Am I in Charge of me or is my Brain: Julian Jaynes Edition

March 15, 2010 | Comments (1) | Permalink

Oh shit! Guess who is actually reading that sick (as in awesome) Julian Jaynes book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind I told you about some weeks ago?? ME.

First of all, it has the most excellent cover in the history of scholarly texts:

Damn. That is a tough cover. That cover is like "why pretty it up with useless frills or illustrations that may indicate what kinds of things are inside of the book? TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT."

But what of the book itself? I will confess to only being through chapter 1 but already I can say with certainty that my mind is 100% blown. I never took philosophy in college, so maybe this book is like "ho hum" for everybody who already had their age-eighteen "holy shit maybe everything is just a dream" moment. For me though it is totally wicked!

Jaynes begins by laying out all the metaphors we have used to describe consciousness. Plato and Augustine and those guys ("old dudes") used metaphors of caves and caverns. In the early 19th century the metaphors seemed to align with new geological discoveries involving the layers of the earth--maybe the mind is like that too! Layers of experience creating a whole (a.k.a. "the unconscious"). Mid century metaphors of the mind took on the qualities of chemistry and laboratory experiments: the mind as a product of sensations and feelings that could be seen in the "gleaming stainless-steel" of the lab. By the end of the century metaphors of mind became all about steam engines--the subconscious as a swollen boiler that needed outlets in the form of weird dreams/desires/perversions. So our mind-metaphors actually mirror real-world shit that's going on.

The question "what is consciousness" has plagued humankind for thousands of years. "How can we derive this inwardness out of mere matter?" We know if we cut somebody open, we don't find anything like consciousness. We find blood and guts and tissue. So where is consciousness, what is it, who is it, how did it come to be, etc.?

Jaynes then summarizes all the prevailing theories of consciousness up to the time of his writing. There are some wild and surprising jaunts here. EXAMPLE: The guy who discovered natural selection at the same time as Darwin, who, unlike Darwin, believed consciousness had to come from outside--what he called a "metaphysical imposition"--because, how else do you explain it? Why does no other animal on earth read books or fly rockets to the moon? It's totally bonkers. This guy insisted that consciousness is imparted from beyond us--by who, he did not say--and his scientific inquiry took the form of going to séances and trying to contact the spirit world! AND THIS IS WHY WE DON'T EVEN REMEMBER HIS NAME (which was Wallace). Because it's kooky! We want our science to be firmly based in the natural world, which is what Darwin did.

Darwin is like, no way, consciousness can ONLY be explained with natural science. When some degree of nervous complexity is reached, "consciousness appears," and so begins "its futile course as a helpless spectator of cosmic events." Well, as Jaynes points out, this is not a very satisfactory answer ("appears" not being a super specific word), and nobody has been satisfied with this idea of consciousness as merely a byproduct of brain function--the melody from a harp that can not pluck the harp's strings. That seems like bullshit. But so does the metaphysical imposition. UH OH.

Behaviorism! William James. These are the people who claimed all of a sudden that Consciousness DID NOT EXIST AND WASN'T REAL. This is obviously totally obnoxious, and Jaynes demonstrates how this line of reasoning came into being specifically to push philosophy out of the sciences---a state of affairs I am constantly harping upon in this blog! Psychology is trying to become a separate science, so it must distance itself from the noodlings of philosophers. After WWI everyone was excited to turn over a new leaf. "Fuck it! there is no such thing as consciousness." The LAB reduced all conduct to conditional reflexes (rats in mazes; we are all just rats in a maze (or cage, according to Billy Corgan (not a scientist)). But, as Jaynes points out, "Behaviorism was only a refusal to talk about consciousness. Nobody really believed he was not conscious."

MICRO-BLAST!

(also you've got to love that that was Psychology's attempt to distance itself from Philosophy! What could possibly be more bullshitty and more patently untrue (i.e. "philosophical") than that stupid theory??? That's the best you could do, Psychology? Damn, I'm going back to my Kant)

So then there is this whole line of thought that is like: All of these theories are bullshit. We want to know WHERE IS CONSCIOUSNESS, LITERALLY. If it is real, it must exist. If it exists, it must be HERE, in the body of a man. Let's cut one open and see what we can see. Um....as expected, this was inconclusive. Sure, science can increasingly see into the working, living brain in an amazing way. We can now pinpoint where synapses fire, where impulses travel, we can see the bundle of nerves that does this or that. But Jaynes points out something I think we instinctively all feel: that physical stuff can never, "not ever,"explain consciousness itself. But a lot of us also don't believe in God. So in conclusion: WTF?

He then goes into this extraordinary section of explaining what consciousness is NOT. "When asked the question, what is consciousness? we become conscious of consciousness. And most of us take this consciousness of consciousness to be what consciousness is. This is not true." (<---best sentence ever, he is so wry, this Jaynes fellow! I must find out if he is still alive...oh damn, he died in 1997)

Here are all the things people all say about consciousness: it is obvious, it is located in our head somewhere, it's the defining attribute of all our waking states, moods, affections, memories, volitions, it's the basis of concepts, learning, reasoning, thought, and judgment. NONE OF THIS IS TRUE.

1. Consciousness is not reactivity.
Seeing, hearing, walking, reacting, holding a pen in your hand, itching your head, writing a sentence, speaking a sentence, catching a ball, etc.
Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we aren't conscious of what we aren't conscious of. WTF MAN? Ok here is an analogy: Imagine a flashlight. You ask the flashlight "what things in this dark room have light shining on them?" the flashlight looks around, and everything it sees has light shining on it. Because it's a flashlight. So it says "well, everything has light shining on it." the flashlight can't see the vast numbers of things--all things, really--that don't have light shined on them in the dark room. Thus, the "seeming continuity of consciousness is an illusion." We're only conscious of being conscious when we're conscious. PLUS: While we're playing the piano, we aren't conscious of each finger's motor movement; of the meaning of each symbol on the page we look at; of each individual note or melody; of our feet pressing the pedals. Somehow it all combines into one act, during which we are conscious, but we are profoundly NOT CONSCIOUS of many millions of aspects of it. Reading and speaking simply slur into meaning, without consciousness of phonemes and articulation--indeed, consciousness of phonemes would DESTROY meaning. Consciousness decides what to say, when, and how, "but then the orderly and accomplished succession of phonemes or of written letters is somehow done for us."

SOMEHOW DONE FOR US.

2. Consciousness is not a copy of experience.
John Locke: tabula rasa: we all kind of think of consciousness as just storing up memories as its main function, then we use those memories to know stuff. NOT TRUE! Jaynes wants you to tell him now, from memory: how many teeth do you see in the mirror when you brush your teeth? which is your second-longest finger? is the red or green light on the top of the stoplight? exactly which pictures are on the wall of your living room and where exactly are they all? You don't know, yet you have seen all these things literally millions of times. You don't know, but if one of these things CHANGED you would know immediately. So you know all the answers, but NOT CONSCIOUSLY. "What you can consciously recall is a thimbleful to the huge oceans of your actual knowledge."

Furthermore! if you try to "recall," say, coming in the coffee shop and sitting down, you are recreating lots of it based on what it "should" be like rather than what i was actually like. Which he calls "Narratizing." You recreate--you don't really remember it exactly, all its sensations, everything you did, everyone you looked at. "Memory is the medium of the must-have-been." JESUS!!!!!!

3. Consciousness is not necessary for learning.
"Learning," in laboratory terms, is broken into three groups: signals, skills, solutions.
SIGNALS: Like Pavlov! Learning that when you hear the dinner bell it's time for dinner. When you say certain things, whoever you are talking to is more pleasantly disposed to you. These things are by definition unconscious. In fact, they have proven in studies that if you are CONSCIOUS of the terms of the experiment (like, if you are told, "ok every time I ring this bell I'm going to give you a treat and I want to see if ringing the bell makes you start salivating after awhile") THE LEARNING DOESN'T HAPPEN. Boom.
SKILLS: toss 2 coins into opposite hands. You can learn it quickly. Are you conscious of all your movements? No. Learning skills is often purely organic, not conscious. Your consciousness sets the terms of the learning (what Jaynes calls a "struction") and then your body takes over. In fact, you do WORSE if you try to be actively conscious of your movements/decisions (think of playing the piano! As soon as you start thinking about your individual fingers, you can't keep playing. You are paralyzed).
SOLUTIONS: Yes, consciousness is often a major player in finding solutions, BUT NOT ALWAYS, which means it is not purely-speaking NECESSARY for solving problems. He gives as an example a fun project given to a psychology class, where the professor told the entire class to spend a week complimenting the appearance of every girl they saw wearing red. Within a week, "the cafeteria was ablaze" with ladies in red. The ladies had learned the "solution" (wear red) to the "problem" (getting compliments, which are nice), without anyone having any knowledge of any of it. He gives other amazing examples.

So! Consciousness is important, but we see we can learn all kinds of stuff without it.

4. Consciousness is not necessary for thinking.
YIKES! For real?
Judgment: carefully, consciously pick up 2 objects and determine which is heavier. You feel the muscles tensing, the surface of the objects. You are conscious of everything you're doing. "And now the actual judging of which is heavier. Where is that? Lo!" (he actually says 'Lo!' He is a great writer). The judgment itself is "somehow just given to you." Thus "judging, that supposed hallmark of consciousness, DOES NOT EXIST AT ALL" (emphasis mine).
He gives many examples. Speech itself! Consciousness gives us a struction ("tell your listener the story of that asshole who almost ran you over today") and then speech JUST HAPPENS. You aren't consciously being like "now I need an adverb. This adverb I have chosen has 3 syllables. Each syllable has whatever a phoneme is. How shall I articulate it? What accent shall I put on it? How loud should I say it? Etc. etc. etc. )

(this makes me think of the Radio Lab episode about choice, and the guy who after brain surgery lost his ability to make choices because he lost his ability to have feelings about them. They didn't put it this way, but now I see that it is that he'd lost his ability to NOT BE CONSCIOUS while making a choice. Holy shit.)

5. Consciousness is not necessary for Reason.
First of all, what is Reason even? It's totally vague and everybody crows about it but what is it really? It's not conscious, that's for sure--the reason we need logic to explain it is BECAUSE it's not conscious. Everything he's just proven (judgment, solutions, etc.) is really just primitive forms of reason, so we've already seen that reason doesn't have to be conscious.

But what of High Reason? Scientific deduction, for example? Surely that must be conscious! Except, as Jaynes points out, scientific deduction often comes "mysteriously." He quotes Gauss: "like a sudden flash of lightning, the riddle happened to be solved."

(also reminds me of the New Yorker article about intuition--how they found the place in the brain where intuition actually happens, but found that it takes it forever to travel to whatever our consciousness is. Thus you "know" the answer up to EIGHT SECONDS before you know it. WTF)

Jaynes says, of Einstein himself, that so many insights came to him abruptly while he was shaving that he had to carefully slow down his razor "lest he cut himself with surprise."

SURPRISE. He's just shaving, and suddenly----a voice? OMG we'll get to that later---suddenly from somewhere inside (or outside) of him comes the knowledge: "LIGHT TRAVELS FAST" or whatever. "E=MC2." And he is caught off guard and surprised by it! Where did it come from--he wasn't even thinking about it. That is obviously not "consciousness" doing that work.

You consciously work on a problem (setting up the struction, just like when you told yourself to learn how to toss two coins into opposite hands), then it incubates unconsciously, while you're sleeping or watching "Star Wars" or whatever, then illumination suddenly arrives, and is justified LATER by logic.

LATER!

6. Consciousness is not in the head area.
By far the funniest one. We all feel like consciousness is in our head. But why? Try to FEEL where your consciousness is. You can't, really. Try to project your consciousness around the corner, and do your thinking from there. You kind of can. Although the body/"I" situation is important and he will talk about it later. But still!
EYES: everyone feels like it's something to do with the eyes. That it's behind the eyes. You "look" within yourself. You "look" into somebody's thoughts/feelings through their eyes. AND YET we know quite well THERE IS NOTHING BACK THERE. Just blood and guts! We actually create a totally imagined space where we fantasize consciousness resides. Aristotle for example thought consciousness must be around the heart. We just make it up and agree to believe whatever the collective unconscious (HA HA) decrees.

Out of body experiences
LSD
These aren't metaphysical! These experiences demonstrate that the location of consciousness is at least somewhat arbitrary. CONSCIOUSNESS HAS NO LOCATION. This is a real mind-fuck if you think about it (with your consciousness).

CRUCIAL JAYNES MOMENT

Okay! If all this is true, then is consciousness necessary? Ok, no, fine.

Okay, if it's all true, and consciousness is not necessary for all this shit, then can't we actually imagine "a race of men who spoke, judged, reasoned, solved, indeed did most of what we do, BUT WERE NOT CONSCIOUS AT ALL"???

MACRO-BLAST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now he's gonna talk about the Greeks. I'm so stoked!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Check out this summary of his whole argument from wikipedia, is this the toughest thing you ever read?

"in which he argued that ancient peoples did not access consciousness (did not possess an introspective mind-space), but instead had their behavior directed by auditory hallucinations, which they interpreted as the voice of their chief, king, or the gods. Jaynes argued that the change from this mode of thinking (which he called the bicameral mind) to consciousness (construed as self-identification of interior mental states) occurred over a period of centuries about three thousand years ago and was based on the development of metaphorical language and the emergence of writing."

Consciousness ITSELF only coming into being after we invent metaphors???????????????????

"An early criticism by philosopher Ned Block argued that Jaynes had confused the emergence of consciousness with the emergence of the concept of consciousness. In other words, according to Block, humans were conscious all along but didn't have the concept of consciousness and thus did not discuss it in their texts."

DAMN.

Me and my consciousness are going to go take a bath now. OR ARE WE

By Regarding @ 12:33 PM | Comments (1)

martinis

March 12, 2010 | Comments (2) | Permalink

that last update is bumming out my mellow so guess what??

I am having a new lady friend over tonight for Silence of the Lambs, and I thought, hey, I've never made martinis at home. I'm in my 30's now, it seems like I ought to start doing that, especially since vodka is my new jam. Why not make it fancy? Who wants to drink vodka and mineral water out of an old jelly jug anymore? Not me. I'm in this stupid game of life to win.

So I walked to my favorite store in town with the goal of looking for:
- cocktail shaker for under $20
- fancy toothpicks/swizzle sticks
- hilarious vintage shot glass with ounces marked on side

I thought, well, surely this store will have maybe one of those things. This store, I should add, is RAD. I am slowly befriending the owner, who I am mildly obsessed with as I always wonder how people like that end up in a town like this. A very hilarious, fancy, urbane gay man with a deep and abiding knowledge and love of democratic party platforms, old books, and antiques. Why does this man not live in New York City? And yet he doesn't. I just feel like, if the crazy/terrifying homophobic frat boys bum ME out, how do they make him feel?? Then again, perhaps actually coming of age as a gay man in, like, the 1960's, makes you a much tougher person than I am. Actually I am certain this is the case.

AT ANY RATE, his store is completely awesome. It is full to the brim of totally classy, beautifully-maintained ancient shit that is somehow not at all expensive. I have gotten the most ridiculous things there, for, like, one dollar. And he knows everything. You can be like "I'm looking for one of those things that's like aluminum and it has the weird attachment and it's like belted down on one side and it looks like it would be in a Spencer Tracy movie but you percolate coffee in it?" and he's like "ah yes, a 'Vesuviana,' we have one right here."

Still, it made me laugh to walk into the store and within 1 minute I had found:
- a beautiful cocktail shaker for $12
- a tiny bag filled with decorative toothpicks/swizzle sticks someone had collected during their travels throughout the 1970's
- a hilarious vintage shot glass with a donkey on the side that tells you how many ounces to measure depending on what kind of person you are (1 oz. for ladies, 2 oz. for men, 3 oz for loudmouths, 4 oz. for jackasses).

additionally, I purchased two crystal martini glasses from the 1930's that I will no doubt break within one week.

I also purchased two ancient, incredibly soft handkerchiefs for my husband's poor nose.

The owner of the store told me approvingly that I was going to throw an awesome party. I said "but the vermouth I bought only cost $7" and he said "ALL THE BETTER."

Now I need to make this pot of beans and listen to some more radio lab so I can learn about the world.

Have a nice TGIF. Why don't you watch Silence of the Lambs too, and report back to me in the morning?? I think you will enjoy yourself.

By Regarding @ 11:26 AM | Comments (2)

Two Bodies and the Life of the Mind

March 12, 2010 | Comments (3) | Permalink

Also, I have to say that of late I have been thinking about The Future in more concrete terms than usual. You probably don't know this, but awhile ago in the Chronicle of Higher Education there was this hugely controversial article about how because of the crumbling of our nation's educational system combined with the not-proportionate ever-increasing number of PhDs granted, it's foolish and possibly even evil to encourage people to continue going to graduate school in the humanities. In the past generation, it was relatively easy to get a good job at a university--so grad school was approached as a kind of high-falutin' professional school, akin to getting your plumber's certificate except that it took longer and you got to smoke a pipe and wear one of those jackets with the leather patches on the elbows. There are many, many, many jobs that pay more money than a tenure-track job in the Humanities, so it was never a money-making proposition, but there was a certain amount of security and satisfaction that was all but guaranteed to you if you succeeded in getting your PhD. Those days are over. So this article was like "nobody should get PhDs anymore," basically (I'm paraphrasing).

Everyone's been talking about this article for what feels like years, and me and everyone else I know find ourselves really disturbed by it. I have put my disturbed feelings into words on a number of occasions, but now finally here is a rebuttal in the Chronicle that does so calmly and rationally: the new reality of the humanities in america

I appreciate this article because it acknowledges the gnarly situation we've gotten ourselves into, in this stupid country (literally a stupider and stupider country, BTW, compared to the rest of the even vaguely affluent world), but it also acknowledges a deeper truth that I think people are rarely willing to deal with: the life of the mind is a worthy pursuit in and of itself, regardless of future job possibilities or lack thereof. Isn't there something disturbing about tying every endeavor to how much money it might make us? When did we start evaluating things in those stark terms? I don't want to join the movement that increasingly thinks of public universities as corporations that have to show financial profit, and the whole "stop getting your PhD" argument, however well-intentioned, totally joins in that movement. If you don't make money doing something, then that something is a pointless and stupid endeavor??? What about having babies? What about working at your local homeless shelter? What about playing in a band? What about READING A BOOK? etc. etc. etc. More and more I encounter people who do have this attitude about every endeavor in life. These are the people who scoff to my face about how stupid I am for getting a humanities PhD. First of all, that's just rude, but second of all, since when was the study of MUSIC supposed to make anybody any money? I resent the scoffing, because it implies that I am this total moron who was like "Ah, a PhD in music! SOON I'LL BE A MILLIONAIRE," and that I need some wise person like themselves to point out helpfully that professors don't make much money. Um. Thanks!!!!! ASSHOLE

So this article basically points all this out. If you go to grad school, you are no longer guaranteed a job when you get out, but is that really the only reason you went to grad school? This is the point that gets lost in these arguments, and I think it is REALLY IMPORTANT. For me, and for almost all my colleagues, grad school is at least half of the point of the journey. Everyone told me going into it that the job market has never been worse, but I went anyway. It's shocking to me that there could possibly be this impression of a person sitting on their bed and thinking "Hmmm....should I get a PhD in English literature, or should I go work at a bank? Which is the more lucrative career? Well, the bank offers more potential for money-making and advancement so I guess I will do that." Has this ever happened in the history of the world? No. Those are two different kinds of people, with two different outlooks on life. There are people who think of "job" as inextricable from "how much money can I make?" and I think that is fair, in our capitalist world. I think that is a perfectly reasonable way to approach your career, and I think lots of people who work their way up some sort of business-ladder and make more and more money are perfectly happy people. I know some of them! But nobody who wants to get a PhD in English literature is thinking along those lines. It's a whole different world view, and that's also fine. You go to get your PhD because you are interested in English literature, because you value the life of the mind, because you want to refine your critical thinking skills, your communication skills, your writing skills, FOR YOUR OWN JOY, to experience the world around you in a new way.

And I don't think you can even make the argument, as many people do, that this outlook is itself the product of privilege. I guess it is in the sense that you'd have to grow up around people who encouraged you in some way, or who knew what education was, or who read, or who cared about the arts...or, if you had NONE of those, you'd have to have been born with a weird mind, itself a kind of privilege in that situation...but although there are unfortunately many many people in our country who truly don't have any of those things, I still don't think that money is the sole factor. There are so many Americans who grew up in abject poverty who still pursued education and succeeded. There are Supreme Court justices and American presidents and public intellectuals and poets and artists and molecular biologists who grew up with no privilege at all, no money at all, with the most shocking living conditions, every physical hardship imaginable, and they still wanted to learn and go to school and read a book---even when, perhaps, everything in their daily life seemed to indicate that their top priority should be making as much money as possible as soon as possible. So yes, privilege enters into it, as it enters into everything, but privilege still isn't the only thing, and it is underhanded and deceitful of people making the "privatize!" argument or the "you are an idiot for wanting an education" argument to rely on privilege as this supposedly dire/obvious thing that negates the whole idea of pursuing an education. It's a classic neo-con Catch-22, mixing weird libertarianism with weird capitalism with weird Protestant work ethic stuff in a toxic brew that makes no logical sense whatsoever: Education should cost tons of money ("no free lunch") but then only rich people can afford it, and so, even though we think you ought to have to pay for everything in your life, we also hate rich people who CAN pay for everything in their lives, so that means education is stupid. Um.

Since when is "learning" worthy of being scoffed at? I just want to point out a little someone called ABRAHAM LINCOLN, e.g., who all kinds of crazy "education is stupid" americans claim to revere. Dude is DEFINED BY POSTERITY by his education. His relentless pursuit of education is what we perceive as having made him what he was (A Great Man). Dude was poor, dude had to feed a family, dude didn't have shoes on his feet. But he studied, he learned, he read, he walked 12 miles in a blizzard just to get to school or whatever, and why? Because he wanted to become a millionaire? Without idealizing him too much, I really don't think that this is the case. I think there used to be an understanding, in our country, that education was a means of "bettering yourself," of making your life richer and more awesome, of becoming a better citizen and opening your life up to greater possibilities. Not just in money-making, but in, like, "being a cool human." Things like "oratory" and "poetry" and "speaking compellingly to a lynch mob that wants to murder those two boys who are actually innocent" (ok now I am just thinking of "Young Mr. Lincoln," obviously).

The quest for education has long been a defining feature of various movements in support of oppressed people, minorities, women, the poor. The ability to get an education is a right that must be available to all people! We believe that, and yet we simultaneously think education is basically kind of lame. Somewhere in the past few decades, we have lost sight of the belief that education is Good and Worthy, which I think is a good belief and a true belief. Frankly, if everyone in America could cogently present an argument with a thesis statement, literally everything in our lives would be better.

Capitalist ethos has obscured this greater truth.

So, there's that, and that is something very real to keep in mind. I love the distinctions he draws, in this article. He's like, "this isn't a job in the same way that working at a bank is a job. This is an attempt to marry job to life in a really weird way that is probably doomed to failure but is still a worthy pursuit." Basically, we all need to keep a bumper sticker on our brains that says "I'm Not In This For The Money."

So I try to tell myself, if it doesn't work out, I don't regret it. I regret nothing! I wouldn't trade what I've learned and experienced, the amazing intellectual opportunities I've had, the unbelievable geniuses I've been able to talk to and learn from, these people who have shaped the way we think about music in fundamental ways, they read my papers and help me craft my scholarly identity! What a gift, what a joy. My colleagues, all so brilliant and engaged and motivated to make positive change in the world. The books I've read, and then gotten to discuss in classrooms full of bright and lively people. The students I've taught and helped, the amazing classroom experiences I've had in my capacity as a teacher! Seeing the light go on in a kid's eyes as they make a connection or get excited for the first time about something they've read, some aspect of history you've been able to elucidate for them. How could I ever regret any of it? I wouldn't trade it for career stability in a career that didn't mean as much to me.

But then of course, there's also this: academic lady talks about the two-body problem

Oh the dreaded two-body problem. This problem, like most problems (including, apparently, serial killing), is the fault of feminism. Back in the glorious 1950's, the only people who got PhDs were rich white men who had charming wives who trained themselves for a life not of the mind but of the support of the life of the mind. This was great! Mr. Professor Man could get a job wherever he wanted, which was easy enough back then if you weren't a complete idiot, and then the Family would go there and do that until he retired, or got a job elsewhere, or whatever.

However, once women (and, you know, black people and stuff) finally started being allowed into PhD programs and what-not (so cute!), NOT ONLY did the field of candidates obviously balloon, making it harder to get jobs, but now we have a situation where life partners might both be academics. The two-body problem! We all know you tend to meet your husband in whatever circle you travel in. I met mine in the wonderful world of online fanclubs for tiny indie record labels. But then what happened? We both went to grad school. And of course lots of other people--people who, perhaps, did not wait QUITE so long to matriculate--end up meeting their partners IN grad school. Because that's where you are; those are your peers; those are the people you have shit in common with. So now what? It's hard enough for one person to get a job at a college. Now two people have to, and in the same city??? This is a fine state of affairs!

There are many stories, both horror-based and inspiring, and I could go on and on about them. But basically, in this day and age, by choosing academia you're making it hard on yourself, and by choosing a mate who is also choosing academia, you make it like at least twenty times harder. So then you end up commuting 12 hours to see each other, and what starts off as a temporary situation turns into decades, and then what? The comments section of that blog entry is pretty brutal.

So then you're in a situation where you have to ask yourself the following question: "is my career more important to me than being with my beautiful partner who makes me feel whole for the first time in my life? Or is being with my partner more important to me than having this career I chose so long ago and have worked so hard to attain?"

But more and more now I'm thinking about it. All these versus questions: having my career in a shitty town vs. not having my career in a rad town. Having my career vs. being with my mate. Working in a bagel shop in Portland vs. teaching undergrads in Corn, Ohio. How does my feminism play into these decisions? My sense of self? My warring desires for my life. There's no divine law that says we should get everything we want. Hard decisions have to be made, and that is life.

File under: me no know.

I think there is a level of insane optimism that buoys us, though. I think part me can't truly grapple with this question because I'm still waiting to see what will happen. There is this completely irrational voice that's like "Oh, well, maybe you will both get jobs in Portland and you will get tenure and you will win the lottery and you will get a magical talking dog who grants wishes! LETS WAIT AND SEE."

ha ha ha haH AH AHA

By Regarding @ 8:23 AM | Comments (3)