And finally the last of my four great accomplishments during our
very first class of the year was establishing a legitimizing
incantation, at least that's what Bo had earlier called it at the
Chester School in London, and I liked his expression, and have been
using it ever since, in my private thoughts, I mean "legitimizing
incantation". That's what Carpe Diem is, and of course that's what
Seize The Day is as well.
And what a wonderful technique it is for tightening control over
a group! First, put the fear of death into the students. Best would
have been to take them to a graveyard, dig up a corpse, say about a
week old, make them examine it closely, expect that several of them
will start vomiting at the smell, then tell them that that was
going to be them in just a few short years. Very effective,
especially if a worm could actually be seen eating out an eyeball,
say. But can't really pull this off. It's illegal. And worms have a
hard time getting into modern coffins. So instead I show them
photos of boys who had once been in their shoes, students in Welton
Academy in the distant past, and so who today are probably all
lying in their coffins.
And then tell my boys that they should seek compensation for
this death that awaits them the compensation of Seizing The Day. In
other words, since life is going to be brief, pack as much into it
as possible.
And my little test of passivity, how well that went too! It is
like having a meat thermometer in a roast which tells you when it's
done that's what my test of passivity is like, and it tells me
whether the students have reached the desired state of passivity
yet or not, have stopped thinking, have handed their brains over to
me, or in other words have put me in absolute control of their
intellects and their emotions. The test is to make a statement
which is obviously false, and to see how much protest it triggers.
I did make such a statement, and I did get not a peep of protest,
and so I knew I had put my boys into a state of passivity so total
that it pretty much qualified as a hypnagogic trance, which sounds
like a bad thing until you learn to recognize that it is the
attainment of Samadhi, which is Union with the Divine, and what can
be better than Union with the Divine?
My test statement was that the students in the old photographs
on display in the foyer had the "same haircuts" as themselves, than
which nothing could be more obviously false, as the most popular
cut in the old photographs had a part right down the middle of the
head which strikes today's boys as peculiar or comical or even
absurd.
I was delighted as well with the success of my doggie-level
delivery which I had learned in London from my Transcendental
Therapist and Eastern-Mysticism Guru, Maharishi Menshi Yogi, whose
teaching focusses on the importance of the altitude above ground
from which a communication is delivered, there being four
significant heights worm, dog, man, and eagle. If a teacher speaks
with his mouth at, or close to, the altitude which is optimal for
the material being taught, then the room reverberates in sympathy
with that material, and as a result the students grasp every idea
instantaneously, and the idea is stored securely in memory from
which it cannot fade or be dislodged, and, in short, learning
proceeds optimally. However, if the idea is delivered from the
wrong level, sympathetic vibration is largely absent, and as a
result comprehension is muddled, memory is improperly stocked,
education turns to chaos.
The optimal level, of course, is one wave length from the
ground, the wave length being very small for some subjects, as for
example the properties of metals in chemistry which definitely can
be explained clearly only with the teacher's mouth almost in
contact with the ground, which is to say, at worm level; and large
for other subjects, as for example Marxian economics which benefits
from eagle-level exposition, which can be adequately approximated
in a classroom by the teacher standing up on his desk. I
recommended to both the chemistry master at Chester and the history
master that they at least put Maharishi Menshi Yogi's
altitude-of-delivery doctrine to a test in their lecturing, but
they refused peremptorily, demonstrating that their teaching
methodology was dictated by tradition rather than by the more
modern criterion of experimental verification.
As my early pilot studies in London proved, establishing a
legitimizing incantation is best done from doggie level, and so it
became necessary for me in the Welton Academy foyer to squat
somewhat, and also bend over, which a few students found
disconcerting for the reason, perhaps, that what seemed like
doggie-level delivery to a crouching speaker seemed like
crotch-level-delivery to his standing audience. For example, when I
was behind Richard Cameron he of the flaming red hair done up in an
ostentatious brush cut I dipped particularly low, and elicited from
him a frown of severe disapproval, as if I were a dog goosing him
with its nose. But I think all the other students recognized and
appreciated the increased clarity with which doggie-level delivery
was able to transport the Carpe Diem message from my brain to
theirs. In many situations, by the way, the speaker can avoid
having his doggie-level delivery give the impression of
audience-crotch-level delivery by having his audience crouch down
along with him, or at least sit, but which remedies in the instant
case were unavailable as there were no chairs in the foyer, and in
any case the boys needed to stand erect in order to properly view
the photographs in the display cases.
My great relief at the effortless addition, with the cooperation
of my American boys, of Carpe Diem to my arsenal of available
thought-control weapons stands in sharp contrast to the obstacles I
had earlier encountered in my London pilot studies because of the
lack of cooperation of my London boys, especially that Bodan Kozak.
When I tried to deliver pretty much the same Carpe Diem message in
London, all hell broke loose. Bodan approached me not long after
class saying that he had been reading a book called Jrn Uhl, in
English translation from German, and English not being his first
language, a passage from which confused him, and he wondered if he
could read it to me and have me clarify its relation to my Carpe
Diem doctrine. "Doctrine" was his word, which I am not sure I
liked, as it could have been intended respectfully as
"unimpeachable truth" or disrespectfully, as "benighted dogma".
Nevertheless, I agreed, and we found a bench out on the lawn, where
I had at first wanted to skim the Jrn Uhl passage with my own eyes,
and thus all the faster dispose of the matter, but because he
anticipated this, and feared that my superficial reading would
leave me unacquainted with the details and nuances of the passage,
wanted me particularly to attend to every word, and so insisted on
reading it aloud to me, which he did well, pronouncing carefully
and distinctly, and wherever the drift was intricate or hard to
follow, reading with appropriate intonation and pauses which laid
bare the structure of the sentence, and clarified its meaning, and
which with rushed or careless reading would have been lost. As I
listened to him, I was transported into the scene described, and
watched it as if it was taking place before me.On one farm the wife
herself put the brown horses into the cart, and put on the
silver-mounted harness, and drove into town and asked the
magistrates for a declaration of her husband's incapacity. She
spread out before them the documents which she had brought with
her, and showed how much of her own marriage dowry he had
squandered. She placed the little lad she had with her on the green
table, drew down his trousers, and showed the bruises her drunken
husband had made, and she bared her full, white bosom and showed
the marks of his fingers, and demanded that she should be made
administrator of the property.
The magistrate was a young man, and though he had stood by many
a woman's side, he had never yet stood face to face with one. He
made a motion toward the bell, and said it wasn't such an easy
matter, according to the law, to do what she wanted; and then
hebeganto recount the various steps it would be necessary to take.
They were many and intricate.
Then she began to say hard things about the law of her native
land, maintaining that it was as clumsy as an old cow, and that it
was as much a woman-hater as a hardened old bachelor. Her words
rang right through the office into the corridor. And at last she
said there was, thank God, another sort of justice, which she would
in future put into application. And sheraisedher hand threateningly
to illustrate her meaning. She would find a way out of her distress
without magistrates and law-courts a cheaper way, too, faith. But
if it should happen that her husband should some fine day find his
way hither to complain ofher, then they'd better send him back
about his business; else she'd give him such a drubbing that he
wouldn't be able to stir a step for a fortnight.
In this way did this wretched woman speak, made desperate by her
long years of misery, and then drove unmolested home again. Many a
time afterward folks saw her driving through the village, always
with two smart horses. She had sold the silver-mounted harness next
day; her horses pull in good strong hempen trappings up to the
present day, and she looks neither to left nor right. She has
become a hard woman. The farm-servants and produce-dealers are
afraid of her; her children have turned out well the boys a little
shy, and the girls strong-willed women. Her husband shuffled out of
life one day after sneaking along the walls of his own house for
many a year. He lies buried in a neglected grave, near that of one
of his workmen, old Peter Back, which is always kept fresh and
neat. It is said that the wife of one of his sons once quietly
tidied up the farmer's grave, but the widow found it out, and got
seeds of stinging nettles from a weed plot near, and sowed them on
it. And what made this more remarkable was the story that older
folk of the village told how, long ago on her wedding-day, she had
not been able to contain herself for happiness, and how, after
their mutual "Yes" had been exchanged, she had thrown her arms
around her young husband's neck, laughing and weeping at the same
time, without caring a jot for the people who were there. Out of
love so warm there had come such bitter hate.
"Well," said Bo, "my first question is whether this wife, when
she approaches the magistrate and presents reasons why she should
be given administration of the family property, is she not taking
decisive and courageous action to staunch the hemorrhaging of the
family estate, and to emancipate herself from the brutal oppression
of her husband?"
"Maybe so," I answered guardedly, not knowing what he was
getting at, but sensing that he was leading me into a trap for
purposes of humiliation.
"Then might not she be said to be Seizing the Day?"
"Well, and suppose that she is?"
"And at the end of the passage I just read, which describes her
on her wedding day having been unable to contain herself for
happiness, and throwing her arms around her young husband's neck,
laughing and weeping at the same time would her marrying with such
joy not be an example of Gathering Rosebuds While Ye May?"
"Maybe!"
"And Seizing the Day at the same time?"
"The two are almost synonymous."
"Well," said Bodan, "what confuses me is that her Gathering
Rosebuds on her wedding day seems to have been a tragic mistake
which she had done better to avoid, whereas your presentation to
the class earlier today seemed to assume that Gathering Rosebuds
was always desirable and beneficial. And the same, of course, goes
for Seizing The Day sometimes it brings good, and sometimes it
brings harm; sometimes Seizing The Day means uniting out of love,
and sometimes it means separating out of hate. And so the
Gather-Ye-Rosebuds poem, read in full," he said opening his blue
book on page 542 and handing it to me, "seems to warn virgins to
marry as quickly as they can so as to avoid spinsterhood gives only
half the warning that young people need to be given."Robert
Herrick. 15911674
To the Virgins, to make much of Time
GATHER ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying:And
this same flower that smiles to-day To-morrow will be dying.
The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun, The higher he's
a-getting,The sooner will his race be run, And nearer he's to
setting.
That age is best which is the first, When youth and blood are
warmer;But being spent, the worse, and worst Times still succeed
the former.
Then be not coy, but use your time, And while ye may, go
marry:For having lost but once your prime, You may for ever
tarry.
"The other half of the warning that the young need to be given
is that they should take time to find a worthy spouse, because
relying on only the emotion of the moment may result in a ruined
life. The other half of the warning can be condensed into six
words: 'Marry in haste, repent at leisure' six words that in nine
cases out of ten give better advice for the young than the more
numerous words of Gather Ye Rosebuds. In other words, perhaps it is
the case that over-haste produces many times the pain of
over-caution. Perhaps while needing to be warned of the danger of
tarrying, youth needs more often to be warned of the danger of
rushing."
Bo closed the Jrn Uhl book, and placed it on the bench between
us, saying "allow me to present this book to you as a gift. It
teaches a number of worthy morals." Which is what makes it possible
for me to reproduce Bo's reading exactly today, especially given
that Welton has just purchased its first Xerox machine.
But Bo was not finished. "And so if the wife can Seize The Day
by casting off her husband after many years of marriage, would she
not also have been able to Seize The Day by casting him off at the
altar, just before they were married? And could she not also have
Seized The Day assuming she had been armed with skill in reading
character and foreseeing the future an hour after meeting him, by
casting him off even as early as that?"
"Well, yes," I had to admit. Bo was cunningly leading me into
admissions that I could see were eroding my foundations, and yet
each of which was too obviously true to deny.
"But if marrying the idiot because you love him is Seizing The
Day, and if dumping the idiot because you hate him is also Seizing
The Day, and if dumping him when you love him because you can
foresee that you will grow to hate him is also Seizing The Day,
then no matter what the wife does, and no matter when she does it,
it can be called Seizing The Day. In other words, Seizing The Day
has no meaning, it can be applied to any and all actions, it does
not steer us in any particular direction, and so we may call it not
a description of only some of the things that may be happening, but
rather an incantation which bestows a blessing on whatever is
happening, or in other words we can call it a legitimizing
incantation whose purpose is to wash away guilt from every action
to which it happens to be affixed."
"I commend you for an insightful analysis," I answered, "but you
do not take into account that Seizing The Day encourages action as
opposed to remaining in a state of passivity," to which Bo replied
instantaneously, as if he had dealt with this argument many times
before, and had his answer ready, "which seems to make sense if we
think of a choice as one between acting or not acting, and which we
might call Doing A or Not Doing A. However, the same choice can be
described differently, which is to say as Doing A or Doing B. A
girl being able to Marry A or Not Marry A can be described instead
as the girl being able to Marry A or Start Dating B. No matter what
we do, we do something. In poker, we are faced with the option of
raising a bet or not, but which can be re-phrased as raising or
checking, as either seizing the opportunity to raise, or seizing
the opportunity to check. Whether in poker or in life, refusing to
take an action can always be depicted as taking some alternative
action, and that alternative action can lead to higher winnings
either on the poker table or in life."
I sat silently. Bo was too much for me. Too much nattering,
which I did not think worth following. I had retreated into a state
of Samadhi. Why need I struggle to follow the nattering of this
teenager when I was United With The Divine? Bo could have used some
of the same, seemed to me some of the same Uniting With The Divine
in order to cool his fevered brain.
"And does not my 'insightful analysis' as you call it call for
some qualification to be imparted to the class?" continued Bo,
relentlessly.
The whippersnapper was becoming intolerable! I gave him my
coldest stare. He, in turn, abruptly took his leave, as if not so
satisfied with my attitude that he could exchange pleasantries, and
yet not so dissatisfied as to justify pressing his argument beyond
what he already had. Of course, I had no intention of presenting my
class with anything like a retraction of my Carpe Diem directive,
because no leader is able to lead without at least one legitimizing
incantation. No matter what any follower is commanded to do, a
legitimizing incantation gives leadership the power to reassure
that follower of the rectitude of his obedience. For the
incantation to work, however, it is essential that the follower be
kept from recognizing that he is free to apply that same
incantation to whatever other action he chooses, even the action of
disobeying a command, and it is essential that the follower resign
himself to allowing his commander to supply fresh definitions of
the legitimizing incantation as they are needed. The military
commander who announces that disobedience in battle will be
regarded as cowardice does not want his soldiers to recognize even
while he speaks that "Many would be cowards if they had courage
enough" meaning that many would run from battle if they only had
enough courage to run from battle, enough courage to face the
disapproval of the warmongers who were ordering them into battle. A
military leader will lose his power to command once his soldiers
beginning telling each other that disobeying his orders would be
heroic.
As I want my students to love poetry, I define reading poetry as
Seizing The Day; if I had wanted them to love engineering, then it
would be studying engineering that I would define as Seizing The
Day. It's simple, but it works. And as I also wanted them to become
sexually promiscuous, I called sexual promiscuity which I
euphemistically referred to as Gathering Rosebuds Seizing The Day;
had I wanted them to exercise discretion in sex, to establish
enduring love and commitment to a single carefully-selected and
worthy mate, then I would have defined that as Seizing The Day.
Without the power to control the thoughts and emotions of my
students with the help of some legitimizing incantation, my
influence over them would be weakened, and my plans for them would
stand in danger of failing. The only effect of Bo's meddling in my
affairs was to motivate me to get him kicked out of my class, and
expelled from the entire school if possible. Yes, getting Bo kicked
out of Chester was the answer. The Chester School was not big
enough for both of us. One of us was going to have to go, and it
wasn't going to be me. And a corollary of my conclusion was that in
any future attempt to establish a Dead Poets Society, among my
first steps must be the identification and removal of troublemakers
like Bo.
That the differences between me and Bo had not in fact been
resolved soon became evident in the case of Howard Humes, whose
initial interest at the Chester School had centered on poetry, but
who began to view poetry as a frivolous playing with words where
the world's needs could be better served with action, and who with
the encouragement of his teachers of science and mathematics had
begun to dream of becoming a hydraulic engineer, to which I, of
course, responded with incredulity and disapproval. All he would be
concerning himself with for the rest of his professional life would
be moving water from one place to another. Being a glorified
plumber did not promise to give either spiritual or intellectual
gratification, I warned him. He spoke of bringing potable water to
millions who drank out of puddles, of irrigating parched fields, of
offering ships shortcuts through canals and locks, of bringing
electricity to homes presently lighted only by candles. He had
hanging in his dormitory room not the healthy pictures of Playboy
Playmate foldouts, but neurotic photographs of Roman aqueducts, of
the Panama Canal, of the Hoover Dam. He read the unabridged Les
Miserables because he wanted full detail on the sewers of Paris in
1832, at which I sneered "Nobody reads the unabridged Les
Miserables, or at least if they pretend to, they really skip those
tiresome chapters on nothing but the history of the sewers of
Paris, which chapters do not advance the plot in the least, but
merely show off what Victor Hugo hopes will be admired as his
meticulous scholarship and his prodigious memory." I warned Howard
Humes that if he persisted in his folly, he should expect to
discover, when he came to die, that he had not lived, that he
should, rather, follow the Latin injunction Carpe Diem, Seize The
Day, should give expression to joy and love, explore the mysteries
of Bacchus through wine, music, and ecstatic dance, free his soul
from anxiety and toil.
I was beginning to make headway toward preventing this erring
student from throwing away his life on glorified plumbing projects,
when Bodan learned of my efforts, and impudently began to
intervene, passing along to the would-be-plumber his propaganda
identifying Carpe Diem as a "legitimizing incantation", and said
further, both to myself and to the would-be plumber, Howard Humes,
that Seizing The Day could as well be applied could better be
applied to what Humes had spontaneously been doing choosing to
abandon poetry in favor of hydraulic engineering because hydraulic
engineering would save lives and reduce suffering and relieve
hunger. Putting a cup of water into the hands of a man dying of
thirst, Bo told the would-be plumber, was more beautiful than any
poem ever written, and more gratifying than any drunken debauchery.
Give mankind what it urgently cries out for, and you earn mankind's
gratitude and respect. Mankind does not urgently cry out for more
poetry, it hasn't even seen fit to read the tiniest fraction of the
poetry already written. Read a poem to a man dying of hunger or
thirst or cholera, and you earn his contempt.
Oh, and that bunkum of arriving at the end of your life and
finding you have not lived! Of course the man we are picturing on
his death bed saying this has in fact lived, as every man does live
until he dies. How can he arrive at the end of his life if there
has been no life? What the dying speaker means by "I have not
lived" is "I have not had as much fun as I had hoped". But this is
not the discovery of a truth, it is an expression of
disappointment. What the speaker of these words really means is
that at the end of his life he feels he could have had more fun,
which sense of disappointment any man might feel at the end of any
life. Such disappointment is equally likely to arise in the breast
of the would-be-poet who becomes an engineer instead, but misses
the fun of having been a poet; as in the breast of the would-be
engineer who becomes a poet instead, but misses the fun of having
been an engineer. We can, if we wish, imagine either one of them
feeling on his death bed that he has not had as much fun as he had
hoped he would, and expressing this regret in the hyperbolic words
that he had discovered that he had not lived. But only children are
impressed by such word games.
And so from all these experiences at the Chester School in
London, I learned the importance of ridding a classroom of any
devils who appeared in the guise of students, and these learning
experiences were excellent preparation for my present teaching at
the Welton Academy in Vermont, and so thorough had been my
preparation that in my very first class at Welton, I accomplished
perfectly what in London I was still struggling to accomplish very
imperfectly after three months. With my American boys at Welton,
then, after only a single meeting, my students have learned four
important things, a level of accomplishment which I think may be
unequalled in the annals of education.
(1) They have learned to rely on mental telepathy as their chief
mode of communication.
(2) They have learned to submit to my absolute control under the
title of O-Captain-My-Captain.
(3) They have acceded to their names being ridiculed, and to
being generally abused, in the interests of further strengthening
my power of command.
(4) They have accepted Carpe Diem as their chief legitimizing
incantation, and of course have left the definition of what does or
does not constitute Seizing The Day entirely in my hands.
In view of which first-day accomplishments, I am forced to
conclude that education at Welton Academy, at least in my own
classroom, is proceeding with the highest imaginable efficiency,
and that at least my students can reasonably look forward to a
profitable and gratifying academic year.