Paradise Park (27 page)
Authors: Allegra Goodman
I stood up. “Please—”
“What is it?”
“This test doesn’t show what I can really do.”
“I’m relieved to hear that,” Friedell said.
• • •
A
LL
weekend I sulked over that conversation with Friedell. I sat by the pools and fountains at Ala Moana Shopping Center. Just slumped on the concrete benches and felt so sad. Hour after hour I watched the carp that lived there. Beautiful koi from Japan. They were white and orange. They were golden. Their eyes were bulgy on the sides of their heads, like blueberries. They looked so fat and happy as they swam in their shallow pools, their whiskers nosing a few pennies on the bottom.
They seemed a little bit dumb. Yet you had to give them this: They sowed not, neither did they spin. They were making the most of their God-given abilities; they were living their lives. Twelve points on a test would never faze them. Nothing did. They didn’t rail or curse their fate, being mall fish.
Sharon, Sharon, I thought to myself, where is
your
detachment? How is it you’re already after one semester caught up in this whole academic evaluation scam? That’s not what education is all about. You know that. Do you need approbation from a guy like Raymond Friedell? No! You’re learning for yourself. Just forget about Friedell already. Cut out the middleman.
I was not giving up on seeking knowledge. I was not going to let some prof stand in my way. Monday morning I strode into class with my notebook, and it was like I was coming back to the scenes of my nightmares, wide awake, in the middle of the day. I looked around, and I thought, Sharon, please. Is this what you were so intimidated by? The art auditorium, with indoor-outdoor carpet on the floor? Is this what you considered a temple of the gods of learning?
Friedell stood before us. He looked us over, and he started talking. He started walking and talking on the little stage down on the auditorium floor. And he said, “Some of you have been a little bit concerned about your performance on the midterm. And well you should be.”
Despite my newfound freedom from caring about superficial things like Friedell’s course and his opinions, I squirmed when he said that. I couldn’t help it.
He went on, “Some of you have been feeling rather put upon, I gather, by the volume of reading in this course.”
There were more than one hundred students in the class, but all of a sudden I felt like everyone was looking at me. I told myself, Sharon,
remember the koi. Remember the koi. Do you think those carp could care less what this land mammal is carrying on about?
Friedell was saying, “Perhaps those of you with concerns would do well to remember that the drop date for the class is approaching. In the meantime before we move on I would like to touch briefly today on some misconceptions about Augustine.”
Loosen your attachments, I thought. Let go of your anger toward this man. Let go of your resentment. He is neither an obstacle to you, nor a guide. He is nothing. He is neutral. He is …
“Augustine did not start out a saint, as some of you seem to believe. He was not even a Christian when he began his journey as a young man. It was much, much later in his life that he had what one of you so fittingly described as his aha moment leading …”
Aha moment! That was my essay Friedell was quoting up there. That was my exam he was exploiting in his lecture! There he was, plagiarizing my work, while at the same time flunking me for it! My eyes went wide. I clutched my notebook to my chest. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe what was going on in this class! All my calm went by the wayside. All those good thoughts the day before with the fish. Out the window. It’s just that I was not a very calm person! It’s just that he was getting off on my failed efforts. Appropriating them. Mocking them for his own personal entertainment! He was raping me in front of a hundred people.
“Augustine was a theologian,” Friedell said, “He was a bishop. He was a writer. He was many many things. Augustine—”
“Fuck Augustine!” I screamed out into that dark theater of the lecture hall. I sprang up from my chair. I pushed past all the other students in my row. I was running up the aisle toward the red
EXIT
sign. The door slammed shut behind me.
PilgrimProf. Friedell,
This is to apologize if I offended you in class—though I realize you probably forgot the whole thing by now. I was the one who said Fuck Augustine. It wasn’t having anything against him—not at all. It was you lifting passages from my essay on him. And right after I came to see you and appealed to you on the harshness of the grading. It seemed like you were just using the occasion of my test to be making fun, which I realize now is probably one of your pedagogical tools. Nevertheless people’s feelings are on the line there in your class, whether you realize it or not, and people’s sparks of creativity, which you can either fan constructively or snuff out with irony and intimidation. Is that the way to go? Because actually teaching could be about tenderness and training up the little vines of people’s imaginations onto strings, like they are bean plants, and then they would bear fruit, or rather, legumes. Teaching could be about inclusion, where you just let everybody come to the well and drink at their own levels, rather than about grading and public humiliation, where you hold up someone’s exam for ridicule. That’s all I was trying to say. Learning
isn’t really how many pages you can choke down. Learning isn’t cramming Augustine down one’s throat.
What I meant by my comment was I didn’t take the class just to read about Augustine’s hang-ups, I took it to learn about religion—God, prayer, ritual, Buddha, the Madonna mother-goddess figure, transmigration, forgiveness, miracles, sin, abortion, death, the big moral concepts. Because, obviously I am not eighteen and I work, so school is not an academic exercise for me, and not just me, as I’m sure you’d realize if you looked around the room one of these days and saw there are thirty and forty-year olds and some a lot older than you are in the class. The point is, when you’ve been through journeys and relationships, multiple careers plus unemployment—the whole gamut—and then you come back to school, you’re ready for the real thing, and as far as I’m concerned Augustine’s Conception of the Soul, or Illumination of the Mind, or whatever, is not it. What is “it”? you’re asking—well, that’s what I came to find out, so you tell me. Obviously what you are paid for is to deal with the big religious issues and you are not dealing with them, which again is what I was trying to point out when I made that remark in class.
My feelings still are that basically as a “mature student” I was supposed to feel grateful that the University of Hawaii let me in or gave me a second chance on life or whatever, like I am the lowly unwashed and I should come in the gates to be blessed by the big phallus….
I was working on this letter to Raymond Friedell. Scribbling it down, and getting frustrated, and starting over. I just wanted to smoke him. I was so furious. I wanted him to see what he had done; how he had looked at me in his office and with that one look shrunk me into a little shriveling ball of snot. I wanted to tell him, because he, and teachers as a whole—they just don’t get how they can affect students, for good or bad. They just don’t get the power that they hold over us! They don’t know!
Under the sausage trees by Moore Hall, the words were pouring out into my loose-leaf notebook. All around me the undergrads were walking by in their Bermuda shorts, and going to lunch without a thought in their heads. And I looked at them, and I thought—Who are these people? I looked around the campus, and I thought, what is this place? My notebook sat there in my lap, and my hand couldn’t even keep up with
what I wanted to say. Friedell thought I was just complaining about my grade, but that wasn’t it at all. For some reason when I came “back” to “school” I’d believed in the
universe
part of
university.
That it was all about Life, and Time, and Freedom, but when I got to Friedell those things were just constructs. I’d thought religion was about God, but it turned out in Friedell’s class it was just about the history of people’s conceptions of God. And there couldn’t be any saintliness in Augustine. He couldn’t be a great believer, just a great bishop, writer, thinker, et cetera.
And that was when it hit me. I wanted to learn about religion—so what was I doing in academia? I wanted to understand—so why was I reading books? It was just like Rabbi Siegel said: words are the least important thing! Poetry and light, and the sublime. That’s what mattered. The exalted. At the time I’d thought Siegel was such an elitist for mentioning the exalted. But wasn’t that actually what religion was about? So here I was at the university, and where was the exaltation? I mean, I had seen a vision. I had in a boat, with my own eyes, seen the ocean folded back upon itself. I had received this precious gift, a vision. The sea had stood up upon its tail!
The fever was taking hold of me again—the heat to see and do and know. I raced home. I collected all my notes from Friedell’s course that were lying on the floor of my room—I was thinking I would burn them! Except I had to sort out all the letters mixed in—the ones from Gary. Oh, Gary, why am I here while you’re over there? I thought. Oh, man, how did we end up this way? And I uncreased all his letters and I smoothed them all down. I looked at Gary’s letters on the Torah Or letterhead, and it was
bashert
again, dawning on me. Marlon was there with me, and Kathryn and Will were clattering pots in the kitchen, and Tom was practicing his dulcimer, like some clumsy angel, all thumbs and wings. I said to Marlon, “I’m going out there. I am. I am! I’m going out there to learn with Gary!”
My grumpy yet inwardly sweet cat looked at me with his yellow eyes. I said, “But don’t worry, I would never leave you unless you were with really close friends.” He went back to his food, nibbling from his dish. If I’d known then! Oh, my poor cat. My poor baby.
And I picked up the phone and I called Gary at Torah Or. All the way in Jerusalem.
There was a muffled voice on the other end of the line.
“Gary!” I said.
“Who?”
“Can I speak to Gary,” I said loudly. “I need to talk to Gary. It’s urgent. It’s an emergency! Could you get him? Please. I have to speak to him.”
The muffled voice got more muffled. It burst out something in Hebrew and then said, “Is something the matter?”
“I’m calling from the States. Tell him it’s Sharon”
“Wait. Hold on the line, please.”
I waited and I waited. At last someone croaked to me, “Hello?” “It’s me,” I burst out.
“It’s Sharon! Are you sleeping?” I’d forgotten it was twelve hours later in Israel. It must have been early in the morning. “Sharon?”
“Oh, Gary,” I said. I was about ready to burst, there was so much I wanted to say. “Is that really you? Is that really your voice?”
“Sharon, where are you? Are you all right?”
“Yes!”
“Thank God. They said it was an emergency!”
“It is! It is! But not a bad kind. The good kind of emergency!”
“Sharon, Sharon, slow down—”
“Gary, I can’t stay on the phone—this is probably costing like a hundred dollars a second! Gary, I’m coming out there.” “You’re coming where?”
“To you,” I said. “To Torah Or. Oh, Gary, I want to learn. I want to know. I want to reconnect.”
“Baruch Hashem!”
he said.
“What?”
“I said Praise God!” Gary’s voice was breaking up. I couldn’t tell whether it was him being so moved, or the connection.
“Just, you have to tell me what to do!” I shouted. “I mean, to get to the institute. Could you tell me? But talk fast, ’cause I can’t even afford calling you—this is the most expensive phone call I’ve ever made!”
I don’t even remember the flight. It was this long, hazy, yet euphoric trip. There I was, sailing through the air. There I was, leaving academia and Friedell and earth behind. Cleaning out my bank account, taking
leave of my job. I wasn’t sitting home reading, or teaching temple ladies left and right. There I was, with my three-week excursion ticket and my little photo of Marlon—and I was going to the source of this great religious debate! The root of all the questions in my mind, like who or what is God? And how do you get to know him/her? As in a pilgrimage. As in a quest. Like the great poet Yeats, when he picked up and traveled to Byzantium.
I was just so thrilled, having finally flown away. I was so tickled I’d up and done it after all those years. My ticket was for three weeks, but in my mind I was off to a whole new scene—maybe forever. I figured Gary and I would fly Marlon out to join us. We would send for him so we could all live together, since, in one of those huge miscalculations I excelled at, I was already convinced Gary and I were fated to get back together.
I was just floating when we finally landed; I was just levitating high up near the ceiling of Ben-Gurion International. Somewhere down below there was all this Hebrew, and all these guards, and a voice calling me, “Sharon!” I didn’t even realize who it was there calling my name. “Sharon!”