I took a trip–rather, I made the pilgrimage, to Oxford University. I had to escape the city for a while; so accustomed was i to bus stops, tube re-routes, murderous black taxis, and city stretching forever in all directions, I had barely taken in the last falling leaves of autumn foilage. The last time I had stopped to admire the onset of deciduous nudity, I was lying on my back on a bench in Woodburn Circle at WVU, wondering where I would be next autumn when the last leaves floated earthward. 

It was graduation day, and many Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts, and DPhil candidates were in full academic dress, showing their parents around their cloistered and self-contained colleges; tan stone against black, white, red, green, and the reds, oranges and yellows of the trees around. It was like watching a film, a bachelor and bachelorette held hands and quick-stepped down cobbled narrow lanes, their white-fur lined hoods bouncing as they hurried off to their portion of a commencement ceremony that is the latest version of a nearly thousand year old tradition. They were full of energy and hope. Life had been good at Oxford; it can only get better, right?

Oxford is one of those few places on earth where simulation finds no niche, being the source of the simulation. There are instances, as everywhere, of the simulation folding back on itself, where the copies come back to change the original to look more like the copies themselves; hoodies featuring “OXFORD UNIVERSITY” in the American style, the co-educational model, lacrosse teams and other oddities that would have been unseen or forbidden a century ago. 

It is superstructure after superstructure, stone after stone, an entire city devoted only to learning and understanding. It’s where knowledge is, sythensized from older and less useful pieces of knowledge that have been shelved and dusted over. It used to be where knowledge was forged from illuminated repetition, didactic induction, and the miasmic air of degree-annointed authority–it was like alchemy, making something from nothing, and that something was just a transformation of something else. This was the center of scholasticism, one Western university birhtplace of four. It was the first university of the English-speaking world–an anachronism to any amateur linguist which, though naive, is nevertheless charming. 

There are the famous quadrangles bejewelled with emeralds, grass over which the students cannot walk only fellows and in some cases the reigning monarch), let alone sit and have wine and cheese. The medieval is dressed with the gothic mortared together by the centuries of scholastic sweat and political blood, spires and domes and arched architecture which makes you feel guilty for not being brilliant–the intimidation of cloisters and freshly painted crests, grotesques scowling at your academic inferiority–gates and guards, whose signs say “Open to Visitors” but really mean “You Don’t Belong.” And behind all the big bricks there are millions and millions of books, poured over by thousands of the brightest scholars. The contemplation of it all makes your mind go blank when you try to remember the great thoughts that you thought you had.

I can understand the colleges, the inception of which was reactive to the brutality stemming from town-and-gown trouble. Now, they shelter you from the ignorance of those educated in the more useful disciplines, and emotional vocations–keeping not you in, but them out..? They serve well to allow the best minds to describe the world, without having to participate in its filth and injury. The students, though, they belong to their colleges. They have porters, they feel sheltered, loyal, as if they belong to something the privilege of which demands only intelligence and the desire to learn. They are forever a member of their personal collage of architecture, their chapel, their wood-panelled and portrait-lined dining halls, their heavy leaded windows that look into quads and onto lanes and over an ancient skyline, little universes full of so much life, so much love, and century after century of secrets known only to them and the others that have called their colors their own. 

In comparison, you have UCL. UCL was founded on the model of Oxford and Cambridge, to be a college in a university system. Instead it developed into its own degree-granting university. In contrast, it was open to all religions, and was a cosmopolitan university. Oxford required Anglican allegiance until late in its life, and until the 1970s having a penis was the first part of the application process.  UCL reflects the continental universities, which rarely had a campus or a quod–they were spread out across cities, occupying and overtaking buildings as they grew.

Then you have the American University, which began with Harvard (itself modeled after Oxford, intending to be the first college of many in a university system) and was influenced by the secular, liberal-arts curricula of Jefferson’s University of Virginia.  Its curriculum little resembles the modern British equivalent, but is actually in closer correspondance to the early medieval Master of Arts education, through which you were educated in the seven liberal arts of Martianus Capella and the wide-ranging works of Aristotle. The most absurd by-product of the importation of the university is the “collegiate gothic” architectural tradition, which was perfected at places like Boston College, Duke and Yale. Duke’s campus, which was built in the first half of the 20th century, has all of the spires and arches and gargoyles that you would find at one of the 15 oldest Oxford colleges, except that Duke is simulation carved in stone–its crests would be false, its coat-of-arms blank and its heritage not of tradition but donation. It certainly looks pretty, though. 

Oxford is what a university should be, because it is where all universities come from.

It feels like a lightning strike, Margaret. It feels that scary, that strange, and that singular. It is sourceless electricity, unaware conduction…

You feel high, like you had just mixed up two grams of cocaine, an ounce of marijuana, a fifth of whiskey, and all the spiritual vegetables of Aboriginals, and experienced that euphoric clarity before overdosing into confused sensory overload. Your blood is hot and your heart is fiery, but everything is cooler to the touch than it has ever felt.

But all I drank was a cappuccino, all I inhaled was light perfume, and all I swallowed was a comment–the true consumption was neither animal, vegetable, nor mineral, but human. 

The unbelievability of it complements the irrationality of the human condition, and magnetizes it into a presentable and compelling fantasy–the hope of tomorrow, of the next day, of the distance and fallibility of the end. 

Twisting and turning, shuffling and shifting, moving because stillness hurts–wanting to sit where you stood, reverting to the childlike whims of delayed satisfaction, dangling your legs over the Underground platform edge, because really at that moment the loss of a limb or two would just be a temporary distraction.

The metaphors were freed from their pedestrian conceptual cages, breaking the bonds of typified and repetitive experience, elevated above the mediocrity that had struck them down and held them helpelessly in the throes of arbitrary vernacular. The analogies of angels exploded from the pathetically epiphenomenal to the phenomenally epithetical–a divine gift, an inexplicable miracle, an alignment of manipulative stars…

…an ascendant circumstance constructed by constellation alone, descended from somewhere hidden behind, beneath, beyond this universe of mine. 

It cannot be real, cannot be true, and i have been transported to a world where the law is not quid pro quo, this for that, to one where the science of my fortune is omnia ex nihil. In my search to understand, to believe, I find myself invoking the favors of gods that i and others have slain, just so that i can give this sweet madness a name. 

I must indulge, Margaret. All the daydreaming and the idle fantasies, were just practice–simulation, preparation for this concentration of everything i have ever wanted.

Piazzale Roma came into view, and i knew my exodus was certain. My heart spiked when I realized I was crossing my last bridge in Venice, and my steps slowed as if doing so would lengthen its span. Then, I remembered I was still in Venice proper, the old Republic, and had yet to cross my last: that Austrian monstrosity, the bridge which “keeps Europe from being an island” and my personal Devil’s Bridge–the Causeway.

The focus of latent panic returned, and what was seconds ago once familiar became strange, foreign again–like viewing an impressionist painting illuminated by haloed lights and studied through the haze of amnesia.  

No. But there was that special unfamiliarity, like objects that i had known already were something unknowable, like seeing things you only saw in the detail of bright sunlight shown to you again under shadows cast at unnerving and nauseating angles.

…yes, Margaret, we will come and stay, and sleep the hot days away. Then we will rise, as that unforgiving summer sun sets, and have Venice when she is at her best–in the deepest night and the earliest morning–altogether. We will roam those cleared calle and explore scary corners of the city. We will laugh, and laugh harder when our echoes meet us on the other end of an empty campo. We will dip our feet in the water when it is too dark to see what lies beneath, when light fails to find the filth, and watch the boats moored next to us to see if they felt the wake of our toes as they were tickled…

–

A high-brow rant: the difficulty of writing (Fall 2007)

And i don’t believe in proofreading, rough drafts, rewriting, editing, or any of that premeditated, corrective corruption. True writing is done once, the first time, forever. When you have a thought to be conveyed and an inspiration to be shared, it cannot be processed and manufactured as though it were composed only of interchangeable parts of the English language on an assembly line of critical approval. The verbs and adjectives chosen the first time, written with consistent fluidity and without hesitation, they are the words that should be written. Indeed, you can cross out letters, words, sentences, and phrases, but they still exist behind you, an permanent reminder of human fallibility through doubt. Even erasing leaves a ghostly impression of your first, and forgotten, choices. Old drafts, recopied indefinitely until satisfaction or exhaustion, linger in garbage cans and landfills.

The metaphor fails as i write, leading a blinking cursor back and forth across a phosphorescent screen; i can delete, recreate the void i had spoiled, and you would never know. But even after this program closes, and that ephemeral binary memory is cleared from electronic existence, broken messages will still propagate through space forever, scars on an unseen fabric of space and time. Something, someone knows what I did, how my courage failed when I scratched out, or erased, or backspaced, and will hold my ill-written errors over my head until they culminate in the perfection of brevity that will be my epitaph.

Thus in writing is reflection of a greater difficulty; the burden of the author is the same burden of life. Choosing the right word, at the right time, is a fraction of the greater decision that decides a paragraph. As authors of our lives, diction is the clothes we wear and the styles with which we ally. Theme is the personality we maintain or fake. Plot is the story we tell with our education, our careers, and our inevitable approach to death and denouement. Alliteration, connotation, and all the devices that inspire fire within us as we read, the magic writing can perform, they are love–love and passion. Epigrams–those pieces of our prose that sound too good to be forgotten–are our best memories, the ones that are even better remembered than when written. Irony and turns of phrase are the humor we find in our days, sweetening our stories with just the right amount of bitterness. And metaphor: it is the dreams, our dreams, something that isn’t or could never be superimposed, maybe with hope, onto something we composed. 

Only a single path may be tread, as only one cohesive composition may be written. What of the choices not made or decided against, the revisions, the erasures and deletions, the drafts you always wonder whether or not really were better? They too accompany infinity in abstract immortality.

The wise choose their words impulsively and spontaneously, write forward and fluidly, perhaps go back and annotate to avoid future mistakes—but they have written, and they keep writing.

The recklessly ambitious, the artists-in-theory, wish the impossible: write once perfectly, without compunction and hesitation, indignant of providence, obsessing over the beauty of spontaneity, fighting a compulsion for correction and anticipating crushing regret—they do not write at all, for fear of wasting their chance, casting insufficient imagery, making a mistake that cannot, will not, be erased or changed.

True life, as true writing, is not something to be finished, reread, altered whimsically. It is only the sentence before, and the prompting of a new word choice, a new thought, a new inspiration, leading to a conclusion that changes with every new word chosen

I write my life selecting words that more often read well to others, and only sometimes finding words that read well to me. But i never write as often as i should, for fear of finishing an imperfect, or still worse, average, manifesto.

But you will never know how many times this has been rewritten, and how much I will wish to rewrite after there can be no more revision.

On Wedesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, I wake up at 8. I have breakfast and watch London begin its day from nine floors off the ground. I shower, dress “smart,” and get out the door by 9:15. The walk along Holmes Road would take ten minutes if i didn’t walk as if i were running with heavy shoes on. I swipe my 7-day pass Oystercard, race to catch the first Charing Cross branch southbound Northern Line, where I shoulder my way into one of the train cars overflowing with people headed to Central London for work–suits, denim, skirts, sweatpants, as though a wardrobe exploded somewhere up the line.

My iPod plays the soundtrack by which i steal glances and try to get away with a study of strangers’ faces and postures that, i’m sure, seems like staring. It didn’t take me long to realize that the way you can tell the difference between someone who has been Living in London and someone who is Visiting is by where they are looking–these lifers have their own lives, and do not have the time, or the patience, or the care to think about someone else’s. They don’t try to catch eyes as they fly by in the blur of a stopping tube train, or pass by diagonally on the long escalators. London is too fast for anyone else but yourself and those you have made part of you through whatever rituals of cooperation and consummation are specific to your culture.

I get off at Leicester Square, wondering what is above since I’ve yet to spend dozens of pounds at its well-know pubs. I make the ten minute subterranean traverse to the Picadilly line, where i take a meager one-stop ride to Picadilly Circus. The southside exit brings me to Waterloo place, with its monuments standing atop piles of carved cannon and uncarved corpses. At the intersection of Pall Mall there is Carlton Terrace, which drops off into St. Jame’s Park. It used to be an area of Royalty, but now is a foreign wealth district, with several embassies and national institutes. 

I walk into the Royal Society, take the ID-card lift after passing Newton’s locke of hair next to his handwritten corrections of the first edition of Principia Mathematica, and take my temporary place in the Publishing Editorial department. The original journal, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, is nearing its 350th anniversary and is the longest running (and first, arguably) sustained scientific journal on earth. It has twinned, and given birth to two children and a grandchild: PhilTransA, PhilTrans B, Proceedings of the Royal Society A, ProcB, and Biology Letters. My work is assigned through ProcA and Biology Letters. I spend the day monitoring the submission process, looking through manuscript submission citations for peer reviews, which I then hunt down online. I write some emails, do some marketing research, eat a very substantial free lunch downstairs, drink four or five cups of tea, and when i am feeling bored or listless, i walk to the bathroom and look out its window to the Thames skyline–the gold of Big Ben reflects October afternoon sun brilliantly. 

If i have energy, I retrace my mass transport steps back to Euston, where i cross heavy traffic to UCL’s campus and get a coffee at the Union. I read assigned reading until my nerves feel hot again, then head to the Bloomsbury Fitness Centre. I run, and then stand around while the oversized crowd obstructs my routine, and take more time than i want. I change, without showering–and sometimes i don’t even change–and head back to Euston to catch High Barnet branch north to Kentish town, as my exercise high wears off and fatigue sets in. I always have to pass The Oxford, Kentish Town’s best pub, on my way, and it is always full of young people clutching pint glasses. 

I cook dinner, and then try to catch up on my reading. Sometimes i have tea and spend too much time talking to Taavi, or sitting online like this, while piles of books and journals sit on my nightstand. My internship ends next week and I have my first round of essays due (one 900 word book review and one full-citation 3500 word essay).

I found a file of things I had begun to write convulsively but stopped, and which never amounted to much more than pleasant-sounding sputa. They were just pieces of me once, but their ejection might just be necessary, or unavoidable, in the slow and horrific distillation of my creative viscera. To pick them up now, and make sense of them later, would be as fruitful as trying to reform pieces of bloody lung.

—–

“Our thoughts are like cross-country race-runners. We think, and the electrical impulses that constitute the thought run their convoluted courses. Thoughts do not settle, do not cease in their circuits, just as the resting state of the runner is motion. But if the terrain does not change, the track becomes more familiar, easier to run, trodden down and unmistakable with each lap. So our thoughts become easier to think, and our lives neurotic: an unsolved problem, leading our mind in circles; a especially fond or terribly painful memory, a permanent path into the wilderness of posterity; and an obsession, the easiest track to run, paved with insolubulity and painted with anxiety. The terrain must change, so that we do not follow these circuits and live in lifeless circles. We must run where we have never been, where our minds will plot new courses and think strange thoughts. We must trip over ourselves, and we must fall.”

“Love is just a word. Like all other words, it has a definition. For whatever reason, though, that definition seems much more difficult to dictate or understand, and the denotation provided by the dictionary is certainly unsatisfactory. It is more than a word, we are sure, and the lifeless pages of a stuffy old books could never feel its distinctly human connotation, its living passion, its omnipotence. A feeling glorified throughout history, the stuff that makes the world turn, certainly could never be defined just by other words or synonyms.

Instead, it is definied by impression–one impression, in fact. Our youth is spent searching for love, looking for the word that meets a definition we have seen on TV or in movies, described by peers and elders. We feel like we are getting closer, the feelings more defined, until once, finally, the feeling matches the word, and the word has a definition. We first fall in love.

Do we ever fall out? If we have felt love, if we have decided on a definition, then we are doomed to define all our subsequent stories by that feeling–by that one person whose hair color, smile, touch, and tears can together be summed up in one word. If we have truly felt love, then we have our own definition of love that cannot be replaced. There may be subtleties in meaning…”

…as self-reliant as Emerson would have him, though hardly as aware; and then, in the midst of this “maturation,” we find someone who tolerates our new self-satisfaction, hopefully someone anatomically reciprocal and sexually conducive.

…but my dissatisfaction serves a purpose, passionate about finding what makes me feel passion–and i fear that, once i find it, once i find you or me, i will live down my days with that daily malaise, stepping confidently and contentedly to my death. “

“imagine what restless souls learned about themselves before the luxurious recourse to the convenience of classified disorder and illness!”

“The conclusion of my teenage years and the advent of my twenties were characterized by an impossible desire for two things; wisdom, and women. It was in the abscence of one that i violently sought the other, the sacrifices to which can never be seen in the pictures and transcripts which crystallize my obsession–only understood by perpetual fantasies begining with

“What if”

and ending with “should have been.” I could have known this or that, i suppose. I could have known her.

It was when the two pursuits crossed paths that i was both at my best and at my worst. Beauty was never enough, and I spent hours and nights and years watching the dance of eyes and bodies and wonder how i could learn the spells that had to be cast to seduce her. And if …. looked into mine, wondering what had led her to lay with me. Had she chosen me according to some calculus, or was our rendezvous the product of pure chance, and we had fucked and kissed by coincidence? Did it mean anything?”

“At the beginning of college she was a ball of energy, wrapped up by the hand of high school popularity and rolled into a city bouncing with people just like her. By the end, she had become a flower child, but her petals were not of philosophy; a hippie without a culture to counter and free spirit that was never caged in the first place. She is all beautiful bloom, but stemless. She and i believe in the same ideal of happiness; she lives it without being able to understand it, and i understand it without being able to live it. It is this dichotomy–the death of our unborn relationship–that drew me to her still.”

“Funny how having almost everything doesn’t satisfy, but rather seems to magnify the one thing missing–like a perfectly tuned car without a steering wheel, a beautiful skyscraper without an elevator, or a youthful, toned body without a heart. “

I had drinks with Amy on Tottenham Court Road after walking around Bloomsbury. She asked me why I drank, and after I told her the long story of my alcohol-soaked adolescence, and the university years that i spent like a carbonation bubble in a bottle of beer, she asked again. I didn’t answer well. She doesn’t drink. It reminded me of a little experiment i tried when i was younger. I was fifteen, and had reached the point in my philosophy where action could no longer be transcended by assumption, and in my atheistic, reletavistic flailing for meaning, i realized quite excitedly that there really was no reason not to do anything.

So i got drunk. I was fifteen, and wrote it all down. It began what would become a seven year journal, recording most of my first and all of my most memorable experiences.

Newly Solvent

It used to be embarrassing, but eight years after the fact (!), it is now only as hilarious as it is precocious.

At the time, there was nowhere to go but inward.

She’s smarter than I am.

A recap of celebrations in my approach to quasi-adulthood:

Eighteen to Nineteen: I calculated the time it would take for me to safely consume a bottle of Jack Daniels by using the standard oxidation rate of one shot per hour, which is used in anti-DUI literature around the country, and based on my bodyweight (125 pounds at the time) guessing the BAC i could acquire before becoming comatose–i shot for .3, but underestimated the ironside tolerance i had worked hard for in high school). I began at noon; by 8PM I was sweating and pale, and had to call the girl i was seeing at the time to come and rescue me. I did not, however, vomit, and i am proud to confess that after the equivalent of eighteen shots of whiskey i walked home under my own power and managed to sign her into my dorm. Later that night, she told me the next day, some things i did “really scared” her, and she had the bitemarks to prove it.

Nineteen to Twenty: Unremarkable in its revelry compared to its loss of teenage status. I spent the night going back and forth party-to-party, getting fairly hammered until i rendezvoused first with a girl i had had a crush on in early high school, and then brought home a girl i had a crush on in the last days of high school. Those encounters, too, were sadly unremarkable.

Twenty to Twenty-one: The gala of all galas. The epic event that marks the transition from juvenile delinquent to full-blown alcoholic–i gave myself a few days for this one. The night before i threw a small party on my porch on Jones Avenue, invitation primarily extended to those i felt were worthy of the holiness that is a keg of Yuengling. I don’t remember much of the party, or what bar we went to afterward. The next night I went home to celebrate with my family, in coincidence with a family friend engagement party that, conveniently enough, had an open catered bar. We later all went to a nearby bar, where my parents arranged for champagne to be brought out as the clock sounded twenty-one when it struck twenty-four. I ended up at a different bar, somewhere in Wheeling, absolutely jackhammered. The last thing i rememeber is having a tie around my head and booze all over my suit, leaning out onto a deck railing, smoking a cigarette and wondering where a certain person in my life was at that moment.

Twenty-one to twenty-two: It fell on a Monday, and I had an exam (histology, i believe) early that same week. I spent the day studying, then crashed a medical school block party and drank with some friends i rarely saw anymore. I didn’t get absolutely annihilated, as the tradition had become–there were other nights, in fact three of them per week for another two semesters, for that.

Twenty-two to twenty-three: My birthday is tomorrow. I might go out for a couple of pints at night, but i don’t intend to get plastered. I’ve been taking the weekdays easy, since it’s been an almost non-stop bender from the day i got to Venice, through Eastern Europe, and in the first week of London. Celebration can wait until Thursday night, when the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine is having its 8th Anniversary party, featuring loads of free (and high-priced) wine, beer, and foods. I will submit to incoherence either there or afterward, and follow it with any pub that will be televising the debate.

It’s strange, though. Previously i met each birthday with bitterness, and sorrow, and regret for all the lost youth and the forgone opportunities, et cetera, and all that melodrama. But here it doesn’t even matter–i am somewhere i want to be, doing something i want to be doing, and days passed are all days valued, and a day spent couldn’t be a day wasted.

What timezone does a birthday obey, anyway?