A SIDE
It is Friday, Oxalá‘s day, and it was luminous as befits Oxalá. Oxalá is known to be reserved and I say that if reserve adorns him well, it well adorns anyone who chooses it, especially on his day.
I was interviewed live on television this afternoon for town-and-gown reasons. I was asked a personal question. Not expecting it at all and caught off balance by the way it was framed, I did not deflect it, or give the formulaic response which was actually desired. I simply answered. The question was: “Before we discuss our topic, could you please tell us how you came to be a professor in our marvelous town?” Tears rolled down my cheeks and I spoke calmly and directly to the camera.
I do not mind having done this on television. I do mind having done so before some of the studio audience in attendance. I do not think it is valuable to unmask yourself for just anyone. I have considered and rejected the platitude according to which things that feel wrong, are actually right. I felt as though I were doing myself violence, and I think I did.
The other, and more important reason I did not like answering this question is that although the answer I gave is the most coherent one I have right now, I do not think any of the answers I have right now are true. The answer I gave is dark and simple, but it does not feel true. And I have considered and rejected the platitude according to which the darkest and most uheimlich of answers is the truest.
After television I had an invitation to gumbo and to the parades. I went to the gumbo, but not to the parades, because these particular Mardi Gras revelers are true Americans, and I would have to keep up the American banter. And as I spoke on television, I had a vision of Eurydice, falling back among the shades. And the Brazilian versions of the Orpheus legend are set during Carnaval.
And tomorrow there is a ball, but I would rather sit on a stoop and listen for Indians. And many people would like to be on television and go to balls, but I love being lost in a crowd.
FLIP
This is a hard town to live in, and a hard place to work. I am here as a result of a complex series of factors, involving some choices I made and a series of external factors which, for purposes of concision, I will call fate. I can explain but I find the discussion exhausting, first because repetition of things one already knows is dull, and yet moreso because people who ask questions have so many illusions of their own bound up in them.
Some struggle with the story: it cannot be, it does not fit my illusion. You did not experience what you experienced. Others lose their illusion, and need emergency palliative care for this. Dealing with either reaction is work, usually not of the kind that leads to enlightenment. This is why I like to choose with whom I discuss both joy and suffering in academia. And in any case, performing is one thing, but being on display is quite another.
On the street where I grew up there lived a boy older than me, enough so that we did not coincide in high school. We were at the university together, though, because he attended intermittently. Steve was in college when I was, and again when I was already in graduate school. It was a very large university but we were in related programs, and we had some of the same professors. Sometimes we would go out to these funky cafes and bars, and compare notes – on the university, and on our lives now, and on things back home.
On one of these occasions I was in the middle of my graduate program and thinking about quitting. Steve had come back determined to finish this time, and to become a professor, as he has in fact done. “I have been to every jazz bar here and in New York,” he said, “and I have worked all kinds of jobs. And I am sure that the best life is the life of the mind.”
I thought he was being idealistic, and also terribly strict with himself. He had been to more jazz bars and worked more different jobs than I, and he was now managing an entire Taxicab. But he was still an undergraduate, so he did not know the antics all of these crazy graduate students and professors could get up to. I also thought then that I already knew all of the antics these crazy graduate students and professors could get up to.
Now I know a great deal more about those antics. I also have a much better idea of what Steve meant. Choosing the life of the mind, meant using all of what he had, not just a few parts. He meant not chopping himself down. He did not set out to don a straitjacket, as I had feared he would. He was being kind to himself. Steve is a very tight fiction writer now, and he would not be nearly so good if he were not razor sharp. And what I dislike about academia is that it is so often antithetical to the life of the mind.
Academics also tend to be timid. They will not go downtown, or look for Indians. But we can listen to Indians right now. Here are the Wild Magnolias, not sounding as Indians do on the street but still sounding very funky on “Ho Na Nae,” from Home of the Groove.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I’m glad you wrote for my own case. For, in my case, it is a life of the heart.
[N. Ed. I changed the paragraph Nez refers to since he wrote this comment – in case any one wonders where those words went!]
Nezua, me too really. That is a different post, or set of posts, to tell the whole story. Letters were what I fell in love with first – in a day when you could only choose one thing.
This post reveals a new side of you. I’m glad you allowed us to see it. Thanks 🙂
I have a question for you. I recently finished my bachelors in Arts & Science and have a degree in English Literature. I am looking into getting my MA in Comparative Literature, either here or abroad. I know that academia breeds solitude because we need to read, write prepare for classes and exams. We spend endless nights worrying about classes, assignments and administration issues (we shouldn’t worry about Admin!).
If I continue my education and become a professor myself, in Literature… Is it worth it? Will I be choosing academia over family and friends? Excluding the people already in the field with me, those friends are keepers.
Hi CO! It depends on where you work, I would say. I have never had a job offer in a city I would ever choose to live in. This is the hardest thing about it for me. I spend a lot of energy steeling myself against local desolation, gritting my teeth and dealing with it, and finding ways to get relief from it. I also spend a lot of energy dealing with a culture into which I will never fit (despite all of my adaptability) – and remaining interested in what I do in a place where there is very little context for it. In this university and town, there are some fields – I am thinking of music and studio art right now, but there are a couple of other fields as well – which both the university and the general environment support. I can see why professors in those departments are content here.
I do think you should go to graduate school, though – it seems you would like it – and you will have a choice of institutions and cities. What I tell people now is, go to graduate school in the field you like, but also get a professional degree, or orient your studies in your graduate program such that you can become a professor or something else as a result of your studies. Graduate degrees are research degrees, and there are a lot of entities besides universities who hire researchers.
In the foreword to my thesis, I wrote — for the whole jury to read — that I went into my line of study “just like almost everyone did, for all the wrong reasons” — and then went on to add that there was no better reason I knew of.
A couple of years later, just about to get that tenure-track job I am applying to (counting days here!), I still believe it.
I mean, I am still there for all the “wrong” reasons: the laughs, the friends, the hallway silliness and the meeting craziness, the students, and heck, even the antics. Pure “jouissance”.
And somehow, I am always sceptical when someone comes up with the “[academic] knowledge is the utmost important thing in the world” reason. But I guess they have what the public is “expecting” from an academic in an interview… Or do they really?
SW – Good for you !!! And: I say that academic knowledge is very far from being the most important thing in the world. The life of the mind is a different thing entirely.
I went into academia because when I was a child, my father had books in his car and went places during the day. It was the only spark of life I could see. I also wanted to live, and it appeared to me that life lay in letters.
I was expected to get married and I was very concerned about this, as it seemed to me that to do so was to step into an early grave. You went into a house and there you stayed. I wanted to live, and it appeared that one could make a living in letters.
I gathered these impressions, and made these choices very early on. My professor jobs have been far less pleasant and interesting than graduate school, but I am alive.
In one of my professor jobs, and much more in what I call Reeducation, I took very heavy criticism about being intellectually oriented and research oriented. I did my very best to renounce these things. It was like committing hara-kiri and it did nobody any good.
I still keep hearing these platitudes: “Because you are an intellectual, you have no heart,” and “Because you are an intellectual and a professor, you value academic knowledge over all things.”
Neither sentence is true, and I have certainly never valued ‘academic knowledge’ over all things. I needed a place to put my heart and I placed it in words and books and an art studio. These places are as good as any, and better than many. And I am only saying that that is where I placed mine, not where anyone else has to place theirs.
Being told that my intellectual interests are signs of desire for elite status, or of a desire to oppress others by knowing more than they do, or of general heartlessness, still hurts, even though I know those projections are ridiculous.
And I certainly know that having had the chance to study is a privilege (DUH! I am not, like, DUMB), as I know that having citizenship in what is still a comparatively opulent country is a very great stroke of luck (again, DUH, I was not BORN YESTERDAY), and that institutions are oppressive (again, DUH, I have to deal with this every day and it is not at all easy).
But I only did what I did because I wanted to live and not die, and most specifically, because I wanted *not* to freeze my heart. And I am *as* tired of being told it is wrong to have intellectual interests as I am of being told, as some academics do in fact tell people, that ‘academic knowledge’ is the only worthwhile thing.
P.S. Also: it was helpful to nobody that this televised event took place. It was in an effort not to engage in such a self-destructive scene that I said “if you need to discuss these things with me, let us please do it privately” to the Free Slave.
I keep harping on that debate because it so closely paralells my Primal Scene of Reeducation which was: “you self-destruct and let me watch, and I will call it therapy.” And I can just hear people saying, “but you managed to get something out of that, so you must have needed it.” And I say: just because I managed to garner something positive out of it, does not mean it was a net good.
An amusing discussion opener for a narratology class: what is the difference between reality tv and life writing?