coldhearted scientist وداد

I decided to earn a Ph.D. the day I learned this degree existed. That took place before I started kindergarten. Thus it was that my academic career and my full acquisition of formal language began almost simultaneously. My recurrent question then was whether thought preceded language or whether, on the other hand, language informed thought and to that extent, produced it. As a person recently initiated into language I was already nostalgic for the direct contact with the world I was in the process of losing. I wanted to believe that that consciousness of and with the world was also a form of thought, but my experience of language acquisition and its influence upon my mental processes suggested to me that speech came before what we call thought. I was further concerned that when I learned to write, I might find that writing informed speech.

Where would my intuition go then? I wondered. Would I still be aware, while sleeping, of the planets in their orbits and the crickets chirping, and the vaguer, yet still strong presences emanating from the trees and paintings, and gathering near my head?

I requested reassurance from several adults on these issues – reassurance they refused to give. “We, too, would like to believe that thought precedes speech, and speech, writing,” they said, “but these are Romantic ideas and we are not at all sure of their absolute validity. You will have to do a Ph.D. and conduct your own research on this matter if you are to discover an answer that will be satisfactory to you,” they intoned. “I will begin now,” I said. I was informed that I must first attend elementary school, and that Ph.D. programs related to the topic I had just outlined would probably require that I learn French.

I was enchanted to learn that there was French, because this meant there were more languages in the world than I had realized. I began to study French as soon as I could.

*

In those days, when bureaucratic conversation was something I overheard but did not participate in actively, a recurrent theme appeared to be that one could not write articles presenting the actual conclusions one had drawn from one’s research because one would then not be published, and not make tenure. If that happened, one’s wife would be barefoot and one’s children would starve. Survival depended upon writing texts which confirmed the possibly false and outmoded, but authoritative and authoritarian convictions of older people. That is: if the professor did not write articles and books in which s/he did not believe, I would starve. Therefore: if I did not write articles and books in which I did not believe, I would starve. So that: one should write publicly in a false voice, and keep one’s actual thoughts for the drawer.

Accordingly, I have always tended to reject what I know to be true, or my first instincts, my main desires, my first choices. My interests are fortunately broad and my mind is flexible. My methodology for all decision making tends to involve identifying and then rejecting or bracketing my first choice, so as to make a new first choice from among the many attractive second choices available. This methodology, often useful for buying houses and cars, also served me well in college and graduate school. The compromise appeared to be valid for some time: strike a balance between what you want or what you think and what appears to be acceptable, and you will be rewarded with the renewal of a fellowship which enables your interesting life in an interesting place. Rejection of one’s first choice is the sensible option in normal circumstances. First choices, first instincts, are to be followed only when there are lives to be saved. This, as we shall see presently, is because first choices and first instincts are those best aligned with reality. “Sensible” second choices have to do, rather, with preserving an ideological bubble, someone else’s dream.

*

My favorite academic exercise of all time was my Ph.D. examination because it was so difficult. The essays were long and there was no evading topics for which you were not well prepared – you had to write each day on the one question asked. Each question was pegged to a particular passage and a particular text, and since each was a seven-hour essay you had to be able to handle whatever came along in a way that showed great familiarity with that work, that author, the relevant contexts, the secondary material, and the implications for current theory. The examination became my favorite exercise the day I realized I had so much information to manage that I would not be able to write cogent essays unless I informed them with my actual views on these authors.

I enjoyed myself greatly from that point onward, having identified the examination as an emergency situation in which survival would depend not upon bracketing myself, but upon using my actual power. That is to say, I enjoyed myself because I decided to speak for myself and use all of my intellectual power – the power I had learned would be best reserved for the drawer. Nothing I wrote in the examination was calculated to be safe or to protect anyone’s feelings. I wrote on first choice.

When I was given my test results, assuming that like many I would be told I had passed some questions and failed others, the committee chair – who had herself just decided to leave academia – looked at me over her glasses and said: Well, you passed, but I am really curious, what happened to you? I mean, it is not that I did not think you would write an acceptable exam, but I had no idea you would do anything like this. That is, you always presented interesting work in classes, but I never saw you write with real interest or speak with real conviction. Now, but only now, I see you can have a brilliant career. I thought: This is wonderful, I do not have to repeat any questions. I can have a pleasant summer and make timely progress to degree. My sub-thought was: Yes, I know that already. I can have a brilliant career, even with one hand tied behind my back, if I use the methodology I used for this exam. I did not fully absorb this sub-thought, however, so I did not really learn all I might have done from this conversation.

*

That examination, however, was read only by the examiners, so it was a private exercise: serious, but not published or circulated. I use the methodology I developed for it when I write abstracts. If you only have 250 words, you have to come out with what you want to say in very clear terms, and the abstract itself is ultimately for the drawer. I use it when I give conference presentations, in which you must limit yourself to 15-20 minutes, make a point, and be an addition to, not a weight on your panel. I use it in class, where the point is to get a group of people moving in the direction(s) they need to go. Otherwise I do not use this methodology except in obviously out of field articles and pseudonymously published texts, because I fear that to make public, in permanent fashion, under my professional name, original words in which I actually believe, will hasten my certain demise.

My operative paradigm appears to be that life is precarious and survival can be ensured by making the right second choice after censoring (and ideally, not even consciously seeing) the first one. The way to preserve life is to stand aside from oneself, placing one’s own ideas in the freezer and shepherding others through the door in an orderly manner. It is all right because one may then keep one’s house, in which, after hours, one can admire and enjoy the ideas one has stacked in the freezer. What I find interesting about this ultimately irrational modus operandi is that it is in some circumstances rational, and it is often presented as “mature.” Yet I would remind everyone, myself included, that neurosis consists largely in fetishizing an outmoded or no longer necessary survival tactic, and that the greater part of savvy or “good instincts” is realizing, quickly, which solution corresponds to which situation.

*

I once told a friend I was two people, a public one and then a private self I only brought out for emergencies in which true intelligence was needed. I said this in reference to having realized I had just solved a problem more easily than I had expected to do, by managing to bring my private opinions to the fore in a situation in which I would not normally have done so because it was not a five-alarm emergency. He said he thought I would do better to keep those opinions in the foreground 24/7. At the time I thought four things: (a) I saw the point, but (b) I did not think I had the power to accomplish this, and anyway, it would be (c) unseemly and (d) not allowed. This, by the way, was the same friend who used to encourage me to do what I wanted to do, in an era in which I was not aware of not doing what I wanted to do. He realized more clearly than I did that I was always searching for good second choices. Again I saw the point, at least logically, but that did not mean I had easy access to awareness of my (censored) first choices.

All of this is, of course, an object lesson in some of the ways we are taught to limit ourselves and do limit ourselves. And in my writing here and elsewhere I have discussed at great length the feeling of being enslaved. Yet I have felt very much freed lately and I believe it has a great deal to do with centering upon the idea of first choices. I feel balanced then and notice the breath in my diaphragm. I feel taller. I feel that the pile of things to do rises not up above my head, but only to my knees. I feel that I am handling that pile easily with my left hand while with my right, I compose my magnum opus. I feel that the horizons have expanded. I feel I have new muscles. I feel that my vehicle has been endowed with a second engine. It is as though I were at a pleasant way station. We live here nicely now, but the tracks will be finished soon and there are many stops ahead.

Axé.