coldhearted scientist وداد

Tonight we go back to standard time. It is November, when the trees grow stark. The bricks, the sharp gables, and the iron balconies sprout new, ever more severe angles against the cloudy sky.

Here the water slaps slowly against the sides of the piers but in our imaginations we are walking to Washington. We’re almost there. I do not remember being more excited about a U.S. election.

CLICK

Although my first publication was twenty years ago, most of my published writing is academic and I do not consider it to be writing, but gloss. People refer to me as an author when they cite my writings in theirs, but I feel more like an author when I find out something I wrote has been assigned in a class. Now a class is studying some creative work I self published under a pseudonym, and I truly feel like an author. I feel like an author because people are reading me as a writer, not as a commentator. I feel like an author because I am under this illusion. I feel like an author because I appear to have produced a primary text.

The class has noticed that I may be more invested in the idea of authenticity in writing than some theorists (Barthes in “The Death of the Author,” and Foucault in “What Is An Author?”) might recommend one be. Both of these theorists remind us that authors do not own the meaning of their texts. In addition, authors are constructs quite different from the physical person who conceives and creates a text, or writes a story down. I, on the other hand, say tenaciously that I am not interested in writing anything I cannot stand by fully. Yet it is not the ebb and flow of language which worries me. I like it. It is because one is being written by language (Barthes, “To Write? An Intransitive Verb”) that I like writing.

*

In present day academic writing, however, one is supposed to be original and at the same time conventional, and also marketable. I have sometimes found the requirement to incorporate these three disparate imperatives in a single text disabling. It is as though the writer were expected to be a ventriloquist’s dummy, the ventriloquist being an amalgam of editors and reviewers, at a party with one’s senior colleagues and dean.

Perhaps we can say my problem is, I am perfectly happy with allowing writing to write me, and that I am happy to allow others to endow me with an “author function” if they so desire. But I am not interested in setting up an author function and then writing to that. I think that is what the “hurry up, get it done” mentality wants one to do. I think that is precisely the way to block writing, because it does not take into account what writing is. So what that mentality really says is, produce writing, but without having written. Produce writing, but take no risk.

*

Barthes and Foucault want to question the kind of authority with which the idea of the “author” is sometimes endowed, and I understand. But they are not considering that one needs at least some authority to write at all. That is because one must make decisions. One must choose words. It is this modicum of authority I gave up when I decided to succumb all too completely to the kind of self-censorship academia encourages under the terrible triple imperative of originality, conventionality, and marketability. Especially if you wish to navigate those shoals, you must be sure of your rudder.

That is also why I feel so bored when I undertake academic writing. The suppression of voice I believe I must undergo if I am to write within bounds feels suicidal and I procrastinate for the same reasons prisoners agitate for stays of execution. When I do suppress my voice successfully enough to write as the person I believe I should be, I still have difficulty concentrating due to the persistent, nagging feeling that I have once again put off the beginning of my own life.

*

Perhaps I could get over all of these things more easily if I could think of academic writing more like writing for a think tank or a newspaper. Then it is one’s own writing, one’s own research, one’s own craft, but one SAYS one is writing for the machine. “For NPR, this is Linda Wertheimer, in Jerusalem.” “For the Academic Industrial Complex, Subaltern Studies Branch, this is Professor Zero, in Bayou Maringuoin.”

I like that quite a lot. I think I have cracked a problem. All academic writing is like writing administrative memos, which are often dry reports with a fair amount of creative thought behind them. And I used to write that way, in fact. Before Reeducation I had written a great deal as a ventriloquist’s dummy, but also a great deal in this memo writing manner, and I was quite pleased with the latter set of work. I had a whole other set of things I wrote as myself and those things were not academic. In Reeducation one had to write from its idea of “self,” and that was the problem in a nutshell. It was a nuclear weapon which shut down both my research and my creative writing. But now, Hah! I have got Reeducation by the neck and I am shaking it.

*

Here is what I find interesting about all of this: neither my academic advisors nor Reeducation thought I could have a professional opinion of my own. Reeducation thought I should be writing about personal things. My academic advisors, meanwhile, thought I should be reporting upon and aggregating what other people thought while making sure to stifle my own assessment of matters. Both thought it arrogant and neurotic of me to believe I had a right to a professional opinion. I had not articulated it but this has been “the stone in my shoe,” as the Brazilians say, for some time.

CLICK

And it is the weekend, and Ralph Stanley is for Barack Obama, so he will sing. First he will teach us how to play “Little birdie, little birdie / what makes you fly so high? / Do you know that my sweet lover / is waiting in the sky?” Then he will sing the very famous Man of Constant Sorrow. People believe that is a Dylan song, but it is not.

Axé.