Moon Dance. Brooke Biaz

who was so often torn up with rivalry that he turned entirely to vapor, sang: “He’s Einstein disguised as Robin Hood.” And everyone knew exactly what he was talking about.

      Out our gate, up along the Vale escarpment, past the red box in which he’d conducted one-sided conversations, past the black sandstone overhang from which the effect of letters had been judged and along whose trail an undergraduate had made discoveries de le espirit and formed opinions unchallengeable, past a spring bunya bunya pine, a tree that was leathery, needled and grey, and in which had been read The Puberty Rites of Savages by Reik, Gates of the Dream by Roheim, Catch 22 by Heller, The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills, Burning Water by Sejourne, The Tin Drum by Grass and Wells’s The Present Crisis in Human Affairs to name just a few, library tickets stuck like blossoms between pineapple-shaped cones; finally to begin his descent into the world of many colored earthmovers, competitively moving dirt from high spots to low while the Federal Treasurer is saying “What a boom we’re having this year!” and the provision of the narrow, tar-smelling pipes of Metropolitan Water, Sewage and Drainage into which Mr. Beckett’s own future was going to be channeled, along soon-to-be-kerbed streets where unborns were being conceived nightly by senior clerks of the Bank of South Steyne and junior partners of the soliciting firm of Oppenheimer und Oppenheimer—embryos like seeds sown for some groovy crop of Iochief sweet corn! And . . . and then down to school, to park a navy blue DeSoto beside the red Speedwell bicycle of the Principal . . . and there, to cast his mind back to a night on a beach when a bright, diaphanous light shone down on him, leading him blindly to a kikuyu verge and covering him like dew. Salt-laden. Sweet. Toppling him into whitewater and flipping with him like a porpoise. Taking from him one thing while (though he could not be sure any of it had happened) simultaneously giving him another. . . .

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      So, you’re wondering, did young Siemens Roszak have diaphanous Daffodil Trymelow on his mind when he looked up at the bright tin roof of South Steyne’s tropical schoolhouse and said out loud: “Self-sufficiency will be found to belong in an exceptional degree to the exercise of the speculative intellect”?

      He was not thinking, after all, of six year old Alice Bull, sweet sweet carrot-top, who was inside the schoolhouse watching the Principal draw a detailed map of the ancient conquests of Julius Caesar.

      Was it Daffodil Trymelow’s perfectly round face he was imagining when he opened the DeSoto’s door and smelt the leather of government issued pommel horses and continued: “Unhappiness consists in the excess of desire over power. A conscious being whose powers equal his desires is absolutely happy”?

      And it isn’t over yet because it seems that, after having spent twelve months stoking the bibliophilic fires of his undergraduate desire, he was overcome with generally desirous emotions and unable to prevent himself running off at the mouth . . .

      “Supreme good is not authority but freedom. With the many restrictions imposed on children by their own weakness it is barbarous for us to add subjection to our caprices toward the natural selection, and take from them such limited liberty as they possess.”

      Fighting words to my freaking ears and . . . Man look! these words are having another effect. Down below. In his corduroys!

      (‘Disgusting!’)

      No no! sweet babaloos, you’ve heard of the seven wonders of the world, well the eighth is the power of words and images to bring about physical changes. After all, the following phenomenon owed a great deal to the National Defense Education Act of 1958. Remember, too, that it was DeSoto (the man rather than the automobile, but nevertheless . . . ), Hernando deSoto who believed in the poetry of action, dressed in hidalgo steel and carrying lances and that he followed the example of Ponce de Leon who named Cape Canaveral and thus was in some way responsible for the formation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; and that, led by the fictions of a Carib girl, he set out to discover a fountain famed for renovating old age. Recall at that time: the speeches of the National Student Association, the Students for a Democratic Society, SNCC, CORE, and the letters of the Education Senator McCaughley who would shortly forward a request to Mrs. Lucille Trymelow, dictated on paper with a lion crest rampant, asking that she “Desist!” in her plans to subvert the education of minors. Using words in an ascending order of erudition: “Wicked!” “Unprincipled! “Iniquitous!” and “Nefarious!”

      But first, the story of a doctor who wasn’t a doctor, and then . . .

      “In my school there will be no theory of morals, there will be no such subject, and there will be no one appointed to teach this theory or obliged to communicate it to the children according to a given Program. Ummmm, because the basis of discipline is exactingness without theory.”

      So what Daffodil Rosa was causing to happen in Siemens Roszak’s underwear was spontaneous and purposeful. Nothing could have led him to propose what he did without the addition of substantial physical change. There was a need—trust an eyewitness—a need for adjustment to the extraordinary conditions. No virginal outlook could have sustained us through those times, from the first sound of Mr. Barry Goldwater marching before the shiny brass band of the Birch Society to Sergeant Pepper floating before the mantra of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, (Goldwater, that is, who wore glasses without lenses and thus had a metaphysical understanding of the character of politics); from Floyd Patterson, heavy-weight Champion of the Whole World, taking the title in the fifth, to a champion who refused to fight, holistically, at all: the butterfly, the bee, our man Muhammad Ali. The moment was pendulous. What was needed for the growth of all concerned was simultaneous, passionate alteration. . . .

      “Because education can have no means beyond itself. Its value derives from the principles and standards implicit in it. What is required is not feverish preparation for something that lies ahead, but to work with precision, passion and taste at worthwhile things that lie at hand.”