coldhearted scientist وداد

Because they are terrified preachers: fire and brimstone, how bad the world is; because they are grand inquisitors.

Because they are unrelenting torture victims; because they are lying in vats of burning oil, and stretching out their hands to pull us in.

Because they will not be satisfied until we join them in death and terror.

We who listen are deficient and do not understand the truth of things. We do not realize what life really is.

We will find out one day, and then we will be sorry.

They can say these things to us now because we will not remember.

If we do remember, they can always say we must have “dreamed” it or that we have invented it out of malice and wickedness.

♦

Some of my earliest memories are of people lecturing each other urgently on how to get tenure: the terrible self-mutilations they must undergo to do it, and the even more terrible things that will be done to them if they do not.

I remember being told about how I would not be able to compete at the university I had chosen, and about how unfair of me it was to be going there; it did not fit the image required of me.

I remember being told I would not be competent. If I got a job it would be in the tundra and I would not be able to tolerate it. I would have to do research, and it would be too difficult for me to accept that. It was selfish of me to imagine I could understand it. I only appeared to be doing well; it was on false premises and I would fail soon.

I remember the professors in graduate school saying many of the same things, and I have only realized recently that they were the same class of people — terrified, and not entirely well informed.

I remember my colleagues saying these kinds of things to each other again. I also remember being told that because I had a point of view on matters and because of who I was related to, I was unemployable.

I went through the tenure mill twice, so I have had to deal directly with more than a double dose of colleagues who were terrified, and not entirely well informed assistant professors.

I think academia is a torture chamber because of these experiences. I am not allowed not to be an academic so I more or less freeze myself, try to move as little as possible and to be as impermeable as I can — try to dissociate as much as I can so that at least a part of my mind can remain intact for later.

This makes progress difficult and indeed, experiencing academia as a torture chamber, or having this split experience when I am working where only half of me is working and the other is being worked over in a torture chamber, is a real impairment. In fact: it is quite shocking how well I do and have done given this condition. I might have to award myself a badge for bravery.

♦

Despite all of this there was a long interregnum in college and graduate school and parts of one or two assistant professorships — one before the night of the beat-down I never entirely got up from, and one later, when I still believed that beat-down had been undeserved — when I did not feel like this at all. It comes down to a different mapping of the body; mine never actually changed but it feels different, as if my head were not actually a part of it and were floating slightly above; and likewise with all other limbs.

In the other mapping there is a connection between the head and neck and it goes all the way down the spine and to all the nerves; one is complete. I still have this configuration away from academic settings, but not within them. The way I experience the body now, if not as something frozen inside a block of ice, is as a cartoon figure: I am too lazy to search for the right image but I am sure you have seen one, it is when someone has just been punched so that their feet are off the ground, their head is falling back and their limbs are flying everywhere.

I do not like to step out of the block of ice because this is what I will step to, and it is in that body-state that I do most of my work. I keep having to make contact with my thoughts, and I do not have that physically centered feeling that says: “Here is my focus” or that can stand on that without very great difficulty.

I am trying to recover that body-map. One can understand things, understand everything, but the question is how one feels. During the time of living in the other body-map I was also not dogged by this image. I was also in a much better atmosphere than now and a much more supportive situation. A key element was that self-destruction was not presented as the only possible path to survival, which is how things appeared to be later on and was also how things had been presented much earlier.

I am trying to see how to make contact with that gestalt. This is my true research project; everything else is mere entertainment.

♦

Normally I am somewhat critical of the fact that I rarely do anything except work, and work on the house, and then stay up all night writing blogs. However, I may decide to declare this a good idea. Part of the reason I never go anywhere is that every tank of gas is $50 that could go toward home repair, and part of it is that I have had some expenses dealing with this PTSD or C-PTSD (which has now been rediagnosed as “insomnia” for insurance purposes — c’est amusant) … so I am realistic. And it seems that the blog works better than analysis.

Axé.