Perhaps it is because of being from the west and meditating on the ocean. I like and have balance and calm, which is not laziness. People from New England are brash, loud, crass, immature, and anxious, so they have much harder lives than I do.
Perhaps I have been on strike all these years, against their anxious rushing. Do more in less time, suffer. Never spend five minutes contemplating, always use time to manufacture something. Produce more words, but say less with them. What? How dare you have finished in so little time without ruining your health? There must be something wrong with you; you must be a hedonist. Yet when they want company, they say in a supercilious manner: don’t you know you should not work all the time?
They speak so urgently, professors, and they always seem to be in such pain. For reasons I never understand, it seems crucial to them that I work at certain speeds–even though I am making good progress to degree, and even though it is not clear why my methods should affect their lives. Nonetheless, they want more desperation, more suffering, and above all less content, less interiority.
It seems to me that they really need this from me, this content-free rushing. It appears that if I rush for them I may be able to calm the anxiety and pain they seem to feel when the see me walk calmly. I try. They, after all, are the successful ones. Perhaps that is how one must be. I have never been able to do anything, though, living in that way.
The rushing, the desperation, the assembly line, the pain, and the investment in these. The joylessness, the commitment to meaninglessness. These are the the things I dislike in professors.
♦
The reason I became un-depressed was that I decided I (a) was right about many things, (b) deserved to take control of matters, and (c) was in fact efficient, even if I did not look as unhappy as one allegedly should look to prove efficiency.
This attitude is arrogant, you will say. I know. In academia we are to (a) constantly beat our breasts and rend our hair about how wrong we are, (b) constantly remember we have no control over our lives and moreover, that we should not, and (c) constantly rush, and keep rushing. So I have become un-depressed by becoming a barbarian.
Barbarism is helpful. I am now only oppressed, and that is a different world. It is healthful to recognize this situation, because it is easier to combat and resist oppression than it is to attempt to show how its effects are self-generated. At the same time it is saddening to be aware that so much of one’s effort is having to be spent fighting for one’s life rather than moving ahead, and disappointing not to be in a position to take advantage of the resources available.
My colleague, in the part of the department that has a Ph.D. program, is directing an interesting dissertation, which relaxes his mind. I am wrestling with language requirement students and my mental reserves are gone. Who do you think is going to get more written today? I could win a Fulbright, for instance, but I could not afford to take it. I declined one in the past, perhaps misjudging the economic difficulty; now in a still less advantageous position it is even less clear I could do it.
#OccupyHE.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I have found that one of the reasons I had previously been unable to process my trauma was that I seem to have literally developed holes in my brain, likely due to the prolonged stress. My thoughts would become fuzzy in certain instances, and I would have to make a leap of faith to the other side of my ideas, bypassing many dead synapes. That in itself felt stressful. I have found, though, that very high doses of Resveratrol have repaired my brain. I have taken these capsules for several months now, and my thoughts are much calmer and smoother. It is very useful to take these with a glass of red wine as it helps with the assimilation. I think it removes plaques from the brain and may have some regenerating effect. Anyway, I highly recommend it.
I should try it! Fuzzy thoughts, I know. What seems to have done me the most good is learning to see oppression and deciding I might be right on things in some instances, as opposed to assume not. But I will look for these capsules — they can’t hurt and may add to the general improvement.
Working the side of awareness is very good, too, but I think that ongoing stress does create physical damage that also needs to be repaired. One the awareness side, I recommend Bataille’s THE UNFINISHED SYSTEM OF NONKNOWLEDGE. He speaks in Hegelian terms of a Nietzsche agenda. One must first negate the philosophy of the decline in oneself, which is Christian morality. This is done through “sinning”. After this, one negates the negation. That is, it disappears like a pebble into a pond and is no more. Perhaps it’s not so much this progam of his that is interesting, but the way Bataille humanizes and relativizes the meaning of the search for knowledge. Authoritarian systems seems to lose their power under this new light. For instance, people professing absolute knowledge are resting in the complacency of their sufficiency. With this remapping of the system of knowledge, you can see they have a long way to go. They, however, think they are on the summit. I had, for instance, one troll recently proclaim that Luce Irigaray had made an ‘objectively stupid statement’. It was clear this idiot had not thought through the meanings of objectivity and stupidity. Neither of these are so simple as the unexamined mind would posit. Objectivity is more closely realized in the awareness that knowledge does not and cannot get you everywhere you want to be. Nonknowledge is satiety — although it can be premature. These are not dialectical opposites, but dialectical counterparts.
Deeply, deeply realizing these things can make you very calm, I find.
I should work in that direction. I like the idea of negating the philosophy of decline.
Demasiados meses, años, abrigando una esperanza que nunca tuvo vida real. Cuénto sufrimiento inútil. Ojala hubiera escuchado la voz de Paul cuando me decía: “Olvidate, en ese espacio nunca entrarás porque no te dejarán entrar. Y, quien te anima, lo sabe tan bien como yo. Por eso se no se deja ver ni oir.”.
Entrar en ese espacio “per se” no era algo ansiado porque en realidad, es una atmósfera tóxica. El espacio era solo el trampolín para alcanzar el sueño. Sólo que el sueño era justamente eso: un sueño y, además, irrealizable.
Es hora de pasar página a un pasado y a un espacio, ambos tóxicos. Goodbye Idaho!
Y sí. Lindo post! Hoy me desperté consciente de lo opresiva que es la institución, con sus multiples mecanismos de “apoyo” que son en realidad de opresión. Hay que tomar quina… 😉
Weird. But then again everybody is different.
It’s: advice as patriarchal and as negative countertransference. They are advising one on the assumption that one is incompetent and to be humored, and shown how to survive despite incompetence. That advice is destructive.