Another Academic Muse

At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities--to clarify just who it is we really are?
--Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma

I happened upon this quote while reading Girlfriend in a Coma, a book filled with dark humour and an apocalyptic sensibility. I'm not too far in, but it had me thinking about that quote, especially how it relates to my personal experiences as a graduate student in English. I am realizing that the further up i go in the institution the more blurry i become, the more it doesn't really matter who i am. I become a slave to the system in such a way that i am producing essays, research papers, argumentative strategies for discussion but it provides no meaning for me, especially when i begin to survey my own subjectivity as a "crisp individual." I know that this sounds a lot like life in the big city, or even nihilistic, but i think that it is a bit more complex than that. I feel an incredible rush of excitement and satisfaction when i produce a paper and i am usually very happy with the returns, but for no apparent reason, at times i feel lost and confused. The truth is: I realize just how phony the whole system is and how complacent i am, moving to the same phony beat as everyone else. I guess that is what happens when you lose a sense of meaning and purpose in your work and your entire life becomes obfuscated by this burring: the inability to see who you really are.

I am writing a paper and i have reached the end; i am supposed to be happy at the finished product because it is coherent, the argument is solid and the structure is great. Instead, i start thinking about the next paper that i am to have done in a few weeks and i try to think about the "new" language i will need to successfully produce that argument. I have to create that new language while producing a sense in the reader that i have mastered the topic/language. But, really, getting an excellent mark has to do with how well i can argue that i am right; it does nothing, it changes nothing, it challenges nothing--at the end of the day, it goes into a drawer and takes its place with the pile of other papers i'd already written, and it stays there.

Higher learning institutions thrive on showing you how insignificant you are; how minuscule to your professors, your superiors who "know everything." They keep you in place by making you aware that you can't know everything, and if you're black like me, that you won't reach anywhere. It's survival of the fittest. The university is one of the most brutally racist, sexist, elitist, Eurocentric, xenophobic places on the earth. yet it praises itself on being the best door to a world of opportunities. In the end, it doesn't matter who you are and the University becomes a big business that owes you nothing...

I survey the drawer, then finally, i manage to get-up and open the door; i enter the parts of my house that aren't filled with phony people and phony principles. My daughter sees me and calls, "mommy, mommy!" She runs up to me, and as i take her into my arms, she starts to sing me a song; suddenly, i realize who i really am, and my world isn't so blurry anymore.

I have met some amazing professors, students and writers who are not in the least bit phony. And that is why i have survived, and still surviving, the traumatic alienating effect of higher learning.