… a novel in the first person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers – a very few readers – to divine a reality atrocious or banal.
– Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940) [1]
•
LIST OF TOPOI
[Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (1996)]
- Breaking & Entering: “Novels often begin with a ‘break’ or a ‘cut.’ These, or analogous words - ‘pierce,’ ‘sunder,’ ‘shatter,’ etc. - are likely to be found in the first paragraphs.” [p.309]
- Marshes, Shores & Muddy Margins: “Beaches and marshy margins are omnipresent in fiction ... The place between water and land functions most obviously and overtly as a threshold ... It is liminality made visible and palpable.” [p.321]
- Tomb, Cave & Labyrinth: “Taphos or taphros - tomb or trench, sepulchre or grave. The place of sepulture can be envisaged as miniature house of the dead ... or as the pit, the ditch. The place of sepulture gapes for novel characters, and they not uncommonly find themselves in the hole. The matter may be treated any number of ways by novelists: it may indeed form the stuff of comedy ...” [p.338]
- Eros: “Eros (or Cupid) as a trope of fiction is a multiple and subtle signifier, even when introduced in apparently incidental embellishment. He stands, usually, outside the story proper, yet to come upon him is to encounter him, an experience always important for the reader, whether the character is conscious of Eros or not.” [p.359]
- Ekphrasis: Looking at the Picture: “Although other kinds of creative and created things may be invoked over and over again within any given novel, the visual image has a special place and a peculiar status ... It reminds us of the visible world, and thus of the sensible universe, but it also speaks of stasis, and artifice - of things out of nature. It transforms us into powerful gazers ...” [p.387]
- Ekphrasis: Dreams & Food: “The Dream is not only a greater challenge to our powers of interpretation, but also a disturber of all sorts of systems of separation, or taxonomies.” [pp. 406-7] ... “Whereas dreams issue (supposedly) from the deep ‘interior’ of the character, enabling us to posit a vivid and complex psychic life, and hence a human reality ‘within’ the character, food disappears ‘into’ the supposed physical interior of the character, persuading us that a character has a solid physical life.” [p.421]
- The Goddess: “The Novel as a genre ... has an innate desire to allude to the female deity, or rather, to allude to Divinity as Feminine. The multitude of references to goddesses in the ancient novels represents no peculiar aberration. Nor does the emphatic appearance of a goddess in any individual work of fiction indicate a peculiar swerve from Novel into “Romance.” [p.439]
It struck like lightning out of a clear sky.
One day I was basking in all the complacent ignorance of my intellectual torpor: keeping my course readings up to date, scribbling little notes to myself about my current areas of “research” (late-Renaissance occultism, Swedenborgianism, the nature of Andrew Marvell’s “vegetable love,” and whether it could be at all illuminated by the modern environmental movement – in particular the so-called “Gaia hypothesis”). The next I was fighting for my life, besieged in my hitherto-sacrosanct little cubbyhole of an office (for which I had finally managed to wangle another chair, after what seemed like decades of official wrangling, for the reception of the posteriors of visiting students – or colleagues, for that matter).
It was like that scene at the beginning of Heliodorus’ Charikleia & Theagenes, where the curtain opens on a bloody littoral strewn with the corpses of slain men and drowned women, clearly the victims of some monstrous – one presumes un-natural – outrage.
I stress “un-natural,” above, as there is admittedly a kind of necessary violence inherent in nature itself, fruitless to resist, and possibly a shipwreck – for instance (for it is thus the Aethiopika begins) – might be interpreted as natural, even necessary as a means of maintaining what used to be referred to as “the balance of Nature.”
Was it that? I asked myself the question, in all seriousness, that morning as I sat opposite my new boss, our newly appointed HOD, brought in from outside to reduce to order the rumoured chaos of our Departmental organization and finances.
We had met briefly a few days before at a (compulsory) mixer organized by our Administrator for our new Head to “meet and greet” – her words – those she had so recently been appointed to rule. The forced bonhomie of such occasions lay heavy upon it. I partook of the wine and the heaped foodstuffs (they might as well have been deemed “funeral meats” for all the atmosphere of honeymoon they were able to convey), even exchanged a few phatic words with our new Professor.
She seemed amiable enough – even eager to please. “A lively sense of humour” was one of her principal attributes, opined some of the references we had all scanned so carefully in the weeks leading up to her appointment. Could this be the dawn of a new day? Might we, at last, obtain some of the official favour (and cold cash) which had been so lacking in the old order?
Her first job, she informed us next day, after completing an initial scrutiny of the accounts, would be to meet separately with each member of staff and have a “frank discussion” with them about their current teaching load and research direction.
One would have thought that this would be enough warning for most people. That danger signs would have begun to emerge simply from that choice of the word “frank.” But they didn’t. I’m not ashamed to say that I had no trepidation whatsoever about the upcoming meeting with my new – I’m tempted to say “Master,” but that would of course be gender-inappropriate. Nor does the word “Mistress” seem to serve the case much better. Leader? But then compulsion, the stick from behind, was from the very beginning more her characteristic method than the dangling carrots of enticement. Führer? Too compromised by history. Lord, Lady … – Overseer it must be.
I walked in like a fool, trusting in what seemed (to me) like an impregnably busy schedule of classes, accompanied by occasional scribbling and conference presentations in fields congenial to me – I might as well, in retrospect, have been wearing a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, with a well-loved meerschaum pipe poking out of my lapel.
She started off rather strangely, I thought.
After a few initial remarks about the weather, complications of settling down in the area, etc., she started to quiz me gently about my recent research plan (one of these we were obliged to fill in each year, but largely – we had been assured by the previous Head – as a book-keeping formality). What was the larger “direction” of my research? What “outcomes” could reasonably be expected of it?
I jawed on a bit about the unpredictable nature of true archival research – the serendipitous surprises which can, from time to time, justify so long an immersion in materials which might seem to have been exhausted by previous students – hinted broadly at the prestigious publication which might result from my work on the original Cyrano, so belied by Rostand in his populist play.
She looked blank.
– You’ve published nothing of substance for the past five years, at least, from what I can see here.
– Well, it depends on what you mean by “of substance,” I suppose. It has been a period during which I’ve been pursuing a number of trains of thought.
– Which will result in a substantial publication?
– There’s always that hope.
– And in the meantime you expect to go on being paid for, among other things, a set of research results which contribute nothing to our Departmental profile, have not been fruitful in attracting funding or graduate students to our programme, and which frankly resemble a compendium of pithy quotes from other people’s writing?
At any rate that was the burden of what she said. I doubt that was the exact phrasing, but then I was a little distracted at the time. No-one had ever spoken to me like this, not when I was a student, not when working on my Doctorate, not when engaged in the long, complex peregrinations which had eventually led me here, to my comfortable little job in the College of Liberal Arts.
– I understand that my publication record may look a little depleted to someone of your standing, I began (a little flattery goes a long way, I was thinking, with pathetically transparent cunning).
– No, that’s not it. Your publication record is non-existent. The last item listed here is some kind of rehashed version of your Doctoral thesis, published on somebody’s handpress here in town, in an edition of thirty signed and numbered copies. Did you even try it on any of the major publishers in your field?
The answer to that last question was “No,” but I still hadn’t realized the extent of my rout, still clung to my vision of collegial decorum …
– I just felt that revising the text for such a purpose could be a useful preliminary to wider distribution of the material. It was never intended as more than a stop-gap.
– And was it a useful preliminary to wider distribution …?
– Well, not yet, admittedly, but I still hope …
– None of this is to the purpose. I have to warn you that you are on formal Academic notice. You must improve your dismal record of missed opportunities and self-serving excuses, and produce – at the very least – a substantial, peer-assessed Academic article by the end of the year. Two would be better. Thereafter you must aim at an equivalent rate of published work and submitted papers every year you are employed here. Do you understand?
I understood, all right. The party was over. The wicked witch had come to town, and the singing had died in the streets. I knew what she was talking about, all right. I had, in my salad days, tried submitting a couple of papers of the species of which she was speaking, to periodicals prominent in my field of study. Little had come of it. Prompt, curt rejection had followed. None had even made it as far as the peer testimonial stage.
It was after that that I began to resort to the more congenial expedient of jotting down quotes from various disparate sources in what I called my “research notebook.” It had been a great coup a couple of years before when I had actually discovered the free, self-published, web-log form – I’d even toyed with the idea of claiming my “blog” as a substantive manifestation of “research aims” – at the very least the staking of a claim to an area or platform for such studies … [2]
Her dismissal of such fantasies was characteristically brusque and blunt: “Without clear statements of intent and an editorial structure, such websites can be seen as having little more significance than things you might say in your column in the local Church newsletter. The university does not dispute your right to maintain such a site (so long as you are careful not to claim any official status for it), but it cannot be recognized as fulfilling your contractual obligation to be research-active in your field.”
Fair enough, I thought. Perhaps she has a point. She was, after all, the principal editor of some huge compilation of bio/bibliographical data about Australian authors. No-one could dispute her own visibility in the forefront of that particular field (whatever my secret reservations about the actual quality of much of the literature produced by her various favourites).
– I feel that the pressure of my teaching load has been such that it’s been difficult (at times) to maintain a steady focus on my own research.
– Ah. I was coming to that. Your teaching. How many students enrolled for your graduate seminar last semester?
– Well, three – but your predecessor always maintained …
– Don’t bother me with what my predecessor maintained. Instead, let’s stick to the point. You had an enrolment of three. Of these, two dropped away after the first couple of weeks of the course. The last one continued to attend classes, but was unfortunately unable to attend the exam due to personal problems (I gather he’s since been hospitalized locally for a nervous affliction). Your attempts to obtain a compassionate pass for him based on some rather erratic course-work have been unsuccessful.
– His course-work wasn’t that erratic …
– I’ve read his course-work.
Was this woman a machine? How could she have read the course-work of every student in the Department in the short time she’d been here? Was she bluffing? Had she really read it? I blushed when I thought of the padded grades I’d awarded him for his increasingly crazed rants on the necessary inter-connections between all things, animal vegetable and mineral. God help me, I’d actually stolen some of his more arresting conceptions for my own studies of esoteric spirituality!
– But that was just my Graduate course. I do teach in other areas, you know.
– Do you? You seem to have gradually curtailed most of your guest appearances in other people’s courses in favour of a whole slew of papers listed in the calendar as “retired” or “taught triennially.”
– But there’s my History of Western Ideas course.
– Oh yes. But the enrolments in that course seem to have hit rock bottom. An initial student body of 100 has shrunk, over the years, to a total of twelve passes in the course in the last calendar year.
– I need some more time to rewrite it, bring it up to date.
– From what I can see, you’ve had nothing but time. In fact, two years I see you requested a study leave abroad for precisely that purpose: to investigate “History of Ideas” courses internationally. Most of that period appears to have been spent in a cottage in the South of France.
– Where I was investigating course materials.
– While sampling the local vintages. No, I’m afraid that I have to place you on formal notice that your level of classroom teaching and engagement with the Department’s offerings will be increasing by approximately 100% over the coming year. I’ve worked out a preliminary schedule for you already, in fact.
With a shuddering heart I glanced over the baleful sheet of paper she had handed me: seminars in this, lectures on that, undergraduate tutorials in the other.
– But this must give me a good dozen contact hours a week! That’s intolerable. When will I get time to …?
– Actually it’s only ten contact hours a week, which is the average within our college. Many people do more, but I thought it best to start you off gently. Course materials for the various new papers you’ll be contributing to will be provided for you, and I’d advise you to start reading them as soon as possible. Term will be upon us sooner than you think.
“Why are you doing this to me?” I was tempted to cry. “Why me?” What is it in me that has attracted your beady little eye? She was a large woman, fleshy rather than fat, with a superficially jolly expression but cold blue eyes of steel. I could see that no appeals would soften this hard heart, burnt bitter in the purgatorial fires of the Outback.
– Coming to terms with this many new courses will make it very difficult for me to work on the peer-assessed articles you’re also demanding.
– It’s called work. Get used to it. You’re expected to be here, in the office, working every day of the week. That’s what we pay you for. I gather from some of the secretaries here that they’ve never actually met you, despite the fact that your office is right across the hall from Reception.
– It’s quite noisy during the day. I find I work much better …
– At home? You’re not the first one to tell me that, funnily enough. I’ll say to you what I said to your colleague. I want you in here, under my eye, from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon. After that you’re free (unless you have a late lecture). If you have to be elsewhere, you should leave clear contact details with our secretary – and I want you within arm’s length of a phone.
– But this is an Academic department, not a New York sweatshop!
– It’ll be tough at first, I don’t deny it. Just think of how much you’ll get done in all those hours on campus, though. And think how useful it’ll be for the students to know that you’re all there, ready to be consulted, pretty much every hour of the day! They’ll love you for it.
– I don’t accept that you can do this. It breaks every precedent within our Department. You have no authority to tell us how to do our jobs, so long as those jobs are done properly.
– There I’d have to take issue with you. Read your contract. I think you’ll find that I have every right to “do this to you,” as you put it. Mind you, if your rolls hadn’t been shrinking every year and a few more of you had bothered to publish some articles from time to time, you might get a bit more sympathy from the powers-that-be. But you didn’t. You wasted all that time, and now it’s too late.
She wasn’t even smiling – not even now. You’d have thought that she’d be twirling a set of long false moustaches as she gloated over her victim, but no. Her coarse, loud, Aussie voice grated on, inexorable, unanswerable, loading on new duties: college committees to attend, fresh initiatives to foster, until the bile and vomit of rage and disappointment was building up to critical limits within my soul.
But I took it all. Listened to all she said. Bit my tongue. Sussed out (as I fondly thought) the enemy’s plans: Richard Hannay at the headquarters of the World Conspiracy, ready to strike my blow for liberty when the moment came.
I understand that this is an unusual note to strike near the opening of so official – and so momentous for my academic, and, indeed, employment, future – a document, but I think you’ll appreciate why I’m taking so radical a step if you’re prepared to persevere with my train of reasoning (or, if you prefer, anecdote).
The essential thing to establish is the complete paradigm-shift that had taken place within a couple of weeks of our new Overseer’s advent in our midst. Like a stage conjuror, she had appeared in a puff of smoke and destroyed all our comforting certainties with a few curt words and a stroke or two of the pen. And we were back in the cotton-fields now – with a vengeance!
Or was it “all” our comforting certainties? I wasn’t close to many of my colleagues – had taken to skipping meetings and relying on chance words in the corridor for most of my knowledge of the Department’s inner weather. Was there not to be detected – in some of the faces I saw, at any rate – a certain atmosphere of relief? Was it not as if they’d somehow been wanting some über-Nanny to arrive and clean up the “mess” which the rest of us were somehow now implicated in creating?
And that “rest of us” – just how many people did that category actually include? I quickly gathered, as one does, from a look in the hallway, a speaking-over in casual conversation, that this was by no means an enviable designation. Blunt, reductionist cartoons began to appear on bulletin boards: bearded, flaccid Academics praying piously for the Lord above to grant them … grants; greedy tots attempting to con one another out of the meagre crumbs of their allowance. It all struck a note (as Henry James might have put it), conveyed a certain atmosphere.
Were there, finally, any more members than one in the Resistance (for want of a better term)? I’ll leave you to guess who that one might be.
There was a time when I’d felt quite popular around the Department. The previous two HODs had positively sought me out for literary chat, enjoyed my capping of their quotes, my Latin tags and slightly more convincing knowledge of the Romance languages.
Such attainments had seemed to them – to all appearances, at any rate – the mark of an educated human being, the sign that one had somehow been chosen to impart the polish of a humanistic education to the greedy, rebarbative young.
Now, by contrast, I had clearly been chosen as official scapegoat by the group: the one pariah so clearly defective (under the new rules) that he must eat the sins of the others. That this was now literally (as well as figuratively) so was made clear one day at a faculty party when I found myself off in a corner exiled from the various eager chattering groups orbiting around the central sun of our new Head.
That is, until our Head of College came strolling in and, insouciant as ever, made a point of greeting me effusively with news of his own recent discoveries in the more arcane realms of palaeography that were his specialty … More of that later, however.
The point is that just when I thought myself at dead low water (to quote our esteemed late poet of the littoral), then, reaching my office door one day, I found it already open with a student perched eagerly inside on the one spare chair I’ve already told you about. Or am I getting muddled?
In any case, there she was, a not-too-atypical specimen of the genus Student: scruffy and ill-dressed, of course, but with the bright, vacant smile of youth on her ever-so-slightly too plump features (though who was I to judge, my tweedy girth having enlarged a couple of sizes since my wife had left me all those years before).
– How did you get in?
Not a very charming greeting, I’ll allow, and the surge of guilt that came over her up-to-then so-friendly smile made me regret them instantly.
– The secretary said I could … that I should … wait for you here.
Of course that would be it. Our former secretary would never have been so bold, schooled as she was in a kind of false, half-reverential, half-mocking subservience to the learned ladies and gentlemen making up what was so obviously, even so, her department. This one, however, seconded to us along with our new Ocker Overseer, had no such reservations about keeping us up to the mark.
I hadn’t been there; here was a student to see me – what better place for her to wait than in my room?
But what was she doing there? That was the question. I couldn’t for the life of me think of any appointments that might have slipped my mind. Reluctant though I was to upset my guest any further, I felt a necessity to probe:
– And you are?
– I’m Lisa! She exclaimed brightly, apparently reassured by the fact that I hadn’t chivvied her out of my office with blows and objurgations.
– And this is about? I don’t think we had an appointment, did we?
– Oh, didn’t they tell you? The smile faltered slightly. I’m your new graduate student – you’ll be supervising my thesis.
So that was it. It is almost incredible to me that I hadn’t suspected already that the need to Publish More Widely and Teach More Courses was not, in itself, going to be the end of my persecution. Graduate students – of course!
I’m uneasily aware that I may be conveying the impression that I’d been operating as some kind of shirker all these years: ducking the necessary work of the Department in favour of my own desultory pursuits. Nothing could have been further from the truth! Most of these matters had quite simply never been brought up by anyone during the years I’d been teaching here.
I’d undergone my evaluations, apportioned my teaching, celebrated the others’ petty triumphs, all in what I fondly imagined to be a collegial fashion. I’d even had graduate students before, had nursed them through draft after ill-spelled draft until the final fiery ordeal of examination. One or two such hard-won tomes were on my shelves at that moment, in fact.
It’s true it had been a while since anyone had actually applied to work in my particular area of the Early Modern, so I’d got a little rusty in my bedside manner (so to speak), but there was nothing outrageous or absurd – in and of itself – in this young lady’s presence in my office.
Except for the fact that I hadn’t been told about it, that is. Hadn’t been told about it, hadn’t been consulted in any way shape or form, didn’t know what she was working on, didn’t know what degree or portion of a degree she was working towards, didn’t know anything at all about her, in fact.
Something told me that this might not be the moment to kick up a public stink about it, however. Unprofessional though it undoubtedly was to send a student along, sight unseen, to her designated supervisor without ever discussing the matter with said lecturer, I could see a certain deliberation in it which betokened premeditated malice rather than mere inadvertence.
She was here – however innocently and unconsciously – as a stalking horse, that much was clear at once. I could see, too, that while this piece of ammunition might form a useful adjunct to my arsenal of grievances at some point in the future, that to explode it now would be premature. I’d risk, in fact (to belabour the metaphor) being hoist by my own petard.
– Ah! Lisa, is it? I exclaimed with mendacious enthusiasm. Of course. I think I must have the paperwork here somewhere … In the meantime, though, perhaps you could just remind of what you were hoping to work on with me?
– Well …
And off she went. Luckily she was not of that sullen tribe who make you do all the talking, come up with all the ideas, suggest all the strategies. On the contrary, she seemed only too eager to please me with her degree of preparation for this interview.
She was hoping, it seemed, to do a study of the rhetorical strategies and compositional aims of Casaubon’s True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits, with all its tablets written in Enochian script and transcripts of conversations filtered through the somewhat muddied lens of Dee’s crop-eared companion (and conman) Edmund Kelley. [3] I think I heard something about the famous (so-called) Voynich Manuscript in there, also. [4]
Well, why not? I thought. This is in my (approximate) area. She does sound enthusiastic – if a little too suspiciously eager to cite such “authorities” as Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code or Thomas Harris’s Hannibal (the latter of which I’d never even heard of, in fact. When I did finally get hold of it, it proved not to be the esoteric biography of the late Carthaginian general I’d fondly expected, but instead a lurid, inappropriately – to my mind -- hagiographic account of a latter-day Gilles de Retz-like cannibal and serial killer).
I even felt a certain gratitude to our Head Troll for sending me so promising an acolyte: Occultism, the hinges of the Modern era, Prague in its golden age … it all seemed so plausible.
How was I to know (then) that I was the latest of three (approximately) putative supervisors, each one of whom had given up in disgust – not to mention a little fear at tangentially personal remarks she would throw into the mix from time to time?
– Rape isn’t rape if you go to it consenting, she commented one day, à propos of Edmund Kelley’s notorious suggestion that the spirits desired that he and Dee swap wives.
– I’m sorry. What do you mean? I said in reply. (What an ass! I should have simply turned it off with a “moving on” or some other facile situating phrase).
– I should know. All of my teachers have been rapists: intellectually, if not in the physical sense. I don’t mind it.
– …
To this I had literally nothing to say. Was she mad? Did she consider me one of these “rapists” (hopefully in the “intellectual” rather than the physical sense)?
If “mad” means “having been frequently hospitalised for a smorgasbord of psychological conditions,” then the answer to the first question was an unequivocal “yes.” As for the second, one could only hope that she wouldn’t be sharing any of these thoughts with any Faculty advisors anytime soon.
She was, in short, a ticking timebomb of potential harm: to me, to herself, and – of course – to the Department which had so unwittingly signed her up for a Graduate degree. (I have, of course, even in these private notes meant only for your eyes – not on the unmarked official copy – changed her name to avoid identification. No doubt you could hunt down who exactly it is I mean: though a gender can be changed as easily as a name, in case you’re wondering. Perhaps you couldn’t, though – there’s more yet to the story, as I mean to explain).
Explaining myself. Sometimes I think that’s all I’ve been doing for the past couple of tiresome years, ever since that loathsome interview with the Ocker-accented Troll-woman. Blah, blah, blah. She said this. I said that. She did this. I did that. She denies doing that, but admits to this. I’ll admit to – slightly – overstating this in exchange for your admission of that. All conducted in the shadows – never face-to-face (except, once, with a screen of intermediaries to prevent acrimonious personal confrontation).
I’m losing my thread, though (just as I long ago lost my marbles. No, I didn’t really – not by comparison with poor … what did I call him, her? Lisa – or some of the others, for that matter).
The point is that she wasn’t the only one. While I considered it a little odd not to have consulted me on taking on this new responsibility – and let’s not forget how considerable a responsibility it is to act in loco parentis to any such student, with you as their sole living contact with the world of the university, in many cases – I didn’t then feel any great compunction about (as I saw it) agreeing to take her on.
Within the next few days, however, I discovered how little “agreement” had to do with the essentials of the situation. No fewer than three new students made their way to my office, one after another, each with their freight of papers, their half-baked project, their story of woe.
Together with Lisa, that made four. I’d never had more than one graduate student at a time before. At times I felt my head would explode with their – not unreasonable on an individual level – demands on my time.
No sooner had one draft chapter been read and commented on, than another followed hard upon it. At times I had two, three, even four tattered nests of printout squatting on my shelves like evil spiders.
Keeping up with their forests of revisions, their complex submission calendars, their residential and funding dilemmas might in itself have constituted a full-time job, if it weren’t for the fact that I still had one of those.
Or what I’d always been accustomed to regard as a job before the Wicked Witch of Oz had landed on my life. This wasn’t Kansas anymore – so much was painfully apparent.
And yet, for all they could do to me – all the petty indignities, the compulsory “requests” – I still had my ace-in-the-hole, my Enigma machine, my special secret weapon. I was close friends with the Dean, our Head of College.
The friendship had grown up over time, much time. He wasn’t (then) Dean, but a mere Lecturer in another Department, but we’d taken to chatting at faculty parties, then mutual dinners with our respective spouses in our respective houses, and on to shared holidays in baches, etc. etc. You know the sort of thing.
Then, when Cassie left me to go back home, to France, there were a lot of late night sessions over a bottle of whisky and a lot of lachrymose whining (from me). Ditto when Brewster Marsh – that was his name: “Bru” for short – got involved with a close colleague and his own marriage was teetering on the edge of collapse. I was there for him then.
So it was with a certain satisfaction that I contemplated the fact that I’d apparently feathered my nest so well without even meaning to – that a few acts of friendship over the years meant that we had each other’s backs, were old cronies, had “heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow” – to coin a phrase.
And yet I waited. Waited with a certain diffidence, unwilling to play my trump card too soon, reveal my hand to the powers-that-be within my own Department.
As the true dimensions of Lisa’s madness began to dawn on me, though (she’d taken to addressing me as “Magus”, and sending me complicated acrostics – sometimes two or three a day – scrawled on the backs of serviettes. That’s if they were serviettes? Maybe they were something else? Maybe they were … but let’s not go there), I realised that it was coming time to call in my debt.
It was time to see the big cheese and get him to call off the dogs of war.
One of Bru’s peculiarities was his fondness for cats. I don’t mean that it’s intrinsically peculiar to like cats – though I have to admit to being comparatively indifferent to them myself (I did inherit one from Cassie, but never got round to replacing it when its number came up). I say “peculiar” because his favourite cat (they had three – I think; the numbers fluctuated from time to time) used to accompany him to the office.
There was a campus regulation that pets were not allowed, but he’d somehow managed to get a special dispensation for some spurious health condition of his which required his furry companion to be on hand at all times.
And so it was.
Wherever you looked in his office you could see evidence of the cat’s passing: piles of books arranged at convenient heights for him to brood on top of; little play corners with scratch posts and bowls of dry cat-food … Methusalem (that was the cat’s name) had a part in every aspect of his Master’s life.
So it was with no surprise that I found myself greeted, on my entrance into Bru’s office, with a rather startling back view of his weedy posterior bent over the egregious moggie, which had apparently just started to cough up a furball in some dusty corner of the disaster which had once been a room.
– Now, now, Methusalem – not all over Daddy’s carpet – No, not on Du Cange either! (Du Cange is a multi-volumed dictionary of medieval Latin).
– Hello? Bru? I can come back later if you like …
– No, no, come on in, don’t mind us. It’s just that those new friskies are disagreeing with him, I think. He was making some very odd noises in the car coming in this morning …
Methusalem was one of those rare felines who appeared to have no prejudice against wheeled transport. And there was certainly no question – as his Master had often informed me, with a beam of pride – of leaving him at home, even when a day of faculty meetings stretched ahead. He would (apparently) act up like a mad thing if “Daddy” dared to sneak off without him.
I understand that he’d even accompanied them around the supermarket a couple of times until the management took exception to this arrangement. It was all settled amicably, though – after a certain amount of cursing and name-calling. Bru and his wife Shirl shifted to another supermarket, and the cat was confined to his “time-out” room during their brief, weekly excursions there.
I took a seat on one of the less cat-scented armchairs, and waited for Bru to emerge from the stacks. He did, carrying with him a rather dubious clutch of tissue papers which he placed on his desk and proceeded to toy with throughout our brief interview (it made me think of Lisa, rather – what is it with lunatics and tissue paper? Why does it exert such a fascination over them .. there were certainly enough boxes of it in Bru’s stronghold: mostly – predictably – the ones with cute kittens disporting themselves over fluffy beds of it, though I won’t swear that there weren’t some puppies there too –).
In any case, it was with a certain surprise that I heard him intone:
– So what can I do for you?
– Well, Bru, you understand that I hesitate to call you into a matter of this kind, but I have been having some difficulties with our new Head of School lately, and I was wondering if I could ask your advice about it?
– Yes, that’s what you said in your letter.
So why the hell are you asking me about it, then? I was tempted to riposte. All this had been gone over in advance. I’d already explained my reasons for requesting an interview in fairly unequivocal (albeit decently veiled in official office-speak) terms. What purpose could possibly be served by asking me why I was there?
– The question is, of course, what you expect me to do about it? he continued.
This was not going quite as expected. I shifted tack.
– It’s not that I expect you to do anything, exactly, but it’s just that I’d like to know if this is to be policy now at the university – if a Department head is really allowed to allocate work for a member of staff without any consultation whatsoever?
– That’s always been our policy.
– Maybe on paper, but you know as well as I do that that’s not how things have been done in the past. There’s been discussion, bargaining, mutual agreement …
– There have been those things, yes.
– But I’ve literally been assigned graduate students I’ve never met! Students working in fields which have almost no relation to mine! Students who are quite unstable.
– You say your students are unstable? All of them?
– No, of course not all of them. One in particular – the first one they gave me.
– There’s a medical service on campus, counsellors ...
– I know all that. I just mean that I should have been consulted, warned, before being asked to take on this student.
– And you claim that you weren’t.
– Yes I do claim that I wasn’t. Why are you being like this, Bru? Do you doubt my word on the matter? Do I have to bring you sworn affidavits and signed confessions before you’ll believe what I tell you? I’m not an untruthful person, and you know that very well.
– I never said you were.
– You did imply that you doubted the accuracy of what I was telling you, though.
– Well, as to that, I’m not sure that your account of what’s been going on in your Department is entirely accurate. You understand that you’re not the only person I’ve spoken to about it. And that the changes in emphasis which have been established there – though they may seem a little inconvenient at first to some members of staff – are aspects of a larger realignment by the university as a whole.
– Why are you talking to me like a public meeting, Bru? Of course I know about the “larger realignments” that are taking place. I don’t dispute that. These aren’t questions of policy I’m talking about, but simple matters of courtesy. The fact is that there have been no negotiations, simply ultimatums –
– Ultimata …
– Okay, “ultimata” if you insist on being a pedant about it.
– It isn’t me who insists, it’s Methusalem. He’s the pedant in the family, the drivelling moron continued, stroking the cat which had just jumped in his lap and was squatting there like the indispensable fashion accessory to a Bond villain that he was.
– Don’t bring that goddamned cat into it! This is serious …
– Ooh, serious is it, Mister Man is not being very respectful of you now, is he, Methusalem-paws?
– And it’s I that insists, not me …
– I’m sorry?
– Just then. You said, “It isn’t me that insists.” It should be “It isn’t I that insists” – a complement, not a direct object.
– Are you correcting my grammar now?
– Well, you just corrected mine.
– That’s different. I’m in charge here. Aren’t I, Methusalem-paws? You have to do what I say. I’m the Dean. You’re a lowly lecturer. You must grovel and kiss my boots …
I could see that he was in one of his silly moods: the ones where every statement had to be referred to one cat or another (or possibly the council of three – or the “troika”, as he so irritatingly called it) for confirmation. I tried vainly to drag it back to the realm of serious business.
– Joking apart, Bru, I feel that there’s a demarcation issue here. I’m thinking of calling in the union, to be honest.
– Ooh, the union, is it? The union of furry paws? The big bad union will come and blow our houses away. Run little piggies, run! Hide, Methusalem, they’re coming for you!
The cat continued to survey the scene with the placid equanimity that seems to characterise his species. I suppose he was sufficiently accustomed to his owner’s fatuous injunctions and diatribes to pay them no mind. I could hardly believe that I’d once found these sorts of speeches mildly amusing – even pointedly accurate – when the victim wasn’t myself, that is …
– Yes, the union.
– Do you even belong to the union?
– Well, no, not exactly … (I’d let my membership lapse some years before after some trivial argument over the correct answer to a question in a fund-raising quiz – rather a bad move, in retrospect). I could rejoin, though!
– I think you’ll find that we’ve already spoken to the union, and they’re completely on board with our need to prune out some dead wood in order to keep the organisation viable.
– Is that all I am to you? Dead wood?
– No, no, of course not. You’ll notice that I used no names in that last statement – did I, Methusa-loser? “Dead wood” would apply to those members of staff we’ve already let go: not those who’ve been chosen to continue to work for us in the faculty.
– So I’m to understand that there’s nothing at all that you can do for me? That I’m just a lazy whinger who needs to be given a bit of a slapping before he’s allowed to continue working for you?
– Not at all, not at all. Once again, that’s not what I said. You must get out of this habit of misquoting me to my face – mustn’t he, furry? (From now on you’ll just have to take his frequent references to the cat, its opinions, likely reactions to coming events, and general prophetic brilliance, as read – I find it nauseates me too much to place them on record). There are a number of things I can do for you. Have done already, if the truth be told. Most of all, though, I can offer you some advice: Don’t get on the bad side of your new HOD …
– Too late, I’m afraid. From what I can see she regards me as the reincarnation of Beau Brummell, with a little bit of Mr. Casaubon thrown in for good measure.
– Mr. Casaubon? From Middlemarch, you mean? That’s rather good: Beau Brummell crossed with Casaubon. I must remember that one … You’re quite wrong, though. She certainly doesn’t dislike you. Or no worse that some of the others, at any rate. She is here to do a job, though, and that’s to get things straight over there – to get some students through, to get some books and articles out. If she can’t do that she may well be looking for alternative employment herself in the not-too-distant future, but you mustn’t quote me on that. Don’t quote me on anything I tell you in this interview, for that matter …
– But you haven’t told me anything! Nothing I didn’t know already, that is.
– No? I thought I had. Never mind, then – all for the good. So what I suggest is, take a deep breath, concentrate on the day to day, maintain good relations with your colleagues, and generally concentrate on not rocking the boat too conspicuously. Some heads may roll in the next semester or so, and I wouldn’t want one of them to be yours.
– Why not? You obviously consider me a liability to the place. Funny, I used to think I was rather an ornament. That’s what I was given to understand, in any case.
– And of course you were – you are, I should say (for the first time he seemed momentarily flustered). It’s just a matter of turning your powers to good – writing down some of that brilliant talk of yours: shunting through a few of those students …
– And if I’m still having trouble adjusting to the new order in Festung Europa?
– Rather an unfortunate expression, that, I think. If you are still having trouble, well, once again we have made provision for that. You’re perfectly welcome to go and see the people in HR if you want to talk to a counsellor about it …
– The Bullying and Harassment Coordinator, you mean?
– Well, not necessarily, but yes, that would be one possibility, I suppose.
And so I left him, poking and prodding at his pussycat and bleating foolish platitudes about “getting together soon for lunch” … Only if the main course is that spoiled, sulky feline of yours, I told myself inwardly. On the surface, though, I think I managed to dissemble sufficiently to conceal the extent to which I was boiling with rage.
If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, they say. Or rather, in this case, if they’ve got you bent over for a butt-fucking, you might as well smile and pretend to enjoy it – then get the bastards later. Do I shock you? Yes? No? Not quite the language you’d expect from a man in my position (pun intended)?
Well, fuck you if you can’t take a joke – and, joking apart, it’s a bit hard to convey just how upsetting all this was to me.
Disproportionately so, I imagine most people would say. I mean, how big a deal can it be to tell a lazy employee to pull finger and do a bit more work from time to time?
But that isn’t really it, you see. The fallacy lies in thinking that that was my only objective: to defend my own idleness and my privileged position (and there’s no doubt that it was a position of privilege: the luxury of setting my own office hours, working at my own (self-motivated) pace, choosing my own areas of interest to explore).
I could see their point – that was the problem. I understood what they were telling me. The concept of improved productivity and a more vocational approach even to such esoteric areas of tertiary education as literary studies made sense to me. I didn’t really agree with it, or find their arguments in favour of it particularly convincing, but they were – after all – my bosses, and I couldn’t deny their right to expect me to work according to the contract between us.
It was the way in which it had been done that was so shocking to me.
It was as if I’d been hauled off and caned in front of the school principal on the mere suspicion that I might be rebelliously inclined. It reminded me a little of those pep rallies in Pol Pot’s Cambodia where they’d say that they had need of doctors and teachers and other educated people for various specialised jobs – then go round and execute everyone who put up their hand … Oh, and anyone wearing glasses, too, just in case.
I know that that sounds like a ridiculous comparison, but I’m trying to convey to you how it felt, not how it might look to an outsider. Anyone who’s ever been bullied – at school, or in life – knows just how easy it is to conceal it from outsiders. In public it’s all smiles and slaps on the back – it’s only in private that the thumbscrews come out. As long as you don’t leave any marks, it’s your word against theirs – and bullies are usually better at lying than other people: they have more motivation, have studied the subject longer.
My new Head of School was undoubtedly a bully. I could see, looking at her flat, unintrospective dial, that she’d held court over her peers at school, and then in every life situation since. It wasn’t that she applied force as a means to an end; she did it because she liked it – it gave her some perverse thrill to see people tremble when she walked by – to know that she was never out of their thoughts whether she was there or not.
Bullied by a woman! That would be the attitude of anyone I mentioned the subject to, men or women (women are often the least sympathetic in these situations – they find it difficult to conceive of a man ever feeling oppressed by a woman. “Now you know how it feels,” would be the automatic response. And not unreasonably. But the fact that other people before you have felt terrorised and powerless doesn’t make it any easier to bear – and doesn’t assist one to find solutions or ways out).
Just get on with the job; keep your head low; try not to attract attention to yourself. Those were the obvious strategies that occurred to me.
I did, after all, have enough on my plate simply with the vastly – and, I firmly believe, unreasonably – swollen workload I now had. The teaching and research demands were, I felt, reasonably achievable if I could simply get some uninterrupted time to get on top of them, but the addition of so many unasked-for dissertation students made that quite a difficult proposition.
I think that I could have done it, though – even dealt with the ever-increasing demands of crazy Lisa – if it hadn’t been for that pulling-the-wings-off-flies, kicking-a-dog-while-he’s-down attitude of my immediate superior.
She was careful not to leave evidence, that was the trouble. I’d suddenly start getting emails from some university committee which I’d been signed up to without my knowledge – but there it’d be, my acceptance letter. I hadn’t written it, but someone had. When taxed with the question of who had, my boss would simply shift tack to the need to fulfil my obligations to do some service on top of my other contractual requirements.
That conversation was quite a telling one, in fact.
First of all, it’d been immensely difficult to get an appointment to see the Head Troll. There was no more popping-of-heads-round-doors in the new order. No, audiences with She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed had to be negotiated with her brash monosyllabic new PA, who lived to disserve.
Having made such a date, it was – of course – subject to instant cancellation at the drop of a hat. One would be primed to enter, only to be told that she was elsewhere that day, or that it had somehow “not gotten written down in the book” – accompanied with a glare, as if that were somehow one’s own fault.
On one striking occasion, I actually knocked and was asked to enter, only to find her in the middle of some other meeting.
“Don’t we have an appointment?” I faltered.
“Get out!” she roared. And, on emergence twenty minutes later, advised me that I needed to make another time. “That is, if you really have anything to talk to me about.”
I guess that’s when I really began to appreciate how powerless one is in the face of an entirely amoral manager, in good odour with the authorities above, who is careful to leave no traces, but is entirely unscrupulous in her methods.
To add insult to injury, to her particular favourites she was always at home. I remember commenting once, to one of my junior colleagues, how difficult I found it to get in to see her, and watching the look of incredulity (mixed with a certain condescension, too, I felt) spreading across his face. “I just drop in whenever I have a problem,” he said. “I’ve never even had to make an appointment. Why not just knock and go in?”
Yes, and be yelled at and ordered to get out, I added mentally. It was just my problem, then – nobody else’s. And nobody wants to befriend the bully’s chief victim. All I could hope was that that was where it would end.
One last reflection before I leave this attempt at explanation behind.
I guess the thing about bullying is that it leaves one with such a feeling of sick loathing for the tormentor, such a physical aversion from their mere presence in the room, that one simply has to dissimulate it. You find your voice going up a few octaves in its squeaky eagerness to please, find yourself laughing extra loud at pathetic attempts at humour, generally abase yourself in such a way as to lose your own self-respect, not to mention everyone else’s.
I suppose that the easiest way to convey it might be to describe one of the dreams I had at this time (when I managed to get to sleep, that is – there were few nights now which I didn’t spend tossing and turning and trying to devise strategies for getting through all the ghastly ordeals each new morrow would bring).
I was standing on the seashore, contemplating an idyllic beach scene. There were clouds in the distance, drifting past a large bushclad hill. Everything was serene, the waves skidding gently over the sand, the golden dunes mounting up before me, unmarked by feet. I was all alone, happy, absolved of the day’s worries.
Then I started to move. There was some necessity to reach the hillside, some consequence which a failure to do so would entail. I could feel the dry sand slipping out from under my feet every time I tried to get going. It was as if I was falling back into some morass of wet mud just underneath me. Every attempt to extricate myself just seemed to make it worse.
And now I became conscious that the tide was coming in, that the waves, so gently lapping to begin with, were getting larger and more white-capped, that a squall was coming up, that the high tide mark was some distance away up the beach, that I had to get out of there now.
If I could have died in the dream, I would have done so. I would have plunged headfirst into the quicksand, surrendered myself to the surf – but so much was beyond my powers. I was forced to keep trying, moving one foot only to find it plunging back into the emptiness. The waves would never quite reach me – just tower higher and higher above me, ready to collapse and drown me at any moment but not yet at that tipping point, that moment of truth.
It all sounds quite wimpy, doesn’t it? Why not just quit, you ask me. Why put up with all this shame and humiliation? Why allow yourself to be driven into such a state?
Or maybe I’m just transferring to you the questions I kept on asking myself, every night I had one or other of these falling dreams, these trapped-in-an-uncontrollably-descending-lift dreams, these dreams where my friends all turned out to be zombies, eager to chow down on my face. I would wake up with a start to sweat-soaked sheets, often with my own screams still sounding in my head – throughout the house, for all I know: there was nobody there to tell me.
Why not leave? Why not give up? Why fight City Hall?
I guess the answer has something to do with that strange mindset that comes from being a specialist, a trained professional in some esoteric field of study. It isn’t so much that you can’t imagine doing another job – just that you’ve been active in that field for so long that it somehow bounds your horizons.
All your sense of self-worth, of possible advancement, lies within those visible borders of achievement. You don’t think of having a number one hit single, or winning the lottery – you imagine yourself getting that next promotion, climbing that next set of rungs on the ladder.
It’s very difficult to let that go – especially without a fight. And what fighting had I done, really? I’d been to see my boss’s boss, and got a very cold reception. But why not go above his head? Why not try to kick up a stink at a higher level, force some kind of demarcation – or, at the very least, provoke some kind of investigation.
They’d done a good job of muzzling me by dint of simply occupying so much of my day with time-wasting new duties. Was I so much of a fool that I couldn’t think of any clear strategies of escape?
There must, after all, be precedents for such situations, and was I not a trained researcher? Could I not turn my mind to the politics of inter-office relations as easily as the memory systems of seventeenth-century Jesuit mystics?
So where you gonna go when you want to bone up on something quick? Wikipedia, of course.
So much is obvious. I know that we warn all our students against it – try to stop it appearing as their one-stop-shop for any and all pieces of information in every bibliography – but sometimes (as in this case) it just makes sense to start off there.
And I could certainly see the relevance of much that was said there: the fact that it’s so much more difficult to deal with than other kinds of harassment, “because, unlike the typical forms of school bullying, workplace bullies often operate within the established rules and policies of their organization and their society.”
And then, a little bit further down:
“Several aspects of academia, such as the generally decentralized nature of academic institutions and the particular recruitment and career procedures, lend themselves to the practice of bullying and discourage its reporting and mitigation.”
Chime after chime in what was reported online:
Bullying is characterised by:“Attributed intent” – what precisely was meant by that, I wondered? The fact that I saw this behaviour as instrumental – carried out not simply for its own sake, but “pour encourager les autres” (“to encourage the others” – what Voltaire said when he witnessed the English Admiral Byng being shot for a lack of keenness in engaging the enemy). I, too, was being terrorised to encourage the others – to make sure that none of them felt like exposing their heads over the parapet, let alone make them feel inclined to take my part.
- Repetition (occurs regularly)
- Duration (is enduring)
- Escalation (increasing aggression)
- Power disparity (the target lacks the power to successfully defend themself)
- Attributed intent
Bullying need not be an irrational activity. “It’s not personal – it’s just business,” as Donald Trump repeatedly intones in that ghastly reality show The Apprentice. You must accustom your slaves to fear the lash – that way you’ll have to use it more rarely (unless you really want to, that is – in which case there’s always the risk of going a bit too far and provoking some Spartacus among them to stand up and fight).
… common abusive workplace behaviours are:1 and 2, yes. 3, definitely. 4,5,6 – above all 7; not so much 8 – and 9-11 I suspected but could not definitely prove.
- Having opinions and views ignored
- Withholding information which affects the target’s performance
- Being exposed to an unmanageable workload
- Being given tasks with unreasonable or impossible targets or deadlines
- Being ordered to do work below competence
- Being ignored or facing hostility when the target approaches
- Being humiliated or ridiculed in connection with work
- Excessive monitoring of a person’s work (see micromanagement)
- Spreading gossip
- Insulting or offensive remarks made about the target’s person (i.e. habits and background), attitudes or private life
- Having key areas of responsibility removed or replaced with more trivial or unpleasant tasks
Then, in the article on Bullying in Academia: “Academic victims of bullying may also be particularly conflict-averse” – wimps and cowards, in other words: always with one eye turned back over the shoulders, fearful of the consequences of the slightest signs of resistance:
“The generally decentralized nature of academic institutions can make it difficult for victims to seek recourse, and appeals to outside authority have been described as ‘the kiss of death.’ Therefore, academics who are subject to bullying in workplace are often cautious about notifying problems.”
How can you tell a superior that their close crony and drinking buddy is a bully? Even if they listen to what you say, you know that it’ll all get settled over a glass of whisky later that night …
“One study of mobbing in academia found that vulnerability was increased by personal differences such as being a foreigner or of a different sex; by working in a post-modern field such as music or literature; financial pressure; or having an aggressive superior.”
I suppose, in a sense, like any hypochondriac, I found it easy to see myself in each new definition. While no foreigner, I was of “a different sex” to my – from my point of view – unmanageably “aggressive superior.” I couldn’t quite follow the reasoning around the statement that “working in a post-modern field such as music or literature” made it more likely to happen. Since when were music and literature “post-modern,” anyway? But every crumb of comfort was treasured to my bosom. If literature was a particularly bully-rife field, then it followed logically that I was not alone.
But what should one do about it, that was the sixty-four thousand dollar question.
There was advice about that online, also.
Commonsensical, for the most part, but still very welcome to someone as downtrodden as I felt at that moment:
The article emphasised that this last was likely to be a complex and long-drawn-out procedure (with the strong implication that it was one which most institutions would be reluctant to pursue).
- Consult your organisation’s bullying and harassment policy
This will usually begin by advising you to:- Speak initially to a colleague or superior about your concerns.
I’d done that – with little success. “Then, if the situation cannot be resolved on an informal level with the person you think is treating you unfairly”:- Mediation
“Seek formal mediation by a neutral third party: preferably a trained mediator.”- If this has not worked, follow a formal complaints procedure.
“If your complaint is upheld, this may conceivably lead to the final recourse”:- Legal action
All in all, while I could now feel confident that what I was experiencing at work would certainly be covered by the term “workplace bullying,” and had a lot in common with other examples of it reported throughout Academia, the only practical option that had come out of all that reading was the advice to seek mediation. Which (after all) was what Bru had suggested in the first place.
Never mind, though. I did feel that some of those lists of characteristic bullying behaviour might stand me in good stead when I was accused of “making a mountain out of a molehill” or “failing to take a joke.”
… It’s funny how often what you anticipate happening is dwarfed by what actually does happen. I’d – consciously or unconsciously – assumed a certain stasis had been reached in the bullying: dysfunctional, maybe, but still (just) endurable. But of course I hadn’t really taken seriously that comment about “Escalation (increasing aggression)” as a principal attribute.
Certainly I hadn’t expected to come in one day and find all my files and books on a pallet out in the yard, with a light wind ruffling them and a threat of rain overhead.
I suppose that a normal reaction to such an event would have been to barge straight into the boss’s office and demand an explanation. The burnt child fears the fire, though, and I could see how such an act could be interpreted as aggressive or disproportionate (I was already beginning to think in terms of legal liability – of subsequent lawyers’ affidavits and defamation suits). And yet I had to talk to someone. This was clearly intolerable! Surely anyone could see that they’d gone too far this time!
So it was the secretary’s office I ended up barging into – since there didn’t seem to be anyone else there.
– Yes, she said, with her customary cold insolence.
– All my papers and books are out in the yard – and my office key doesn’t seem to work any more …
– No. Today’s the day of the big move.
– What big move? Nobody told me about any move …
– I find that very difficult to believe. The emails have been going around for weeks now – today is the day of the move, and all papers and books are to be packed ready for transport. You didn’t do that, so your papers will have to be shifted as they are.
– But nobody told me.
– Didn’t you see the preparations everywhere? The boxes in the corridor? The workmen coming round to measure up?
– No. I’ve been busy. I certainly didn’t receive any notification of any kind.
– I think you’ll find you did – if you go back through your email files. Now, if there’s nothing else, I am rather busy just now …
– But it’s coming on to rain!
– I’m sure that they’re moving as fast as they can. But if you didn’t have the presence of mind to cover everything in plastic: especially cardboard boxes, then I’m afraid that you’ll have to take the consequences.
– Where are we moving to?
She looked at me pityingly. Then, wordlessly, picked up a piece of paper from the top of one of the piles and proffered it to me. It was a map of a strange little set of rectangular buildings, grouped round a central hub which I recognised as one of the older structures on campus, a few hundred yards away from where we were now.
– But what’s all this in aid of? Why are we moving?
– Safety, she said. In case there’s a natural disaster. This old building has been deemed unsafe. You must have heard that much.
At this point I didn’t feel sure just what I had heard and what I hadn’t. I didn’t think that I’d heard anything about having to pack down the entire building and move all its contents half a kilometre across campus, but maybe I had and just hadn’t registered it. I had had other things on my mind, after all.
Nor could I recall seeing any emails about it on my system, but I didn’t doubt that a trawl back through the files would reveal a considerable file of correspondence on the matter. For quite some time now I’d been suspecting that they were manipulating my access to the university system. Things I expected to find there were gone, or somehow suspiciously misplaced, whereas other things popped up which I was sure had not been there the day before.
How do you prove such a thing, though? Can you take a snapshot of an entire system, then compare it with the same system the next day? Perhaps you can, but it was certainly far beyond my competence. I took it for granted that when it came to technical cyber-bullying, that I’d be a non-starter. My only hope was to keep things in the analogue realm, where at least I had some training in rhetorical flourishes and the laws of evidence.
It did come on to rain. Heavily. By then I’d managed to scrounge some heavy sheets of plastic from one of the movers, and had tried to arrange them over the pallet to prevent worse damage than had already occurred.
Understandably, the best-packed boxes were moved first. It was two days before they came to carry off my worldly effects, and by then a good many of them were irreparably ruined.
I think I’ve never felt so utterly forlorn and alone than sitting alone in my new office (considerably smaller than the old one – what a surprise!) and peeling book after book off the soggy mass which had once been the nucleus of a research library.
Most of the more valuable books had been at home, admittedly – quite a few of the ones in my office were duplicate copies for loan to students – but there were still some losses which I really had no words for. Not to mention the indiscriminate mass of papers almost – at this stage – beyond sorting out.
Even so, I was conscious of the danger of giving in to paranoia. Surely nobody would go to the trouble of organising such a move simply in order to victimise me! I could see that rationally, but couldn’t really internalise it. Even if the two events were quite coincidental, I felt that this move had been manipulated to turn up the pressure on me.
How else could it have been that I was the only one who knew nothing about it? For all my self-doubt, and my inability to prove whether I had or had not received the multiple reminders of the great upheaval, the fact remained that I had turned up that day blissfully unaware that anything was in progress. I could hardly have forgotten so momentous a date, nor neglected to shield the work of so many years from the effects of exposure to a couple of days in the open if I’d had even the slightest intimation of what was intended.
I did put my losses on record, though – in a letter to the university insurer. It was, after all, unacceptable damage caused during an officially sanctioned move. I didn’t have great hopes of any action from them, but I felt that it would be one more important piece of evidence for my upcoming meeting with the university Bullying & Harassment Coordinator, set for a couple of days thence.
Which meeting did indeed take place. I don’t know if I can quite face rehearsing the details of yet another conversation with yet another university bureaucrat – it all seems so pointless somehow. Though perhaps that’s just because I’m writing after the event. Hard to keep up the suspense when you know what’s going to happen ...
But I suppose it hasn’t happened yet – for you, at any rate. “It’s always about to happen,” as some poem I read once put it. So let’s get on with it.
I can’t resist putting in a couple of details, though.
The Coordinator was a brisk, efficient-seeming young woman, who’d obviously been carefully schooled in all the techniques of conflict resolution: maintaining eye contact, speaking in a calm low voice, meeting questions with other questions: “How did that make you feel?” etc. etc.
I suppose that I started out nervous because of the distinct air of pettiness in most of what I had to report: sidelong glances, cold shoulder at staff meetings, occasional put-downs by the Head Troll herself (there’s a great passage in Grettir’s Saga which kept coming to mind as I was describing these events – it comes in the chapter about the hauntings by the malevolent – and intensely physical – ghost Glám, who rides the roofbeam of the Icelandic farmhouse where he once worked as a thrall, and whose footsteps can be heard resounding up and down it every night. The Saga-writer says something like “From then on he was seen more and more often looking down on the farms in the valley below.” Icelandic sagas never explain the motivations behind people’s (or ghost’s) actions, but they don’t leave you in too much doubt about what’s going to happen most of the time, either. In this case, if Glám isn’t stopped here, he’s going to spread his attentions elsewhere – to the fat, undefended valley farms far below. In fact Grettir, the hero, is successful in dealing with Glám, but he takes away as a legacy the fact that the dead ghost’s eyes will appear to him every night as he goes to sleep for the rest of his life, and he’ll never be unafraid of the dark again).
I may even have started explaining this passage from the Saga to her – the fact that, like Grettir, I felt a certain sense of duty in bringing this to the university’s attention. After all, the websites were adamant that institutions that permitted bullying to go on unchecked were unlikely to be able to retain staff or maintain morale for very long. She cut me off fairly abruptly at that point, though, in order to get me to focus on the summary she’d been preparing of what I’d reported to her.
- I’d not been consulted about changes in my workload (even though I was prepared to acknowledge that some at least of those changes were, in themselves, not unreasonable)
- Further additions had been made to this workload without consultation (though here I was forced to admit that my testimony and the official trail of emails might well be at variance)
- I’d been moved out of my office with insufficient warning to prevent substantial damage to my books and papers (though, again, I accepted that the computer record would show that I had indeed been given time and instructions on how precisely to conduct myself during the move in order to avoid precisely this kind of situation arising)
- I’d been treated belittlingly by my line manager and other senior – and junior – staff members, in what seemed a preconcerted way (but it was hard to put a finger on the differences between this and previous attitudes within the Department – I’d never been much of a joiner, and therefore had little experience of the day-to-day give-and-take of the Department: certainly a black mark against me).
Put like that, it all sounded like the grousing of a weak-kneed sob-sister, unwilling to do a job of work when it was required of me. The terms of my contract, which we also hashed over in the meeting, were hardly encouraging, either. And yet:
Unlawful harassment is unwelcome conduct that is offensive, humiliating or intimidating to any other person and is either repeated, or of such significant nature, that it has a detrimental effect on the person, their performance or their work and study environment.That last one was the passage she emphasised to me. The fact that I found these “behaviours” detrimental to my performance and my self-esteem meant that there was indeed a prima facie case for the university to consider, and it was now simply a question of how I wished to proceed.
Even if there is no intention to offend or humiliate, seemingly harmless acts such as gossip, jokes, teasing or the use of inappropriate nicknames, could all possibly constitute unlawful harassment.
Did I, for example, wish to meet informally with my HOD – preferably with a third person present – in order to discuss these matters informally?
No, I didn’t. It seemed to me it had gone far beyond that already.
Did I, then, wish to institute a formal mediation proceeding – a meeting which would be called in my interlocutor’s office, chaired by her, and recorded by a secretary so that no-one could later dispute just what they had and hadn’t said.
Yes, I did. That was precisely what I wanted, in fact.
– There’s also a third option of instituting legal proceedings immediately, in which case I would advise you to see a lawyer skilled in employment law, and start preparing to sue your employer for placing you in this situation. The burden of proof would be very much on you at that point, however.
– I understand. No, a formal mediation, on the record, is what I want. I suppose it would always be possible to go on to talk to a lawyer if that doesn’t resolve things between her and me?
– Yes, it would. The only point to consider is that the minutes of the mediation would have to be made available to the employment court, so you wouldn’t be able to rely on suppressing any evidence or statements which have already come up there.
– I wouldn’t want to anyway!
Oh, wouldn’t I? In retrospect, my fatal naïveté is what stands out to me about this conversation. As if you could just stand in a mountain meadow and explain to Glám that his depredations on the livestock were hurting the farmer’s livelihood! As if he’d just say “Aw shucks” and shamble away into the mist like Frankenstein’s Monster! No, the Gláms of this world are always leaning over the edge and looking at the farms below, the boundless fields of harm still left to them to wreak.
It was with a certain sense of satisfaction that I turned up on the designated day, however. For all my doubts and suspicions of the university’s bona fides, I couldn’t deny that I’d been given a fair hearing by the Coordinator woman, and that she had summarised the case in as favourable a way as any outsider could.
She was, it seemed to me, a person of good will. I felt little doubt that she would conduct the meeting fairly, and that – as long as I succeeded in keeping my cool through all the lies and deceptions my opponent would no doubt bring to bear – I had every chance of coming out of this with at least the possibility of better treatment in the future. It isn’t exactly to a manager’s credit to be taken to mediation by one of the professionals she employs, after all.
I’d gathered all the evidence I could – had printed out emails, collected notices from bulletin boards, and generally crept around the Department like a pack-rat, trying to assemble at least the vestiges of a paper-trail. It was true that there was nothing there in the nature of a smoking gun, but at least I had a few insolent and curt emails to exhibit – though only one ignoring the need to explain the presence of an unexpected graduate student, an appointment with whom had been made for me without my knowledge.
I’d made all this into a dossier, with little explanations of dates and times, but none of the weighting I’d have added if I’d wanted to slant or prejudice the evidence. There was nothing there that was not either strictly factual or clearly marked as anecdotal – and therefore contestable – testimony by me.
I was rather proud of the document, actually. It made me think that perhaps I should have spent more time compiling data-rich articles over the past few years – instead of moping round the house trying to concoct strategies for bringing Cassie back to me.
I duly arrived at the Mediation suite ten minutes early (I would have been half an hour early if I’d allowed myself to be. That was about the time I got to campus, but I forced myself to walk around for twenty minutes before approaching the building).
There was nobody there. The door was open, though, as I discovered on knocking on it, only to have it yawn ajar in front of me. Nor were there any obvious signs of preparation inside.
I walked in, took a seat. Nothing. Nobody. I forced myself not to worry. After all, most people regard five minutes late as a perfectly reasonable time to get to a meeting. There was no reason for anyone else to regard this one with much anticipation.
Still nothing. The minutes ticked by. I’d arranged all my papers in front of me (including the bound-up copies I’d made of my dossier: four of them in all. One for me, one for the mediator, one for my boss, one for the recording secretary. It’d been hard to restrain myself from making another few copies for any unexpected onlookers or witnesses who also formed a part of the process, but I’d managed to calm myself down and stick to four.
Nothing. Nobody. By now it was ten past the hour. I worried that I’d got the wrong day, the wrong month (even) – but no. I’d carefully printed out the email recording the appointment. This was the right time. This was the right room (though I checked the number on the outside again, just to make sure).
At roughly twenty past nine, the Bullying and Harassment Coordinator walked in. She looked apologetic, certainly, but there was something else there, as well: a certain defiance, a certain advance steeling of herself against possible reproaches ...
– I’m afraid she’s not coming. She’s just phoned us to say so. Or rather, her secretary has rung to confirm that she’s out of the country, and therefore won’t be able to attend the meeting.
– Can she do that – just not attend the meeting? I mean, it was in our online calendars and everything ...
Even to me that sounded a bit pathetic. Of course she could do that. She just had.
– I’m afraid that we can’t compel anyone to attend these mediation hearings. They’re strictly voluntary. And in this case her secretary explained that she’d been called back home for family reasons.
– Which are?
– Which are none of our business. In any case, the point to focus on her is that she won’t be here, and so no meeting can take place. We’ll have to try and reschedule when she gets back.
– Try and reschedule … What if she misses the next meeting, too – and the one after that?
– Well, I can’t deny that there is that possibility. She’s clearly a busy person, and these meetings can take quite a while. It’s not unusual to have to reschedule a couple of times before everyone can be here.
– And then what happens?
– What do you mean?
– What happens when we do actually all get together around a table. What percentage of cases would you say get resolved in that way?
– I couldn’t possibly say. In any case, we won’t be having a meeting today, it seems, and I do have some other work I should be getting on with instead ...
– And all the work that I’ve done, preparing for this meeting?
– How do you mean?
– It’s all useless, isn’t it? She’s so contemptuous of me and of this process that she’ll never turn up. And even if she does there’s absolutely nothing to compel her to keep any agreement we do reach, is there?
– This isn’t a disciplinary tribunal, no. We have no power to monitor or enforce the agreements we broker. But I explained all that to you at our initial meeting.
– I know you did, but that was back when I was a believer – when I thought that all this talky-talk might actually make a difference. I can’t believe that I did that, actually.
– I think you’re getting a bit upset? Shall I call a nurse?
– No, no nurse. Thanks for all you’ve done, anyway. None of this is your fault. I’m sorry I spoke to you that way.
– That’s all right. It’s understandable that you should feel a little agitated. Maybe you should go and lie down for a bit? I really should have explained that we do occasionally have these scheduling problems.
Yes, maybe you should have, I was tempted to riposte, but what would have been the point? The true shape of things suddenly came into focus for me. They could none of them do anything for me, these well-meaning inhabitants of a universe where everything made sense. They had no concept of that final bleak vision of Orwell’s 1984: a boot stamping on a human face, forever. [5]
To Whom It May Concern,I started to receive a lot of these kinds of letters. There was never any mention of my list of reported grievances, nor of my superior’s failure to attend the one mediation session I’d so painstakingly set up.
Regrettably, it has not proved possible to reach an accord with Dr. –– on certain employment matters, despite repeated interviews and discussions (sporadically attended, it must be said). To wit:I’m therefore forced to report that Dr. – is hereby placed on notice for breach of contract, and is hereby required to attend an HR counselling session to inform him of his rights and responsibilities in this matter.
- Workload calculations towards an equitable teaching load
- Assessment of agreed-upon research targets
- Postgraduate teaching obligations
Yours,
blah blah
I could see that the point was to manoeuvre me into a position where I could be safely fired (despite my long record of service) for failure to attend such counselling sessions. Any attempt to reply to the addresses on said correspondence ran into stone walls of silence, though. Far from being “invited” to counselling sessions, I was quite unable to find out when – and if – such sessions actually existed.
HR appeared to have the most notional existence in any case. They had no physical office on campus (ever since all such services had been contracted out to various private firms). The extensions I rang got me nowhere except a series of redirections to even dumber and more obstructive myrmidons, until (eventually) they would peter out into a dead silence, or – worse still – some ghastly pop-song on perpetual replay.
Never mind. The trouble with switching to hardball is that it tacitly informs your victim that there is no recourse left but retaliation in kind.
I began to study up on ways to fuck someone up – petty harassments and annoyances bound to cause alarm and despondency.
I made a few innocent phone calls to the local council, based – as I lyingly informed them – on the threatened depredations of a (non-existent) disgruntled ex. Could they indeed (as they’d threatened) close off my water account, cut off my electricity, cancel my credit cards, etc. etc.?
I affected a slightly dumb, hang-dog tone for these conversations, and took careful note of the limits of what could be accomplished by a dedicated mischief-maker over the phone. Some things required “test questions” and pin numbers to be recited. A great many did not. Nor were such precautions automatically in place unless a situation such as the one I outlined to them (I was careful to make it the same each time: I didn’t want them to find significant divergences if – as I suspected they would – they eventually found themselves comparing notes).
The idea was to do a great deal in a short time, before any alarm bells could ring or suspicions could be aroused. Short of paying a group of thugs to go round and kick her windows in, I felt that a great deal of morale-sapping damage could be done from the safety of a phone box (not – of course – from a traceable cellphone or landline) …
I suppose if I were to list all that I did, that would rather defeat the purpose of doing it in the first place. I mean, I assume that – while they’re not really intended for her in any way – my nemesis may someday have the opportunity to read these pages. Why would I tell her all the things I tried to snafu for her? I’m sure that she will have found out most of them by now.
The list of things was far too long to memorise, and I’d picked the ideal phone box, shielded by trees in a deserted subdivision, unobservable from the street (and, so far as I could see, unfrequented by anyone much most of the time). I felt a little like James Bond as I made my way there cross-country mid-morning (neither early nor late – in office hours, but not at the beginning or end of anyone’s shift).
First of all there were the utilities. I’d made a list of all of these, and told the same story for each: the disgruntled ex-lover, the threats, the needs for new protocols and above all, crucially, to ignore … description of a person closely resembling my boss.
I changed them all to new, cheque-paid accounts, and redirected them to a nearby house which had recently been vacated by some people I knew very vaguely by sight.
I reported her car stolen, and gave details of the suspected perpetrator of the crime (very like her, in fact).
I suppose that it was her bank that I had the most fun with, though. The trouble with getting your bills delivered to the office is that it’s not very difficult to intercept them. And it’s surprising just how many things you can do – once again – over the phone.
I’d timed it all for a day when I knew she was away at a conference, so the next step – after burning my list of misdeeds to a crisp and scattering the ashes to the winds – was to drive into the Department, open up my office, tip-toe down the corridor to her office, borrow the masterkey from Reception (I knew when her creatures slithered off to morning tea: all together, of course, to cause maximum inconvenience to students), open up her room, and – fuck up her files.
The physical papers I stuffed into rubbish bags. The computer itself was easy enough to sabotage with a needle shoved up the appropriate power cord. As I’d anticipated – though it still seemed a little too good to be true – she hadn’t bothered to log off her account before turning off the monitor, so before trashing her machine I took the opportunity to:
1/ download her email files onto a memory stickI knew that these could be restored within twenty-four hours, but that after that the task would become increasingly difficult with each level of backup overtaking the former one. Something could no doubt be salvaged from the mess: but, I hoped, not much.
2/ erase her account on the system
3/ clear her backup account of everything it held
Now you may well be crossing yourselves in dismay at this tale of grim sabotage and petty crime. But you see I knew I was right. She really was out to get me, with any means at her disposal. Perhaps I reminded her of a committee head who’d got up her nose at some point in the past, or the patriarchal tool who’d denied her entry to a programme of study .. who knows? But just as the old joke has it, when Job comes before the Lord to complain about the calendar of woes he’s been oppressed with, and cries out “Why, Lord, why?” The Lord just sighs, and says: “Actually, Job, to tell you the truth, I don’t really know myself – there’s just something about you that pisses me off.”
The point was that I was beyond trying to prove it to anyone else at this point. I knew it was so, beyond a shadow of doubt, but I also knew that she was pretty ingenious at hiding her tracks and playing the system for her own ends.
Nor would she be expecting any comeback or retaliation, except of the most blustering and ineffectual kind. Whether or not she suffered any real harm or inconvenience from any of my acts remained to be seen, but I relished the idea of her having to rack her brains to come up with possible avenues of attack, having to change every single pin-number, re-route every account, explain again and again to a succession of faceless robots just how her affairs had got so tangled up.
They wouldn’t believe her. That was the wonderful thing. Who would? Who could possibly anticipate the degree of malice which can be brewed up in the soul of a solitary pencil-neck, lying awake night after night and pushing pins into the imaginary voodoo doll of a hated superior?
Would she even get back home, I wondered? I mean, the great thing about the Homeland Security Act in America is that it makes it a legal obligation on citizens to inform on each other. I wasn’t an American citizen, but I felt there was now enough “evidence” floating around the internet on my boss to put her on the FBI’s no-fly list. Nor did I think she’d be returning to the States any time soon, given the pro-Al Qaeda-ist spam she’d been sending out from her account …
Would her bank cards work? I sincerely doubted it.
How would she make her way home from the airport with her executive university taxi service account cancelled? And then the changed locks on her front door (and her office – I’d booked in a visit from a locksmith on Saturday morning) might cause some momentary confusion, also.
In a sense I didn’t even want to know what her next few days would be like (not to mention the weeks after that when the power would suddenly go out from her unpaid account, the water dry up in her pipes; not to mention the months after that when her lapsed memberships in learned bodies would exclude her from mailing lists, her shredded files deny her the backed-up research results of a lifetime) … It was enough to dream, and – above all – prepare.
When you go thermonuclear on somebody’s arse, you can bet that they’re going to be pretty keen to find out who’s responsible – then take revenge. For all I knew she had legions of enemies, but I couldn’t help feeling that the searchlight was going to fall on me pretty quickly.
I mean, who else had access to the Department keys, knew all the procedures? I’d wiped everything down before I left,. so I didn’t think there’d be any fingerprints (and I’d been assured by various websites that all the CSI crap about DNA from eyelashes was pretty unlikely to be applied in the case of a petty break-in). Nevertheless, I’d taken the precaution of adding a few sweepings from her sycophantic secretary’s desk to incriminate her rather than myself.
All those phone calls to official bodies were bound to have left traces, too. In fact, I didn’t doubt that they’d eventually get me (nor did I really believe that she’d have a moment’s doubt about who was responsible). The real question was, could they prove it? Not beyond a reasonable doubt, I hoped.
As long as I looked innocent, did nothing to incriminate myself, and said as little as possible to anyone, then I suspected I’d remain in the clear.
There was always the chance of some super-subtle electronic protocol I’d infringed without knowing, but then she was already hell-bent on revoking my tenure and having me thrown out on my ear – the problem for her was that she’d left me with nothing to lose. There was literally no penalty the university could impose which could exceed expulsion.
Except jail-time, of course, but I doubted she’d be able to muster enough proof for that. In any case, as a first-time offender with a squeaky-clean record, I was more likely to get a suspended sentence than be remanded in custody.
Perhaps I too would end up unable to travel out of the country, but I couldn’t help feeling that the red flags around her sympathies with well-known terrorist organisations would haunt her for longer than that.
I’d done all the above on the Friday before a long weekend, in order to guarantee maximum mayhem. It was with a certain anticipation, as you’ll have anticipated, that I went into the office on Tuesday.
Nothing. She wasn’t back yet (though she had been expected, I could see from the online logs of various meetings), and there was a certain amount of bustling to and fro down by reception. I guessed that they would have discovered the changed locks by now, and be trying to find out who’d authorised them. My guess, though, was that everyone would assume that it was her, and therefore no-one would get into her office in time to discover the missing files and the stuffed-up computer.
I suppose, actually that the reason so many clever criminals get caught is that they can’t help but hang around the scene, as well as scrutinising the papers, to find out just how it’s all panned out.
I guess that my saving grace may be paranoid self-doubt. Far from being clever, I see myself as dogged and determined. I had to be in the office – so much was required of me under the new dispensation – so I did hear the odd far-off cry of rage and astonishment (as the office door was finally opened), the distant sounds of raging from the troll herself.
I even anticipated a visit from her, I must admit, and had carefully schooled myself in the probabilities of what a completely innocent me would be likely to have observed and intuited about all these goings-on.
In the end, though, I wasn’t bothered. And I was careful not to ask any questions of those closer to her who could be expected to be in the know.
I gathered, though, from overheard conversations in the staffroom (where I still repaired from time to time to eat my solitary lunch) that the overseas trip aspect of my assault on her cyber presence had succeeded beyond my wildest hopes – that she literally had spent the night in a holding cell, that she was on a no-fly list, that she’d been deported from the States in handcuffs, with a uniformed official deputed to accompany her.
What’s more, it seems that there was a disgruntled ex-employee who was out to get her, and had uttered threats to that effect on earlier occasions. Not only was I not in the picture at all, but it seemed that no-one had even mentioned me in connection with it.
All in all, I felt a little piqued.
So it was with a certain surprise that I received a letter summoning me for a disciplinary hearing to answer certain accusations that had been made against me by a certain (unnamed) student.
Ol’ Troll-face had fucked me better than she knew when she gifted me that crazy Occultist tit: the one I’ve been calling “Lisa” hitherto.
I tried to imply, earlier, that, since this wasn’t her real name, that mightn’t even be her true gender, but am now forced to admit that it was. That she was, for my sins, a girl, and that that was the basis of the battery of charges she was bringing against me.
I wasn’t allowed to see said charges, though (at first): I was simply given a date and time to turn up and attempt to answer them, with assurances that they would be provided to me in time for me to make rebuttal.
Twenty-four hours in advance of the hearing, as it turned out, and very lurid reading they proved to be.
First of all, I’d leered at and ogled her lasciviously every time she’d come to my office (perhaps I was just grimacing with boredom, actually – certainly I hadn’t been conscious of any such designs on her virtue – or var-tue, as Fielding’s Shamela so memorably puts it). [6]
That was only the beginning, though, lewd eyeing had quickly turned to blackmail. I’d required her to let me lock the door during her supervision sessions, and had exposed myself to her, while talking vilely of my sexual conquests among the student body …
I suppose you can guess the rest: forced to service me in a variety of degrading ways, she’d not know where to turn, until persuaded by some sage member of the university counselling team to commit all her memories to paper and cast them upon the waters, whence they had returned after many days, bearing much freight.
Up and down the corridors they’d gone, apparently – all those side-long glances I’d been imagining had not been mere phantasms, it now appeared. The gossip-machine had been working overtime, and my goose cooked in many a water-cooler colloquy long before things had come to this head.
To tell you the truth, I felt vaguely flattered – at first – at this oblique tribute to my virility and terribiltá. “Oderint dum metuant”, as the Emperor Tiberius once put it: Let them hate as long as they fear. [7]
But that was only a momentary feeling. The fact that I was entirely innocent of any of this gallimaufry of crimes was clearly neither here nor there. The mere fact of being accused made me seem redolent of guilt somehow – a moral leper who had touched pitch and was thereby defiled.
(Of course, there was a certain added irony in the fact that I was indeed culpable in many other ways: I had contrived to subvert many aspects of my HOD’s life and comfort, with scant compunction, and had chortled with glee at the evidences of my success).
I remember reading a crime novel once called Payment Deferred. [8] It was about a guy who murdered someone and then disposed of the body so carefully that nobody could find it. But then his wife got ill and he was accused of poisoning her. Though completely innocent of this, he went to the gallows for it, thus accomplishing the punishment for his earlier, unsuspected crime.
Payment deferred – yes, that was it. I felt too ashamed to ask any of my colleagues from work to accompany me to the hearing (though this was one of the privileges stipulated in the letter). I felt too embarrassed to ask the Bullying and Harassment Coordinator (who I now realised must have been in the know the whole time – this set of lurid accusations having taken quite some time to work their way through the alimentary system of the Academy), so I ended up bringing my old solicitor, the one who’d been dealing with our family business for many a long year. He’d had to put up with the rather less melodramatic fanfarade surrounding my divorce, so it seemed only right that he should sit there and hear me accused of being one of those pitiless Great White Sharks of tertiary education who prey on the weak and the young.
Present, then, on that inauspicious day, around 11 of the clock, were:
Myself, complete with flimsy exculpating missive (despatched electronically in advance to the other members of the tribunal, though by some curious oversight it turned out not to have reached any of them in time for prior perusal);
My solicitor, with his usual half-asleep demeanour, a folder of papers, and his mind no doubt firmly fixed on lunch – or perhaps elevenses, given the time fixed for my hearing before this tribunal of the inquisition;
My Head of Department, even more smirky than usual (if that’s really a word), no doubt at the only too delightful prospect of being rid of me at last;
Our Office Administrator, her brown-nosing acolyte, complete with pad and pen to record proceedings;
The Vice-Chancellor’s Representative (clearly the great man could not be expected himself to assist at so trivial an encounter). This was a middle-aged Brit Professor from some alien discipline such as Chemistry or Mathematics (“Stinks,” as we used to refer to it humorously at school);
Two (co-opted) Members of Staff, who, together with the VC’s Rep, constituted the decision-making troika of the committee;
I think that was all, but there may have been others. They might just as well have been selling tickets for all the attention I was paying to the buzzards gathered for this particular feast. Had I said enough in my letter? That was most firmly on my mind … Was the material I’d so blithely indicted for my pastiche “research portfolio” likely to read somewhat compromisingly under these – unforeseen – circumstances? The answer to that latter question seemed likely to be an emphatic “yes” – while not yet released to the assessor (in this case, presumably, my HOD) – I had been foolish enough to commit various parts of it to the world wide web even as I was composing it, not to mention the parts already archived in the university database.
What was actually in it? I hardly remembered, but I did recall that it contained some fairly racy passages – evidence that my mind must have been working on lines of “moral turpitude” at more or less the time alleged by my (hopefully now ex-) student …
The student – let’s still call him/her Lisa – was not, needless to say, forced to appear. Her letter was duly produced and “taken to have been read into the record,” once it had been ascertained that all of us had, in fact, read it (though I had one or two doubts about my solicitor; could he, in fact, read? I’d never seen any irrefutable evidence of it, while many indications – his complete doziness during cross-examination, for instance – testified to the contrary).
But none of them had, it seemed, yet encountered my rebuttal, which I proceeded to read in as deadpan a manner as possible.
Now it’s a funny thing, but I no longer have a copy of that letter. It seems strange, given the fact that I sent it out to so many people, but – like the copious printings of early jest-books – the mere fact of existing in multiple copies makes it less of an instinct to preserve a clean text of the editio princeps.
Were it not that my HOD was still obliged to send me her notes on my mock portfolio, I wouldn’t have access to a copy of that, either, and I’d have been left with no context whilst scribbling these notes.
Tant pis, as the French say: “What a load of piss …” (as we used to mistranslate it to bug the Languages Master). I have to rely on memory, then, to reconstruct what I said, but it’s a little difficult – at this distance in time – to reconstruct the tone of the oh-so-telling letter I’d put together:
I refuted her claims, was the main burden of it, naturally. (The more pedantic of you, in whose company I would once have placed myself, are probably saying now: “No, you denied her claims; you’d composed a rebuttal to her accusations; you can’t have refuted them without clear, undeniable evidence that they could not be true.” And I suppose that you have a point. I did deny her claims, but I would claim that the specificity with which I was able to counter each and every one of them constituted a refutation. If it weren’t for those closed-door meetings where it was literally her word against mine, that is. Everything else I could show to be fallacious. Times, dates, everything were wrong. I could not have done all the things that she said.)
Having established that in as much detail as I could (with attached appendices of particular pieces of evidence), I then went on to point out the sacred principle of “innocent until proven guilty” – or (in Hume’s terms, from his essay on Miracles) the axiom that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” – the bizarrerie of some of the constituent parts of the case against me: the attendance at Black Masses, forcings of the deponent to kiss upside-down crucifixes (as well as, Baphomet-like, my own anus), the 120-Days-of-Sodom-like acts of Sadeian excess, were surely likely to have left behind some physical evidence. Where were my Occult conspirators? Were the Illuminati alive and well and living in the central regions of the North Island? (Quite possibly so, given the nature of the tribunal’s decision – but I mustn’t run ahead of my story).
On and on I droned, while they doodled, took notes (some of them), or stared into the middle distance.
At the end of my reading, the VC’s rep (or VCR), in his capacity as Head of the Tribunal (HOT), asked me if I had any questions of a procedural nature at this time.
– Well, yes. What happens now?
– Now we consider the two documents which have been presented, and decide whether to render a decision today, or to postpone it for another occasion.
– But don’t I get a chance to argue my case? Question the witnesses?
– There are no witnesses, and your letter would seem to argue your case at great length and in considerable detail. The rest of the meeting will have to be held in camera, though, so I’ll have to ask you, your representative, and your Head of School to withdraw and wait for us to deliberate.
– What about her? (pointing at the malignant visage of our Departmental secretary) She’s not objective about any of this business.
– I’m afraid that [Ms. Name] is here simply to record our discussions. She has no part in them beyond that. If you like I can ask her to place on record your objections to her presence here, if you like, though.
– Damn right I want my objections noted!
– You should, however, have mentioned them earlier, when the list of participants at the meeting was circulated.
– Which was done twenty-four hours ago, together with the letter of accusations, giving me almost no time to compose my own rebuttal!
– That can’t be correct. You should have had a minimum of a fortnight to see the documents and prepare your responses to them …
– Twenty-four hours! I reiterated.
– Hmm. There must have been some oversight. In any case, if there’s nothing else, I’ll have to ask you all to leave us now so the next part of the meeting can take place.
I’d feared feeling a certain awkwardness at having to wait in the same room as my HOD, whom I could hardly look at now without waves of nausea. Luckily they seemed to have anticipated this feeling, and showed us to separate rooms.
My old solicitor, bless his heart, showed no disposition to discuss how things had gone (not well, clearly, though I’m still at a loss to know what else I could have done or said, given my complete innocence of all these charges). After a while he took out his phone and started to fiddle with it vaguely. I myself lacked one of these tools of the devil (perhaps that was why I was so little in the know about what was going on in the Department and the wider college and university, I thought for a moment, only to dismiss the theory, a moment later, as arrant defeatism!).
We didn’t wait long. I’ll say that for them. Within three quarters of an hour – at most – we were all back in the room and awaiting the decision. Which was (roll of drums): to defer any and all decisions till a later time.
In the meantime, though, I was suspended (on full pay) from my duties at the university, and forbidden to enter its grounds unless specifically summoned by this committee for some judicial purpose. I was not to return to my office, nor to collect my personal possessions, which would be forwarded to me at home.
Asked if I had anything to say, I threw caution to the winds, and commented that I was, effectively, being treated as if I were guilty, without having been convicted. That the decision to suspend me without dismissal proceedings was mere prevarication, and that I demanded the right of appeal!
To which the HOT VCR replied that I would certainly be entitled to appeal the decision once a decision was made, that refusing me access to university grounds was as much for my own protection as that of the students, since it would shield me from any further accusations of malfeasance during the course of my duties, and that – while I would have to remain, as it were, in limbo for a certain (unspecified) period of time – I was in no sense absolved from my status as a tenured servant of the university, and that my research (for instance) would continue to be assessed as a part of the larger offerings of the College of Arts.
At that last, even I had the grace to blush, and so retired, bloodied but I hope unbowed, from the field of battle.
I think that it must have been about this time that I had a dream. I’ve always had a bit of a fascination with visions, and have written quite a lot about encounters with doppelgängers and spirits, time-shifts, and all that sort of thing. I should stress that this was nothing like that. This was a simple, ordinary, bona fide dream.
I was back at my parent’s old house, the one that I’d been forced to evict my father from a few years before, when it turned out he hadn’t been paying the rates or the taxes, but instead piling up all the letters he received in the trash-to-recycle basket (like father, like son, some might be tempted to say).
I was out in the garden, round the back of the house, admiring the roses (a great bank of pink Albertine roses grew all the way up the fences on either side of the property – they had the singular attribute of blooming desultorily all year round, but really came into their own when summer arrived). And then I heard voices.
They sounded close by, so I walked up the side path, only to find an elderly man shading his wife with a parasol from the heat of the day. She was squatting in the middle of the front lawn, and – how can I put it in a delicate way – shitting on the grass. She looked up at me with a kind of quiet hatred. The old man glared.
“Oh,” I faltered. “Oh. Sorry to intrude. I quite understand …”
Retreating, I saw out of the corner of my eye another woman, younger this time, retreating from the side-garden with an armful of roses. This was more straightforward – this was plain theft. I immediately started to shout at her:
“Stop that! Those aren’t yours. Get out of here.”
She retired at a run, still clutching the flowers.
I woke up with those words still ringing in my ears: “Stop! I’ll give you in charge! Those aren’t yours …”
No more they were: hers, I mean. But she had just as much right to them as I did, despite the deeds I’d inherited from my father, who’d planted them in the first place.
I’d sold the old house to fund his retirement home, so it was strange to find it recurring in my dreams.
Hard to say what it means: the shitting, the outrage, and then the stealing – I suppose a psychiatrist would have no problems with any of that.
It’s funny how it can come as something of a relief when the thing you’ve been anticipating actually happens. It was a bit like that when my wife left me: all the crying, squalling, begging, arguing – then off she went and … life went on.
The same with all this palaver. I suppose the obvious thing would have been to throw myself into my research and – prove myself a hero. Show just how wrong they’d been to expel me from the fold.
But the joy of being shot of all that day-to-day poisonous administrative blah was just so strong. I found myself sleeping in, hardly getting out of bed till noon, rereading old fantasy novels from the 1960s – Ursula Le Guin, Stanislaw Lem, Philip K. Dick – and generally enjoying myself in a way I hadn’t done for years.
It was a strange time. I started working again in earnest on my online writing, taking it to strange new places, weaving in more and more echoes of my own life, ceasing to be a responsible member of society and instead heading out in some strange new directions.Hush little baby don’t say a word
Momma’s gonna buy you a mocking-bird
& if that mocking-bird don’t sing
Papa’s gonna buy you a diamond ring
& if that diamond ring don’t shine
Papa’s gonna bring you the end of time …
I guess you can read it for yourself – it’s all up there on the blog. But when I read it back, somehow all the excitement, the madness I’d tried to put in there had evaporated, leaving just a strange medley of fact and fiction.
It wasn’t enough, somehow.
I did put in some of the visions I’d started to have, though. I know that it’s never precisely reassuring when someone tells you they’re seeing things (or, worse still, hearing voices), but the fact is that it’s not that unusual. Many people do so – as I ascertained from a very interesting book called Hallucinations, by W. H. Auden’s old buddy Oliver Sacks – and it doesn’t mean you’re crazy. Though of course it doesn’t mean you’re not, either.
They hadn’t imposed any restrictions on travel – though it had been made clear to me that I had to maintain the same mailing address for (possible) official communications, so I took the opportunity to go up to Auckland and revisit some old haunts.
The last time I’d spent any time up north was after my father’s death, when I’d had to go up to make a lot of funeral and estate arrangements. As an only son, I’d always known it would fall to me to do that (as well as making the decision to lock him away in a home in the first place). Luckily he didn’t last long after we – the lawyers and I, that is – moved him in. He wasn’t happy there.
And so it was there that it happened. I’d driven out to Point Chevalier, that long muddy beach stretching round part of the inner harbour, before you run into the roadblock of Henderson. It was a sunny afternoon, and there were even some people swimming, despite the tide being most of the way out.
And suddenly it all started to make sense to me: the loss of my job, Cassie’s leaving me, the things I was writing, the long car trips out into the bush, the bush itself. I could see a pattern in all of that, it all came down to a single bright vision: The Chancellor.
The Chancellor of our university was a spry old buffer who liked to maunder on about Gallipoli and the birth of our nationhood on the airstrips of Crete. In himself, he was no different from any other well-meaning old codger of his generation, but ceremonially he had mana.
He was the only one who might be able to do anything about what I’d been through. By now I was sure that it had all been necessary somehow, a kind of suffering foredoomed for me, but the question remained, what was I to do with the insights gleaned from all this spiritual testing?
Simple: write to the Chancellor (even then I retained the glimmer of sense that told me that a midnight visit to his house, even if I could find out the address, was unlikely to improve my chances of a sympathetic hearing).
And so I did.
I didn’t keep a copy, and even if I had it I doubt if I’d transcribe it here – I suppose I could have attached it as an appendix, but that didn’t occur to me at the time.
In any case, it was mostly composed in pencil that day by the beach, and then copied out later, back at my hotel.
I can’t help feeling that it would embarrass me a little to read it over now. I know that I included a lot of stuff about visions, and vastations, and I might even have hinted that the end of the world was nigh.
His office address was listed on the university website, so it was the work of a moment to buy a stamp at the front desk and send it off.
Post in haste, repent at leisure.
I wonder if he ever read it? Certainly I never received a reply. I suppose there must have been some screening system that made sure that letters by obvious madmen weren’t allowed to waste the time of the university’s top officials.
But then, for all of his titular grandeur, he wasn’t really one of the university’s “top officials.” His post was largely ceremonial, a pat on the back for a retired local body politician – a rubber-stamp for certain decisions made by the university council. Did he share the same screening facilities as the real leadership team?
I like to think that he didn’t. That he did in fact pick it up one bright morning and read it. I suppose that his first reaction would have been to tear it in half and drop it in the wastepaper basket – after that sager counsels would have prevailed, though. He’d have picked it up, smoothed down the edges, re-attached them with Sellotape, then sent it on to be attached to my file – and there, no doubt, it sits to this day (perhaps a photocopy rather than the original): a timebomb of testimony ready to trip me up if I can ever persuade anyone to listen to all of these complaints.
It’s not that they matter – that I matter at all. What matters is the principle of the thing. Simple decency and kindness have, it seems, deserted us. Unscrupulous hucksters strew the floors of the temple with their gimcrack goods. Someone, somewhere, must take a stand: like a tree, defenceless against those who would harm it, but a beacon of hope to those who admire the intricacy of its veins, its power to turn water and air into bounteous, green, life-giving life.
One last confrontation remains to be recounted.
I’d tried every level of my own institution: had been afflicted in ways that I didn’t deserve (albeit escaping punishment for things I had done).
There was a power above the throne, though – a level of authority they could not dispute: the Minister of Education, in parliament, the voice of the nation.
I knew it would be difficult to obtain an interview with him, but what was my alternative? Was I to sit and rot in my house, scribbling fantasies, and waiting to be ignominiously dismissed at the end of the disciplinary committee’s “deliberations”? (That’s if they ever actually concluded the case – from their point of view it might be better never to present a report at all, given the fact that it was bound to lead to expensive litigation, litigation which they were not at all guaranteed to win. Outside their own kangaroo court, the lack of any real evidence for my ex-student’s psychotic claims would be bound to tell. Their only plausible weapon would be character assassination against me, in fact, and defamation is a two-edged sword. All I’d have to do is look wise and statesmanlike, and their case could crumble in ruins …)
In any case, I didn’t want to live like that, waiting endlessly for the hammer to fall. I remembered reading an old novel by Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities, and his hero’s mocking self-description as a “professional defendant” at the end of the book … I had no desire to waste my time and squander my substance in a protracted court battle.
Nor did I really want to return to the university: that university – but if I was ever to have any chance at an ongoing career, I had somehow to crawl out from under this black mark they’d imposed on me.
A visit to Wellington, the beehive, the heart of our democracy, seemed the most obvious way of cutting through this Gordian knot.
Of course I’d emailed ahead – had compiled quite a file of correspondence, in fact. It’d been made clear from the first (by whatever underling it was who had the job of answering the Minister’s letters) that this was not the correct procedure to pursue.
What I should do was go and see my local MP and ask him or her – as a constituent – to raise the matter with the Minister and, thereafter (if necessary) in the House. That would guarantee me a swifter access to the corridors of power.
Which would have been fine, had it not been that my local MP was a redneck farmer who was about as likely to espouse the cause of a morally compromised Academic as to vote for gay marriage and universal suffrage for sheep.
I explained all this, only to receive a very close replica of the same form letter, with a few curlicues and details altered, informing me – “with regret” – that my request for an interview could not be granted at this time, while my case was still sub judice at the university.
Was there anyone else I could see, I then wrote (with cunning determination to bust along and burst into the Minister’s office however distant was the desk of the shiny-bum they bequeathed me to …)
I suppose they were used to such transparent ploys. They could see that I was not the sort they wanted rampaging around the building with an official pass, on any pretext. No, they said, it was up to me to abide the decision of the Tribunal, after which a number of legal options would open up to me – not least the intervention of my own local MP, who could … etc. etc.
They just weren’t reading the letters, so much was obvious.
But who can deny the right of a citizen to enter the debating chamber and contemplate the majesty of the serried ranks of our representatives weighing up the issues of the day in sage debate?
I’d never been (I had to admit, to my shame). This was my chance.
I took the train down, suspecting that the parking facilities around parliament might be a bit sparse, and marched up the hill to the imposing old building.
There wasn’t a lot going on, to be honest: a few Asian tourists photographing one another in front of the statues, a few pigeons pecking at pie-crusts in the grounds.
I’d taken the precaution of checking that Parliament was actually sitting that day, and checking when question time was (which always seemed the liveliest part of proceedings when re-broadcast on the TV news).
My plan was to emulate those people you see standing up and unfurling banners to “cause a disturbance” in the visitors’ gallery. I didn’t have a banner, but I did flatter myself that I had a loud voice (honed through years of shouting in ill-designed lecture theatres).
Jimmy Stewart here I came: “It’s just a little thing called the Constitution. It’s just a little thing a lot of people died for …”
Oh fuck.
I made it all the way inside, took my seat, gathered my courage, actually stood up, but then subsided.
A few eyes flickered in my direction – there were a few giggles from up behind me in the upstairs gallery, but then why shouldn’t I stand up? It was necessary for people to get up in order to sidle in and out? Who was to say that I was about to start anything? …
I suppose if anyone had seen how deeply I was blushing, how much I was longing for the earth to open up and swallow me alive, they would have realised how complete was my humiliation.
But it was not too late! I could still do it, make myself a martyr, have myself dragged off in chains, and thrown in pokey.
No. No. I couldn’t do it. All the instincts of a lifetime – don’t speak out at the meeting, don’t volunteer for the sub-committee, don’t walk up and start chatting to the cute girl at the party – kicked in at once. It was as if a giant hand had reached down to suppress me, wind me, knock the stuffing out of me, like the bags going down over the animals in the court scene in Alice.
The speakers down below were concluding their wise and witty sallies:
– Can the Honourable Gentleman explain why his answer is no answer at all?
– Can the Honourable Gentleman opposite explain why he’s a great Galah?
– Order! Order! (from the Speaker). The Honourable Member will apologise and withdraw the phrase.
– I’ll withdraw the phrase when the Honourable Member stops cackling like a chook!
– Order! Order! Unless the Honourable Member is prepared to apologise, I will have him expelled from the chamber.
– I will not apologise – unless the Honourable Member opposite is prepared to apologise for not having the intelligence of a nanny-goat …
– Order! … and so on.
It just seemed so pointless all of a sudden. Life seemed so pointless, really. But then I started to think how much more pleasant it would be to get out of this great big room full of hot air, wander down the hill, and order myself a great big pint of beer with a great big basket of hot chips in one of the pubs downtown. And, after that, a slap-up meal at a restaurant.
After all, did I really have to get myself arrested, spend the night in a malodorous cell with a bunch of drunken thugs, then get kicked out in the morning, unshaved and unshat, with a boot in the backside to hurry me along?
Who said I had to? Who said that I had to wait around to hear my fate from the grand high pooh-bahs at the college? They’d had their fun, sure – putting all my books out on planks in the rain must have had them positively choking with bestial glee. But then I’d had my fun, too: the Big Bad Wolf of the Dept. manhandled into a cell by American Customs, and informed that she was to be deported immediately as a “security risk.”
In retrospect, I almost felt sorry for her. After all, I could go where I wanted, there were no travel restrictions on me – despite my (alleged) habit of forcing my female (only female, I hope) grad students to perform fellatio on me in my office chair in exchange for a high grade …
All in all, hightailing it out of here seemed by far the best option. What was holding me back? I had some savings – was even on full pay – for the immediate future, at any rate. Even my solicitor should be capable of forwarding any actually important mail while writing fobbing-off answers to everyone else.
I could be based anywhere in the world, just as long as I had access to my New Zealand bank account – and didn’t admit to anyone that I’d flown the coop.
Would they even care? I thought of that comment made by Lincoln in the last days of the American Civil War, when they asked him what his reaction would be if Jefferson Davis managed to slip out of the country quietly:
“Waal,” he said (I imagine him sounding not unlike Ezra Pound: that same affectation of down-home, prairie utterance): “Waal, it puts me in mind of the Irishman who took the pledge because his wife threatened to leave him. He wuz around at one of his friend’s houses a couple of weeks later, when the friend proposed that they help themselves to some liquid refreshment. ‘By all means, begorrah, to be sure!’ said our Hibernian friend. ‘Lemonade, I take it?’ continued his friend. ‘To be sure, to be sure,’ said Pat, a little less enthusiastically. ‘You’re sure you won’t have a whiskey?’ the friend went on. No, no, no, Pat was sure that he wouldn’t have a whiskey. ‘Nor a brandy neither?’ No, neither a brandy nor a whiskey nor any other species of liquor. ‘You’re sure you won’t have a drop of something in your lemonade?’ the friend concluded. Ah well, there now, Pat allowed that that would be mighty pleasant. And added that if, behind his back, some brandy were to be added to his lemonade ‘unbeknownst to myself,’ then he would have no objection.”
I couldn’t help feeling that if I were to quickly and quietly vanish away, “unbeknownst” to them all, that they would be unlikely to mount too vociferous an objection.
And so I did. I walked out of that chamber (past the slightly bristling guards – they’d seen me, all right, and divined my intentions. An instant longer and they’d have had me down on the ground with a taser up my arsehole), down the hill, to the pub, to the bar of the pub, thence to a neighbouring restaurant, back on the train, back home, onto the internet, onto the flight centre (thankfully it had never occurred to them to confiscate my passport), onto the page of “flights to Aussie,” and thence away, away, away, to where I’ll never say where:
& Dockie had done what he would not declare,And nor will I. Not neither, not nohow, not to any of you
& Dockie had gone where he would not say where …
So that’s my story. I’ve put it all on record as much for myself as for any possible readers. I don’t think I’ve left too many clues, but honestly, you wouldn’t have to be Hercule Poirot to put two and two together and track me down. If you could be bothered.
Anyway, so this is how a hitherto productive and reasonably respectable citizen turns into something resembling an outlaw. Or this is how it happened to me, anyway.
I suppose that now I’ve had my vastation, it’s up to me to interpret it somehow. That’s how Henry James, Snr and Jack Kerouac, Jnr, seem to have regarded it, at any rate.
But all I’m left with is this sheaf of papers, this annotated draft that’s been forwarded to me by my good and faithful solicitor back home. He, and he alone, has access to my address, so I suppose he must have at least imagined that it might be important enough for me to want to have.
I hadn’t even thought to keep a copy, to be honest, once it had all been posted onto the system, but I suppose that their automatic processes must have kicked in, that the stern voice of duty made my dear old ex-nemesis feel the need to go through it.
It doesn’t seem to have done her much good. And if it hadn’t been that I started scribbling all this in the blank spaces, I don’t think that I’d ever have had the heart or the inclination to re-read it. But you can’t entirely disown your past, even if you are having a rather better time in the present.
So, as Charles Alldritt remarked in his book Tree Worship, almost fifty years ago now:
Early critics have suggested that the purpose of the book is not clear. Perhaps there is no purpose. [9]Perhaps indeed there is “no purpose.” But, like him, I’m writing it all down here anyway, and don’t despair of finding an audience for it someday.
Over to you, then, Your Majesty. As the living embodiment of the Crown, sovereign over the United Kingdom and the old Dominions, New Zealand among them, I’m sending this stack of bound-up papers to you.
You may never read it, but there was that little book by Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader, which seemed to type you as a voracious and not uninsightful consumer of literature, so I can always hope.
In any case, do with it what you will, I’m done with it now, and with the life described in it.
I’d just finished bundling up these papers to post them off – to Queen, c/o Buck House, etc. etc. when it suddenly came to me that I should go for a walk to clear my head.
It was nice outside: cool and refreshing. I could breathe again, for what seemed the first time in ages. It was evening, and the streetlights were coming on one by one as I walked towards the park. As I came closer, I saw a strange sight: a large group of animals – possums, I realised with a frisson of disgust – all grouped together by one of the iron gates to the reserve. A man was feeding them. He had a small plastic bucket, and was handing out titbits from it to the strange ghostly creatures. Their eyes shone like luminous lamps in the twilight.
I stopped for a second, put off by this writhing carpet of fur (it’s hard to imagine any New Zealander going out of his way to feed a possum! Feral pests is how they’re seen in our neck of the woods).
“All right, mate?” the man feeding them said.
“All right,” I replied. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many possums all gathered together in one spot.”
“Funny things. They look all fierce on the outside, but if you take away the claws and teeth, they’re pussycats, really.”
“Ah. Okay.”
I didn’t want to dispute his views about the endearing natures of his little pals, but I couldn’t help thinking that they’d be tearing him apart, too, if it weren’t for that iron fence.
Anyway, I left him to it, and sidled (somewhat nervously) into the park.
As I walked along, I thought again of Henry James, Snr, and that “damned shape” he saw one day in the corner of an inn parlour “raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life” – then of Jack Kerouac, and the not dissimilar demons he encountered during his extended time alone as a fire-spotter on Desolation Peak, Northern California. [10]
Neither man ever really recovered from the experience. James spent the rest of his life writing ponderous religious tomes designed to calm the unfathomable panic he’d felt that morning in 1844. Kerouac became a hopeless drunk, living with his mother in a suburban house in Lowell, Massachusetts.
What had my vastation – for that was what I was forced to conclude this long history of workplace bullying and consequent psychic disorder had actually been – done for me? Swedenborg described it as a way – perhaps the only way – of dissipating the “evils and falsities” of the life we have led. Certainly there was no lack of either in the way I’d been living before my bullshit was called by that troll-like creature from Down Under (even now I couldn’t think very charitably of her, though I was forced to concede that she’d had a point all along – had, in the final analysis, done me a favour).
“There are many kinds of vastations, and longer and shorter periods of vastation. Some are taken up into heaven in a comparatively short time, and some immediately after death,” he goes on to say.
My own appeared to have taken longer than the average – if Henry James Senior (or Jack Kerouac, for that matter) can be taken as in any way “typical” – but was no less painful or intense for that. Every part of me had been stripped bare, tried, and found wanting.
And out of all that, what?
I looked at the trees which flanked the long walks. That, perhaps. That endurance, that equanimity in the face of manmade pollution, tree-cutters saws, forest-fires, disaster, drought …
Apuleius concludes his Metamorphoses – or Golden Ass – with a transcendental vision of the goddess Isis, who changes him back from a donkey (don’t ask) into a man. And that’s where most adapted versions of the book end.
But the book goes on, reporting his various disappointments and perplexities in the priesthood he has been called to, his suspicion that they’re all just out to defraud him, and all the other pettinesses attendant on this new Life of the Spirit.
All of which has been a stumbling block for readers down the ages: is the book an ironic attack on religion, or a true believer’s confession? Its author refuses to say.
But there is, right at the end, another vision – not of the goddess, this time, but of her husband: Osiris, god of the dead. This is how it goes (in William Adlington’s 1566 translation from the Latin):
… the god Osiris appeared to me the night following, and giving me admonition said, There is no occasion why thou shouldest be afraid with so often order of religion, as though there were somewhat omitted, but that thou shouldest rather rejoyce, since as it hath pleased the gods to call thee three times, when as there was never yet any person that atchieved to the order but once: wherefore thou maist thinke thy selfe happy for so great benefits. And know thou that the religion which thou must now receive, is right necessary, if thou meane to persever in the worshipping of the goddesse, and to make solempnity on the festivall day with the blessed habite, which thing shalt be a glory and renowne to thee. [11]It doesn’t end, in other words. Most are called once, but some need more help than that – to be called three times, or even more. I can’t help suspecting I might turn out to be one of those.
As I turned towards home, I saw that the man with the plastic bucket was gone, and the possums had retired to their respective trees. Bats hung under the branches like ripe brown figs.
The moon was rising as I slipped out onto the street.
Notes:
[1] Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Ed. Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby. Preface by André Maurois. 1964. Penguin Modern Classics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 27.
[2] cf. Tree Worship (6/1/11-12/8/12) [available at: http://treeworship.blogspot.com/].
[3] cf. Meric Casaubon, A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits. 1659 (Kila, MT: Kessinger Publishing LLC, n.d.).
[4] cf. Gerry Kennedy & Rob Churchill. The Voynich Manuscript: The Unsolved Riddle of an Extraordinary Book Which Has defied Interpretation for Centuries. 2004. An Orion Paperback (London: Orion Books Ltd., 2005).
[5] George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four. 1949. Ed. Peter Davison. 1987. A Note on the Text. 1989. Introduction by Ben Pimlott. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 2000), 280.
[6] Henry Fielding, The History of the Adventures of Mr. Joseph Andrews and of His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams & An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews. 1741 & 1742. Ed. Douglas Brooks. 1970. Oxford English Novels. London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 337.
[7] The original phrase used by Tiberius was “Oderint dum probent” [Let them hate me, so long as they approve my deeds]. It was his successor Caligula who used the similar expression; “Oderint dum metuant.” [Let them hate me, so they but fear me]. Information from Suetonius. Lives of the Caesars I: Julius / Augustus / Tiberius / Caligula. Vol. 1 of 2. Trans. J. C. Rolfe. 1913. Rev. ed. 1951. Rev. Donna W. Hurley. Introduction by K. R. Bradley. Loeb Classical Library. London & Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 392 & 464.
[8] C. S. Forester, Payment Deferred. 1926 (New York: Bantam Books, 1961).
[9] Charles Alldritt, Tree Worship: With Incidental Myths and Legends (Auckland: Printed for the Author by Strong and Ready Ltd., 1965), [iii].
[11] Lucius Apuleius, The Golden Ass of Apuleius. Trans. William Adlington. 1566. The Chiltern Library (London: John Lehmann, 1946), 238.
Jack Ross: The Annotated Tree Worship: List of Topoi (2017)[21/11/13-5/3/2014]
[23,367 words]
[Published as The Annotated Tree Worship: List of Topoi. ISBN 978-0-473-41329-3 (Auckland: Paper Table, 2017), iv + 94 pp.]
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