Cut/back

It's one of the finest words in the English language: form and sound shearing it of fat and smoothing it down to hard bone. Cut. Cut cut. Synonyms, in this case, just don't cut it.

I've spent a good cut-out of life in a relationship of deep ambivalence to cuts and cutting. A precise incision was responsible for liberating/flinging me from me mum's belly; a Caesarian section (Latin caedere, to cut) followed by a scissoring of the umbilical cord gave me my first breath as an exiled, discrete human being. The terror of that primal cut travelled through my infant brain and grew into comical ineptitude when it came to the blunt scissors of childhood. I couldn't cut straight to save my life. My first school report expressed major concerns as to my scissor prowess. The greater freedom of high school allowed me to expand into the scalpel genre; would the less bumpy action of a sharp knife improve my technique? No. I lacked the patience to follow the lines, and the decisiveness to cut straight first time without subsequent revisionary motions - motions that targeted tidiness but ultimately yielded more mess. My cuts bore the rugged extemporaneousness of rips. Every incision in the paper was a commemoration of that first traumatic surgery. I wanted to get it over and done with as soon as possible, but botched and repeated the job over and over in my haste. I cut myself from the class - legitimately, I'd never cut class - and hung up the blades that continue to slash at me to this day. The first cut...

While scissor cuts have been substantially removed from my everyday life, I still have to drive the metaphorical knife deep into the text I produce quite regularly. Needless to say, the same hesitation spills over into this cutting process too. Better the writer, better the cutter: a good representative of both, for example, would have cut that paragraph above and deleted a generous portion of this whole blog, slicing sentence after sentence with ruthlessly sharp movements between mouse and delete key. Not I though, shameless believer in quantity. Luckily I haven't had to polish much (any) work this year, but the cuts of yesteryear are still fresh in my mind: sweatily palming through the comments on my first undergraduate essay to find the reason for the bad mark, only to find that it was because I chopped a fundamental section to bring it down to size; painfully parting with chunks of my undergraduate thesis, chunks which were never quite chunky enough to sink it under the word limit; sacrificing that fond pun in my Masters thesis because the remnant would carry the message in one word, not three. With the same uncertain hand that could never quite cut deep enough into the lino block until each repeated shallow cut formed a disastrous over-cut, I worked away laboriously. Every little snick of the razor hurt like hell, and the finished product always looked ugly.

When it comes to text reduction in theory, I now have to tow the party line: I urge students to greater conciseness, economy, to give me more with less, and think of less as more. But what I'm thinking - and what my paradoxically uneconomical comments on their essays bear out in practice - is really: why not use as many words as possible? Why can't multiple forms of expression enhance and clarify the thought? Why shouldn't you experiment with luxuriant rhetoric? Why shouldn't you contest the dominant model of brevity and simplicity, the capitalist logic of most 'material' for least 'expenditure' as applied to language?

In other words, the other words are the point; verbosity has value.

That lengthy pre-amble hopefully bore out the programme obviously enough (and bored you in the meantime, double-whammy). What put me onto the theme in the first place was the more sinister, more penetrating cuts floating around the universities of Britain at the moment: the cuts to higher education planned by the coalition of the no-frilling in government here. Like most acts of violence, in some sick way the cut is sexy; David Cameron and Nick Clegg have shown how lean a machine they can be by slicing through a host of government funded services, and higher education, it seems, is set to cop one of the biggest chops. Students Britain-wide, not to mention many other higher education faithfuls, have taken up the gauntlet in vocal style; nor is it, I'm proud to say, all quiet on the Cambridge front.

As evident from previous posts, I'm about as guilty a practitioner of self-satisfied middle class irony as they come. Traditionally, the cynical sense of humour and the classicist in me have hooked up to form a philosophy of inaction, quite smug and snug, thanks very much: the only way out is to have a laugh (cynical humour). Forget about forming an opinion: a final judgment can never be made because knowledge is always selectively used and occluded, there's always more to know and all I really know is that I don't know nothing (classicist). For these reasons I've always been a little reticent in the realm of the protest: while guts and broad sympathies are aligned with the cause more often than not, I find it difficult to shake the feeling that I'm not quite informed enough to 'demonstrate' a view, and merely adopting one pre-digested by others. A protest, for me, was always bound up with a sense of shame at my over-caution, my inability to ever muster a full-bodied commitment...to anything. I aped the chants at sub-audible volume, afraid to trumpet the lack of conviction in my voice in case it should infect all (sometimes more, sometimes less) devout humans around me. The sensation casts its shadow back to my pathetic incursions into the Sydney punk community as angsty teen: the fear of exposed fraudulence haunted me then, and haunts me now.

But for the first time since I was cut from me mum, I ain't so haunted. The value of higher education is something etched in the genes and the childhood mind: both my parents were beneficiaries of the wave of social mobility that hit Australia in the late 60s and 70s, and a basic part of their forward march was their pioneering venture into higher education. Both took their studies way beyond the narrow horizon of expectation envisioned by their parents for themselves, and the parents of those parents. But their achievements weren't just a triumph over the adversity of cultural, generational habit (though they were indeed that): they were also only enabled by accessible and healthy institutions, schools and universities that offered them subjects they loved without demanding wealth to study them. You'll be spared further sentimental biography, but needless to say: I heart higher education for all.

So, in the wake of announced cuts and fee-increases (a kind of cut, as the cut is a kind of fee), I've been joining the protests, and, well, digging them for real. I'm still a part-time activist (or as one friend pointed out, a full-time passivist), dipping in and out when I don't have to teach. I can't claim full commitment even now. But when I'm there, I'm there. Perhaps it's a mere sign of reduced reservations about the cause, but I'm nervously poised on the edge of admitting that maybe just maybe there could be such a thing as collective spirit. As I squatted on the lawns in front of the university senate house and watched my friend speak clearly through the megaphone, I felt some big, hitherto flaccid words begin to fill up. I still hesitate to say it, I still hesitate, but: it felt as if the smallest strand of that cut cord had been restored, and me and my beings were connected again.