How many years, scraping by? On the dole. Part-time teaching. How many hours in the garret? (Laughter.) 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! When everything else could be deferred. Relationships (laughter). Leisure (laughter). Lifestyle (laughter).
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. And rejections came. From every scholarly journal. One after another.
Writing, finishing articles, sending them off. In hope? In trepidation. But sending them off, undefeated. Optimistic. Every time, optimistic. As if there were no other choice. Because there was not, we told ourselves, any other choice.
What an excuse! What an alibi! 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.
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. Laughter.
Never a question of what the point is of it all. Never, about the meaning of what we were doing. Because it was a question of survival, merely.
What 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, and dissolution into the day and suicide. A life of afternoon melancholy and suicide. 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. Knowing that it would be enough. Knowing that nothing would come of it – could possibly come of it. Knowing without knowing. Pushing to the back of our minds the knowledge that what we were writing was no good. That what we were writing would be read by no one. That what we wrote was an exercise in futility.
All we needed were publications. All we needed were a few essays in the right journals, and then we’d become employable. All we needed was enough to be invited to an interview. All we needed was enough to be considered for employment. All we needed was to be able to compete with those tossers who came out of some good uni and published an article or two. All we needed was to be players, of a sort. Laughter.
Quantity, not quality! Pepper the target! Fire the blunderbuss and hope something hits! Kaboom! Laughter.
Work, we told ourselves. Write. Press ahead. Lean forward. No how, on. One day after another. Aimed. Cocked.
Our daily routines. Out for an espresso. Walking the circuit, waiting for the caffeine to hit. To cross the blood / brain barrier. Then home to work. Then up to the attic room to write. Then busy at the laptop, high up, in the summer heat, in the winter chill.
A simplicity of life. That’s what we knew. An asceticism.
All the things denied to us. All the things we denied ourselves. A normal life! Money! Lifestyle! Romance! God knows, even friendship!
Sacrifice – self-sacrifice – instead. Deferred gratification. The sacrifice of today for tomorrow. And in the meantime, work, just work. Days of work, days of 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.
Reading! As if we could read! Even translating! Us, translating! Us, showing we could work in original languages, translating!
And for what? Those years where we turned ourselves into – what? Workhorses. Were we actually learning? Whole oevures, devoured. Were we actually acquiring range? Depth?
We read, in our own way: it’s undeniable. We read if it could 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 Aristotle!
Because we could only read from our torment. From our twistedness. Because we could only read from our desires for world-destruction. From our impatience for it all to end. Because we could read only from our desire for revenge on a world that ignored us, that placed no value on our interests. On our European thought.
Doubtless we could never transcend our petty interests, our petty desires. Our perversities – which were legion. Our craving for bad news. For catastrophic news. Our desire for ruination to reveal itself. The entire disaster of the world.
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. As sacrificers of our reading to NOTHING.
We read. We had a map of it all, of all the traditions. We had a feel for the terrain. We weren’t just know-nothings. We knew what we were supposed to have read, even if we hadn’t read it all. We’d passed many worthy books before our eyes. Read the lines, turned the pages.
And giving up life for this! Late twenties life! Early thirties life! All the things we were supposed to be doing! Setting down. Pair-bonding. Lazing around in bed on Saturday mornings. Lovely Sunday days out! Drinks with our pals on Friday nights! Because what friends did we have back then? We hadn’t met each other yet. We hadn’t found one another. And weren’t we too poor for friends? For drinks? For the pub? Weren’t we too skint for ordinary life?
And it got us our jobs, in the end. The impossible happened, in the end. The universe relented. Pulled back. Our list of publications. Our interview-intensity. Our unfaked determination. And that’s how we slipped the ones who never got jobs. Who, much more worthy than we were, were never desperate enough. Could never make time enough. Who had too much to sacrifice – relationships and children and mortgages. Who had other things to live for.
That’s how we got our jobs. That’s how we ended up here, who had nothing other to live for. For whom it was always a question of life or death. Who had the focus, it’s true. But only because we had nothing. Only because we’d narrowed ourselves down to nothing. To desire, nothing else.
To have made it, in inverted commas. To have succeeded, in inverted commas. Survivors’ guilt – we’re full of that. Guilt about those better than us, cleverer than us, more erudite than us, who never got jobs. Survivor’s guilt. About those who could never stay at their desks for week after week, month after month.
Survivor’s guilt, as we sit in our offices. As we look out of the window. We could doss for a few years, if we wanted to. Put out feet up for a while. Take it easy. Coast, until we really need to publish again. We could get married, or whatever. Settle down. God knows, we could even afford a flat in this mad world. Go on holiday.
The walls of the world aren’t raised against us. Life isn’t completely impossible. We have prospects. We’re even eligible. We’re not no ones. We’d make suitable husbands or suitable wives.
We’re shadows no longer. Ghosts, no longer. We’ve emerged from the shadows. Into the light. Into the world. My God …
*We don’t take it for granted. We know we could end up out there again. That if we lost our jobs, we might not be able to find another one. That if our department closed, that could be it for us.
And who would we be without this? How could we make sense of anything without this? We want to look out at the world from our office windows. Keep it out there, separate from us, away from us. Distant from us.
Which is why we’ll play along with anything, to keep our jobs. Why we’re perfectly happy to merge with chemical engineering, if that what it takes. We’ll do what we have to. We want to dream our lives away in here. We want to live out our whole lives here. Surrounded by our books, our annotated books.
No longer eating discounted crap. No longer living in crap parts of town. No more mouldy bedsits. No longer scraping by. No longer watching the pennies.
We can rest. Close our office doors. Plan the next year and the year after. My God, we’re regular people at last.
What will happen to our radical politics now? What will happen to our desire for revolution now? What will happen to our general apocalypticism? To our eschatological fervour?
To calm down. To relax. No longer to live on high alert. No longer to live in perpetual emergency.
To have been brought in. Do we have to have sold our souls. Is that what we’ve done: sold our souls? Have we given up our souls, sacrificed them? What will happen to our intensity? To our ardency? To the things we used to say we’d live or die?
Madness – will we know that? Will we be close to madness anymore? Feel the wind from its wing-tip?
God knows, we could get married. Could reproduce. Make more of ourselves. After all this time. It’s not too late for us – not quite. We didn’t miss the appointment. Life was waiting for us, after all.
But will we know what to do with it, life? Don’t we need to read the instruction manual, life?
Now the long seasons. Now the rhythm of weeks. The larger rhythms of life.
We’ve done the reading, God knows. We’ve done the watching. We’ve seen the right things. It’s not just meaningless. We don’t just pass it unawares. These aren’t just names to us. We didn’t encounter Celan first quoted in some philosophy essay.
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. One pound charity shop buys. Old DVDs. Old CDs. We became collectors.
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. To struggle through Lardreau by ourselves. To read 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! Catapaulted 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.
Work in Progress 