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In the words of my supervisor, the Heretic:
“You seem distressed, lately.”
[I know.]
“You’re still finding your way, aren’t you.”
But your proposal is “another smashing number [...] lovely stuff.”
You’ve done it before. “I’m proud of you.”
But then there’s the… thing you just handed me. “This isn’t your most… coherent piece of prose.”
[I know.]
“What’s troubling you about this?”
“Keep going. Try to find your intellectual centre.”
…I am trying. I find it, I think, now and then — here in a bit of a gospel, there in an invigorating line, then again over here in a particularly masterful stroke of scholarship. Then it slips away. I forget my purpose; I lose my centre.
I juggle my many elements with perfect precision, one moment. I see my task clear. The next moment… I don’t exactly drop an element, I don’t exactly fumble. I simply forget what I’m juggling, or that I’m juggling. I stand still. The elements juggle themselves, somewhere, above my head or next door, or beyond me in a dimension just slightly aslant of this one.
In still another dimension, Robert Southwell laughs gently to himself, his young poet’s hands moving swiftly, creating with my elements, the elements I see in him, hoops and swirls and arabesques excruciatingly exquisite. He laughs again. (Martyrs can, and do, laugh.) And then he winks at me, and I slide back from my inter-dimensional hallucination, and am again alone amid my books.
My books and my teacher’s voice: “Find your intellectual centre.”
Notice: this is going to be one of those long, self-indulgent, narcissistic posts that usually drive me insane when I read them, but of which I tend to write more than I probably should. You’ve been warned.
I mentioned a few posts ago that until the middle of my junior year in college, I fully intended to become a scholar of post-colonial francophone literatures. You see, reader, a smart, Academe-bound undergrad tends to study straight from the gut: she trips over something that sets her passions ablaze, and writes about that. It very swiftly becomes her dream. If it’s full of heady, new (to her) ideas with fancy jargonistic names, so much the brighter the blaze. She can’t see far enough ahead, or deeply enough into her subject-matter, to determine the real value of her work, or of her potential place within it. She is not, in other words, by any means prepared to make the career-shaping decision of which area to enter — that decision makes itself for her. And a lot of it is accident.
Assia Djebar, Leila Sebbar, Tahar Ben-Jelloun — they set me ablaze. They still do. But in the middle of that year, the year I was twenty-one, circumstances aligned (conspired?) to kick me across four hundred years, where I landed on my ass in the middle of the English Renaissance. (If we wanted to stretch the metaphor farther than would be wise, we could say that I have since stood up and scraped the horse-shit off my breeches, found a tavern, ordered up a bottle of sack, and got so drunk I couldn’t contemplate leaving if I wanted to.)
The benign circumstance: by a stroke of (more or less) divine luck, I found myself in Professor Wry’s classroom in the fall. I remained glued to my francophones for that feminist theory seminar, but felt so well-served by Wry’s steady-minded brand of pedagogy, and was fond enough of Shakespeare, that there was no question of not signing up for her seminar on race and early modern drama the following semester.
The malign circumstance: that same fall began the unnecessarily long process that became the single most humiliating, disgusting, self-disintegrating series of events ever to disrupt my young, otherwise blessed life. Details are immaterial, but this involved: multiple layers of betrayal — others’ betrayal of me, and much worse, my betrayal of others; sexual humiliation; nasty social factionalism; and the loss at my own cruelly inept hands of a very valuable friendship. What does this have to do with early modern studies? Nothing. Which is precisely the point. (See above, “accidence.”)
In the second or third week of the spring term, having got through the first phase of the Events by means of a cunning system of repression, denial, and grin-and-bear-it-tude, I was happily mucking around the early-seventeenth-century public theatres for term paper topics. When I went to Wry’s office with an idea about Desdemona, she (rightly) laughed at me. She then tossed Jonson’s Masque of Blackness into my lap, along with Mary Floyd-Wilson’s brilliant essay on it. A few wide-eyed library hours later, I was hooked.
The following week, Phase Two of the Events swung into full gear. The teetering protective barriers established between me and the Yuck by repression and denial crashed down and left me staring blankly at the wall for hours and hours every day. The only class I made it to was Wry’s. Something about her coldness, her exacting professorial demeanor, her refusal to admit anything other than rigor and attentiveness into the space of discussion — something about her classroom promised solace, and delivered it. I had scheduled a meeting with her for the following week. After class, I croaked meekly, “Can we make it Thursday instead?”
I tottered into her office, blankness in my eyes and rings under them, schlumped down in a chair and said, somewhat involuntarily, “Well. That was the most fucked-up week ever.” Now, Wry is not exactly a cuddly bundle of motherly comfort. But she mustered up enough empathy to ask, with sincere concern, what had happened.
Something clicked. “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Let’s get to work.”
So we did. I don’t remember what we talked about, or looked at, except that it involved a lot of geeking out over stuff on EEBO. At the end of the hour, I was smiling. You know it, reader — that smile that comes from a very profound source, the smile you can’t help smiling, the smile of recognition of something valuable to be worked on, the smile of inspiration at the inception of a new project. I think this was the first time I ever smiled that smile. It came out of the work, and it came out of the closeness of work with another person, of that kind of trust that only a mentorship can foster.
Meanwhile, nothing around me made sense. I couldn’t talk to my friends or my family; I certainly didn’t care about what went on in my other courses. I couldn’t handle being inside my own brain with myself, with my pathetic guilt.
The only things that made sense (and this is insane) were Jonson’s texts and the histories I was beginning to build around them. I read about clothing, stage-craft, nationhood, the humoral body, gender, race, proto-colonialisms, architectural design, you name it.
I loved what I read, and it sheltered me. I dove into work in order to shunt away everything else, until everything else could be dealt with in due course. I created a small burrow of comfort and sanity in that work. Two weeks after that Thursday meeting, I asked Wry to advise my thesis.
I stayed on campus over spring break to work on that paper. With the library to myself, with all its huge spaces and its brightness, I began to lay the groundwork – without knowing it, really – for the first piece of original academic work I would ever do. I applied for – and won – my first fellowships. I spent long, quiet hours for the first time in a special collections reading room.
I was building a (teetering, weird, ill-written) argument, yes, but more than that, I was building solace; I was building a world that I could inhabit safely, where I could safely be myself, where I could be alone and be happy.
As for the Events, well. Whatever. Time passes; drama works its shit out; you tot up the casualties, remind yourself Never To Do That Again, and you heal. You cover your scars, or sometimes you show them off, but they’re scars, and That’s All Over Now. Et puis voilà.
But remnants do often remain, and to my great surprise, the remnant of the Events was, well, beautiful. There I was with this gift, with this beautiful gift, the gift of an entire historical period, an academic field, the gift of ambition and love for my work. (I do tend to run screaming from Jonson these days, but that’s got a lot more to do with him than with me.) I don’t think I could have come to this period by any path other than the one that brought me here. I came to this period because I found nothing in it that I could identify with — I needed the distance, the lesson in cold critique, that Wry’s approach to research-advising and work on early periods both demanded. During the course of the Events, work on, say, Virginia Woolf would likely have destroyed what remained of my psyche and left me chattering inanely to the pigeons in Dishtown’s main street for the rest of my life.
I still value this aspect of this work — and, for that matter, of my relationship to Professor Wry. That relationship could, really, only be called “purely professional” – we rarely talk about anything but early-moderny, academicky things, and while I usually wear my heart on my sleeve with mentor-types, I never feel the urge to confide in her. And yet there is a warmth and a closeness to this relationship, this professional friendship — the comfort I derive from that closeness is exactly analogous to the comfort I derive from the work itself.
Today, I woke up with a case of what my father calls the creeping blue woozies (near kin, like as not, to the howling fantods). I moped for a bit. Then: “Fuck this.” I glanced over some articles, some notes, realized I’m ready to write on my Welsh paper. So I wrote. Back the woozies crept to wherever woozies come from. And here I am with a really stunning start — nothing revolutionary, naturally, but strong sentences smartly in step with the ranks of the ruling regime.
The bottom line? Not only do I love this work, reader; most of the time, it loves me back.
[I still feel this way.]
Olin Memorial Library, 19-06-07.
This is the image of me attempting to craft, from nothing, a future. The image of a girl-woman seated in the great expanse of air and windows in a library reading room.
Her hair knotted ingeniously, sitting on her heels in the too-low chair, squinting and pulling faces as she peruses lists of requirements, demands, standards. She cannot hold herself against these lists, cannot compare with cold scrutiny some image of herself with the abstract of desirability.
She has sent off, already, one cry for help, one request for rescue, whose destinataire has either not received it or been unwilling to respond.
She turns to examine the summery cascade of freckles that spill down from her shoulders, the six bracelets of wooden beads on one wrist, the Touareg device in silver on her right index finger. She stands and stretches and walks away down to the ladies’ to examine her prototypical self in the mirror.
“What is this?” she would wonder aloud if not for the librarianess standing next to her. “What is this fleeting thing in this mirror, here?”
That figure has learned herself, over the years, she realizes. The woman in the mirror has learned to say “I”.
But what now? Now with this “I” tucked cleverly in her pocket, where will she go? And how will she get there?
She can no longer contemplate these long lists of demands, can no longer face the prospect of opening some line of communication for the sake of marketing a self she is not sure of. That it is there, this self, she is certain. At least there is that.
But what can it do? When push comes to shove or when the shit hits the fan or when simply it comes down to it, of what is this self capable?
There is, of course, no way to know. That is what she cannot face, today, as the wind outside the window fades and the trees on the hill grow still and silent. What she cannot face, today, in this library that has cradled her through all her mind’s misadventures and furious yearnings, is the possibility that it ends here. That the next step is too brazen and broad for her small form to manage, that the path may be not only meandering and twilight-obscure, but may also be simply not there.
Reader, excuse me for a moment. I am having a fit.
… I MISS MY BOOKS.
As you may be aware, I am currently in the middle of another in a series of temporary living experiences: “home,” whatever that means at this stage, is somewhere in the American Northeast. I, however, am not. I am in a tiny, minimally furnished, undecorated room in the south of England, with only the “necessities” (broadly defined) of an MA student’s life.
I and my books are not in the same place.
This is one of many symptoms of the temporariness of my life here, one that in many ways encapsulates the exilic feeling I have from time to time. My life is unstable, the world I’ve built here clearly defined by its inevitable end, its dissolution, at the end of the summer. I need stability. I need my books.
I miss my Eliot. I miss my Wallace Stevens. I miss my full collections of the works of Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov. I miss my Middlemarch. I miss my mammoth anthologies. I miss my non-book ephemera — my course readers from undergrad, drafts of my thesis with Professor Wry’s handwriting all over them, my course notes and their marginal observations on the state of my brain, my journals dating back to early high school.
After a long day of, largely, drudgery, I need the solace of a well-worn, over-read paperback. I need the Four Quartets, god damn it. There are perhaps three books in my bedroom that are not either products of the Renaissance or keystones of critical theory, and one of them is authored by Anne McCaffrey. My library quota has been filled with books on Shakespeare editorship, early British nationhood, the history of the book, and recusant poetics. Right now, I don’t need any of those things. I need a break from my intellectual world, and this just ain’t cutting it.
More than their content, though, I miss my books. I miss their comforting plenitude, voluminousness, ubiquity. The bedroom I lived in for years in my parents’ house is bursting with books. They, not the studs and drywall and insulation and wooden siding, are what sheltered me from the violences of the outside world. They are, in many ways, my home.
I have always thought of the true moment of growing up, the genuine moving-on, the real “on my own,” as being the moment when I move into a place and take all of my books with me. I will do this in September. I want it now.
I need something vaguely resembling stable domesticity. I need to go to a place, stay there for years, make it my own. And I need my fucking books.
Why, reader?
Why, when I wandered into New Eden Books today to visit with my old co-workers, could I not just walk out again empty-handed? (It’s not like I have forty pages of at least vaguely academic prose to produce within the next three weeks. Not like I have anything to read. No sir.)
Why, when I realized I couldn’t resist the temptation of books (to be paid for in dollars! o, exquisite currency!), why did I have to buy this one?
Why couldn’t it have been the new Ken Follett, or a police procedural, or even a fucking Phillippa Gregory romance, for chrissakes?
Why, why, why is the volume sitting next to my computer very much titled Against the Day?
Why?!?!?
“Have you ever been dismissed or suspended from any academic institution? If so, please explain in the space provided.”
Sigh. Here we go. Again.
A combination of unfortunate events, bad decision-making, immaturity, mental health issues, disordered eating, and a certain unbloggable habit, led me to fail two classes at the Petri Dish in the second term of my first year, lose all hope of good standing, and to be “required to resign” from the Dish for one year. I was told to get my act together, scrape together some credits, and reapply in the spring.
I lived at home, assistant-taught French at my public high school, and took classes at the local campus of my state’s public university system — a little institution we’ll call the Fishbowl. I failed a class there, too — in 17th century European history, no less. I was still reeling from the deadly cocktail sketched above, and furthermore, reader, you cannot even begin to imagine what torture that class was. Somehow, the professor (a stammering grey non-eminence whose specialization was in early modern Scandinavian tax systems — no, I’m not kidding) managed to make a century full of war, religious anxiety, great art, misbegotten colonial schemes, and all manner of wacky goings-on hideously boring.
But I digress. The point is, that segment of my life is not the stuff of pretty pictures. But in my spring term at the Fishbowl, something finally clicked. I got my shit together, with the help of kind and generous faculty, made perfect marks across the board, was re-admitted to the Petri Dish, was re-instated in good standing after a semester’s probation, and continued to make perfect marks and generally distinguish myself for the rest of my undergraduate career. Anyone who looks at my transcripts can see that something weird happened five years ago, but that I resolved the problem and executed myself in fine style from there on out.
So why do I still need to explain this? My mental health history is something I regard as deeply private. The issues are not ongoing, in fact were more than put to bed years ago. I should not have to keep pulling out my tired narrative of that time, five years later, what with excellent performance at two excellent institutions and the testimonies of three excellent scholars to vouch for my status as a stable human being. I also see no reason that I should be asked to submit transcripts from the Fishbowl to my Ph.D. programs — the credits were accepted by the Petri Dish, and that is all anyone should need to know.
This information is humiliating to me. The Fishbowl “F,” the stupidity of the immature girl who failed herself miserably in every way — these are not things I want on public display. (So why am I blogging about them? Because you love me and you will forgive me. Because you are not a graduate admissions committee.) The rest of my record is virtually spotless. The first twelve of those eighteen months are a hideous stain.
On the other hand, my recovery speaks volumes. And having to do this explaining reminds me of the debt I owe to four generous, kind, brilliant teachers at the Fishbowl, who gave me the tools I needed to get my academic self back on track. Two of them in particular opened my eyes for the first time to the real possibility of spending a lifetime in academia. I tend to forget this period because of its humiliating aspects, but I need to remember how valuable the experience was.
And so, with head held haughtily high, I copy and paste the old explanatory paragraph, and haughtily click the “save” button, with a “Ha!” and a “So there!” But the haughtiness masks a wound — that question, “Have you ever been dismissed…” feels like an intrusion at best, at worst a serious blow in the fencing-match that is this application process. I sincerely hope that this is the last time I will ever have to do this particular bit of explaining.
My infatuation with Thomas More continues. I’ve spent much of this week in the rare book room at the British Library — ohhh, glory. Musty, delicate glory in fine secretary black-letter (thank you, Master Rastell). More on this later.
For now, a belated Despondent Humanist instalment. Nobody else likes them, but I do. So they stay.
Further to my last post, good reader, riddle me this: why is it that I cannot, absolutely cannot, encounter anything to do with More’s eldest and favorite daughter, Margaret, without weeping my bloody eyes out? The biographies are cheesy propaganda — still, I weep. I’ve read his last letter to her at least a dozen times. Still, I weep. Monday in the café, over my yogurt and coffee, weeping. Today in the reading room near closing time, typing my notes, weeping. Why?
I reproduce that final letter in full after the jump.
The first application went out today.
I fretted; I flitted; I twitched.
I prevaricated.
I school-marmed two stoned hippies whose misfortune it was to demonstrate poor library etiquette in my presence.
I edited – and edited – and edited – a single sentence.
I reconstructed the sentence in its original form.
I alarmed the lad sitting next to me with my repeated sharp-intakes-of-breath.
I formatted.
I title-paged.
Alarmed, heart-racing, I printed.
I paper-clipped and document-sleeved.
I addressed.
I glanced over.
…I glanced again.
At my application to the “Univeristy of Pseudostate.”
AGH.
I re-title-paged.
I panicked.
I read every goddamned word of both sample and statement.
Aloud.
I felt very badly for my future readers.
I enveloped.
I whimpered.
I… I… I… sealed.
I posted.
….. I drank.
This is me vigorously pretending that I don’t have a million things to do today, that I am not behind on my research, that I don’t have to send out my first application tomorrow. Denial is delicious.
The fact is, reader, that sometimes I need these long mornings. Sometimes I need to get a decent night’s sleep, tell the alarm to fuck off, waddle around with my coffee, play loud girly music, read my blogs, try not to eat my own brain while I catch up on the news. Sit around in my jammies til noon. “Weakling!” cry the Gods of Academe. Fine. Whatever. Sometimes, it feels good to be a weakling.
I’m healing. I had a very long weekend of not accomplishing what I wanted to accomplish — and not accomplishing it by the most roundabout route possible. I was working, or at least it sure felt a whole hell of a lot like working, but I couldn’t be sure, because I had nothing to show for it.
Breathe, I told myself yesterday morning when I woke up panicking about that nothing-to-show. I’m sure you’ll find something worthwhile in that — hey! that pile of notes. See? You have something. Stop freaking out, eat something, and look at your notes.
Poor scraggly little ruffled thing though I was, I did get my shit together as I usually do, had coherent things to say in both of my classes, got more done on the application front than I expected to. Still, by the end of the day I was in a bare-nerve state to match any I’d ever achieved — and that’s saying something. I wasn’t so much on the verge of tears as unable to prevent my eyes from streaming. I didn’t so much feel like crap about myself as I was unable to tell for certain that I had a self. I felt like wailing out of sheer protest at the universe, but I just couldn’t be bothered to wail.
Then someone who is an important figure in my life gifted me with an incredible kindness. The sort that makes me feel cared-for and smart at the same time, cared-for because I’m smart, that makes me feel like I have a future ahead of me after all, the sort that feels at this time of the year like nothing so much as an act of grace.
So I’ve allowed myself to take the morning off, to smooth myself over. The best thing about this moment was that it meant that this person has faith in me — and more importantly, that I now have to live up to that faith. The bar has been set. I can see it. It’s one I owe it to myself to clear. That’s inspiring.
Reader, tomorrow your mouse wakes up early indeed to engage in the most trivial and yet most excruciating activity the American statistical-educational complex has to offer an aspiring doctoral student in English: from the deepest, darkest, most aliterary lairs of the Educational Testing Service, the Graduate Record Examination Subject Test in English Literature.
Say it with me, reader: what a load of flaming crap.
To those of you who possess immense erudition, knollidge, smarts, book-learnin’, mental archives of the entire canon of Anglophone literature, etc.: if you could see your way ’round to sending some of that my way through whatever means you may have at your disposal, I sure would appreciate it.
To the spirits of excellent luck, bending chance, augury, test-writer-mind-reading, and sheer dumb right-place-right-timeness: o ye! guide my number two pencil that she not err nor lead me into false belief concerning early Victorian verse forms!
To everyone who has ever taken part in any decision to require these test scores or in any part of the process of producing the tests themselves: I hope you die slowly of a combination of carpal tunnel, ritual standardized humiliation, and repeated broadsword strokes to the head, you bunch of sadistic, miserable, no-account sons of syphilitic goats. Honestly. You should be ashamed of yourselves.
