Scraping By

We’re losing ourselves. Forgetting who we were. Forgetting what it was like outside – outside the campus. In the real world.

Becoming vague. Becoming brain-fogged. Is it something in the air? Are they pumping something into the air? Some anti-philosophy gas. Some anti-thinking substance.

They’re probably raining it down from the clouds. From the controlled sky. From the controlled clouds. Raining barium and strontium and God knows what else -ium. Pouring it down …

We have to remember … the people we were. The would-be philosophers that we once we were.

Our years of training! Our PhDs! And then the whole period post-PhD …

How many years, scraping by? On the dole … Part-time teaching … How many hours reading and writing in our garrets? But we had a sense of mission. We wanted to survive. To find a job we could bear. To establish acceptable conditions of life.

Our years of work! Before we knew each other. Before we knew others of our kind. In terrible isolation! When everything else could be deferred. Relationships. Leisure. Lifestyle.

And, above all, any question about the quality of what we were doing. Any questions about our qualifications for writing. About our basic skills.

We worked! We burrowed through days and nights. Reading, writing, finishing articles, sending them off. In hope? In trepidation. But sending them off even as rejections came. Every time, optimistic. As if there were no other choice. Because there was not, we told ourselves, any other choice. Because how else were we going to get jobs?

What purpose! What keenness! Our lives shaped into missiles. We took aim with our lives. Fired, with our lives, our whole lives. Never thwarted. Never defeated. As if sheer effort would get us though.

Because was the alternative? A life outside the uni and suicide. A life of going nowhere and suicide. A life of understimulation and suicide. A life of dole office assessments and sick-leave assessments and suicide. A life of friendlessness and suicide. A life of general social ostracision and suicide.

A life of entropy, scattering, of afternoon dissolution and suicide. A life of afternoon melancholy and suicide. A life of the emptiness of the emptiness of the morning, the loneliness of the night, and suicide.

We worked – how we worked. Every night and day we worked. Every weekend we worked. Writing.

And reading. Borrowing books through interlibrary loans. Chasing down PDFs. Downloading. Converting into Word. Annotating, minutely. Line by line. Highlighting. Underlining. Setting into bold. Working through texts. Processing whole books. Fiercely learning. Intensely learning. Burning out your eyes learning, reading.

Until our eyes ached. Until they were totally red. Until we woke up sore-eyed in the night. Until we had to buy artificial tears. Until opticians shook their heads, concerned.

We read, in our own way: it’s undeniable. We read – but could it really be called reading. No doubt we perverted what we read. No doubt we created unholy monsters from our readings. No doubt our Heidegger was a twisted Heidegger. No doubt our Adorno was a malformed Adorno. No doubt our Hegel had little to do with the real Hegel. No doubt our Kant was unrecognisable compared to the real Kant. And our Plato, our beloved Plato!

Because we could only read from our torment. From our twistedness. Because we could only from our desire for revenge on a world that ignored us, that placed no value on our interests.

We read, which is to say, we polluted what we read. Poisoned what we read – indeed, the whole wellspring of European thought. We read, which means only that destroyed what we read – burnt it. We read as book-burners, as book-pyre-builders. And we knew it!

And no difference with our writing. What we destroyed with our writing. What we sacrificed! Because of none of it, we knew, was any good. Because it was at best mediocre. No – sub-mediocre. On a good day – a very good day – passable. Just about. But no more than that.

All we wanted was to be published. And in decent journal. In ranked-highly journals. Doubtless we could never transcend our petty interests, our petty desires. Our perversities – which were legion.

European books. European culture. We made it ours. It became ours. As though washed up on our shoes. As though shipwrack, random detritus. We picked it up, brought it home. Decorated our rooms with it.

And on our own, all of this. In solitude. Barely knowing anyone like us. Isolating ourselves more and more.

Having no small talk. Having no range of conversation. Unable to talk of fine dining or favourite recipes or planting the garden or where to go on holiday this year. Unable to talk of favourite box sets. Of prize-winning fiction.

Because we were burrowing into the night. Into our night. Beneath our stars. Our constellations. Thinking about Paul Celan on the bus. Thinking about Nelly Sachs on our way to sign on. Thinking about Chatelet on our way to the dole office. And learning French, in our own way. And reading German, in our own way. Grammar books. Online exercises. Struggling through Lardreau by ourselves. Reading the untranslated Grelet. The unknown-in-English Chatelet.

And in the meantime, scrabbling about for part time work. Looking for hourly paid work. Being available on call for hourly paid work. Just about getting by on hourly paid work. Surviving – barely – on hourly paid work.

Scurrying around the feet of the real academics. Ghosting the corridors of the real academics. Doing the real work of the academy. At short notice! Catapulted in! With no time to prepare! Infinitely adaptable! Saying yes to everything, for hourly paid work.

And signing on in the long vocations. Reduced to the dole in the long vacations. Income support and housing benefit in the long vacations.

Until Cicero.

Sure, until Cicero. Until she hunted us down and saved us.