“Who am I if I am no longer this?” and the Endless Nameless

Last week, for the first time in nine years, the University’s fall term began—and I was at home.  Not at home as in “Oh, as an Academic Tutor, I don’t start until next week” at home, nor the “Ha HA! Tuesday-Thursday schedule! Extra day of prep and syllabi tweaking” at home. 

No. I was at home because I didn’t have to be anywhere at home. At home in the “No Job” sense.  An intense sense of existential dread had been haunting me in waves since I had turned in my badge and keys, taught one final, very surreal evening class (complete with student penned libertarian protest music),  limped home and spent a long, dark night of the soul staring into the yawning maw of a professional abyss that was to be my new reality. 

The reasons are exhaustive and exhausting as to why this came to pass, but they can be reduced to “Elections Have Consequences”: Collegiate Restructuring.  Politicians, who belong as far away from education and its institutions as is humanly possible, decide to “fix” something, and, without considering its moral, intellectual or logistical implications, make it so and those of us who either do the educating or the learning are left holding the bag.  For the poor and working class students in the state of Ohio, as well as many of us who taught those students, the bag turned out, especially in Cincinnati, to be the only consolation prize. The venn diagram between the community college and the university was a chasm of the “fix” assumptions about participation of the parties, problems of accreditation, left those students out.    I, too, found myself on the outside looking in, a victim of restructuring, a shit economy, budget cuts and too few years in the profession

Ten years ago, I made the decision to go to graduate school. After few years of shit jobs, ranging from construction laborer to house painter to the library job I wrote about previously in “Tuesday’s Gone”, I found my priorities re-ordered on that terrible day.  Sure, I liked this job, but when death comes ripping, as it did, I felt as though it was time to get on with it.  I mean, this wasn’t ever meant to be permanent.   I needed to move. So I applied to, took a lousy GRE, and was accepted to graduate school.

Graduate School was, of course, a hazing ritual that gave me a way to think about the discipline, but also the academy itself, so I haven’t really been surprised what has transpired over these years, and, unlike many of my colleagues from my time in graduate school, I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time and find myself in a full time teaching position at the University less than a year after receiving my M.A. in English.

What transpired between that first class and the last one is sublimely edifying, though too long a tale for this post; my three readers will have to wait for an re-telling of that particular tale.  My desire to educate within the university was kindled as an undergraduate, watching the solar brilliance of the professors, their socratic elegance, the torrent of words and ideas, the humanity in the humanities. It was rekindled with equal brilliance in those graduate seminars and classes where the substance of the discipline, rather than the politics of the Ivory Tower, was stressed, where I learned to think about that “solar brilliance” and the certitude of knowing that, in a life where a sense of belonging was either tenuous, met with suspicion or non-existent, that I had maybe found a home.  I belonged with these people; I was one of them.  For my father, a UAW man of forty three years, the first in his family to graduate from High School, the idea that I was a university  professor was proof of the transcendence of the American Dream, that working hard, doing the right things, pays dividends. 

He still does, as he is adamant about reminding me with our weekly chicken and beer long lunches, where all manner of of things are discussed and world problems solved.  I am not sure: “Who am I if I am no longer this?”

I feel very much a drift, a person who, in passing his  bookcase, will thumb through a 1947 Viking Press Finnegans Wake, only to return to his couch, empty handed, to an Xbox or the loving torpor of cable news, numb: “WTF happened?”

This week, the twentieth anniversary of Nirvana’s epochal Nevermind was released, and while I have yet to purchase it, I am certainly contemplating a certain wry-rony in purchasing this with part of an unemployment check.  When it was first released, I was seventeen years old, making it possible to embrace “not belonging” for millions of kids like me.  But those were different times, as Uncle Lou would say, for while they seemed desperate, and we who were so moved by that music looked to a future beyond Reaganomics, beyond the war, beyond George H.W. Bush (and soon enough repudiate his Brahman entitlement with a saxophone wailing rake from a place called Hope), the truth is that we had no idea how bad things would get.  There was still a dream to pursue, though it seemed a bit further off.  But concert tickets were cheap, the music coming out was challenging and righteous, and whatever, and however, it was manufactured for consumption by the emerging merchants of cool, the pre-packaging of Punk (as if the Pistols were as put together as the Monkees) for the masses, it doesn’t make it any less valid, or life changing. Unless, of course, you were (or are) one of these punker-than-thou dicks (and Christ, there is a version of these people in every generation; see Don’t Look Back if you doubt me) who only listened to bands that had just formed in a garage an hour ago because, man, they ain’t sold out.

Well, my imagined caricature of the smug pricks of Christmas past, how sold out do you feel now?  It seems that neither Nirvana, or Bad Religion, made much difference: Clinton tacked right, sold out organized labor.  The millennium came, and while we were worried about banking software, the Republicans rolled back financial reforms dating to the Depression.  Then, in a 5-4 decision, we got stuck with the ne’er-do-well son of the Bush we had just gotten rid of. Things went down hill from there.

The music has aged well, and while there is, perhaps, a nostalgia for a time when things looked like they might be starting to go in the right direction, it also spoke—and speaks—to the uncertain future, displacement, and finding beauty in despair.  I…WE…are sorely in need of such objects d’art right now.

The answer to  “Who am I if I am no longer this?” is currently being formulated as the endless nameless.