitories. It was to one of these unfamiliar buildings they came. Paul knew the college had changed, yet he felt disappointment to see it changed. Change was a vital aspect of life and of the universe, yet an emotional countercurrent wished it were not so.
They were issued meal tickets for the cafeteria—and this was in the Community Center where Paul had eaten for four years. This building had hardly changed; it remained a converted barn. The cellar he had helped dig out was now a dining room; he and Carolyn ate there, and he met the other program participants there. It was strange, being in this place that he remembered as the depths of the earth; it resembled a fantasy room, the kind that was not really there.
No faces were familiar; the turnover had been complete except for Will Hamlin, who was not at supper. But these were educated, compatible people, centering around his own age—which had, as it were overnight, doubled. He had jumped from twenty to forty, from student status to instructor status, though inside he felt the same. He was as much of a rebel as he had been. At least he liked to think so. The outward manifestations of it had merely changed.
Carolyn was eating with excellent appetite. She had two glasses of chocolate milk and was in partial heaven. That made him realize, with a rush of feeling: he had changed, for now he had his daughter. From the moment of her birth, his life had been metamorphosed; her existence was the single most vital aspect of his existence. He had diapered her as a baby, he had watched her put her foot in her mouth the first time (so many people never outgrew that!), he had helped her walk and talk and read; since she came into existence he had never slept without consciousness of her whereabouts, the assurance that she was safe. Not graduation, not marriage, not the God of Tarot Himself had transformed him as significantly. When she was born, he was reborn. He could not conceive of the scales on which she could be balanced, in terms of the meaning of his life, and found wanting; as well to balance her against the cosmic lemniscate, the ribbon symbol of infinity. This was why he had brought her here; she was part of him. Eight years old, nine in three months (oh, my—another birthday coming up!), precious beyond conception.
This was not a thing others understood or ever needed to. They thought he was the original Paul aged by two decades, though they had not known the original. Yet did anyone know anyone? A philosophic question, unanswerable.
He talked with these others, planning out aspects of the program. Paul knew Tarot; one of the others knew I Ching: common ground of a sort. “I threw the yarrow sticks for tomorrow’s program,” the other said. “The answer was: ‘The Center is empty.’”
Paul laughed. “That could be literal!”
The man nodded soberly. Much student interest had been expressed in this program, The Future of Revelation, but it was uncertain how much would manifest when the hour came. In Paul’s day some excellent programs had foundered because the students simply couldn’t be bothered to attend.
They finished the meal and went upstairs to the Haybarn Theater. They passed the site of Will’s old office, but the office was gone. Doubtless Will rated more than a niche, today, if less than a silo. Paul sniffed—and there was the odor of distilled Old Grandma liqueur still permeating the hall. After twenty years? Impossible…
The Haybarn was as he remembered it. Carolyn was thrilled, running about the stage, trying to act like an Actress. Here Paul had painted scenery, here he had wrestled with stage fright. Public speaking had not come readily to him; hesitancy and a soft voice had been formidable obstacles. Finally during one session the drama coach had gotten through: “Say it again, exactly as before, but just two point three times as loud.” Paul had done so—and it had worked. Never again had he been faint on stage. He still spoke softly in life—but he knew the technique of projection and used it consciously when it was required. Armed with that mechanism, he had found that stage fright itself faded. Now he could speak extemporaneously before an audience of any size and come across well. In fact, at times he had a better stage presence than he had a personal presence; private conversations could be awkward.
