I had had one objective at New Bank—to sit at the feet of its great gold-wielding god and hear business’ glittering truth tinkle from that gilded throne. There … the truth tinkled and I let you eavesdrop and the truth, as it often is, was a choice. Dreams and madness … or money? Dreams and madness, thanks. And where on God’s unholy earth are dreams and madness most concentrated? Not the asylum … no, asylums are for those who refuse the world’s insanities and go nuts because of it. No, I reasoned at the time, the zenith of dreams and madness must be the academy … all those obsessive eccentrics taking pictures of black holes, detailing every historical offense, counting the number of prepositions in Macbeth. So, naturally, thinking of myself as being weird, I thought I might fit in there. The mad all get along with each other, don’t they? Don’t they?
I didn’t say no to Hal because he was wrong, but because he was boring. He offered me more money, more power; the promise of sanity and respectability. He dangles keys to the dictionary, a Lexus LS, and elevator lust. Acid love will wet my dark and omnipotent head and I’ll be driven to the mausoleum on rubber accolades. Hey, children of VISA, parents of headlines, this is it … dreams in a skyscraper, numbers on my forehead, security in a tomb … death calling sweetly from bank accounts and mortgages. Living behind elevator mirrors, reaching out to stroke your thighs. To resist its leather chair is the task of the inmate. Yes, we all are inmates, but there’s only worthy jailor; I call her Life.
Whether the university is life or not is another question. As a student, stumbling through three degrees on the liquid trinity of beer, coffee and lust, I didn’t know what it was. When philosophy tells you everything’s meaningless and disability studies tells you everything’s meaningful and business tells you it’s all about money and community services tells you it’s all about care and history tells you it’s all about narrative and art history tells you it’s all about freaks and psychology tells you it’s all about projection … and projection and money they sound pretty good and you leave with lots of illusions and maybe a job and some weird sexual experiences that you could have got without paying a hundred grand and a mind bent on turning itself off as quickly as possible and debts piled to Ganymede and no ability to think clearly about anything and maybe a job and free eyeware every two years and that’s what it’s all about vision, a job a job …
Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world … Your professor … he must know what he’s talking about … why else would he have all those degrees and be able to say incomprehensible things?
I remember the eminent Dr. Hermin Nodrass, who didn’t teach me Shakespeare in ENG911. He was tall, lean, wore every day the same ash pants, bleak white shirt, tartan tie and weary tweed jacket, had mold growing from his ears, and spoke in whippet. He’d lean, boneless, over the lectern, tie twisted in 13 directions, the most active part of him his right forefinger as it eagerly probed his nostrils.
I don’t want to but I remember the esteemed Dr. Melsa V. Bloon-Sark, Herbert Hosprey Professor of Historical Ballistics, who didn’t teach me about early medieval siege technologies in graduate school. She wore sweaters so thick they devoured her breasts while she devoured a 200-tissue box of 3-plies before break, and when I went to see her about a research problem she spent the entire time sifting through a massive jar of rusty paperclips, finding nothing, mumbling, Yes, yes, read er Fuffingeist, Fuffingeist, er yes yes, read, that’s it, Fuffinyes, Herr geist, Fuffinfuff.
But there were also moments when the skies opened and light rained from heaven. When the world in all its bloody unintelligibility scabbed into meaning. When ideas choreographed by Shiva danced across the classroom. When Museum Studies, French, Industrial Engineering, Social Psychology, and Theology talked across the night and from their talk produced a song. When that distant being called a professor said I don’t know, and knowledge was born.
Who knows how these moments come about? You can’t predict them. You can’t produce them. They aren’t waiting in your pocket like a credit card. Maybe you can facilitate them, but unless something (I don’t know what it’s called) comes from somewhere (I don’t know its location), the light is going to stay hidden and knowledge is simply another word.
But when knowledge is new, when it’s living and laughing in your face, it’s not a word but vision and power. The toddler climbs the bookcase and throws all the books on the floor … ecstasy! The secret grade two girls’ club invents a language and passes notes written in Schnizzerfleik during math class … delight! The student reads Hamlet and sees for the first time the irreconcilable tension between the individual and society … horror! The poet stumbles down a filthy alley and finds the phrase he’s been seeking for months … awe and gratitude!
This is my theory: that knowledge is not solid, like a rock, nor even liquid, like water, but is the wind, still and wild, shocking, sweet, soothing, deadly. And the one who loves knowledge is a leaf, eager, vulnerable, cast about and tethered to the ride … nothing in the grip of this ineffable omnipresent god.
And this is my dream: that the university would be the home of leaves and wind, visions and terror and joy. And that students and teachers would be fellow pilgrims, wandering where they would, far from money’s teeth. That it would be a showcase of the laughing lightness of the mind, synaptic orgies flashing the marketplace. And that the Ph.D., official zenith of learning, last stop on knowledge’s signed road, would indicate the nimblest minds, the ones that step and smile and leap across life’s spectral stage, and are not daunted by the world’s hard obstacles, but sing in rough weird unities the human spirit’s unsingable song.
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