I took a speech class once with a boy who once said the word "Pyscho-Cybernetics" and we never let him live it down. It was 12th grade, so likely 1985, and the class was taught by Ernie Gulner.
He was the sort of oddball teacher -- young, bearded and showily eccentric -- that you usually only find in films about visionary instructors who transform the lives of their young students. Gulner had a wild sense of humor and somewhat bullying mannerism, and he was about as likely as any teacher I have ever met to make a student cry, but a percentage of his students fell passionately in love with him and worked to please him.
Gulner had been my English teacher in Junior High School, and seemed to take an interest in me, which I found exhausting. Any time a teacher decided I was capable of more than I was providing, it developed into a problem. Parent-teacher conferences followed, and behind them new plans. Perhaps I might be encouraged toward better grades with the help of different goals, or different rewards, or tutors.
To Gulner's credit, he seemed to sense that this wasn't especially helpful to me, but instead overwhelming, and he backed off. He remained cordial and supportive, and I think I managed a relatively decent grade in his class, honestly earned.
For whatever reason, this speech class, years later, was far more interesting. I proved to have a thankfully effortless talent for it, bashing out speeches the night before the class that were generally seen as quite good. I also got in the habit of being uncomfortably intimate with my speeches, discussing things that pained or embarrassed me, riffing up old wounds and detailing them in front of the class.
This seemed like a bit of a trick to me -- discussing these subjects was relatively effortless to me and felt more like a performance than an act of intimacy. But it got me good grades, as it seemed to be the sort of thing Gulner liked.
Other students likewise discussed personal, intimate elements of their lives, including the poor young man I introduced at the start of this. I don't recall his name, but I remember him being a mild, kind, clean-cut young man who managed to be friendly without striking me as especially interesting. I was, nonetheless, friendly in return, in the way that boys sometimes are, in the sense that I felt license to sometimes be a little mean to him.
He had a memorable voice -- deep and strained, with elongated vowels and pinched consonants. In fact, he sounded like Kermit the Frog, who I already could do a pretty good impression of.
In one class, this young man rose to the front and produced a book. "Psycho-Cybernetics," he said, reading its name to a few astonished giggles. The name was odd, and, delivered with that voice, unexpectedly hilarious.
But the young man told of struggling when he was younger, until he father bought him the book as a gift. He had read it and it gave him tools he needed to make welcome changes in his life. It had helped him decide what sort of person he wanted to be, and then helped him to become that person. It was a book he returned to, because we all struggle now and then, and the book helped him when he struggled.
The discussion made me quietly uncomfortable. If I were to guess, I would guess that I saw something of myself in that story. I also struggled, and also looked for help in books -- I had gone through a variety of self-help books, many of them embarrassingly new age-y.
Despite my self-honestly shtick, I would never have felt comfortable standing up in front of the class and admitting that I frequently read Richard Bach's "Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah," in which the author of "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" tells a tale of an enlightened man who quietly works as a barnstorming pilot.
I knew there was something enormously flaky about Bach's writing, and so it was a guilty pleasure. The book comforted me somehow, perhaps in its suggestion that the world is illusory, and that the things that make the biggest demands on us -- grades, as an example -- aren't merely unimportant, they are entirely artificial. That one can make a life for oneself doing something odd and fascinating and be satisfied with that.
Psycho-Cybernetics sounded worse. It sounded like the same sort of flaky, but packaged for overachievers. Instead of revealing the world to be an illusion, it seemed like it showed us how to modify ourselves to work best in the illusion, how to be the perfect manufactured human in a frustrating and senseless construction.
And so, because the young man sounded like Kermit the Frog and I could impersonate Kermit the Frog, and because Psycho-Cybernetics is a funny pairing of words, I spent the rest of the year saying those words in a Kermit the Frog voice.
I did this in front of my friends, who thought it was hilarious, and I did it in front of the young man, who didn't seem especially bothered by my impression. I dismissed the book as just another self-help fad, albeit one with an especially weird name, and didn't bother to think about it any more.
In general, I became increasingly uncomfortable with self-help, which seemed increasingly shallow, a con artists' version of real spiritual seeking or genuine psychotherapy.
And my interest in these sorts of books felt like it represented me as a flake, which I did not want to be. It's still how I see the self-help movement, as a way unscrupulous confidence men can shake money out of frustrated flakes, and I am not entirely unjustified in this. The world of self-help is rife with abuse, because nobody is easier to take advantage of than someone who is unhappy.
But I am also not entirely justified in this either. Whether or not the world is an illusion no longer strikes me as a useful question. Whatever this world is, I live in it. Like most of us, I don't think I am entirely successful at doing so. I think there are enormous, exhausting demands placed on us every day, and most of us are fighting a hard battle, as John McLaren is supposed to have said.
McLaren is supposed to have followed that statement up with a single suggestion: Be kind.
I was not kind to the young man who opened up to the class about his struggle, and how he had found something that helped him with it. I was also not kind to myself, wriggling with shame that I might also be fighting a battle and needed help.
Worse still, I wasn't even rejected the idea of self-help. I just turned into a self-help snob, recasting myself as a spiritual seeker rather than someone just looking for simple tips about getting along in this rough world.
And so I will begin this project with "Psycho-Cybernetics." Because that young man with the froggy voice said it helped him, and he seemed okay. Maybe it did help him to be okay. If it managed that, then who am I to be a snob about it?
