Saturday, May 5, 2012

On the Outside of Inside

I'll anticipate your prayers to spare you another long travelogue by responding to them in advance. That's how much I care for my readers. But the following post will require at least incidental mention of the following fact: I just spent a week in Sicily. For details, obtain your local Rough Guide, circle the cheapest recommendation in each category, and proceed from Catania to Agrigento, allowing the odd extra-textual anomaly in between. I've now betrayed the key to shortcircuiting the loquacious narratives of this blog. You'll have a lot more time on your hands now. Why not go to Sicily?  I can safely endorse the Rough Guide.

Whenever asked the inevitable question 'how was your holiday?', I'm drawn to the classic reply: 'it was good to get away.' That's because I've heard this same reply successfully and convincingly retailed by others. But then I started weighing out the by-catch of this pre-fab linguistic unit. Few naturalised formulas could be as offensive when actually thought to their conclusion. Most of the time we fling this throwaway off to a fellow inhabitant of our permanent surroundings who has taken a good chunk of time and space out of their own memory to remember that we were on a vacation. How do we reward them? 'Yeah, was good to get away from this shithole. Hope you had a nice time munching through those prison rations, sucker.' We flaunt our only-ever-brief liberation in our innocent interlocutor's face. Saying 'it was good to get away', in its blatant self-evidence, conceals the bitchy implication that it was unpleasant to stay here.

Wherefore this constant compulsion to leave the living quarters temporarily, and the smug assault on those who remain? Why the fetishisation of greener grass? If here were really that bad, you'd be dead. But then, some heres in the world are better to get away from than others. I could have sworn I'd heard the desire for, and satisfaction with, 'getting away' about ten times less in Sydney compared to Cambridge. This may have had as much to do with temporal here as the spatial now: in Sydney we were small twenty-three year olds turgid with our own potential, as yet only ankle deep in a system geared to work us to the bone in exchange for the slim pickings of material prosperity. But even with the considerable error margin of nostalgia and idealisation factored in, there is something wholly particular about the way Cambridge creates a mythical outside and sparks the desire to flee to it. People routinely talk of 'needing to get out', whether short term, mid term or long term. We all 'need to get to London from time to time'. My Italian housemate howls to the full moon 'che galera!' (what a jail!). My British friend has just escaped to Germany for time indeterminate, plucking up the courage to intermit his fully-funded PhD. My other British friend is working long hours to blow off this one-horse town and never look back. My New Yorker friend signed, sealed and delivered his thesis in record time only to board a plane straight back to his Mother Apple. In short, I've never met so many people from so many places who don't want to be here.

Before the University posts this piece on its website to attract new students, it's worth asking: where did the dream go wrong? Surely everyone arrived here raring to imbibe from and contribute to one of the greatest intellectual hubs in the world. You don't suffer through a paper-heavy application process, and in many cases an interview, to scramble for a position in a place where you don't want to be. Something moulders away in the hearts of these Cambridge grad students such that, in the course of three or four years, the epithets turn from 'enchanting', 'stimulating', 'amazing' to 'suffocating', 'claustrophobic', 'stressful'. The place itself stays mercilessly consistent, so it seems that we're talking prisons of the mind. It could just be the blueprint trajectory of the grad student replicated throughout the world's universities: the unbending arc of the PhD necessarily steers you from excitement at the prospect of changing your field, to hopeless disorientation as to what precisely you're changing, to disappointment-tinged indifference to the possibility of changing anything. The psychology of self-directed research definitely plays in somewhere, somehow. I don't have much comparative data to run on here apart from the universal stereotype of the wretched grad student. But even despite this, Cambridge seems to come packaged with a very particular brand of abjection, manifesting regularly in the spring to ejection.

I don't think this is a mere matter of social self-selection. Granted, I may gravitate towards people who consider themselves fuller people than the very flaccid and narrow priorities that Cambridge recycles, and those people will always churn out dissatisfaction with the game; but the pathology feels much more pandemic. I've patted a few friends on the back recently for making it through the remorseless palpitations of Junior Research Fellowship (three-year post-doctoral research-only positions, particular to Oxbridge and highly sought after in said game) applications  and ending up the last candidates standing from pools of up to four hundred applicants. But beam a smile to these people to fire them into acknowledging the magnitude of their achievement and they look back with a sad, empty gaze: all it means to them is three more years in Cambridge, ugh, meh. Even people that jump through electrified hoops to extend their stay here profess not to be so fussed about the goal they've just scored. With a few  glistening exceptions, this is the normal range of relation between grad student and place: grudging tolerance at best, outright loathing at worst. And always respiring on the belief that it will be better outside, once the 80 000 word bond between supervisor and supervised has been dissolved good and proper.

Living in Cambridge (as student) seems to require the rhetoric of discontentment for reasons bigger than 'that's what everyone else says'. The turn also functions as guarantor of sanity and survival. If most people here (including me) keep one foot pointed towards the train station, they are also (including me) insecure about the 'right' they can claim to maintain the other foot squarely planted in such an elite community. I'd wager the two are pretty close siblings. Every student here - even the most talented, even those whose oversupply of confidence more than makes up for whatever talent they lack - is confronted daily with their own inadequacy; there is always a better brain working more smoothly just around the corner. And even when there isn't a better brain, just a complementary brain, or a brain dressed up to look its best, you inevitably invent a better brain. I was pub-chatting with a friend the other night about how easy it would be to wage psychological warfare in this hive of paranoia, should you be so evilly inclined: only go into the library with a big stack of freshly-minted, tightly-footnoted paper and place it just within your coeval and competitor's peripheral vision. The document will actually be a five-part series of instructions on how to turn cow-poo into shower gel, with footnotes such as 'cf. bollocky arse pretentious wank' and 'see the tinia between my second and third toe, p. 74' - but the distant observer's nagging conscience about their own slow progress will squint painfully and turn such fluff into diamond-studded academic prose. Every A4 page in sight is the product of better.

One good trick to swerve around the meetings with one's own inadequacy is precisely the pose of partial loathing and detachment that so many good souls employ here. If Cambridge is bought into wholesale, these meetings become more and more frequent, more and more corrosive; but interpose a judicious distance between Cambridge's values and your own, and whammy, you have a healthy buffer against potential failure. Didn't want your recognition anyway, whatever.  I feel like I'm erecting these ridiculously simple (and perhaps flimsy) psychological fortifications more and more nowadays. But, like heroin I suppose, it's astounding how effective they are in the short term. And I think resort to them will only become more regular as I gear up for the inevitable barrage of rejection that is the job application process. Indeed, it's already begun. After puffing out the cushions in preparation to go somewhere else, laying the justificatory groundwork for leaving Cambridge by turning necessity into volition, cursing this spiritually emaciating place...I suddenly swivelled in the shape of an embarrassing volte-face when a temporary (two-year) teaching post came up in the faculty. Yeah, why not apply? Cambridge ain't that bad. Ain't that bad, pfft, what am I talking about, it's actually the best place in the world! My mind let down its makeshift floodgates and allowed me to swim in the milky prospects of being here another two years. And then, predictably, I got a letter containing a politely worded 'thanks but no thanks'. Within seconds, my heart sank, but only fell a couple of millimetres into the safety net I immediately re-installed. Bah, it's for the best. I really need to finish my PhD. It would have been an enervating slog. And did I really want to prolong my sojourn in this parochial English village? One door closes and all that. The speed and efficiency with which the self-contradictory self-defences kicked in was nothing short of comical.

Petty manoeuvres of self-protection aside, the pose of detachment that Cambridge so prolifically generates must also serve an apotropaic purpose, to ward off the evil eye: for deep in the recesses of our detachable and detaching minds, most of us know how privileged we are to be marinating in this quaint bubble of verdant lawns, iced Pimms and tidy hors d'oeuvres. And I predict that this will only become fully apparent when the outside becomes permanent, and I peer back into the bubble from afar. Just as utopias can only be imagined from the outside, so this wonder-town will only sharpen when surveyed from an ever-increasing, and increasingly unbridgeable, distance. I can tell how focal this place will one day become for those uncontrollable rays of nostalgia. For now, I have to keep saying that I could take it or leave it.


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