Learned: extreme explorations of mind and body

Set in the 90s, alternating between the storied quads of Oxford University and the dank recesses of London pubs given over to public displays of queer BDSM, Learned (Book Hug, 2002) chronicles poet and Rhodes Scholar Carellin Brooks’ extreme explorations of mind and body. 

I spent three years at Oxford University, and in some sense I felt like being there raised a ghost that I could never lay. A friend likes to joke that I’m the only person he knows who’s been terribly disadvantaged by having a Rhodes Scholarship, and like most jokes, the sally contains a kernel of truth.

When I left Oxford I left my unfinished degree behind and tried to, as they say in modern parlance, move on. But my crappy ex, er, the dreaming spires, continued to disturb my dreams. I’d find myself back there, trying to live in another student room, only this time with, say, a grizzling baby in tow. In the dreams, my circumstances were so manifestly unsuited to the task of succeeding as a student that even I could see the dissonance. When I woke, I’d wince in recognition: the situation may have been novel, but my feelings were all too familiar. 

Finally, I capitulated to the all-too-obvious proddings of my unconscious. With a sigh of resignation I dusted off my long-abandoned D.Phil., defended my thesis, and actually got my degree. I imagined that once I’d completed this bit of business, and a bizarre one it was, I could finally leave Oxford behind. Nope. 

Out of options, I began to write. My subject became the dichotomy between the queer life I lived in London, and the scholarly life I lived in Oxford: two sides of the same coin, as it were. Because as much as my London life seemed to be about rule-breaking, transgression, and deviance, it actually was as rule-bound and stiffly conformist as the life of the mind Oxford tried to instil in me. 

How could this be so? How could a life of the body in which we explored our own and each other’s limits, tried out all sorts of new sensational practices (I won’t go into detail here – read the book), took each other to public parks and the darkrooms of gay pubs newly opened to lesbians and so forth, be in fact as much bound by codes of conduct as we were (temporarily, of course) by ropes and chains? How could the beauty of these strictures, the virtual and the real, be so apparent both in the reading room tucked away at the top of the Radcliffe Camera and in the room at the tavern where the two women waited?

I tried to tease out the answer, and to play with the question itself, in a series of counterpoint poems describing by turns, say, my adventures with the guy who led the Dungeon 101 class, and with my moral tutor. Did I employ poetic licence? Of course. I fully admit to making up the latter and his uniquely British put-downs:

Regrettably so often you Americans–

But, I sputtered, rose in my turn–

murmured

fundamentally lacking

I’m not going to make more than a modest claim for a book described as an “intimate education.” I’ll just say I learned a lot at Oxford, some of it even intentional. And now I can sleep at night.