Lubricating With The Graduate Record Exam

By David Luntz

An old man’s eyes once filled my mouth with sadness.
In college I read a book about the whaling industry in New England.
The old man was dead.
The taste of his eyes remained.
I didn’t really like the whaling book.
It taught me that the old man’s eyes were widow’s walks.
They’d gazed out at an unseen horizon for a ship’s mast that never appeared.
It’s strange his sadness should exist beyond his passing.
Or that it should become mine.
Or that people we forget about can dream about us.
I shouldn’t think about such things.
I have an important test tomorrow.
The Graduate Record Exam.
I’m flipping through some practice questions.
They’re about neurodivergent and non-heteronormative scientists of yore.
I’m on my seventh blunt.
I’ve smoked a brick of toad venom.
The exam’s practice questions bore me.
I’m reformulating them.
I’m posting them on Insta.
I don’t give a fuck.

1. The 17th century polymath Sir Francis Bacon advocated for the experimental method in his masterwork Novum Organon by stating: “Nature must be bound to the rack in order to reveal her secrets.”

Based on the above, was Bacon suggesting:

(a) Nature must be tortured into confessing climate change is a hoax?
(b) He co-authored Discipline and Punish with Michel Foucault?
(c) Violent delights will have violent ends?
(d) He moonlighted as a Dom?

2. Towards the end of his career, Sir Isaac Newton was appointed Master of the Royal Mint. In this capacity he often went undercover to taverns, bordellos, and other venues of ill-repute to gather intelligence about the numerous counterfeiting rings debasing the circulation of gold and silver within the United Kingdom.

Based on the foregoing, which would it be reasonable NOT to infer about Isaac Newton:

(a) He had a penchant for rent boys, cheap beer, and glory holes?
(b) He was bullied in high school?
(c) He was really trying to learn how to tax evade?
(d) None of the above?

3. Sir Isaac Newton explained the phenomenon of wave interference by studying tidal charts taken from the indigenous Tonkin Gulf riverboat pilots by The British East India Company. (The Tonkin Gulf is located off of Southern China.)

Suppose someone tweeted the above fact. Would it be an example of:

(a) Orientalism, othering, and cultural appropriation?
(b) Implying Isaac Newton’s imperial mind was wholly colonized by the Global South?
(c) Sealioning Isaac Newton stans on Twitter and looking to get ratioed?
(d) Exposing Isaac Newton as the true author of Gravity’s Rainbow?

4. The eminent 18 th century French scientist Comte de Buffon predicted an impending catastrophic ice age due to the massive deforestation of Europe. The 18th century economist Thomas Malthus warned about imminent global starvation as birth rates exceeded the available food supply. The astronomer Sir Isaac Newton spent most of his scientific career studying The Book of Daniel in order to calculate the exact day and hour of Christ’s arrival back on earth.

Based on the above, which one of the following statements would be deemed most credible:

(a) Every generation suffers from an “It’s the end of the world” syndrome?
(b) Facts are on the wrong side of history?
(c) Dialectical materialism and the four stages of history expounded by Marxism have been
vindicated?
(d) The United States violated the “cruel and unusual punishment” clause of the constitution by exposing children to Wonder Bread?

5. By only using historical examples of privileged, neurodivergent, non-heteronormative white European cisgender males in questions 1-4, the drafters of this exam have outed themselves as:

(a) A controlled opposition of tankies who would have gladly supported the Soviet Union during its brutal suppression of the “Prague Spring” in 1968?
(b) A desperate cabal weaponizing language to prove they know why the caged bird sings?
(c) Useful idiots symptomatic of late-stage capitalism, the decline of the west, and the tragedy of the commons?
(d) Suffering from the adverse effects of over-consumption of Wonder Bread?

Honestly not sure about all of this.
Maybe I’ll pass on grad school.
Maybe I’ll become a GRE tutor.
Maybe I’ll just keep getting high so I can stop thinking about that old man’s eyes.

Work is forthcoming in or has appeared in Post Road, Hobart Pulp, scaffold, trampset,  X-R-A-Y Lit, Maudlin House, HAD and other print and online journals. More at davidluntz.com Twitter: @luntz_david