This post is being written in real time. There are posts coming up which actually predate it. Remember that this novel is modernist and follows no chronological order.
I have declared independence at yet deeper levels and bringing more of myself out of the deep freeze where I have been keeping it, saved for later.
We spent many hours yesterday discussing our careers. My colleague for the past twenty years (yes, we have ended up at the same institution twice, for independent reasons), after a lifetime of ambivalence now likes being a professor. I realized I never got the chance to say so.
Let us review our history in another way.
1. I went to graduate school so as to prolong college. That was because I had long since understood my post college options to be clerical work and marriage. Marriage, as we know, was far too dangerous. Therefore the clerical job was inevitable. One might as well enjoy life while one could before just resigning oneself.
2. I found the first weeks of graduate courses a little dusty and sleepy, and I found it a little oppressive to have joined the establishment as a T.A.
3. I soon got used to that, however, and started to enjoy things. Quite a lot, actually.
4. This was not considered cool, and I felt a little guilty about not suffering. But I could not resist and kept on going.
5. My first academic job was awful and it would not have been a mistake to leave the profession at that point, which I wanted to do but at the time felt I needed affirmation from elsewhere to do — affirmation which was not forthcoming.
6. My second academic job was good for me, but all of my colleagues were disaffected and Reeducation thought it was uncool for me to be an academic.
7. The person I have been subsequently, we have already spoken of in great detail.
My question, therefore, is when I ever gave myself a real chance? I gave some aspects of the profession many chances to bulldoze me, and I gave many other people many chances to discourage me from my interests and abuse me for being intellectually oriented. I also gave many people a chance to dissuade me from doing anything else.
This comes down to giving everyone but myself a chance. Reviewing: I enjoyed graduate school but did not give myself a chance to truly excel, and certainly not to commit. I did take that chance for about eighteen months in the job I actually liked. I gave it up because it scared Reeducation.
All of that is why I have always equivocated. Stay in school because it is a way to hide out from an abusive marriage or a dead-end clerical job. Do well enough in school to retain fuding, but do not excel because it is either hopeless, or arrogant, or not jaded enough, or otherwise uncool, or hurtful to others. Do not dare to leave school because that is to enter the jungle and one only ends up on the street.
Considering things coldly and impartially it seems I have given everyone but myself a chance at a piece of me. That is why I am declaring independence.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Heard a CD with Marechera’s voice on it, last night.
It only goes to confirm that my “shamanistic” conceptions of him are perfectly correct.
Once again, he speaks of “shortcircuiting” people’s institutional identifications. If you question things like morality and conformity and so on, people will be able to look in the mirror and see the beautiful person that is there, and embrace the intellectual and creative possibilities, he says.
It’s the trope of “wakefullness” that pertains to shamanism particularly.
I’d love to hear that CD … is it in libraries?
Wakefulness. It was a theme from my conversation of yesterday … my writer friend says that to write he has had to open up all of his pores, so to speak, and he’s channeling things but at the price of being all too easily bothered.
I sent you something in your email.
Maybe be able to send you a copy of the CD.
Yes, I think that the channeling of things does increase one’s nervous tension. Thus my dilemma: to perform much better in kickboxing but sacrifice some intellectual insight, or vice versa.
Yes, it really does. I am utterly exhausted from figuring out what to do about the Blackguard, but I have transformed myself.
I’d love to hear M’s voice.
*
One of the sentences that’s too touchy feely to include in the actual memo I am writing on the Blackguard, but which I like for my own shamanistic type purposes:
“I will make these statements from a position of comfortable authority, not visualizing myself as a peer. I will maintain the kind of social distance one does with students. I will not allow myself to be chased down or backed into a corner. I will not merely defend, but will take authority – not over him, but within myself.”
Brava!
And via your blog, I found that Dance also declared independence:
http://pronetolaughter.wordpress.com/2009/07/05/personal-independence-day/
I wish I hadn’t been in Reeducation when that happened! I really don’t know whether I would have accepted that book contract in those terms had it not been for Reeducation … whether I would have gotten so frozen re what to do about it … or whether it was really true I was not interested.
I felt uninterested in the whole thing, I know that, and once again I am not sure why at that point.
Then, ever since being strongarmed back into academia, I have felt guilty about not being more interested.
And yet not known whether it were actually true I was not interested, or whether this were itself some sort of defense mechanism.
I really and truly cannot tell.
I am definitely interested in the life of the mind.
P.S. and I don’t know why I even wonder. Like the material, can’t stand the people or the environment, associate academic writing and research with all of that, so it is actually no wonder that I struggle to write. It is not about lack of interest in research and so on.
P.S. You can say anything about anything, though, and have it make sense. You can speculate endlessly.
Maybe it is, I am just not interested *enough.*
I wonder if anyone notices the extent to which this blog is an exercise wherein I try to convince myself to be a professor … ?????
And I just don’t know because the post is true — I also never really gave it a chance because the Emeritus Professor said it was so awful and also said I wouldn’t make it.
And of course I did it in the first place because it was something I could do that I could come up with to do without help or advice (none was allowed) and that would not offend the family.
And of course I stayed for the family’s sake as well although they had been against my going into it — they also objected to my leaving it.
So the whole thing in those days was so bound up with them. Is so bound up with them.
I have more and more flashes of seeing myself as an actual adult and I have to realize I will not know what I like until I allow myself to be an adult.
I was an adult in college and graduate school and in foreign countries and for a couple of years in my thirties, before Reeducation.
Aargh. I have to get to be an adult and that means I have to get savings. How.
P.P.S. NOOOOO!!!!! This is Professor Zero’s real professional identity speaking!!!!!
Saying don’t be pushed to questioning everything and at the same time driven to find the one truth!!!!!
Remember, you thought about all of that as you were doing it, and built a being!!!!! It was independent of all that!!!!!
All this questioning of everything is just Reeducation speaking!!!!!
The reason I am mad at Reeducation is it took my professional identity!!!!!
I used to use Strong Work as revenge against abuse by people like the Blackguard — and it worked!!!!!
I will do this again. There is no ultimate truth or ultimate identity or ultimate education or ultimate anything but one can grab one’s strength now … and stop worrying about the problems of professordom but enjoy the strengths, and I am not saying this in a namby pamby Pollyannaish way!!!!!
The answer is that you neither have to flee nor fight, you can just say this conversation is over and I am going to a real conversation (in books) !!!!!
you can just say this conversation is over and I am going to a real conversation (in books) !!!!!
Yes!
That is my principle, too. So long as the person I am speaking to has nothing new to teach me — ie. I’ve seen it all before — then it’s back to the books and to independent reflection. I owe the other person nothing. After all, what are they to me?
Did they introduce themselves?
Did they give me something to remember them by?
Have we shared intimacies?
No. They are just somebody alien.
Back to work.