one reason

Music: Beck: Sea Change (2002)

The soft palate quivers a bit as Beck sings, "that's what you thought love was for." Sea Change remains one of his most meaningful statements, and "Lost Cause" one of his best songs. For reasons well known by another blind man and only dimly aware by the blinking one writing here, I thought to play it to sustain a mood. I learned my Masonic coach, in many ways a grand artificer, is succumbing to the good night, but heeding well Dylan Thomas. We are not supposed to write about such things so frankly, but we think them: he pushed bombs out of planes, and if that deafening sound didn't deaden the nerves, then working in the wind-tunnel did. Hearing aids as big as his ears, curving around them like cats, Cal nodded and read my lips: "Are you a Master Mason?"

"I am."

"How do you know yourself to be a Mason?"

Because I love you and am thankful for your time, even though you lived most of a life I only received as a series of colorful stories. Cal sat with me for countless hours rehearsing the liturgy, sometimes knee-to-knee, and I came to know better what it meant to be a good person, or rather, a person taught to recognize an inherent goodness faced with the cold, brick wall of our mutual mortality.

My friend Mirko sent me an intriguing essay by Darin Barney, a communication studies professor at McGill. Titled "Miserable Priests and Ordinary Cowards: On Being a Professor," the short essay details the familiar gutlessness of the professoriate, or rather, the complexity of the academy and the systemic comforts of risk-aversion. Barney sketches a familiar feeling, the realization that, say, some policy decision is forming that is not in the best interests of others (or oneself) but which one cannot seem to muster the energy to oppose. The labor of risk is exhausting but, the reader is told, this is the uncomfortable seat of the political. Citing Zizek's now famous sketch of ideology, so goes the motto: "I know very well what is happening at and to the university, but all the same, I am a professor."

I don't know. That is, I don't know what is happening at or to the university other than what is happening at Texas (insert neoliberal rhetoric of "accountability" here). And I don't know if the phrase, "I am a professor" necessarily entails a "but." I have been a professor for ten years now, and I have sat in such storied meetings and have recognized that reticence in others and certainly myself. In this stead, wisdom (phronesis) is not the taking of risks but an ethic, a knowing when the risk-taking is truly done in a field of contingency, when things could very well be otherwise as they are. Contingency is the default where people are concerned, I know that, but something like trust---two people sitting, knee-to-knee---has to secure the risk for "things to be otherwise." Trust in this sense is not a sense of the predictable, which has become a metric of interpersonal relation in the academy, but an openness to difference. One can cite Badiou on the "event" all she wishes, but one cannot will the contingent.

Vagueries, again, I know---furies of obfuscation because public statements invite scrutiny. Public feelings, on the other hand, invite something other.

Here's what I can say: if there is one reason to become a professor it is the trust one can build and the friendships one can forge. For the past three weeks I have had the pleasure of hosting a series of guests, and we have dined together and talked together and drank together. As I said at a dinner party some weeks ago, surrounded by smart colleagues who exude affection, "this is the reason for doing what we do---making friendship." Unlike my friends and acquaintances with others in different lines of work, having an intellectual conversation with a fellow academic is not going to make me any money; there is little "to gain" from my academic friends, no investments (other than love) are at stake, and I'm not going to contract a new deal. Certainly there is something like "social capital," in that more commonly discussed notion of "networking." But that term seems too instrumental to me to capture the welcome risk of stupidity: of not having to be "on," just needing to be "with" over a cocktail and some words and a handful of half-baked ideas.

Role modeling is and remains important.

I have really enjoyed "crashing" with friends at a conference, and then having friends "crash" here, these past few weeks. I've spent time with Jennifer, Dwayne, Rosa, Katie, Dana, Megan, Shaun, and Melissa. We've talked ideas, food, and especially music. So, on this glorious and beautiful Sunday, sitting outdoors, I'm going to put off the politics of the academy for a day and meditate on what really matters and the reason for doing what I do. In the end.