On Coming To The End.
In two days I will don my sub-fusc and jump through the biggest hoop of my academic career: I’ll spend a week writing exams in the morning, then revising in the afternoon, all the time wondering what impact it will have on my life and what will happen when it ends. I know what will happen, of course.
First, I will write up a very long Letter to Potential Applicants, a piece I’ve been thinking about for some time and which will (hopefully) be a useful addition to all the stuff written about Oxford. I am both fascinated and repulsed by my education, unlike Zadie Smith who managed to get over any issues of entitlement / inferiority very quickly. I suspect there are others who have not yet arrived who will be especially prone to this dilemma, so I’m writing for them. Second, I will devote all my time and energy to re-discovering why, exactly, I picked English.
I retain a hazy idea which is sustained by the fact that almost every weekend for the past three years I have taken the Oxford Tube out of the land of the dead and into that of the living; London, as anyone who knows me will verify, has become a shining light on the horizon, where the writers I refer to are alive, with twitter accounts and birthdays I can actually attend. They blog, they fuck up, they are brilliant, they hate fish, they bite their nails, they take on the media. My relationship with Oxford and London is a bastard-paradoxical-conflation of the Iliad and the Odyssey – I’m endlessly trying to get home, and yet home is a locus of battle / revelation from which I’m endlessly returning. Will universities ever embrace the vitality I witness every time I go to London? Will it ever be possible to acknowledge the fact that the subjects they offer move?
I like this paradox idea, and Zeno’s comes to mind when I think about the fact that while we English students are sitting there reading “Sheepishness in the Winter’s Tale”* a digital revolution is occurring, and yet we are the supposed heirs of the publishing industry. If you don’t believe motion exists, as Zeno did – that is, if you do everything conceivable to disprove and discredit the idea – then yes, we are Achilles scrabbling furiously behind the tortoise of history (if, of course, we’ve managed to get over the cripplingly infinite nature of beginning). So much to read and we must (for whatever reason) do it chronologically! A thousand years to cover in three! All hail the straight line, and let us congeal in stasis.
It’s more complicated than that of course. I am wholly of my education and wholly baffled by it. I’m just bitter because I went to a weight-lifting class and have incurred the wrath of my triceps. My body is a vindictive mother-fucker at times. So is my mind which decided to put it through that trash two days before the exam. Together they have a beautiful relationship, full of stops and starts and sabotage. But anyway, I am partly convinced that all my academic success prior to university was the result of unselfconscious spontaneous creativity. I am wholly convinced I lost that after my first term and need to re-discover it, and that this process of losing and finding will be an unwelcome but permanent fixture for the rest of my life.
In true Chicken Soup for the Soul style:
* It’s a very interesting essay by Paul Yachnin about how Shakespeare uses Ovine life to represent the nature of Leonte’s infanticide.
Haha, you’ve written brilliantly on something that has been plaguing my mind for a while, a very weird tightrope we’ve walked!
Oxford is such a strange place. Being a student here gave me …well, nothing really, except moving me here. It took…pretty much everything. Money. Health. Sanity. And once it had stripped me of them and decided it didn’t like an indebted bipolar invalid, it spat me out without a by your leave. London on the other hand feels like home the moment I feel the wind from the Westway.
And yet. I write equally about both, and my books, and my poems, and my papers are full of people exiled from one to the other, without directional specificity. It’s as though, like the Oxford Tube, they are poles between which a shuttle operates – Irigaray’s pair of lips between which our lives are the drool that dribbles?
The London literary scene is too manifold to generalise, but the tip of it I’ve seen is ugly – full of the wrong kind of self-love; full of shallowness and surfaces and clubs and ties and mutual media exposure and cliques and crowds and villagers waving off strangers with pitchforks. Oxford has an overground that is full of every kind of parasitic pretension and smugness, but an artistic heart that doesn’t seek to be anything but itself. That takes people as it finds them, takes their art for what it is, and listens and connects and gives back.