The Flowers of Keiwha
Page 21
psychosis himself, because a cell phone is going off right now and it’s making it impossible to write.
A’hem. TUSK remembers those thirty days quite well. The quintessential moment is not involving him, but a Hollywoodesque girl (tall, blonde-haired, quite attractive) deciding in the spirit of first month’s democratic feeling to hang out with the engineers eating pizza in the student lounge. TUSK walks in just as the engineers crack a joke and Miss Hollywood says, “you guys laugh?!?!” Total silence ensues.
This was the problem with Yale, you know. Its social life was dominated by the senior societies and everything revolved so much around who was in who’s circle that nobody actually bothered to study, it was Harvard that produced Facebook, Stanford that made Google, Princeton that produced Carly Fiorina, and Columbia that made a U.S. President or two. Yale’s selectivity had gone down and down while every other elite American university was becoming better and better, and so it was the only one of the U.S. schools that was European in temperament; it alone was in decline, and if this decline was slow and measured and playing off against an old boys’ connection with the highest reaches of the U.S. government, it was nevertheless a decline, a slow decline. Soon morons and freakshows would appear, but at least it had its history and august tradition; Yale which had Death’s Head and Paper Scroll would still play its little mind games with each other and so thousands upon thousands of its graduates who were once the best of their class would be driven off into obscurity, incalculated through four years of education into total uselessness whatsoever.
The difference in the schools could be seen in the health of the respective entrepreneurial societies at each school. Harvard and Stanford had tightly run organizations that served as laboratories for eventual Silicon Alley or Silicon Valley dot-coms. Columbia’s was politicized, accepting government funds that were then distributed cleverly to those who courted the administration rather than came up with genuine ideas; Princeton didn’t even have one—though it had a private analogue that served much the same purpose; finally Yale did in fact have one, but it alone among the top Ivy schools did absolutely no work whatsoever. It just sat there. Yale’s Entrepreneurial Society took in university funding but believed itself entitled to those funds merely for the fact of its very existence, culture the sine qua non of American universities.
This wasn’t it, though, not by a long shot. You went to Yale. You were tapped by a secret society. You then proceeded to attend a party with three hundred other undergraduates, exchanging only through mutual glances the relationship with your fellow society mates such that nobody else in attendance at the party knew of your hidden relationship. Present also at the party with thirty other people who belonged to different secret societies. Could you then identify these people through careful observation? Of course not. To do so would require staring at one person constantly for the whole evening, and then reading into their expressions a possible relationship that was just your own imagination talking. There were six chances out of ten the person was staring at another person out of sexual interest. Three chances out of ten the person was staring at somebody just because they were blurry and drunk. Half a chance the individual was seeking some financial advantage. Several times lower in the spectrum of possible reasons was the possibility that said individual (a) belonged to a secret society, (b) was exchanging a glance with a fellow society member, and (c) you were not being noticed yourself.
No. The best things that unfolded did so accidentally. It was after some hugely secret affair (taking place in an underground location and only hinted at even to other fellow secret society members) that you by accident went to some campus bar, and there, other people not knowing of your affiliation, would walk amidst you, to be noticed, registered, completely examined without their knowledge, studied because they were the kind of people who gravitated to the center of action and did not contemplate the possibility that they were the only ones who did not know every other person in the bar. At such a constellation of events, you took another drink and thought about Proust; you thought about everything except the idea of generating your own ideas, and going to Yale became a sort of accomplishment in itself, whereas once it had just been preparation for actually going and doing work, now it was the end point of everything, the final culmination that justified your getting some highly paid sinecure, that meant you felt entitled for the rest of your life and that made you believe in the absolute primacy of your thoughts, your classification as an individual several orders up the evolutionary tree than mere homo sapiens.
So forget Chicken Leg, forget Death’s Head, forget Paper Scroll, the real action was in the bulge bracket, only here could genuine innovation be fostered and only here in the constellation of other academic cliques, specialties, majors, disciplines, schools of thought, styles, fashions, and personal preferences could we find SEATTLE, girl that launched a thousand dreams. (And this work is self-conscious, as previously mentioned; we know we’re only now really getting to what you really want.)
TUSK first loved SEATTLE the first year. It had happened without planning or expectation, just another drunken talk, but suddenly SEATTLE stood up straight in her chair and said to TUSK directly, “have you ever noticed that people always believe the confessions you make when you’re really really drunk? of course when we are sober we are on guard and parse everything that arrives through our ear, but it is precisely at that fourth hour of the morning when you are trashed beyond trashed, when you are so drunken that everything is a blur, that if you lie, if you tell somebody a strange story or make some odd confession, especially one apparently damaging to yourself, it becomes instantly and totally believed. how odd people are!”
SEATTLE was confident. She believed that just as affirmative action brought less-talented blacks to Yale, it had self-selected only the very crème de la crème of asian students, that there were minds here among them, brilliant, undiscovered, the creative powers of this generation. “Think about it in terms of numbers. If you select one out of ten thousand, that individual is one out of ten thousand. If you pick only one out of a million, then that is one out of a million.”
The conversation had flowed from there. SEATTLE and TUSK were able to agree that it was possible to feed another person a subtext; that words as they existed on the surface were always read, analyzed, and accepted only partially, but one could very well tell a long, long story that was completely disbelieved, while its subtext (e.g., ‘I am gay’ or ‘I commit crimes’) would be believed. The process could also be carried out with a positive subtext (e.g. ‘I am rich’ or ‘I am in touch with royalty’) but that was far harder. In this way relationships between SEATTLE and TUSK reached a new level; each was on guard, yet simultaneously transcendently pleased to find a like-mind. The differences that would emerge were only details.
"TUSK, your mind works in concentricities. You are instantly fascinated by the idea of an elite society and then within that elite society another even more elite society and then within that circle within a circle, still more layers of inner access. But what is that person at the very centermost point? And how much genuine freedom does that person have, now that they have centered themselves so elegantly? The element of play, the ‘finesse,’ it exists not in circles within circles within circles, but in the overlap between different elements that perhaps don’t normally overlap. Take ‘English lit majors’ for example and ‘Japanologists,’ for example. Those are two usually exclusively categories, but that small overlap of people is the really fascinating subsection.”
"Well, I just feel that inner-circles have the secrets, and people are just always fascinated by secrets. For example, if I were to say ‘hey guess what, I heard one branch of the Japanese Imperial family is really pro-American and one branch is really pro-pre-war Japan, and the pre-wars are beating up the pro-Americans, then everyone would find that commentary really interesting and want to know more. Furthermore, some especially creative people might guess that I wasn’t talking about the Japanese Imperial family but the
British, and then it would all dissolve into this big guessing game which people I were talking about.”
"I think you overestimate people’s interest in imperial lives. Those people are… well, they don’t really control things anymore. It’s just all symbolic.”
"Possibly. But okay, let’s assume for a moment you’re right. Which specific overlap people are we talking about in the English lit department that overlaps with the Japanologists? I will note that we could very well talk about elites in both departments as well, for example Ms. Britney Spears of Japan, who by the way…”
"No, no, resist that impulse TUSK. Let us contemplate the normals.”
In the forty possible people who represented the overlap between ‘English lit majors’ and ‘Japanologists’ (and this was stretching it), maybe five were truly interesting, Jihadist, Sasquatch, Samurai, Turnkey and Poker. Jihadist, who was gay and internationalist, spoke fluent Japanese and actually finally switched over to EALL late his third year. Sasquatch was droll and distant. Samurai told everyone about his famous ancestors. Turnkey