PhD: They Make You Want It

My former boss at the Writing Center informed me once that PhD programs in general have about a 50% dropout rate, and I think I understand why. Part of my job, you see, is reading and editing the dissertations, theses, lab reports, journal articles, and grant proposals of PhDs and Post-Docs.

And I gotta say, you read enough of these documents, written in the obscure, esoteric, almost mystic prose of academia, and you can totally see these poor ol' PhD candidates, hunched over the dull glow of an outdated computer, their 30th birthday coming up but still living alone on some sub-poverty-line stipend, typing away to (hopefully) get the funding necessary to explore the possibility that a specific strain of bio-iluminescent bacterium (one of countless thousands of possible candidates) might function as a viable possibility for increasing energy efficiency in next-generation organic-based LEDs, all while the e-mail alerts ping reminders of an in-box full of spam, status updates, and irrelevant cc's from ancillary project members, and their neck pops as they hang their head, when suddenly they jump up and scream, "What am I doing with my life?! Screw this, I'm going out to feel some sunshine on my face." And they run outside and never come back.

Later, the PI wonders vaguely where's what's-his-or-her-face, 'cause they need someone to grade some undergrad papers.

They make you really want it, is all I'm saying; I'm betting that it isn't that PhD drop-outs can't hack the course work, but rather that they just couldn't put up with the alienating lack of purpose in their lives (which is ironically why they probably entered grad school in the first place).

I sense that the only people willing to put up with the dedication necessary to complete a PhD are those who either 1) truly, passionately love and believe in what they are studying, or 2) are conscientious grinds who don't know how to do anything else but grind away.

Jules Vernes and H.G. Wells

Jules Verne's famously critiqued H.G. Well's novels because Wells refused to give the technical specs for his time machines, Martian tripods, and human-animal hybrids on Dr. Moreau's island. Vernes, by contrast, goes into minute detail into how the Nautilus functions, how professor Von Hardwigg descends beneath the Earth's crust, and how Phineas Fogg accomplishes a circumnavigation of the world in only 80 days.

Of course, as many critics have noted, Well's characters actually feel like real people in impossible situations, who learn about themselves and humanity through their harrowing experiences; Verne's characters are mostly ciphers just there to keep the action moving--they are never tested, they are never relatable. While Well's stories have beginnings, middles, and ends, there is no plot arc to Vernes--the reader, for example, waits in vain for the big reveal about Captain Nemo's history in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, because it's not about Nemo, but the blasted submarine.

Moreover, Verne's scientific ideas now feel laughably outdated--modern geology has debunked most of Verne's premises in Journey to the Center of the Earth, the Nautilius is no longer novel technology, and we can now circumnavigate the world in 24 hours (90 minutes if it's by space shuttle).

Wells, by contrast, still feels relevant because, though his science is likewise specious, nevertheless his novels are not actually about the science--

The Time Machine is less about the 4th dimension (just as Back to the Future isn't actually about the flux capacitor) or even Well's clearly shaky grasp of evolutionary theory, than it is about the ultimate futility of all the acts of man (a theme that, in our darker moments, still feels salient today).

War of the Worlds isn't so much about Martians as it is an open critique of British Imperialism, showing a global superpower what it feels like to be invaded by a superior military force (also still relevant).

And Island of Dr. Moreau isn't so much about human-animals as it is about our creeping dread of the dehumanizing, abominating effects of technology unrestrained (in our age of nuclear weapons and over-processed foods, not an idle fear).

This is all to say that Vernes cared about how things work, while Wells cared about what things represent.

But then, Vernes was French and therefore of Catholic background, while Wells was English and therefore of Protestant background.

Verne's background is relevant because Catholicism is a religion where the wafer is transubstantiated into the actual body of Christ--that is, in Catholicism, things don't represent, but actually are, through a process. Therefore, functions and processes would be the focus of a Catholic, not representation, just as Vernes cares more about the Nautilus' functions and processes, than he is about what the Nautilus and Nemo represent (as English-language film adaptations of the novel have focused more on).

Likewise, Well's background is relevant because the Protestants (especially English Puritans) dismissed such transubstantiation as idolatrous and distracting from the higher spiritual reality that the bread represents, though the bread is not the actual reality itself. Hence, Wells would find such focus on functions and processes to be distracting from the higher ideas that the stories represent.

Personally I prefer Wells to Verne, but then, I am an Anglo-American of Protestant decent, so I would be naturally biased; I'm curious as to which author someone of Catholic background might prefer.

Holy Sonnet 10

Since I was first introduced to Derrida in college, I'd wondered what the logical end to post-structuralism must be--simply saying "the void" is too predictable. But if the signifier and referent have no intrinsic relationship, then what are we left with? The language itself and alone. In other words, 20th century lit. criticism just comes full circle back to New Criticism. Formalism. Where we study the beauty of the language itself.

In fact, it takes us back to John Donne--his Holy Sonnets are beauties of language for their own sake. But more importantly, Donne expressed faith in what lies behind language in his Holy Sonnets. For even if language has no intrinsic relationship with the referent, we still live by faith that we are not brains floating in a jar, not projections in someone elses' dream, that there is a reality that corresponds to that language. Donne's Holy Sonnets also express faith that there is a reality behind the dead words on the page.

All of this just a round-about way of introducing Holy Sonnet 10:

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou'art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy'or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

Paradise Lost

So here's my thing with Milton's Paradise Lost: the text taken itself would seem to confirm the whole Renaissance-era belief in the divine right of kings to rule absolutely--for in this epic poem, we have Satan the archetypal rebel being thrust down to hell for opposing the rightful supremacy of the King of heaven.

If I didn't know better, I'd just assume Paradise Lost was written by a pro-Monarchist seeking to vilify the republicans who, Satan-like, dared support the deposition and regicide of divinely-ordained King Charles I in 1649 (the loss of the King being a loss of paradise), and then celebrating the rightful restoration of the monarchy in 1658 now that the rebels has been defeated and metaphorically thrust down to hell.

The problem with that reading, however, is the simple fact that John Milton himself was an ardent anti-Monarchist. Under the brief English Republic, he was offered a civil servant position and happily accepted it; he wrote defenses of the execution of Charles I, anticipating John Locke (and Thomas Jefferson) in arguing that govt. is a social contract between ruler and subject that can be broken, not a divine heavenly right; he published tracts attacking press censorship and promoting the liberalization of divorce laws; when the Monarchy was restored, he justly feared for his life due to his vocal opposition to Kings; he was allowed to live only because he'd gone blind, a "clear sign" that God had punished this "wicked rebel"; and when Paradise Lost was first published, the Monarchists actually felt threatened by it.

This seemingly pro-Monarchist text was written by (and perceived as) an anti-Monarchist. Something does not quite compute in my modern mind.

Some have tried to get around this dilemma by claiming, as did William Blake, that Milton "was of the Devil's party without knowing it." The reasoning goes that since Milton's Satan is so sympathetic, then Milton is clearly establishing his sympathies with the rebels themselves. Now, certainly Milton's Satan gets all the best lines in Paradise Lost and is by far the most interesting character; the problem, of course, is that Milton himself was a good Puritan, for whom to identify with Satan would be abhorrent.

Blake might then argue that Milton made Satan sympathetic in spite of himself; but even disregarding Milton, the text itself makes unequivocally clear that Satan is wicked and evil and the bad guy, that he is the source of all sin and death and suffering, that his defeat was man's victory, and that the redemption made possible through Jesus Christ is mankind's sole source of peace, happiness, and salvation. Paradise Lost's sympathies are most assuredly not with its rebels.

(Milton, in my opinion, merely made Satan interesting, not good; and frankly, if Satan became the good guy, it would be a dull, predictable, sanitizing move--Milton's Satan is interesting for the same reason The Dark Knight's Joker is interesting, precisely because he's so evil.)

Perhaps the solution lies within Milton's own Puritanism--the writer to the introduction of my edition of Paradise Lost claims that the tension in the text isn't so much between ruler and rebel as it is between signifier and referent. (Bare with me.) He discusses how historically, in the mid-17th century, the monarchy and Church of England was seen as less Protestant but more aligned with the Catholic Church, a religion featuring holy relics and icons and transubstantiation of bread into Christ's actual body and so forth--in other words, in Catholicism, the symbol was constantly confused for the thing it signified.

The Puritans, by contrast, rejected this veneration of icons, calling it idol worship--their Churches had crucifixes, but they didn't worship the crucifix itself, for they understood that the crucifix is not Christ. That is, in Puritanism, the signifier (or symbol) is always separate from the signified (or referent). The symbol and the referent have no inherent relationship; the Puritans were proto-Post-Structuralists.

Such a doctrine would be threatening to a Monarchist Anglo-Catholic, for if the throne has no inherent connection with the ruler, then the King has no inherent right to rule. Just to be Protestant, then, would be to naturally reject the supposed "divine right" of Kings to rule as Satanic, for the King merely represents divine rule on earth, and is not actually divine rule itself.

One can arguably see this Protestant separation between symbol and referent in Paradise Lost, as when Satan first wages war against heaven--one critic posits that Satan made the mistake of confusing God's throne with God Himself, treating the throne as an object, an artifact, an icon, something that could be taken or possessed. But the throne is not God Himself, and so to threaten the throne is not actually to threaten God personally.

Also, as other critics have noted, Satan alone calls the forbidden fruit an "apple," while everyone else--Rafael, Michael, Adam, Eve, the Father and the Son--calls it "fruit," fruit having the double meaning of "consequences," as in "the fruits of one's actions." In other words, the righteous understand that the fruit is a symbol, a signifier, representing disobedience and sin, but is not the thing itself.

Satan, by contrast, is incapable of making any such distinction--his punishment is to not just inhabit the serpent but to become the serpent, that is, to continue to conflate the symbol for the thing itself. He and his minions snap at the fruit of an image of the tree of life that appears in hell, fruit that turns to ashes in their mouths, for they continually confuse the representation for the actual thing itself. Satan's comrades are all given the names of idols that were worshiped in ancient Canaan, showing how their conflation of symbols with the referent is a Satanic mistake made on earth as well.

The implication is that any time we confuse a symbol for the referent (e.g. confusing cars for status, clothes for beauty, politics for morality, sex for love, money for success, etc), then we, too, are being idolatrous and foolish, just as the Satan who thinks the apple is the thing itself, failing to understand that the symbol and the referent are not the same thing, just as the Catholics fail to realize that the bread is not actually Christ's body, just as the Monarchs fail to realize that the throne is not actually divine rule.

If such a reading is the case (and given the historical circumstances, I see no other way around this dilemma than by accepting this Protestant reading of Paradise Lost), then the Post-Modernists must relinquish any prior claims to originating Post-Structuralism and Deconstructionism; the late-Renaissance were already thinking like Derrida centuries before Derrida--they were just using a different vocabulary. They understood that "the just live by faith," for if all we have to go off of are images, impressions, symbols, and signifiers for percieving reality, then we of necessity are living by faith all the time anyways. Lit.-theory-wise, we are just now catching up with them.

Much as I am wary of fetishizing some mythical "golden age" or "simpler time" of the past when everyone was supposedly smarter and more polite (I have no desire to return to the racism, sexism and intolerance of 500 or even 50 years ago), I truly must tip my hat to the brilliance and insight of Milton and the Renaissance.

As I Lay Dying

William Faulkner supposedly said that the title to his 1930 novel comes from Book XI of Homer's Odyssey, when the spirit of Agamemnon, down in the underworld, tells Ulysses that, "As I lay dying the woman with the dog's eyes would not close my eyes for me as I descended into Hades." In ancient Greece, this act of neglect was indicative of an improper burial, and according to ancient Greek belief, a spirit could not be at rest in the underworld until it had been properly buried.

Certainly improper burial is a constant running theme in Faulkner's novel--Addie Bundren has requested that she be buried in her place of birth. The Bundrens (their anagram for "Burden" is clear) are a poor white Southern family, for which to make this simple journey across Mississippi is almost too great a burden in and of itself--along the way they find 2 bridges washed out, when they try to ford a flooded river they lose all the mules, lose Cash's tools, and almost lose Addie's coffin in process.

Even before they family leaves, one son, Vardaman, drills 2 holes into the coffin that penetrate his mother's face. While she was still dying, 2 of her sons went off to make delivery. Never having been embalmed, her body starts to stink when the family passes through a town, garnering the attention of a local Marshall. En route, another son, Darl, burns down a barn for no discernable reason and has to be shipped off to Jackson before Addie can be buried. Cash breaks his leg en route, which is so improperly bound with raw cement that it draws a rebuke from the family doctor--this improper care is indicative of the improper care for the dead.

Addie is finally buried with borrowed shovels. While the dirt is still fresh on her grave, her widower Anse disappears to return the shovels, and when he finally reappears, he has a new set of false teeth bought with borrowed money guilted and extorted from his teenage daughter (and this after his incessant stinginess over the course of the funeral procession), and with a new wife in hand.

The burial of the poor family matriarch has been a travesty from beginning to end.

The novel is also narrated in brief chapters from the stream-of-conscious narrations of various people over the course of the journey--including at one point by Addie herself after her death, which is either an uncharacteristic flashback or Addie speaking a la Agamemnon from the depths of the underworld, an implicit condemnation of those who have failed to bury her properly--except that the implication is that it isn't her soul that will be forever disturbed by this neglect, but theirs.

But another thread running througout As I Lay Dying is the idea of property--Addie's dying wish is her property, her claim on her good-for-nothing Anse. Anse fulfills this claim only to fulfill the much more mundane claim he feels that he has--to buy a set of false teeth in the city, so that he can "partake of God's victuals as I was meant," a right he feels is as inalienable as Addie's request. Anse himself will constantly guilt his children with accusations that they are unable/unwilling to show due respect to their mother--this tactic is in part how he gets the ten dollars for his false teeth from Dewie, despite the fact that the money was borrowed, and that for an abortion. Cash condemns Darl's barn-burning specifically as an assault on a man's property, and Cash's very livelihood is threatened by the loss of his tools (his property) and his improperly-cared-for leg. Dewie herself attempts to trade 10 dollars for an abortion, exchanging money for a life, and finally she trades sexual favors for what turns out to be a fake abortion drug.

In short, all through out this novel, properties and claims are being violated, lost, swindled, dishonored, and broken. All throughout the text characters are constantly undermining the intrinsic connection between claims and properties.

Of course, the language of the novel itself fulfills this--each chapter seems to speak around what is actually going on, alluding to events but never actually touching them, just as claims never seem to actually touch "property." This linguistic-disconnect from reality makes the novel more difficult to read (though still not nearly as difficult as its immediate predecessor The Sound and the Fury), but this disconnect also means that the focus is on the language itself, not the actual action. The language, the story itself, is what remains independent of the misery around it. In such a patently irredeemable story of loss, the telling of it alone redeems. The language saves the novel; the language is the covering, the dirt by which the dead are finally properly buried.

Random Thought

So here's my thought: Pride originates from our innate need for distinction, something that separates us from the "pack," as it were. But why is this need innate? I theorize that it is intrinsically linked to the fact that the conscious mind is incapable of focusing on more than one thing at a time--that's why classical music is supposed to be so good for you, because your mind is jumping rapidly between multiple melodies and counter-melodies and symphonic parts at once, focusing on each on singularly, as opposed to comprehending them all at once.

As such, the human mind is consequently incapable of comprehending all things at once--it is therefore forced to place things in hierarchies for which will receive our attention. Our human need is to be high on everyone else's hierarchies.

But here's the thing--an omnipotent God does not have that limiting factors on His mind. He can conceive of all things at once, even "the fall of a sparrow," therefore, concepts such as "distinction" and "preeminence" and "hierarchical priority" have no meaning for Him. Have millions of people fight for visibility makes about as much sense to Him as having your two best friends fight for your attention, demanding you pick one or the other, as though you couldn't value them both.

A desire to gain preeminence over our fellow beings would therefore be an affront to a Being who alone is capable of valuing all at once. This pride would be senseless to Him, and would imply that you think you can see more than God.

Jane Eyre

I initially started reading Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre more out of sense of duty than anything else, honestly; I'd somehow completed a Masters in English Literature without ever once giving Jane Eyre a crack. Not that I wasn't unaware of the oversight; I'd read and enjoyed Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights on my own, and had even read Villette by Charlotte for a class, a book that both Virginia Woolf and a friend from college said was even better than Jane Eyre. But somehow Jane Eyre itself had slipped past me. And when I one day casually mentioned this to a friend, a passing professor stopped, turned around, and all but dressed me down right there in the hallway for daring neglect this classic of English literature.

So now that I've graduated and can finally read whatever I want...I'm still reading stuff my professors demand. Go figure.

But besides, when I mentioned to a couple girls that I was planning on reading Jane Eyre, they both began gushing in hushed, reverent tones how that was their favorite book and had changed their lives. In fact, it seems almost every girl I meet has read Jane Eyre. So, I figured it wouldn't hurt me to read a book that other people actually read for once, especially one that the ladies seem to love so much; and since I will never read Twilight, Jane Eyre it was.

The first thing that struck me was just how unexpectedly dark Jane Eyre is; I certainly wasn't expecting kittens and rainbows from the sisters who brought us Wuthering Heights and Villette, and the narrative itself has a thoroughly happy ending, but I wasn't expecting such a consistently bleak portrait and damning portrait of English society at the beginning.

But it swiftly became apparent why so many young women love Jane Eyre--the titular protagonist is passionate, outspoken, honest, intelligent, uncompromising, and emotionally strong. She's not afraid to be alone, even when she craves love and friendship. She would be a rare character even today. What's more, the book makes clear that Jane is rather plain; after so many countless novels and poems about soaringly beautiful angels, Jane Eyre is a book about the other women. I can see how so many "plain-Janes" would be attracted to this independent young lady who refuses to be trampled.

One might be tempted to label Jane Eyre a proto-feminist, save for the ending; the aforementioned happy ending involves Jane telling the brooding Mr. Rochester, who protests that she cannot possibly still want to marry him now that he is maimed and blinded, that nothing would fill her with so much joy as to wait upon and care for him the rest of her days. After this passionate woman who has been willing, since a child, to endure beatings, privations, starvation, destitution, betrayal, heartbreak, extreme loneliness, despair, even daring damnation itself, all to never compromise her principles, I'm still not quite sure what to do with her considering this life of complete domesticity and romantic servitude her highest fulfillment.

One girl explained to me that the difference isn't that she marries, but rather that she marries a man who always treats her as an equal--she said the book changed her life because it convinced her that she needn't settle for marrying into an inherently subjugated role, but that she could be as stubborn and uncompromising as Jane in insisting that her future husband treat her as an equal. I'm still trying to decide about that one, because Rochester is enthralled with her a in a way that pedestalizes and therefore subjugates her. But at the same time, Jane and Rochester banter in an easy way that suggests each considers the other a worthy adversary.

One thing that did stick out to me was how much this novel couldn't be written today--divorce laws today would allow one to annul a marriage to a lunatic wife from an arranged marriage who keeps trying to burn down your house, thus freeing one to marry one's true love; and though the Protestant ethic continues to haunt us Anglo-Americans today like a curse, the sort of austere Calvinist preacher personified in Rivers St. John thankfully doesn't exist today, nor would he be able to exert such fantastic pressure on a woman to marry him if he did.

Maybe I'm just too male; maybe I'm just too modern; maybe I've never been passionately in love, to fully understand Jane's motivations. Not that I didn't like the novel--on the contrary, I find Bronte's prose to be impassioned and enthralling. Compared to Jane Austen with her passive women, lack of physical description, or even acknowledgment of servants, Charlotte Bronte is a breath of fresh air, a long draught of clear, cold water: Bronte is willing to explore the secret lives of servants; nature itself, with all its biting wind, snow, rain, lightning, blue skies and sunrises, is an active, participating character in Bronte novels; so is God, I would offer. Even after reading Villette, I was taken aback by how much divine Providence figures into this novel. Jane's faith is absolute, rendering her not only willing to suffer anything and everything, but also to stand up to anyone, whether cruel step-family, religious hypocrites, even passionate lovers; she has more in common with a Christian martyr who gains the kingdom than a romantic heroine.

In fact, the more I think about Jane Eyre, especially in this era of passive Bellas, gossip girls, and whores, women who can only be valued for their skills in sexual seduction, the more I wish we had more literary heroines like Jane. Three waves of feminism lie between us and Bronte, yet still Jane Eyre feels like a new woman, even a little dangerous (in a good way), like a mad-woman breaking out of the attic to burn down a house that needed to be burned down a long time ago.

I Had a Cold!

C.S. Lewis, in The Screwtape Letters, mentions how a brooding melancholic forgets his depression five minutes into a really bad tooth-ache--in other words, we forget our former pain once we are experiencing real pain.

That was on my mind earlier this week while I was in the middle of my nastiest cold in years--my head was pounding so all I wanted to do was lay down and sleep, but my nose was constantly running and I had a hacking cough preventing me from getting comfortable enough to relax. I couldn't read, I couldn't surf the web, and I couldn't watch TV. I was bona fide miserable.

During that stretch, I wasn't pondering the uncertainty of the future, or the status of my friendships or romantic frustrations, I wasn't wondering if people liked me or my career path or the difficulty of getting into good PhD programs or my writing samples or the indifference of the Universe--no, I was wondering when the heck this cold would end. The end.

The cold had an ironic re-prioritizing effect--for despite the cold being mostly over now, this morning I just enjoyed the sunrise. I told some freshman about Nietzsche and false-binaries. And I wondered what I'd eat for breakfast. And little else. And I felt fine.

Cause that's another thing C.S. Lewis said--the melancholic likewise forgets his depression five minutes into a pleasant walk outside.