FROM THE V&B TIME CAPSULE​ -
       NONFICTION  -  A SELECTION FROM ISSUE 1 - FALL 2015

"I’m a night creature, so it’s not so odd that I’m writing
these words at three-twenty in the morning."

                                              Photo by Weebly.com                                    

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Nocturne  **
by  Don Plansky

I’m a night creature, so it’s not so odd that I’m writing these words at three-twenty in the morning.  Usually, around this time, I hear Jakki Brown pitter-pattering directly above me on the third floor.  But all is quiet.

I wouldn’t make a good character in a novel because I’m top heavy on reflection, light on action.  You’d have to be adept at internal monologue to find a place for me in your story; as for mine, I don’t think it can be told.  “When a man dies,” wrote Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “an unknown world passes away.”  Except for Joyce and his disciple Beckett, not many possess the genius and fortitude to transmute the vagaries of the wandering mind into art. 

I could serve as an observer of another’s story, commenting on the action, perhaps as the Authoritative Voice of the Narrator Who Sees All.  No, I don’t think so.  Better leave that to God.

I confess I’d be right at home in Samuel Beckett’s twilight world, where character, plot and action don’t matter:

“Vladimir: Well?  Shall we go?

Estragon: Yes, let’s go.

They do not move.”

But it isn’t thorny questions about point of view, plot and character that have brought me out of the bedroom and into the living room deep in the night.  Just three words:  Change precedes insight.

The ridiculous profusion of books in the living room threatens to expel me from my habitat. Even so, I know, more or less, where everything is. I push aside a tiered metal container, stuffed with envelopes and address stickers, and pick out, among the many books on the top shelf about the life of Jesus, The Founder of Christianity by C. H. Dodd.  I open the slim volume to the first page and read the imprint of the previous owner’s name: Dudley K. Yasuda. It was Dudley who said “Change precedes insight” some 45 years ago in a psychology class he taught at City College of San Francisco.

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I didn’t like Dudley, although I attended the services held at the college after he was murdered in his campus office.  This terrible event, which nearly shut down the college, took place 12 or 13 years after I had taken two psychology courses from him at the end of the 1960s.  Being one of those eternal students, forever taking courses, I was enrolled in Intermediate Piano at City College at the time of his death.  That’s how I knew about it.

I’d absolutely nailed the Brahms Intermezzo in A Minor, Op. 76, No. 7 the previous week.  As I played the final cadence, I was dreaming of a late blooming career as a solo pianist.  I glanced, expectantly, at Mrs. Isham.  “Don, I can’t tell whether you’re using a lot of rubato or just can’t keep time.”   

I know I attended the memorial services on campus because I remember one of Dudley’s students talking about his teacher’s love of football, especially the 49ers, who were, then, in the early 1980s, beginning what is known in the sports world as their “dynasty.”  That’s the only distinct memory I have of the services.

Dudley liked to poke around at the vulnerable places in the psyches of his mostly young, impressionable students.  He was like a fencer, alert to weaknesses in an adversary’s defenses, ready to feint, advance and thrust.  On the first day of his classes, he’d ask his students to stand up, face the class, one by one, and introduce themselves.  Advantage Yasuda as waves of anxiety filled the classroom.  The first time I wasn’t prepared, but for the second course I knew what was coming.  I was on guard. 

I purposefully sat in the first row near the door.  After a couple of students fumbled through their introductions, I stood up.  “I have no idea why I’m here,” I said.  “This is the third floor, isn’t it?  Growing Petunias for Pleasure and Profit?  Ornamental Horticulture?”  As the class burst out laughing, I glanced over at Dudley, who was only faintly amused. He preferred to catch you off guard.

I remember one time Dudley telling our class that when Jesus said, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do,” it was an illustration of Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance, a rationalization, not a transcendent gesture of loving one’s enemies.  I suppose he was just poking around at those impressionable young minds, a provocateur hoping perhaps to upset a believing Christian or two in the class.

I once went to Dudley’s office requesting that he write a letter in support of my petition to be a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War.  He refused to write the letter, claiming I was insincere.

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I have one memory I can’t quite put in context.  I went to his home one evening.  Why would a 19-or-20-year-old student go to his psychology professor’s home?  Was I there to argue about a grade?  Talk about a paper?  Wouldn’t it make more sense to see him in his office during school hours?  I’m sure it wasn’t about anything personal.

Dudley often liked to demonstrate that he could read your thoughts; he’d verbalize what he thought you were thinking.  I’m sure he did that with me at least once that night.  Suppose he hit the mark about some hidden part of a student’s life in one of his classes?  What might come of that?

For a while his office was in a temporary bungalow.  He chose, of all things, to post on his door a cover of an issue of Psychology Today magazine which showed a cocktail party in which the heads of the partygoers were replaced by guns.  He seemed to view human relationships as thinly disguised acts of mutual aggression.  A terrible foreshadowing of the way his life would be taken more than a decade later.

Relentless and public exposure of students’ vulnerabilities at a community college is a little like playing Russian roulette.  They are a microcosm of the population, some heading to four year colleges and universities, others struggling with remedial English and math, at least a few, no doubt, mentally unstable.

I do know this much.  I saw students wounded by his remarks, as I myself, on occasion, was.  I remember a burly black guy, Roger.  He played on the football team.  Dudley said he wasn’t aggressive enough to be a star.  Roger was hurt.                                                       

I decide to go to the PC in my study to see what I might learn of the crime that occurred more than 30 years ago.  I find a few newspaper accounts dated within a few days of the event, which took place on Monday, April 12, 1982.

Dudley was having one of his frequent informal seminars with eight of his students in his office around 11:30 a.m. The gunman, described as a Latin male, 5 feet 10 inches tall, about 215 pounds, walked into the office, pulled out a gun and, without saying a word, braced the pistol with both hands, and fired four shots.  Two of them hit Dudley, one in the stomach, the other in his chest.  The killer looked at the horrified faces of the students and fled.

The students immediately called 911.  Two of them administered CPR until campus nurses arrived on the scene.  The wounds were so grave that three nurses were needed to sustain Dudley’s life, trying to keep his airways clear.

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The college nurses remained with him as the ambulance, which arrived within seven minutes, sped off to San Francisco General.  He was still alive when the ambulance entered the hospital, but died within an hour of the shooting.  He was survived by his wife, Karen, and four children.

A psychiatrist had contacted both the school administration and Dudley weeks before the murder, warning them that one of his patients, a former student of Professor Yasuda, was threatening to kill him.  On at least one occasion, a man, presumably the murderer, had walked into the classroom during one of Dudley’s lectures.  After he left, Yasuda told his students it was the man who had threatened him.

There are some disturbing elements in these accounts.  Dudley is referred to as a “sort of guru” for many of his students.  Many wanted to be his “followers” and “revered him.”  Even the Chairman of the Department of Behavioral Sciences, Robert Manlove, is quoted as saying, “Many of [his students] virtually worshipped him,” although one of his former students, Dee Burtis, insisted Dudley shunned the attention.  “He would always say he didn’t want a lot of ‘Yasudaites,’” she said. 

Another student, Jerome Trupet, who had attended one of Yasuda’s classes hours before the shooting, remarked that, although he was not a racist, “he could be misinterpreted as being one.”  Burtis added, “He was really hard on Latins.”

After reading this last remark, I come upon the AP article which describes the arrest of 27-year-old psychiatric patient, Jose Luis Partida, a laborer, in a restaurant in the City’s Mission District, the evening after the murder.  A search of his home uncovered a jacket like the one the killer wore the previous morning and a .38-caliber snub-nosed pistol.  He was later positively identified by several of the students who witnessed the murder.

I wonder what Dudley might have said to Partida when he was one of his students.  “He was really hard on Latins.”  What does that mean?  Did Dudley publicly expose a psychic wound that led to his death?  Did he spin the cylinder of the revolver once too often?  Only one chamber needs to be loaded to lose your life.

In one of the newspaper accounts, his wife said that her husband often talked about the possibility of being shot.  “He always lived a life where he could be shot,” she said.  “He talked about the truth and he never stopped.  He taught about love and he lived the truth.”

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That’s not quite how I remember him.  My portrait would not be nearly so flattering.   Of course, the slim volume on the life of Jesus was not a gift from Dudley.  It was just a used book I happened to buy for one dollar some time after his death. I suppose his library had been sold off.   

It’s odd that Dudley’s words, “Change precedes insight,” had come back to me in the middle of the night in the midst of one of my interior monologues about the shape, or shapelessness, of my life.  No one can see the monologue, just the life.                      

Some of us are benign creatures, lost in nocturnal reveries among forgotten byways, searching, feelingly, for a way Home.  Others seethe with inarticulate rage.  The hammering inside won’t stop.  No word can assuage it.  Let them pass by.  Let them all pass by.  Only God, in His Infinite Mercy, if He exists, can touch and heal our innermost sorrows.

The slain professor’s three words, traveling across a vast gulf of time, arriving on this quiet night, may be all the wisdom you need to get by.  You poke along, doing your best, hoping, of course, that the story, your story, will, at long last, assume a recognizable shape, most likely when you’re not paying close attention.

“Change precedes insight.”  A gentle touch of Zen wisdom received, in gratitude, deep in the night.

** Editor's Note:   This story first appeared in Issue 1 of Vistas & Byways in the Fall of 2015.

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​Don Plansky was an active member of the OLLI at SF State interest group, the Writers Circle, for several years. He has also participated in many writer workshops at OLLI. In a former incarnation, he worked as a freelance journalist, contributing more than 200 articles to the Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, as well as book reviews for The Pacific World: Journal of the Institute of Buddhist Studies.

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