Читать книгу August - Romina Paula - Страница 13

7.

Education as formative. Hours and days and years in institutions; lots of long hours per day and not much aside from that. Education. Inhibition. How they work. Together. One at the root of the other. Being afraid, fearing. And, at the same time, wanting to steal your friend’s boyfriend. Wanting to tempt him with a fruit—from which tree? On the playground—of which school? One of those with the fruits like cotton that comes in a double shell that closes over itself. The silk floss tree? Is that silk floss fruit? Or what is it? Is it the fruit of the green silk floss’s pink flower and spikes? From one of those two-story schools with the hundred-percent-cement play area, perfect for knees. And fear, after. Fear of the teacher, above all, of authority. Fear of them kicking you out? Of them calling you out? Pulling you aside? Getting set apart? Maybe most of all that they will call you out on it. A past of insolence, an initial becoming insolent. I’ll do what I want to do, I’ll do what I want to do, I’ll do what I want to do. A first act of insolence or challenge to authority or lack of recognition of hierarchies, punishments with switches. By force: force of words, of order. Threats. Of what? With what? When they say: what you’re doing isn’t right. Not only that, but also: it’s wrong. When who knows what—in a human being—is actually wrong.

Like in that article about the big serial killers, vicious, greedy murderers. One of the examples was Ted Bundy, a very smiley person, suntanned, such a go-getter; another was that old couple who killed children in England. What were their names? Point being, in the article there were these specialists who said how there’s a certain grade of wrongness that will not fit into any psychological framework, that is of some other order, unclassifiable: pure wrong. Unadulterated wrongdoing. It was kind of like they were freaking out about it a little bit, these psychologists; they didn’t even want to get into religion or morality, which would lead nowhere. They talked about psychopaths, some who’d end up killing, others not, and of course some of those serial killers are not even psychopaths. And there was a kind of scale they’d developed that went from one to twenty-one in order of severity to calibrate the degree of cruelty shown by the killer to the victims. After that I wondered how psychology positions—where, how—death itself, a person’s own death, I mean. One’s own death. What place it holds in the brain, in the mind. A person dying for him- or herself, an intransitive. The reflex of a person’s death, the reflexive act of dying, dying as reflex. Dying is therefore reflexive. I guess that’s something.