Examine THIS

 

Rite of Examination
 
During the three years full-time residence between
my masters  and Phdegreed, I reduced all course
lectures as well as Spiller's massive Literary History
of the United States to a shoe box full of flip cards
which I turned to memorize & test myself sitting
in a web lawn chair next to rambling muskrats in a
small stream running through Poplar apartments during
the summer of ’68 before my  preliminary  exams: that
series of oral and written inquisition pre- venient to
writing  a dissertation, my original contribution to
human knowledge.         .
 
At the end of that hot southern August, I walked
away from an interrogation by a  circle of
disciplinary elders with tears of  postponed
joy in my eyes. A myn. May I have an
Amen.
 
A year later, successfully defending my idiosyncratic
reading of Hawthorne's literary canon of novels and
short stories, I celebrated at a Durham steak house
with my cardio-vascular brother -in-law and his neuro-
surgical neighbor who called me Doctor Scoville
again and again all night long--
 
       "More  wine for Doctor Scoville.”
             “Some of that Ground Pepper, please,
                               for Doctor  Scoville.”
      “Doctor Scoville would like more
                  yeast rolls, please.”
                          Doctor Scoville THIS &
                              Doctor Scoville THAT.
        “The check, yeah: 
                        Doctor Scoville'll take it.”
 
 In some “primitive” tribes
(Gregory Bateson writes in
Steps to an Ecology of Mind), 
boys & girls go thru right
passages where presbyters
in scary masks dance &
threaten the novices unti
l—all done— the masks
come off & the newbies get
to put them on--do some
threatening dances of their
own.  
 
Jeanne Sommer  is correct: neither subject matter nor
content of examination,  (forgotten as soon as released).
counts.  Something else. More like religion.  A
“binding back” to the source. ("My yoga is
easy," says Jesus.}