“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” – Alice Walker
I have recently discovered that unless you are an impeccably capable and simultaneously carefree person, it is HELL having a “career” to maintain, particularly in academia. Yeah. I told myself I wouldn’t take a job in academia when I graduated, probably for this reason. But like lots of things lots of people tell themselves they will never do, I did it anyway. It’s not BAD, per se, and in fact I love my job. But once you have a Master’s in a certain field, you’re more-or-less married to that field. Place is superseded by the work that you do. If you can’t find a job in it, you probably have to move. And it’s COMPETITIVE out there. Hence my current predicament.
It’s been a hellishly busy few weeks for me. Multitudinous job interviews, moves, travel, presentations, new responsibilities, stress, etc. I’m a pretty low maintenance, keep-to-myself kinda guy, so this type of all-over-the-place ridiculousness puts my usual, slow-paced life on the back-burner and tosses my sanity in the microwave. I have recently developed tic, a weird form of carpal tunnel syndrome, and a pronounced sweating problem. But I’m taking it in stride. In fact I’m starting to feel a lot better about being all over the place. I’m starting to feel comfortable in my role as an awkward and aimlessly neurotic twentysomething. You should try it.
I found myself at world-famous Cookout at 3 AM Saturday morning, having smoked an entire pack of cigarettes and drank at least a gallon of beer, looking back on an epic day, a missed (then caught) flight to Ann Arbor, a series of interviews and walkabouts, and a Latin dance party and then a dubstep dance party upon my return. I was talking to a friend about his on-and-off-again girlfriend who finally decided that she was going to marry someone else. He told me she was “the one who got away.” I said “Hell no. Don’t give her that. Someone better will come along.” “And then… get away,” he added. I ordered a spicy chicken platter with my credit card, because I’d lost my debit card that evening.
That conversation made me realize that we really do control our own destiny… sure, yadda yadda… “everyone says that.” But we run from it, from the truth that we all know, that nobody can harm us unless we allow them. That nobody can make us neurotic or stressed or spiteful unless we let them get to us. That nobody can dictate or “be” anything to us unless we give them that pedestal to stand on. Intelligent people seem to have this problem a lot.
At times it is really hard to accept the inanities of our lives and the mistakes we make in the process of dragging ourselves out of bed and into the big wide world that nobody seems to comprehend anyway. After the last few weeks it has become a lot easier for me to enjoy my career and life uncertainty, because I’ve cast a lot of stuff to the wind. I’m cool with it. Although I’ve got more side projects and engagements than I can deal with and I can’t seem to stop sweating or nervously anticipating my next presentation/engagement/awkward encounter, I feel good when I get home, because I can sit down and reading Nietzsche in my underwear with some lucidity. Is that all that really matters anyway?
So I’ve gotta get on with it. There are people to see. There are stories to be told. There are other blogs I’ve been meaning to write.
Tags: eh?, neuroses, things, what a mess
“The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.” – Abraham Lincoln
This may sound strange, but many of my fondest memories are of reading books. Books have an immense, complex relationship with human memory. They can solidify what was once uncertain or contextualize what seemed like a sure bet. If you’ve ever read a work of fiction that made you fundamentally question the world you live in, you have some idea of what I mean.
This is not to say I don’t have fantastic, vivid memories of people and places and life-altering events. Memory is a strange, selective thing. I used to tell people I had a “three day memory”… that I could remember things I had to do three days from now or things I did three days ago, but anything beyond that was beyond my realm of retention. Looking back, I’ve begun to realize that I do have a memory for weird, obscure sensations, like deja vu, or the times I’ve noticed colliding thoughts or my own synesthesia, the smell of the sunlight coming down through the trees when I first listened to “You Forgot It In People,” or the thickness of the air while hiking fog-drenched mountains in Ireland, or the reddened faces of my friends while reading poetry and dancing in our old house in Asheville. I couldn’t tell you how to get back to the place, but I distinctly remember the sensation of careening down a 100-foot gorge and feeling the mist of the waterfall intermingling with my ridiculous fear. I remember that fear very well. In reality, most people don’t remember the details, but they hold on strongest to the feelings and sensations they felt in those moments.
When I think back on what has made me the person I am, all those memories feel counter-intuitive. The immense fear of careening into a gorge pales in comparison to what I remember about the places I sat quietly and read, and the sensations I felt while reading, alone. I remember long summer afternoons as a child, laying on my bed reading R.L. Stein books. I remember bundling up and reading by candle-light during an ice storm in high school. It was anepic alternative history of WWII, one in which the Nazis won and tortured delinquent children (after a particularly graphic scene, this became the only book I’ve ever thrown down in disgust). Of course I read good things too. I was particularly fond of the science fiction of Jules Verne and Robert Heinlein, anything by Steinbeck, and stories about young people, from Tom Sawyer to Dubliners and A Separate Peace. In college I decided I was an Americanist and I started reading more serious fiction from Hemingway, Faulkner, Updike, and lots and lots of modernist poetry.
I have borrowed books and stolen them. I always read whatever I could get my hands on, which has made for some interesting literary selections. I have read the gamut from total trash novels to incomprehensibly heady philosophic works. I remember re-reading 1984 in one night in someone else’s dorm room, just because it was sitting on their bookshelf, and I liked the challenge of reading an entire book in an evening. What a thrill. Another time, I came across a book that opened up an entire new realm of uncertainty. When I lived in California I worked at a Philips 76 station. My manager was an ex-con with a heart of gold, who would let the employees read while we worked. When we hired a new guy, who had gone back to school to study literature, he brought some hefty theory books to work. I wondered how he could read those while actually working. It was an easy job, but not THAT easy. I remember reading The DaVinci Code at work, my feet kicked up on the counter. The DaVinci Code sort of reads itself. Critical Theory and Society does not. I started talking to him about literary and social theory. About postmodernism, and the idea that we had transcended simple plot characterizations, storylines, and linguistics themselves, and moved into something more complex. House of Leaves had just been published, and people were going bananas over it. Then this guy got fired and left all his books just sitting in a cabinet. Naturally, I took them.
I started reading from a book of his on contemporary continental philosophy. I don’t really know if reading Lyotard, Derrida, Baudrillard, and Foucault as a nineteen-year-old really changed my life for the better. I was overwhelmed by the concepts of subjectivity and “the image.” My world was pretty much turned on its head. Knowledge gleaned from literature began to look more like Swiss cheese than anything else. Everything became something to be prodded, and a true cynic was born. I got some pretty radical ideas from 20th century French philosophy. I started thinking I would be a culture jammer and tried my hand at street graffiti. I wanted to usurp the status quo with my knowledge that the status quo was only a facade. Of course now I realize that lots of people know that.
It took me years to rediscover some semblance and solidity of truth in knowledge or books. When I came back to planet earth, I was probably halfway into my twenties. I tired of looking for symbols in any and everything. I was pretty tired of doubting everything I ever knew. I read Steinbeck’s To A God Unknown and discovered that even symbols have a very basic simplicity to them, a simplicity that can mean something. There is something comforting about knowing that our cultural symbols and status quos can be “true” in some sense. There is a reason we generalize things. I began to see that even the products of our belief systems become true simply by virtue of our belief in them, and everything sort of came full-circle. There is no ultimate truth or ultimate subjectivity. We exist somewhere in-between.
I’m an impatient reader. I’m not very good at being pinned down. There is no single book that changed my life, because I am constantly changing and so are they. I guess I feel like books don’t change lives, or maybe that the book that changed my life is the one I haven’t read yet. This is what keeps me reading, what keeps me searching. The ideas in books are simply a reflection of ourselves, and more particularly, of our neuroses. If we change, we change ourselves because we believe in them or don’t. We buy into them or we toss them aside. We change our own perceptions and memories and sensations because they are fundamentally all we control. They are the makeup of our memories and ourselves. Books just fuel the fire. (No pun intended. Do not burn books.)
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This post was written, a bit late (again), as part of a blogging game called Synchro-blogging. The players are The Creative Collective. Read what the others have to say about “The book that changed my life.”
Tags: somewhere in between, ultimate subjectivity, ultimate truth
I’ve been held back for too long by my own preconceptions and insecurities about myself. We all have, inside us, an innate knowledge and a profound security of being which we are only ever partly attuned to.
It is time to uncover and accept what really is. I will not let fear dictate who I am.
I am sitting stark naked in my bedroom as I write this. I’m going outside now.
Tags: getting over self-loathing, nudity, selfish musings which may or may not apply
There’s blood on my jacket and a rot in my gut,
our houses are hollow, soulless inside–
A low roll of thunder and the gurgle of smut–
A sea is split open, an ocean of mine.
It comes rushing back, a light that must prove
its luminous haste to the slow crawl of time.
Far-away friends are weighed by what moves–
Furniture lost, turned-over, inclined.
So much in the wake of one person’s life,
a paisley fever or a mortgaged soul–
Torn through the stitching of sinewy nights–
The sawtoothed dents in the cars they drove.
On Rilke’s advice, I try to forget.
I go against love songs. I go against love.
The past, it provokes, the future begets–
A vital new thump imagined above.
An owl descends on a quiet county line–
A freshly-fletched arrow, always to maim.
Playing his prey on a sidewalk in the pine–
Merely to gorge his visceral game.
One does not simply “wake up” from a dream about inheriting 20 million dollars in gold in a dangerous Latin American country and trying to escape unscathed. It takes another hour of sleep to recoup from that sort of neurological trauma.
Tags: 20 million dollars, my life is an action movie, neurological trauma, weird dreams I had
Hipster/weird/strangely enticing, this song reminds me a lot of an emo Arthur Russell
Tags: James Blake, new favorites
I guess this is right up my alley…? Electronic music about young love written by an aptly-named band.
Tags: Geographer, indie rock music
I never saw the purpose
in your drunk impatient
sounds, a shifting sigh
as snow began to fall;
sensing unpreparedness,
I rustled my jacket, hat,
tying my shoes though
knots never came quickly
to me. You blushed and
withdrew, cold makeup
smeared across blemishes.
A low-ringing bell,
dew-drops on a new year.
Visitors from out-of-town.
A short kiss, a warning.
I muffled my words with
a shortness of breath,
smoke rising from the
trees, shoots laid bare,
poking-up through sog-
gy mountains of leaves.
We crept through sharp
fences to visit Mr. Wolfe
again, his stone, aloof,
ajar, just as we left it,
as if risen in death, the
brass moon like a flicker-
ing candle, dark on your
hands, palms turned-up
seemingly inquisitive.
You said it so bravely,
we narcissists hang
our hearts like mirrors,
awaiting tears, my torn
reaction, shadows in
the orange of your eyes,
as if we’d spent entire
nights and years in that
graveyard, a naked field
of unseemly bedfellows.
Tags: poetry, Thomas Wolfe, winter
