Marvin was a vole whose name was often misspelled.
His misadventures were the stuff of bedtime story legend.
His species was a misspelling as well.
As a small mammal, fear was the great teacher.
Eventually, fear became impulse.
Impulse became instinct.
Instinct became a training program for other misspelled little creatures.
But fear was still a better teacher.
The training program was not effective.
The cats ate well of the graduates.
Or murdered and left behind.
And the teachers wondered what was going wrong.
Their analysis of their own escapes was impeccable.
Their methods continued to work.
Marvin was heading up a research project to understand why the training was failing.
It turned out that "to study" was a way of dulling the direct experience.
The gap between action and input widened to an unacceptable distance in the notes in notebooks.
Listening, processing, reflecting, and regurgitating was an unworkable method for physical action development.
And so Marvin did the best thing he could think of to improve the education of his fellow critters.
The school was disbanded and Marvin stopped teaching escape.
For fear is like love.
It cannot be experienced through someone else's experience.
And the connotations and valuations around both do not do much beyond stiffening the body.
So the voles ceased to speak.
Living many flourishing years of love and escape.
But they could not then pass down the warning against words.
And so one day not so many years down the road,
a school was once again opened.
Roman Ryan 