Teacher Training

(memoir of an experiment at university, 1972)

Fortunate in those favoured years that teachers were needed
and males being given preference, I skidded in.
First of my family to go to Uni, I was failing Psych.
To circumvent shame I took the offer: for marks I’d be a lab rat.
A test of first year males assessed I was of that unusual subset—
the submissive type—a promising field for study. A PhD tilted there.
Gender was the “variable”. The “she” was white-coated,
goggled in heavy-frame spectacles, a clipboard like a shield.
Unspeaking, sexless, her hair drawn back, disembodied as a numeral.

A learning experiment. A flip of a coin. And I became the teacher.
You beaut! We’d been told—pain was involved. Strapped
to a chair a fellow student and I had been given a dose of it.
Writing now I feel it between my ears, two needles of white noise
“zrring”, ripping like supersonic aircraft, like the fibres in muscle tearing,
then numb. The dull afterlife of pain. The erasure of before.
For every slip he made a dial was pressed, pain was given.
And a cry that could only come from the little cell of a torturer broke
out of the intercom as if, like a rat, it were the only thing which could escape.

Didn’t I stop? Only once, and was told curtly, “Continue”.
And did, right to the top of the scale, till the voice came
I shall not forget, “You fucking, fucking bastard,
I’ve tossed the earphones off.”
                                                  She left, without a word.
“Why had I continued?” her colleague quizzed.
They needed to know. Was it sex or the white coat?
“Why?” I could only babble, well, it was the university.
That place our family glimpsed from the top deck of a bus,
the kind of scented gardens our kind were unlikely to enter.

My “student”? He was fine, replaced at the last moment
by another of the research team. He laughed lightly and left.
                                                                They signed me off.
I stumbled into the midday sunshine
and had to grip the railing of the stairs.

I remember two long-haired boys, one so softly-curled and glossy
and a spunk of a girl, her jeans moulding her bum, come laughing,
noisily, into the refectory. They seemed blessed like angels. Ageless, free.
I was sick in the sickness of knowing. I was weeping.
I was Judas. I was damned.

Failing that test I got the marks and passed that year.
I failed that day. And for most of a life
have not needed a mirror to know
how the “I”, this “I”, is piss-weak.
I learned what any small-time Nazi has learned
and learns to live with; how cruelty is, just is,
just floating there beneath the skin;
how trade between humans is between the eyes,
the averted look. In a blink, the knowledge of one over another.
Sex is a variable, alright; power though is the heart of everything.

What had that student wanted to learn?
I hope she put it to good use.
I wept. And folded it into me.
And made a black cave there.
And ache still.
                        For that desexed boy, for the girl
who never knew and became his wife;
for the sickness I now know is in us all,
that given any chance the joy of the knife
in the instant of pain, that delicious control,
however slight, is there.
It is the frantic scrabbling up, over, away
from weakness, submission, the mortality
which frightens us—like animals rearing,
trampling those already fallen in a race.