Flunk. Start. by Sands Hall

Author:Sands Hall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2018-03-13T04:00:00+00:00

every sorrow in this world comes down to a misunderstood word

The Course Supervisor finished up with the student he’d been helping and headed toward me.

“Hello there,” Tim said. “You’re late. Let me show you around.”

The course room appeared to in fact be three rooms. In one, people studied quietly at tables. In another, students sat opposite each other. Some had their eyes open, some closed. “This is the practical course room, where you apply what it is you’re studying,” Tim said. “Those students are doing what are called the TRs: Training Routines.”

I nodded, proud I could indicate that I knew what those were.

At a nearby table, a student was using an e-meter while asking questions of a student opposite, who, moving the limbs of a large doll that he held in his lap, answered using a doll-like voice.

“Those two are getting ready to audit each other on Method One,” Tim said, and gestured to a man and a woman sitting at another table, an open course pack between them. “And Fran is doing what’s called a ‘spot-check,’ making sure Rob understands a bulletin.”

We paused to watch. The woman pointed to a word, and Rob seemed to answer to her satisfaction. She asked something that made him spill the contents of a little basket onto the table: pennies, a ChapStick, an empty spool, a matchbook.

“That’s a demo kit,” Tim said.

Again I nodded, to let him know that I was already savvy about demos. Which is exactly how this noose of practice—the vocabulary (nomenclature), the drills, the sense of being one of the elect—is designed: to tighten slowly but surely around you.

“One of Hubbard’s three barriers to study,” Tim was saying, as we watched Rob manipulate a cork and a paperclip, “is what he calls ‘lack of mass.’ Demos allow us to add ‘mass’ to what can sometimes be abstract ideas. Let me show you the Clay Table Room.”

I followed him through the busy, productive-seeming place, and paused on the threshold of a third, smaller room. Tables ran along three of its four walls. On the tables was clay. Bricks and chunks of it, which students rolled between their palms and shaped with their fingers, creating all kinds of little clay figures, gesticulating with little clay arms.

“Wow,” I said.

Tim nodded. “When you have to build a concept out of clay, it becomes really clear really fast whether you understand it.”

A student turned in her chair. “Could you check this out, Tim? I’m demoing ‘motivator.’”

“This is Joann,” Tim said as she stood. “Joann is on HQS, the Hubbard Qualified Scientologist course.”

I offered a quick smile, wondering how anyone could or would sign up for a course with that name. What did it mean to become a “qualified” Scientologist? I almost shuddered.

Tim slid into the chair Joann had vacated. “Sands is starting the PTS/SP course.”

“I did that one,” Joann said. “It’s very useful.”

Leaning in, Tim began to study the array of clay figures that took up half of one of the long tables. “I see a mother carrying a little boy.

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