A vanity of musicologists

The American Musicologists Society annual meeting, in a city that has its own characteristic reputation – Nashville – but which doesn’t really have all that strong a character, really: a large collection of people who have devoted careers, lives actually, to something that is perhaps not terribly important. A collection of mostly rather dull people, leavened with a handful of brilliant ones – and I think that my friends are the brilliant ones, of course: Mitchell, Judith, Nadine, Andrew, both Susans, and so on – but perhaps every group, every clique, that threads among this mildly unimportant mass thinks itself the only interesting one. And, pathetically, some of them are at each others’ throats – including people I thought I liked and approved of – which leaves me, at points, wrestling with a confused need to figure out which of them are right and which are wrong: but, as the younger Susan says, in the chaos of projections and unreal stories an outsider can only pick one’s ginger way… and avoiding making any final decisions.

My own presentation goes very well indeed: throughout the conference, many people keep coming up and saying how good they thought it. But I think: yes, but – what will that do? Will anybody remember it for long – like a television show that passes in the night? Or, perhaps more importantly, will it get me a job in a warmer and more amusing city? A new job might endanger me by exposing me to vast new demands, in any case; the two charming musicologists from the southern UK who take over my return trip, kindly and brusquely squiring me through their family circles rather than leaving me in a dull airport for eleven hours, are richer and more successful than I and mine, but they also seem endlessly engaged in work, work, work. But I would doubt there’s another job to come through this venue – no one who has a job available seems to care that I spoke well; the brightest spot, when two plump women from Brandeis tell me that I inspired them to stay in the field – through the simple realization that our work could actually be interesting – is more the kind of thing that will happen to me: to inspire, occasionally and fragmentarily, from above, but never to impress from below.

That last, short, night in the hotel, while having trouble sleeping for just a few hours before the airport shuttle comes, when I am fretting about all of this, Mitchell kindly tries to reassure me by reminding me that this is just how things are: and that the field of English literature, similar yet so different, is comparatively an ecosystem of flash-flood trends... so the boredom of our field can be compared with the problems of other fields, and nowhere is perfect.

The hard thing is that our field, with its vast stretch of prizes given to vain mediocrities and its startlingly dull ventures into familiar territory, is so minor: I have the uneasy feeling that this is why I want to become an analyst – caught in one rather vain, useless field, I want to go somewhere where life, where work, is deeper, more important. Of course, I know that Jungians in various cities tend to splinter into groups that don’t talk to each other, so it’s probably more of the same.

Where are those thinking types, those people of the Swords suit, who are not shrill and competitive vanities, who are not consumed by their pettiest and most juvenile impulses? Consumed, until there seems to be nothing else animating their graying, respectably-dressed forms….

How disappointing it would be, if all of those satirical-academic novels were true. True, because we are all like this, and nothing else.

In any case, my Ecclesiastesian musings have led to what must be the correct collective noun for us....