Primordial: An Abstraction

40

After all these years it occurs to me that I have retaken all of my undergraduate classes. I didn’t need to do that. Did I?

I go to talk to a student advisor.

She’s a woman. She’s attractive. She’s younger than me.

“How old are you?” I ask.

“At least fifteen years younger than you,” she retorts. “Maybe more.”

I nod. My underlip tries to outmaneuver my overlip.

Balking, I say, “Do you like my shirt?” I push out my chest and admire the logo. “Technically I may call you shawty, correct? Or is there an age limit? How old does a woman have to be before a man is no longer allowed to call her shawty? Can somebody’s grandmother be called shawty without it sounding acerbic, juvenile, or downright pejorative? Can I call a skeleton shawty as long as it possessed female genitals when it was encrusted in flesh? How does it work? What has happened to the sphere of culture and oblivion that interpellates us? Why is there no linguistic counterpart for shawty in the male register? I assume it has to do with patriarchy and the nature of power relations, but it’s dangerous to assume anything. Perhaps shawty is not gendered at all. I have never heard a woman call a man shawty. I have never heard a woman call a woman shawty. I have never heard a man call a man shawty. But anything is possible. Anything. Somebody who is not a woman, or even a man perhaps, may be getting called shawty right now, even as I speak.”

Terrified, the advisor rifles through a cabinet of files.

I tell her to take it easy.

I ask what she’s going to do about all of the time I lost essentially redoing my entire B.A. degree for no apparent reason. “You are an advisor, after all,” I intone. “Advise me.”

She dry-heaves.

“There are protocols,” she says.

I wait for her to continue.

A toilet flushes in the next room.

“That’s all you have to say about it? Do you even know what a protocol is?”

The sweep of my consequent aerostatic explanation is of course rooted in hard etymology, but the advisor doesn’t want to hear about it.

My students were the same way.

They didn’t want to hear about anything, no matter the context, or the subtexts, or the mere surface-appearance of the primary text or texts under scrutiny, let alone anything having to do with BwOs.

Students only want to pay their money and get their degree so that they can go do whatever else it is they want to do in the dining room or the bedroom or the bathroom or the basement of the House of Life.

Some students prefer to do what they do beyond House limits in the Pole Barn. But there is no escaping the House.

As Louis Althusser writes in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” a seminal piece of Marxist philosophy that I cited with habitual relish in my original dissertation, prompting my dissertation committee to refuse me the civility of crumpets and scones at our monthly get-togethers, an abnegation for which I have never forgiven my committee members: “What thus seems to take place outside ideology in reality takes place in ideology. What really takes place in ideology seems therefore to take place outside it.” Later, Althusser adds: “Ideology has no outside. But at the same time, it is nothing but the outside.” And what goes for ideology goes for studentry, a term I perhaps recklessly appropriate from Herrs Strunk & White in The Elements of Style, an entirely outdated grammar textbook written by a confused and to some extent incompetent English professor (Strunk) and the author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little (White). One enjoys the sound of the word studentry. And there is nothing more grotesque than studentry. Hence my deep interest in the grotesque. Exceptions belie the stereotype, of course, but exceptions are mere bric-à-brac; there are always too few of them to make a difference.

I get out my wine.

I ask where the wine glasses are.

The advisor pretends like she doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

I pull a few sips from the bottle, cork it and put it away.

I get it out again and uncork it and put it on her desk and place the cork at the base of the bottle, leaning it against the glass so that it doesn’t roll away. “Just in case,” I remark.

Clearly the advisor can’t or won’t help me get back my time, money, and expended intellectual energy.

I say, “Who’s a good dissertation advisor to pursue in my department?”

She asks me what department I’m in. I tell her.

She doesn’t know anybody in that department.

I say, “I have a plan to get my dissertation done in a timely fashion. Many of my graduate students used to have difficulty with this. They completed their coursework and couldn’t wrap their heads around the Final Stage. They were used to writing short essays, taking tests, and doing research, if they did any research at all. When they suddenly had to perform real research and produce a book-length manuscript, they faltered. And ultimately failed. Many of them never got past writing an introduction. In my case, I will print out my old dissertation in a new font and turn it in. This should take about five or ten minutes. I wrote it twenty years ago, but it’s still relevant, and the prose is hip. My prose has always been hip.”

My advisor says I can’t do that.

I ask why.

She says I just can’t do that.

I ask why again.

She doesn’t know; people might not like it, though.

I ask why again.

She says I ask too many questions and questions often lead to hurt feelings.

I say, “Well just pretend I never brought it up. I won’t plagiarize my old dissertation as far as you or anybody else knows. I’ll write a new one from scratch.”

“You can’t take things back like that.”

“They took my Ph.D. back.”

“That’s different.”

I don’t say anything.

The advisor says something.

I say, “Stand up and turn around so I can look at you. I have no idea what you look like from the opposite direction. You’ve been sitting there the whole time.”

My quicksilver deflection works like a charm. Already she has forgotten what I said about turning in my old dissertation with a new font. And when she gets out of the chair, a new chapter unfolds.