Once upon a time, I thought the upside of institutional membership was sealed camaraderie. So academies - schools, universities etc. - foster some abrasive competition at times; but they also herd us cardholders into the same abattoir. Sure, some of us get decapitated more imperfectly than others. Sure, some of us shamble along dilatedly to the tasty end with high degrees of dismemberment, while others are fortunate to cop a clean stun-and-slash. But what's important, ultimately, is that we're all providing sustenance for a society only too grateful to eat us up and poo us out. We're all in it together, and it is a waste-treatment plant.
If that metaphor makes the privileged recipients of higher education seem like victims of genocide, then my rhetoric has succeeded effortlessly.
Only with the submission of a PhD have I been able to muscle out of my own cuddly skills of self-persuasion and see academia in the grim light of day. And it's a desolate view through the window dividing me from that little whimper when, on November 8th 2012, at approximately 4.15pm, I handed two copies of three years thought to an unknown woman in a cramped little office. I gave her my all in duplicate. I gave her all the forms she could ever want, all the forms in the world. In exchange, she gave me a two-page sheet of information detailing the approach to my inevitable viva. On top was a nice piece of bold heading: 'Congratulations on submitting your thesis!' I doubted the sincerity of that photocopied sentiment. At least they could have addressed me as some kind of algebraic pronumeral. X would have been nice. But I would've happily settled for Y too.
Two great friends accompanied me as executional staff. But no matter how many of your nearest, dearest fellow humans haul you inside, kicking and screaming, tugging your most prehensible appendages, you simply can't get over the fact that you're doing this alone. As such, it was the first accomplishment of my life I couldn't fling around the room carelessly, caught up in the joyous mutual backslapping of other people around me who had just done exactly the same thing. The gangs of synchronised achievement have certainly fizzled over the years, from a big school cohort conquering themselves to a modest bunch of blear-eyed Masters students toasting their loathed dissertations. Yet they have always been gangs at some level, albeit ones of dubious vigilantist capacity. When the PhD began, the fact that other people around me were making similar motions led me to believe in an all-out choreographed extravaganza: look at us all, her in the field, him in the lab, me in the library, each of us a small part in an annoyingly popular and borderline racist music video called 'Oppa PhD'. But when it ended, I saw what it was all along: one big con to erode my social skills and erase me from the register of those who contribute something meaningful to this world. If you're about to hand in a PhD, don't do it. Stay blissful on the right side of the whimper.
Hyperbole aside (and most of my resources in that department were earmarked for the thesis itself), it was a strange feeling. Birth isn't the right way to analogise: there were few labour pains, little to no tearing of membranes on the final pushes, no real post-natal depression afterwards. Climax wouldn't get it either. There was no real narrative shape to the lead-up, just a series of random expansions, contractions, twists and tweaks. The product was still mutating right up to the moment I had to utter a performative, ceremonial 'fuck it' and print: new typos spotted, new argumental snags hooked, new awkward expressions isolated, cringed at, and smoothed over. People often complain about becoming their own worst proofreaders once the material is so numbingly familiar: your eyes assimilate everything without really processing anymore. But I found the opposite true too. Every reading turned up something different, some thorny problem or gaping crack I had hitherto chosen not to note. I could have read the thing fifteen more times and still found little rooms for improvement. But in the end, I had to guillotine the umbilical forcefully, arbitrarily. Which meant that the finished product looked no more final to me than any other of the myriad possible permutations. My supervisor is on record as saying that texts always feel more provisional to writers than readers - and that truth only hit home as I let go of both what it was, and everything it could have been.
So the awareness of infinite alternative universes, constantly in flux, punctured the importance of the one I happened to hand over. But on the other side of the whimper, the landscape was similarly flat. There are two categories of friend encircling you at the end: one hasn't submitted yet, the other has. Unsubmitted friends are most probably on the cusp and in the gory final throes; their presence for a nervously nursed half-pint is a welcome bonus, but they are hardly in the zone to let their hair down. They usually haven't showered in days, so their hair would be difficult to let down from its moulded ball of dandruff in any case. Submitted friends - unless very freshly squeezed - are, quite simply, absent. They've all long gone on to greener pastures: better cities, better lifestyles, better states of unemployment. The calls and emails flood in, yes - but all from the remote, exotic places of post-PhD success, phone in one hand, pina colada in the other. So the happy people are absent. The despondents are present, but only grudgingly come to be reminded of how much they have left to do until their own toast of tumbleweeds.
And then there was I: content, fairly exhausted, reining myself in for the strategically-booked flight to Italy at 7am the next morning. I'm not even sure I'd have been properly placed to celebrate even if I didn't have a host of sisters and brothers to worry about, all fixated on getting out of the same plight. In the end, the thesis unveils itself as the thankless task it always was: countless hours devoted to something that two people will read in the first year, then perhaps one every five years until the Cambridge University Library of 2100 loses it in the move to Oxford (the Tory government of 2100 will have ironically decided to cut their elite education sector by 50% to pay off their spiralling debts incurred by excessive consumption of port).
But that bulky print-out wasn't the point of these three and a bit years. That point is so diffuse that I can't hope to encapsulate it in the tired final paragraph. But it must be something like: a series of bangs with some of the greatest people I've met on this earth. The whimper to end: an outlier. Thanks Cambridge, all of you. If 79,998 words is what you demand for opening up a whole new dimension, then I'll write you a long, rambling, obscure, opaque, blotchy, 250 pg cheque - any day of the academic year.
If that metaphor makes the privileged recipients of higher education seem like victims of genocide, then my rhetoric has succeeded effortlessly.
Only with the submission of a PhD have I been able to muscle out of my own cuddly skills of self-persuasion and see academia in the grim light of day. And it's a desolate view through the window dividing me from that little whimper when, on November 8th 2012, at approximately 4.15pm, I handed two copies of three years thought to an unknown woman in a cramped little office. I gave her my all in duplicate. I gave her all the forms she could ever want, all the forms in the world. In exchange, she gave me a two-page sheet of information detailing the approach to my inevitable viva. On top was a nice piece of bold heading: 'Congratulations on submitting your thesis!' I doubted the sincerity of that photocopied sentiment. At least they could have addressed me as some kind of algebraic pronumeral. X would have been nice. But I would've happily settled for Y too.
Two great friends accompanied me as executional staff. But no matter how many of your nearest, dearest fellow humans haul you inside, kicking and screaming, tugging your most prehensible appendages, you simply can't get over the fact that you're doing this alone. As such, it was the first accomplishment of my life I couldn't fling around the room carelessly, caught up in the joyous mutual backslapping of other people around me who had just done exactly the same thing. The gangs of synchronised achievement have certainly fizzled over the years, from a big school cohort conquering themselves to a modest bunch of blear-eyed Masters students toasting their loathed dissertations. Yet they have always been gangs at some level, albeit ones of dubious vigilantist capacity. When the PhD began, the fact that other people around me were making similar motions led me to believe in an all-out choreographed extravaganza: look at us all, her in the field, him in the lab, me in the library, each of us a small part in an annoyingly popular and borderline racist music video called 'Oppa PhD'. But when it ended, I saw what it was all along: one big con to erode my social skills and erase me from the register of those who contribute something meaningful to this world. If you're about to hand in a PhD, don't do it. Stay blissful on the right side of the whimper.
Hyperbole aside (and most of my resources in that department were earmarked for the thesis itself), it was a strange feeling. Birth isn't the right way to analogise: there were few labour pains, little to no tearing of membranes on the final pushes, no real post-natal depression afterwards. Climax wouldn't get it either. There was no real narrative shape to the lead-up, just a series of random expansions, contractions, twists and tweaks. The product was still mutating right up to the moment I had to utter a performative, ceremonial 'fuck it' and print: new typos spotted, new argumental snags hooked, new awkward expressions isolated, cringed at, and smoothed over. People often complain about becoming their own worst proofreaders once the material is so numbingly familiar: your eyes assimilate everything without really processing anymore. But I found the opposite true too. Every reading turned up something different, some thorny problem or gaping crack I had hitherto chosen not to note. I could have read the thing fifteen more times and still found little rooms for improvement. But in the end, I had to guillotine the umbilical forcefully, arbitrarily. Which meant that the finished product looked no more final to me than any other of the myriad possible permutations. My supervisor is on record as saying that texts always feel more provisional to writers than readers - and that truth only hit home as I let go of both what it was, and everything it could have been.
So the awareness of infinite alternative universes, constantly in flux, punctured the importance of the one I happened to hand over. But on the other side of the whimper, the landscape was similarly flat. There are two categories of friend encircling you at the end: one hasn't submitted yet, the other has. Unsubmitted friends are most probably on the cusp and in the gory final throes; their presence for a nervously nursed half-pint is a welcome bonus, but they are hardly in the zone to let their hair down. They usually haven't showered in days, so their hair would be difficult to let down from its moulded ball of dandruff in any case. Submitted friends - unless very freshly squeezed - are, quite simply, absent. They've all long gone on to greener pastures: better cities, better lifestyles, better states of unemployment. The calls and emails flood in, yes - but all from the remote, exotic places of post-PhD success, phone in one hand, pina colada in the other. So the happy people are absent. The despondents are present, but only grudgingly come to be reminded of how much they have left to do until their own toast of tumbleweeds.
And then there was I: content, fairly exhausted, reining myself in for the strategically-booked flight to Italy at 7am the next morning. I'm not even sure I'd have been properly placed to celebrate even if I didn't have a host of sisters and brothers to worry about, all fixated on getting out of the same plight. In the end, the thesis unveils itself as the thankless task it always was: countless hours devoted to something that two people will read in the first year, then perhaps one every five years until the Cambridge University Library of 2100 loses it in the move to Oxford (the Tory government of 2100 will have ironically decided to cut their elite education sector by 50% to pay off their spiralling debts incurred by excessive consumption of port).
But that bulky print-out wasn't the point of these three and a bit years. That point is so diffuse that I can't hope to encapsulate it in the tired final paragraph. But it must be something like: a series of bangs with some of the greatest people I've met on this earth. The whimper to end: an outlier. Thanks Cambridge, all of you. If 79,998 words is what you demand for opening up a whole new dimension, then I'll write you a long, rambling, obscure, opaque, blotchy, 250 pg cheque - any day of the academic year.
