Acquisition and maintenance
One of the somewhat pathetic aspects of my life – not just in the past five years of English exile, but since I was started to lose faith in my creative abilities and future career, at the age of seventeen – is my tendency to spend much (and I mean: much) of my time in the acquisition of things (for a long time, books, and then music; and later video, foodstuffs, electronics); and in the maintenance of those things, of my living quarters, objects, clothing, body, and the organization of all of these.
This of course creates an environment that tends to (at least partly) enchant the casual visitor: the bibliophile enters my living room, full of bookshelves of tidily organized, well-kept volumes, with shelves of equally neat CDs, DVDs and other media. The gastronome looks through the kitchen pantries for exotica and strong and complex combinations of flavors. Visitors to my apartment, if they have certain tastes, have entered a charming playroom of things that will amuse them – certainly when spurious comes by for a meal, he spends much of his time browsing the shelves (blah-feme not quite so much, possibly because he is more a gourmet than gourmand in the world of books, or possibly because of his more extrovert/conversational relationship to social events).
Unfortunately, this static world of cared-for things, though as pleasant for me as it is for visitors, tends to exist as a world of potential, of accessible value – a sort of consumerist world of culture, a museum of history. It makes me a librarian rather than a writer; and perhaps I would have been better as a librarian – the daily minutiae of care and organization as a living, combined with lower expectations of innovation and creation, would certain match my activities better than the career I actually have.
It is as though the whole is waiting for a user: as though I would make an acceptable partner for someone who really got work done, who really created things – and I could sit quietly in the background, making sure dinner was ready on time, that the timetable of appearances was kept up to date. As though I am really a secretary to my own potential ability, to my own talent: and, fatally, not its executive....
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Listenings
Particularly interested, lately, in two very different, though perhaps equally talented, musical creators: Porcupine Tree (which is apparently mostly Steven Wilson) and Stephan Micus, the German multitalented instrumentalist and singer.
Both deeply expressive, intelligent, complex: naturally Porcupine Tree is more cynical and contemporary (was there ever anything more savagely accusing than their new video for 'Fear of a Blank Planet', which is more exactly and cruelly critical of the disasters of our culture than any naively angry burst of traditional punk?); I was first drawn to them through what is still my favorite song of theirs, 'The Sound of Muzak', which is something I clearly need to use in teaching my first year students exactly how contemporary Adorno's ideas really can be.
And what could be more strangely, ambiguously, wistful than 'She's Moved On'? – the material, and fragmentary phrases, from a simple two-dimensional relationship gone predictably wrong – but with all the bizarre and inappropriate weight of feeling implicit in any rejection packed into the music, making its impact vaster than the apparent 'trigger', making the whole a universe of emotion.
But then Micus: so sad, and yet with so much belief in time, experience, reality, life – implicit in his music is something that is the exact opposite of cynicism, an implicit sense that life and music are worth everything.
Alternating them: a roller coaster....
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Fear of the future
Though it is still mid-August, I am already intimidated, tired, by the oncoming train of the next school year. It is a shame it all feels so heavy, so unfulfilling, so insistently chaotic, so essentially full of the noise of nonsensical demands and confused mismanagement: some of this is, of course, the nature of the UK university, with its endless, tangled puppet strings leading from every tiny thing we do all the way up to a faceless government bureaucracy that has no sense of academic values. But unfortunately a lot of it is also my dread of the students themselves – their demands, their irresponsibility, their emotional desperation.
It is ultimately a hard thing to be a teacher, at least for thinking types such as I am: the circular repetition of years, where every successful relationship with a student is replaced by one where one has to go back to the very beginning; such that every student who grows into a wonderful colleague worth talking to is abruptly replaced by a nervous, sullen seventeen-year old who has to be convinced that there is some good reason for them to be here.
And the return to the same topics, to the same beginnings, each year – terribly stressful, at least for me; fortunately we are allowed to teach different topics, different specialist courses each year (though the foolish bureaucrats of the university and government tend to dislike this, wanting predictable and repeated courses so that they can impose the simplistic check-boxes of quality control). But even a new topic is not so satisfying when so much time has to be spent just engaging the students – so much time convincing them to do the work, to care about the material, to think about it all; by the time they are actually doing the work enough to enjoy themselves, and for me to enjoy talking to them, the year is over and they move on.
Madness, really. How desperately we all need an entirely different kind of university: one where teachers drop in intermittently, talking about what interests them at the moment; one where students come to what interests them, only (with no curriculum or programs), and return when they have interesting questions and answers. In such an environment, of course, it gets harder and harder to tell student from teacher (also as it should be).
Sort of a Black Mountain College, or perhaps some kind of Neillian university. And why do we put up with any less?...
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