Sophia’s Third Letter

* * *

Sabina is probably right. By the time of Ron’s trial I had already made my choice. But I don’t think either you or Sabina are right about the nature of that choice. I don’t think I chose between Ron and what you call “pedagogy.”

I certainly didn’t choose “pedagogy” in the conventional meaning of that term. That kind of pedagogy didn’t appeal to me at all. The people I admired — you, Luisa, Nachalo, Sabina, Ron — had never even finished high school. George Alberts was the only pedagogue I had ever been close to and I couldn’t stand him. Maybe Luisa was a type of pedagogue too. I understand what you mean in your letter. But I can’t apply it to my own life. During my last year in high school I didn’t see Luisa the way you describe her. Nor did I choose between Ron and Luisa. If I rejected Ron at that time I rejected Luisa as well. I rejected the prospect of spending my days in a factory dreaming of the day when the general strike would put an end to wage labor. It was precisely the experiences and hopes I had learned from Luisa that made me permanently unable to accept the boredom, the scheduled routine, the supervision and the submission.

I rejected both Ron and Luisa but I didn’t affirm official “pedagogy.” I didn’t challenge Ron’s observation that the greatest scientists, engineers and artists were in reform school. I knew already then that great literature wasn’t created by textbook writers or experts in creative writing, that great discoveries weren’t made by the bureaucrats called researchers, that revolutions weren’t carried out by academics who dreamed of governing society the way they governed their classes. Ron, the high school dunce, was more perceptive and resourceful than I was ever going to become. And in terms of sheer information, Sabina already then knew more than I was going to learn during all my years in college even though she hadn’t ever finished elementary school. She had pumped out of George Alberts every scrap of physics, chemistry and biology he had ever learned. She and Alberts had converted the entire second story of their house into a laboratory and a library. And then Sabina abandoned all that and joined “the greatest minds of the age,” minds capable of driving off with a brand new car in less than a minute in broad daylight on a crowded street. She spent several years living in an underworld that you seem to glorify abstractly. You characterize as “individual acts of rebellion” what to me looked like theft, constant fleeing and prostitution. Maybe I’ve always been as narrow as Luisa about this possibility. Sabina offered me this alternative two years after Ron died and I rejected it for the second time. Maybe I never really understood that alternative. All I do know is that at some point Sabina rejected it as well. Maybe I’m not as self-assured about my choice as I was then, but neither you nor Sabina have convinced me that the choice I made was wrong.

What I looked for wasn’t related to the official purpose of the university, although I admit I did have some vague hopes that by studying history and sociology I’d at least clarify my own and Luisa’s past experiences. The first few months of classes knocked those hopes out of me. About this, at least, I don’t disagree with you. State functionaries do see the world from their offices. All their textbooks and all their lectures celebrated the existing social order; the apparatus they called “knowledge” seemed to have been created expressly for the purpose of making the overthrow of the social order appear inconceivable. Everything I valued was considered dangerous and violent. I entered the university at a time when the normal barracks-like life of this medieval monastic institution was supplemented by modern forms of militarization. Numerous professors were directly in the pay of the armed forces. Whole branches of activity that had once been scholarly pursuits were transformed into weapons-development factories: physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, sociology and psychology. Instead of being taught to formulate questions, students were being bombarded with answers. Open apologists for capital and for the state treated their classrooms as pulpits from which to give sermons eulogizing the official religion. Students were brainwashed into believing the state’s enemies were their own enemies. Critics of every shade, even state worshipers of a different brand, were systematically prevented from speaking. Male students were actually recruited directly into the armed forces when they enrolled in the university; military training became another academic discipline. Several professors were fired for refusing to swear to serve the state unconditionally; all the professors who remained signed the oath; they swore to lie systematically, to distort and falsify whatever threatened the interests of the state. No, I didn’t go to the university because of anything it had to offer. I went there because I rejected Ron’s world and Luisa’s world, not because I saw a community in the military enclave that exists only to destroy community. I went there because I hoped to find others like me, others who had rejected what I had rejected. The community I wanted to find was a community of people whose choices were similar to mine. I looked for people with whom to shape meaningful responses to the world we rejected, responses which went beyond sheer opportunism for the sake of survival.

I made the mistake of moving into a dormitory, I stayed there for three months. It was the closest thing to prolonged imprisonment that I’ve experienced. I did learn to play pranks, but even then I couldn’t endure that regime of rules and regulations to which I had never in my whole life been subjected. I couldn’t afford to rent an apartment of my own. Then I found some women students who owned a house and ran it on a cooperative basis; those who could afford to pay less did more of the housework. I washed dishes and got free room and board.

My first friend was my roommate at the co-op, Rhea Morphen. I liked her very much at first, mainly because of how enthusiastic she was about me. I suppose you always like people who think a lot of you. She made me tell the story of my life at least a dozen times during my first few weeks at the co-op. The fact that my “mother” worked in an auto plant and supported me already recommended me to Rhea. She was even more impressed by the fact that my “mother” had never finished high school, that my “sister” hadn’t finished elementary school and that my “father” hadn’t ever spent a single day in school. Rhea’s perpetual comment was, “I don’t believe it!” But after a few weeks of being admired as such a perfect proletarian I got sick of her admiration and when I learned more about her I resented it. It turned out that she was a member of the same political church as Lem Icel, that she and Lem were friends, and that Lem was responsible for the fact that Rhea and I were roommates.

Rhea perfectly fits your portrait of the politician. Her world was populated by constituents and leaders. In her eyes I was a perfect constituent, a potential cadre, a potential rank-and-file leader, a full-fledged proletarian intelligent enough to understand the dialectic and to know how to interpret it to my fellow rank-and-filers. Her father was a lawyer who was later to become a city politician.

The part of my past I had failed to rid myself of was Lem. He was in one of my classes. It was from him that I learned about the co-op when I wanted to leave the dormitory. It was also largely because of Lem that I met the people who were to be my friends throughout my university years. Lem and Rhea more or less conspired to recruit me to their organization. It took me several weeks to figure out that I was a fly in a spider’s web. I got my first clue when, during one of Rhea’s admiration sessions, she commented, “You really have a highly developed consciousness; you see a lot of things the way we do,” implying that there were a few things about which I still had to be straightened out. I immediately asked her if she happened to know Lem Icel. The moment of silence before she answered gave her game away. When at last she said, “Yes, he’s a good friend of ours,” I knew she had known about me before I had moved to the co-op. She admitted she had lacked a roommate and I had sounded ideal; she asked if I minded. I really didn’t mind. I had hated the dormitory and I was glad to find new friends. Rhea’s friend Alec Uros visited her every other day and she invariably recited my proletarian virtues to him. Alec was at least as impressed as Rhea. He was another person to whom the daughter of a worker was as exotic as a Martian.

Ultimately their conspiracy backfired. Because of me their little university group fell apart. It would probably have fallen apart anyway, but not the way it actually happened.

Rhea was the “open” member of the organization. She attended all sorts of events and meetings where she announced her organization’s position on the topics under discussion. Alec and Lem were “secret” members. All three attended organization meetings, which were frequently held at Debbie Matthews’ house, but when Alec and Lem were asked if they were members they denied it. All three pressured me to attend at least one of their meetings merely in order to see what “wonderful people” they all were, but I invariably turned down the invitation, passing up my chance to meet all those wonderful people.

When he came to visit Rhea, Alec would tell us about his projects on the school newspaper staff. The more he talked about that, the more interested I became. He talked about professors who were being fired for refusing to sign the oath of loyalty to the state, about students who refused to take part in the military training program, about the latest speaker who had been banned from speaking on campus. He saw his role on the newspaper staff as that of a muckraker who exposed these infringements on the students’ right of speech and of assembly. He didn’t see any contradiction between his newspaper campaigns and his organization’s denial of all such rights. Alec’s naivete recruited me, not to his organization, but to his campaigns. This was a project I recognized; I wanted to take part in it. I joined the newspaper staff. So did Lem.

Yarostan, your letters inhibit me. No, I’m no longer angry. I’m frustrated. For twenty years I longed to tell you about myself, if not in letters then in a novel which was addressed to you even if it never reached you. I wanted to tell you about my life because I thought I’d lived up to what you might have wanted me to be. I looked at myself through what I took to be your eyes and I wasn’t ashamed. I was in fact somewhat proud of myself. Not altogether. I hadn’t taken part in the overthrow of the ruling system. But I hadn’t succumbed to it either. I hadn’t emerged unscathed but I wasn’t destroyed either. Unlike Luisa, I hadn’t sold my productive energy. Unlike Sabina, I hadn’t sold either my body or my soul. Until your letters challenged my self-evaluation I’d thought I had done rather well. My activity on that university newspaper staff was one of the high points of my story. I saw it as a continuation of activity I had once shared with you. Yet now that I can finally tell you about my little victories I feel embarrassed and inhibited. I can’t help seeing myself through the lenses you’re now wearing and I look ludicrous to myself. The very words with which I would have boasted about my activity are the words with which you ridicule it. If my desire to communicate and defend my insights and past experiences was pedagogy, then it was precisely the opportunity to engage in this pedagogy that attracted me to the newspaper staff. I think you go too far when you characterize every instance of such activity as an attempt to convert people to a religion. I understand the way your analysis applies to Lem, Rhea and Alec; I recognized them as missionaries of a repressive religion. I can even see how your analysis applies to certain aspects of Luisa’s relation to the world. But I don’t see how your analysis applies to me. To communicate a religion you need to have certainties and I never had any. At most I had past friends and experiences, but the answers those friends and experiences gave me in any given context were never clear. Even if I granted that your description of me was valid down to your characterization of my pedagogical activity as a type of missionary activity, I still wouldn’t see that I had chosen the worst of the alternatives available to me. In retrospect I’m still convinced that under the circumstances I did rather well, since I know what other alternatives were available to me. I’ve had a few chances to sample Luisa’s as well as Sabina’s alternatives. I might in time have reconciled myself to Luisa’s situation, but I couldn’t have retained the amount of energy she has managed to keep alive. I could never have been Sabina; I wouldn’t have survived either physically or psychologically.

In a way it’s ironic that you describe the activity I chose as a type of religious activity. I visited Luisa soon after I started to work on the newspaper. She had just been called to testify at an official inquisition; she was asked where she was from, what she had done, what she thought. Later she learned that the inquisition didn’t concern her but George Alberts. His turn had come to undergo the treatment to which he had subjected Debbie Matthews. George Alberts, the person I’ve always regarded as a model opportunist, was called a subversive and fired from his teaching job. (Don’t shed tears for him though; he immediately opened up some kind of research organization connected to the military and he again sold his talents to the same government that had just fired him.) When Luisa told me about that, I had the feeling that I was among the pitifully few people who were engaged in a struggle against the state religion and its inquisition. I saw myself as an atheist during a witch hunt aimed not only at people playing at being revolutionaries but even at totally unprincipled individuals like Alberts who had once in their lives been swept along by a revolutionary upsurge.

Some of my newspaper friends were devoted to a counter-religion as repressive as the religion we fought against, and they tried to convert me. Lem’s and to a smaller extent Alec’s goal was to convert all the students of the university to their form of state worship. But my approach, influenced by Luisa and by my experiences with you, was significantly different from theirs. I don’t think you can really characterize it as religious. Unlike Lem and Alec, I didn’t write articles about fired professors in order to prove that they wouldn’t have been fired if the counter-religion prevailed. I knew perfectly well that the professors would never have been hired in the first place if that religion prevailed. My sole aim was to describe the militaristic lectures, the banning of speakers, the firings of professors, and to let readers draw their own conclusions from the facts themselves. To me reality itself was so scandalous that I was sure numerous students would act as soon as they knew what the facts were. I was wrong, but not altogether. Several years later a large number of students did in fact respond to the scandal; that movement is today being drowned by variants of the religion then carried by Rhea and Lem. I didn’t only resist Rhea’s and Lem’s attempts to recruit and use me; by resisting them I helped mess up their other plans and ruin their minuscule organization.

The editor of the campus newspaper, Hugh Nurava, was a very mild-mannered, very middle-class student. I was immediately fascinated by him. The words he used most frequently were “responsible” and “fair.” He seemed convinced there were always two and never more than two sides to every question. The task of the “responsible” editor was to be “fair” to each of the two sides. Once Alec wrote an article on some students who had refused to swear to be loyal to the state; they were forced to march in a military parade in their street clothes; they looked ridiculous, even to their own friends, and everyone laughed at them. Hugh went out of his way to give equal space to the other half of the question. He interviewed a military “professor” and published, alongside Alec’s article, an equally long article depicting the dangerous and all-pervasive enemy against whose imminent invasion the uniformed students were protecting civilization. One time I wrote an article about a pacifist who was to speak in a university lecture hall but who was denied permission to speak in the hall just before the event was scheduled to take place. For the sake of “fairness,” Hugh telephoned the university administration and alongside my article he published the administration’s official statement that it was the university’s policy never to prevent anyone from speaking on campus since free speech was an indispensable condition for education The fact that one article flatly contradicted the other didn’t prove to Hugh that one of them had to be false; it convinced him that “the truth” lay “somewhere between the two extremes.”

The person on the next rung of the newspaper hierarchy was Bess Lach. She was the managing editor. She was the only person on the staff besides me who didn’t have a middle class background. I learned that her mother worked as a cleaning-woman for people who were managers in the plant where Luisa worked. Her father had run off when she was a baby. Yet although she was even more “proletarian” than I, neither Lem nor Alec took the slightest interest in her. It was impossible to communicate with her. She was literally a machine. I’m sure she was the best managing editor that newspaper had before or since. She read, measured, counted with the speed and precision of a computer. But whenever she opened her mouth she articulated a law. “Don’t, can’t, not allowed, against regulations” appeared in every statement she made. She had internalized all the written and unwritten codes of the state, the university, and while Hugh was editor she internalized the code of “fairness and responsibility” as well. Bess and Hugh went with each other when I met them. I can’t imagine what they could have said to each other and I never asked him. Perhaps by enumerating the regulations she familiarized Hugh with his “responsibilities.” I have to admit I wasn’t able to muster up any solidarity toward my fellow worker Bess.

The most bizarre member of the newspaper staff was Thurston Rakshas. He came from the very top of the social hierarchy and I’m sure that’s where he is again today. He considered himself superior to the rest of us in wit, knowledge as well as looks. He thought himself a humorist. He wrote a regular joke column which was in fact very clever and occasionally he wrote an article. I laughed whenever he said anything at all. He thought I appreciated his brilliant sense of humor. In fact I laughed at him. I thought his poses were ludicrous and hilarious. I had never been so close to a real dilettante, a genuine heir to the wealth wrenched from the labor of millions of wage workers. He never saw through me. Genuinely convinced that my laughter expressed appreciation of his wit, one day he asked me to accompany him to a dance which was going to take place several weeks later. I accepted his invitation immediately. In a flash I figured out this was my chance to slip away from the unwanted attentions of Lem as well as Rhea. I made it a point of announcing to everyone on the staff that I had accepted Thurston’s invitation to the dance.

My strategy was completely successful, but in ways I hadn’t expected at all.

When I told Rhea, she said, “I guess I overestimated your class consciousness.” That put an end to her admiration for her proletarian roommate. She never again asked me about the educational background of my “family.” And she never again asked me to join her organization.

Lem caught me late one afternoon when I was alone in the newspaper office typing an article. He sat down next to me and started to cry. “Are you actually going to go through with that?” he asked.

“With what, Lem?” I asked innocently.

“Are you going to go out with that reactionary, that exploiter of the working class?” he asked.

“He’s really a wonderful person when you get to know him, Lem,” I lied.

In Lem’s eyes I was “lost.” My strategy was an instant success; from that day on I no longer had a private missionary trailing me like a shadow. Lem retreated to Debbie Matthews and to his organizational meetings.

What took me completely by surprise was Alec’s response to my insincere flirtation with Thurston. Alec was jealous. He hatched a plot to “save” me from the claws of the “dangerous reactionary.” And in the process of working out his exquisitely designed plot he threw all of his political commitments overboard, spoiled the plans and projects of his organization, and created absolute chaos on the newspaper staff.

Alec didn’t confront me with the problem directly. In fact he took such a round-about approach that I didn’t figure out what he had done until several months later. His strategy was brilliant and like all brilliant strategies it led to completely unexpected consequences.

He began by breaking up his relationship with Rhea. He told her he was disillusioned with the organization and tore up his membership card in her presence. Rhea blamed me. She accused me of brainwashing him with reactionary arguments. I argued from the bottom of my heart that I’d had nothing to do with Alec’s disillusionment. I felt sorry for her. Little did I know then the place I occupied in Alec’s scheme. When I began to figure it out I silently moved into another room.

Alec’s “defection” from the organization and my deficiency as a “rank-and-file leader” left Lem isolated on the newspaper staff. To remedy this Rhea herself joined the staff.

After breaking up with Rhea, Alec formed a clique with Minnie Vach and Daman Hesper, the remaining two regular members of the newspaper staff. Minnie and Daman were members of a political sect which was indistinguishable from Lem’s organization in terms of its internal relationships but which considered Lem’s and Rhea’s organization the main evil that plagued humanity. I actually agreed with much of what they said. Many of their views even had a superficial similarity to views you’ve expressed in your letters. For example, they held that an organization of professional revolutionaries which claimed to liberate the workers would only enthralled them; they held that the workers’ revolution could only be led by the workers themselves. What I couldn’t understand then and still can’t now is how they viewed their own sect. They never tired of telling me that the role of their organization was not to lead the workers but to educate them. It never seemed to occur to them that the teacher is the one who leads, the student the one who follows.

Alec’s resignation from Lem’s and Rhea’s sect was a precondition for his alliance with Minnie and Daman. (If I refer to Minnie and Daman as a single person it’s because at that time they were like Siamese twins; Minnie formulated the arguments and Daman merely emphasized them.) Alec had a long talk with Minnie and Daman a few days after he broke up with Rhea. He told them he had finally been convinced by their arguments and had quit his organization; he proved this by showing them his torn membership card. He even attended a few meetings of their organization, although he later told me he didn’t agree with their organizational practices at all. As soon as he gained their trust, the three began to plan a series of articles which would systematically expose the bias of the education, the extent to which militarists and state officials dominated the university’s policies, the cowardice of administrators and professors, the apathy of students.

Every day one of them submitted exposures of the military curriculum, articles on fired professors, interviews with pacifists. Hugh couldn’t possibly keep up with “the other side” of all the questions raised in their articles. Consequently there was a lively confrontation in the newspaper office almost every day. Bess and Thurston argued that if the “other side” weren’t given equal space, the paper would become a propaganda sheet and that consequently the articles of Minnie, Daman or Alec should be suppressed whenever a rejoinder couldn’t be published with them. Hugh’s position wasn’t as clear as that. Committed though he was to publishing two sides to every question, he had yet another principle; no article should ever be suppressed. Since he couldn’t resolve the conflict between his two principles he would put the question to a staff vote. At first the result of the voting was that Minnie, Daman and Alec outnumbered Bess and Thurston because Hugh, Rhea, Lem and I abstained. As a result all their articles were published. The reason Lem and Rhea abstained was that they refused to be on the same side as Minnie, Daman and the “renegade” Alec. I abstained because, although I favored including the articles without views of the other side, my vote wasn’t needed for their inclusion. But this state of affairs didn’t last. On one occasion Minnie wrote an article which contained a critique of Lem’s and Rhea’s organization. From that day on, both Rhea and Lem formed a ludicrous bloc with Bess and Thurston and voted against the inclusion of every article written by Alec, Minnie or Daman, who were outnumbered four to three. I was forced to take sides. Of course I voted in favor of including every article without a rebuttal and as a result there was a tie: four in favor and four against. Tempers rose and cliques hardened. After one particularly heated exchange which took place only a few days before the dance to which I was to accompany Thurston, he very politely told me he would prefer not to go with me. I was relieved. Alec had known that sooner or later I’d take sides and at that point I’d clash with Thurston. I was no longer inhibited from openly joining the “clique.” But the ultimate decision as to whether or not to include the articles again depended on Hugh. He once again found a way to be fair to each of the two sides. He voted with us one day and against us the next, so that nearly every other one of our articles was suppressed. In spite of the exclusion of almost half of our articles I felt that my new friends and I were engaged in a virtual crusade to expose the repressive atmosphere of the university.

My acceptance of my new friends wasn’t unqualified. I rarely argued with Minnie and Daman. They were infinitely better informed than I and the convoluted sentences in which they couched their arguments intimidated me. Yet despite their erudition and their rhetorical talents I saw through their outlook; I thought it was a superficial version of Luisa’s. Their affirmation that working people were perfectly capable of running their own affairs seemed to be a mere slogan that neither Minnie nor Daman really believed. The workers’ ability to run their own affairs seemed to depend on their ability to learn this from Minnie’s and Daman’s organization. And they were convinced, believe it or not, that their sect had discovered that workers were able to run their own affairs, that their sect had discovered workers’ councils, and that their sect had discovered the reactionary character of the role of revolutionary politicians. Nachalo, Margarita and Luisa had learned all this from experiences they had lived; this knowledge had flowed in their blood; they had learned from painful counterrevolutionary wars how revolutionary politicians transformed the workers’ movement into a gang of government bureaucrats. To Minnie and Daman these painful experiences were nothing but phrases discovered by their sect only yesterday and not yet applied to their relationships with each other within their organization. I couldn’t respect them. But I did enjoy muckraking with them.

I accepted Alec with fewer misgivings. He was politically unformed. He had joined Rhea’s sect for the same reasons you said Manuel had joined his organization. Alec had been Rhea’s boy friend and had followed her into the organization on a date. When he became interested in me, he abandoned Rhea as well as the entire credo of her organization. After he left the organization he worked out a political potpourri consisting of Minnie’s and my observations couched in phrases he had retained from his earlier commitment. Alec had nothing at all in common with you or Jan Sedlak or Ron Matthews. But in spite of his naivete, perhaps because of it, I liked him a lot.

One night, a few weeks after I moved out of Rhea’s room, Sabina surprised me with a visit. She burst into my room at the co-op late at night. Alec had just brought me home. He and I had taken the paper to the printer’s that night; we had done all the last minute proofreading of galleys and shortening of articles. Sabina had waited outside for Alec to leave. I was dead tired and my head was filled with the day’s events. Minnie had submitted a very long interview with a campus general who had boastfully showed her the files he kept on all the students in the university. He classified students in terms of their degree of patriotism, from loyal to apathetic, disloyal, dangerous and subversive. The article was one of the biggest exposures of the year. Hugh had voted with the four of us to include the article.

I wasn’t glad to see Sabina that night. I knew that I had turned against her and Ron long before they had left me standing next to their bicycles. I knew that my hostility toward Sabina and Ron had been only partly motivated by the fact that they hadn’t trusted me at the time of the robbery. I knew that I had rejected Ron even before our excursion to the beach in the car Ron wrecked. This was very clear to me when I saw Sabina that night because I was then in the midst of the activities and friends I had hoped to find when I had first turned against Ron. It was clear to me that I had rejected Ron already when our relationship was at its peak, at the time of our earliest bicycle excursions. Ron had known that as early as I had. It had been as obvious to him as to me that he could no more take my path than I his, he would have suffocated in an atmosphere of petty quarrels couched in erudite language; he couldn’t have fought his battles on that terrain. Yes, Yarostan, I knew how early I had made the choice you describe. It wasn’t Ron’s terrain or Sabina’s. But I knew it was mine. It wasn’t all petty quarrels. By that night I had already fought some meaningful battles. I don’t want to exaggerate their significance, but I’m certain they were far more meaningful than any battles I could have fought on Ron’s terrain. As I studied Sabina, wondering why she had come, I didn’t regret having rejected their path; I couldn’t imagine anything socially relevant growing out of stolen cars. This was the only time I saw Sabina until I was expelled from college. The following morning I remembered her visit as a bad dream.

Sabina spoke like a robot. She looked past me and seemed not to care whether or not I heard her. “Ron is dead.”

“Dead! How? When?” I asked.

“You and George Alberts are responsible,” she droned.

I thought her coldness and her seeming indifference were symptoms of hysteria. I paid no attention to the accusation. I repeated my questions.

“Missing in action,” she answered. “They didn’t say when or how.”

“But when did he join the army?” I asked with disbelief.

“Air force. He signed up because of you,” she told me without raising her voice, without seeming to be aware that she was telling me anything extraordinary.

“Sabina!” I shouted. “I don’t understand!” I burst into tears.

“I didn’t think you would. But I thought you ought to know.” Saying that, she left as abruptly as she’d come. I cried, uncomprehending, until I fell asleep without undressing or washing.

The next morning Alec’s knock on the door woke me. He was annoyed. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked. “This is a hell of a day to oversleep.” We had intended to rush to the boxes where the papers were distributed so as to see how students responded to Minnie’s article. We spent the day interviewing students who were willing to express their responses to the article. Sabina’s visit and Ron’s death receded in my memory.