coldhearted scientist وداد

Now I am writing a pre-piece of my new book and trying not to ignite my usual set of literary academic writing reactions, having to do with wishing I had always been doing more of this, and also wishing that when I decided I preferred to move on from it that I had honored my decision.

Writing this book is going to free me, however. I am going to do it full on and yet with my left hand. It is an academic book designed to make a contribution and an impact, but I am writing it for personal reasons. I am writing it for personal reasons, but I am writing it with my left hand.

I say I am writing it with my left hand because I am afraid it will stifle the un-academic writing I would really like to explore, but as I say that out loud, as it were, I realize that the fear is baseless. I will still write my great, unfinished novel MADRID in the afternoons, perhaps more sharply.

ON LOCATION

I would like to research and write this book in a city with really good cinema, theatre, and research facilities. I would like to write it somewhere in the Rocky Mountains or points west. Or, more precisely, I would like to write it in a place where I feel like myself, because I need to be present to write this.

On the other hand, I have in my possession space and time, a recently improved university and town, and a renewed awareness and enjoyment of the luxury, calm, and voluptuousness which are available. Still I think it is illogical what we learn in graduate school, that if you care where you are you are not serious, or that you should be willing to sacrifice all quality of life and work materials for the sake of a nominally academic job.

I am not writing this book primarily as a contribution to the field, although it will be that, or to get or keep a job or a promotion, although it may do that. I am writing it for purposes of individuation and that is why I can write it here or many places. I can write it here or many places because it is mine and I am not writing it so that it can or I can pass a test but because I am in the mood to write a large academic piece I can stand by.

ON LEAVING

The time I decided to leave academia it was in part a mental health move. In Reeducation, I had been taught to torture myself and to use academia to do it. I was much better at not torturing myself in other areas of life, and it seemed to me that a good way to practice not torturing myself would be to enter a new profession. I also thought it a good idea because I wanted to live in an urban area and make enough money so as to have more to live on than a precarious shoestring.

To this day I do not know whether my decision to leave was an individuation move that failed, or whether that failure was a success insofar as there was something else I wanted to find out here. Friends and family who disagreed with my leaving, felt that I should not relinquish my academic identity and my specific discipline(s) because, they thought, these things were me. They did not understand that I had already made a serious career change when I became a professor – giving up an urban life, an emphasis on writing and research, and my two primary academic fields for the sake of a third.

They do not accept that what might substitute the word urban would be meaningful context, not adjustment to country life. They do not realize to the extent that I enjoy learning foreign languages, I am prevented from learning new ones as long as I remain a professor. They do not admit that I am much more interested in reading in the social sciences than in literature. They do not imagine that teaching is not just one thing I do easily. They do not comprehend that being where I am, I wish I my research area were a locally relevant field such as civil engineering, sustainable development, poverty law, or rural education. I would be fascinated to re-engineer the New Orleans levees, but the present project comes alive for me in Peru.

Setting matters to me a great deal but it appears that to say so is to betray the ideology of our profession and would therefore be sacrilege. And I expect our profession to privilege reason, but it puts faith first.

ON ARRIVING

My friend 1 says we entered the academic world because graduate school was interesting. We did not realize that professordom, because of where we would have to live and what our actual job descriptions would be, would turn out to be so different from the jobs our own professors had. My friend 2 says we are arrogant to notice this. We should be grateful to be tenured anywhere and excited to have the chance to teach. But friend 2 has never been a professor; she is a para-academic because she wanted to stay in San Francisco. She did not ignore quality of life issues in her own case.

Friend 1 points out that friend 2, although she jumped off the bandwagon, is actually mouthing its ideology. She says we would be happier as academics if we had gotten into it because we had a burning, overwhelming desire to undertake a particular project in a particular discipline. Then location and working conditions would have mattered less. We, however, entered this profession for more general reasons, says friend 1. We had certain kinds of interests, and we wanted a certain type of job and a certain type of life. Given this, we would have been better off using our Ph.D.’s to get research jobs in urban settings, within or outside universities. Had we never gotten our first tenure track jobs, we would have been forced in that direction originally, but once you become a professor, the pressure to remain one is very great. If you leave, other people are faced with the own unhappiness and fear they cover so carefully with fervent faith. They do not want to let that happen.

ON WRITING

I have been writing more for the drawer than for the machine for a long time because I have been so tired of writing for the machine. I have been writing for the drawer because one of the things I most like to do in life is write. I learned to write for the machine long ago and I want to learn to write in general. I have always liked research and writing, which is why I am an academic. I formed my first major research question at age three and my major fantasy in the sixth grade was archival work. There is no reason even to wonder how I got here. And had you asked me before Reeducation what I liked, I would have said research and writing.

My orientation is toward language(s), and I am by nature what a nonacademic friend called decades ago a research professional. I care about context. Everything in my profile adds, everything tends, to the terms writer and research professional, field open, contexts matter. I went to graduate school because it was, for me at that time, an adequately paid research and writing job in a place I wanted to live. Those were my priorities then, and I have not changed.

I have long been told that I am just having trouble adjusting and will soon discover that I am very happy, or that I am already happy and I only complain because I am a girl and girls think it is cute to be whiny and immature. I have long been told if one can simply write oneself into a good situation. This last is one of the most pernicious lies told in academia.

I did not see through the rhetoric about “adjustment” because I had not done this exercise, of asking myself what I wanted to be and defining it as a research and writing job. I thought that by saying an academic, I was covering that. I did not realize it would be important to go into much greater detail on all sides.

ON SLACKING

I stopped writing seriously as an academic before tenure, at the moment I had become successful enough to see I could have a very successful career if I just kept going. My reaction to this discovery was to feel that I had finally graduated. “Now I know, I can have a very successful, high level professional career. It is time to think about which one I might really want.” People were horrified. How could I think that way, when I had, after a certain amount of time and struggle, finally “made it?” But the point of “making it” was to find out whether I could do so generally. It was just an exercise. When the exercise was over, we would move on to the serious work.

I thought the serious work would be a real job, but I have not actually brought myself to leave this one. And  if I look at my original interests and activities, I begin to suspect that by serious work I meant serious writing, and that this would have been the actual purpose of anything I did.  I am beginning now to see that I should think of myself as that person, not as someone trapped in the alienating set of key words and recommended priorities I allowed to be imposed upon me.

I think I have almost begun, that I am about to start writing seriously, not just bureaucratically, under my own name. And the words flow together, erase each other and flow again, and sliding on dark swaths of words I lean into their rolling well.

Axé.