Last night I saw A Scanner Darkly, which was quite wonderful. On my way out, I bumped into Jonathan, the handsome and successful young doctor who has helped me on some of the HIV presentations, who was headed into another movie; I was in enough of a daze that it was actually rather difficult to fake casual conversation.
The book has always been one of my favorite Philip Dick novels (with Ubik, the first I ever read; Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, which is a sort of parallel to Scanner; and, above all of course, the mysterious The Man in the High Castle, which has a climax that I always find far more disorienting than any of the basic concepts that run the novel). I couldn't help identifying fairly deeply with the film – the anomie, the sense of decline, the sense of confused waste and the constant return to the repetitive, meaningless, draining actions that create that waste.
I also spent an appreciable part of the afternoon arguing with a postgraduate applicant who seemed to be dooming himself to failure through doing everything backwards, and complaining about the results; and I had the mild shock two days ago of having my opinions dismissed by a colleague, a fairly frequent experience during the school year (I become unused to it in summer, but will have to deal with it again on the usual regular basis, starting in a couple of weeks); and of course the previous weekend in London, and the week in Spain, spent with colleagues and advisors who have great affection for me, but not much in the way of expectations, and two of whom have made some promises they will clearly not bother to fulfill – not out of any malice, just out of a combination of forgetfulness, plus the implied sense that effort spent on my career is effort that is kind of wasted. Good money after bad, I suppose.
They all acknowledge my potential – but of course I've been playing the potential card since my early teens. Potential instead of action: a disastrous exchange. As I think backwards through time – the past few weeks, even months, and most certainly the years, the evidence simply continues to collect....
All this, with various other minor and fragmentary experiences, plus my normal obsessive concerns about writing and failure, came into focus as an acutely lucid morning dream and waking vision of my current position: that, although it is true that I am not a dramatic failure, it is no wonder I am powerless at work, not invited to preside at pretty much anything, simply not considered by a great many of my colleagues, locally and internationally. It is all simply a natural and accurate response to the figure I cut in the world, to use a rather eighteenth-century phrase – people do not think of me because I myself have not made enough happen; I am indeed perhaps in the middle of the scale of normal academic failures, not someone anyone would need to fire, but someone who will simply be in the back of various pictures, someone who is not really suitable for promotion, or attention, or being asked to speak in a professional context.
And this is not experienced with my usual inflated, narcissistic tragedy or self-pity: just an edge of horror at how clearly the picture develops, if I look at it straight on – that, whatever excuses I can drum up around health and history, I have firmly cast myself as an also-ran.
And even this blog, of course, is simply an ineffective attempt to bypass the work that would have a significant effect on my position, in favor of the casual, ephemeral – the failed....
Comments