Antoine was famously raised under glass
By scholarly Vern, who was not the ass
Hat his arch, defaming disavowers
Would have us believe, neither the lime-sour
Professor-type wrought in magazine blurbs
Or gossip, spread through all the Main Line burbs,
Tattle that always croned poor Antoine's fate
Cooked under glass like a fresh dinner plate
In a bubble that was Skinnerian
(Vern Archer's mentor and MIT friend,
Who formulated the Archer creed
That sense not brains is what the species needs).

"They called me a monster, but the trouble
In my brain that leads to seeing double
Is some spurious wiring defect
That causes a revolt when I detect
The mere potential for serenity,
A randomly prolonged sobriety,
Like bleak, curtained opacity to me,"
Said Antoine with a hint of irony,
"Obscuring insights I would cultivate,
The artist's edge which plainly aggravates
The raw nervous system apparatus
Of my anxious soul (whatever that is)."

Did a laboratory misfire fix
Forever in young Antoine's tocks and ticks
A misplayed beat, an improv out of jazz
To wrench the inner clockwork of the lad's?
That any unmade hour perceived he cursed
If not it come with toasts and sweet desserts,
Was more like fable's fare than reportage,
What followed Paul Bunyan in the forest:
To calculate behavior so closely
Is to discount what we know already:
That life's true motives are unknowable
And why you do a thing ineffable.

One metaphor is "the face is a mask,"
But "What does it cover?" is rarely asked,
Which implies that consciousness forms itself,
That it's conjured out of nothing, do tell.
Our putative immortal soul, this word,
Batting in the brain like a wounded bird,
Skinner repealed as folksy axiom
As wholesale bunk, if you would aks-y 'im,
And demanded psychology rely
On the empirical facts that surely
Science is predicated upon, or
Stop calling yourselves its darned professors.

Vern controlled his son's sensory inputs
Better to measure what he intuits,
And noted that language and fine motor
Skills proceeded apace without grosser
Frills, concoctions of Romantic dreamers,
Imposters like Freud, and snake oil schemers,
The Id, the Ego, and Superego
Divvying up the colored Legos
Of the cranial, Rube Goldberg-style churn,
A scheme as daunting as Japanese porn.
Of Ziggy, Vern said, "All that psych traffic--
The science fails but I dig the graphics."