I remember once, whilst in midst of editing a series of poetry anthologies for a university press, taking a walk on North Head with a much respected local poet (and senior academic).
She listened to my tale of woe about the increasing amounts of acrimony and discord involved in the project, then outlined her theory of the lustrum.
A lustrum was the period of five years preceding a census in Ancient Rome. She claimed that that should be about the effective length of a creative project. Sometimes they have to be renewed for another five years, but even then it’s best to concentrate on the limits in everything.
I’ve thought of that conversation often in the last couple of years. What I really like is to sit as I’m doing now, tapping away on a keyboard, and trying to get closer to that elusive meaning hovering behind each screen of words. What I have spent my time doing is largely other: communicating with students via the screen, rather than face-to-face, grading work by people I’ve never met in the flesh and am never likely to meet.
I’ll never regret spending so much time in Academia, but a whole slew of lustra have come and gone since I started there (especially if you count a decade of undergraduate and graduate study), and I find now that I want to change gear, lose that slightly absurd air of authority you’re forced to assume while teaching, in favour of sitting here alone with nothing solid to guide me.
It feels terrifying. That’s why I know it’s probably right.
– So what do you think? How bad is it?
– It’s not so bad. A bit pompous in places, I guess. You might want to look at all those ‘Whilsts’ and ‘Whilomes’ …
– I don’t say ‘whilome’! Actually, I don’t even know what it means.
– Neither do I, but you get the general idea. It’s kind of like cuddly old Uncle Albert, the great physicist, sitting down with the kiddies to explain his brand new theory of relativity in terms we can all understand.
– Gotcha. In my defence, though, I do have to stress that it wasn’t my idea in the first place. I didn’t want to write a piece about my reasons for quitting the university. They were the ones who insisted on it.
– That doesn’t mean you had to do it, though.
He had me there. There was no real professional advantage to it. How could there be, in fact, given it was about my reasons for retiring from the Academic rat-race in the first place?
All I can say is that it takes a while to adjust to the new order, to get over that constant need to be publishing and performing before that grim and faceless (and I suppose largely imaginary) tribunal which sits in the shadows, determining your future advancement within the institution.
My next door neighbour, Carl, had served out his full term in the Air Force, then gone into civilian life as a hospital administrator. He was one of the few people left in my life whom I could confide in about such matters, as he, too, understood the horror of the bureaucratic labyrinth.
What’s more, his secret passion was reading nineteenth-century novels, and I was probably the only person living nearby who could match him Brontë for Brontë.
But perhaps I’d better go back to the beginning, so you can better understand just what it was I was consulting him about. Starting in media res and then backtracking is a literary device as old as Homer, but it does have its drawbacks in a case such as this.
So, anyway, to make a long story short, an old associate-slash-acquaintance of mine had decided to start up a new journal (really a blog, but such things always sound better if you label them as ‘online periodicals’), and he’d asked me to contribute a piece on my reasons for shifting from my cushy Academic job to join the precariat.
What I’d just finished reading out to Carl was the result.
A trifle stilted, yes, and with a certain amount of personal tub-thumping built into it, but – I thought, at least – an attempt to write about the subject without either offending my ex-colleagues or papering over the deficiencies in my own less-than-glittering academic career.
I deliberated for a long time over the inclusion of a phrase, early on in the piece, about feeling at times like ‘a bit of a loser.’ I tried ‘a bit of an also-ran’ as an alternative, but I kept coming back to the crisp ring of that word ‘loser.’ I also tried ‘impostor’, but that led me down the rabbit-hole of ‘impostor’s syndrome.’
It definitely goes against the grain to call yourself a loser. If people weren’t thinking that already (and let’s face it, most people think solely about themselves), they certainly will be once they’ve read it in cold print.
It was risky, sure, but then the whole piece was risky, in that it exposed some private thoughts about the whole enterprise of ‘retirement’ with less caginess than I’d hitherto employed.
But anyway, in for a penny, in for a pound. It seemed foolish to live in fear of imaginary judgements from imaginary people, so I decided to let it stand. I could always cut it out later if it seemed too distracting.
So I sent it off to my friend-slash-acquaintance. He acknowledged it by return email, saying that it would take him a week or so to get to it, and he would be in touch about it after that.
And that was that.
Until I realised, a couple of weeks later, that I hadn’t heard from him, and decided to send a quick follow-up email to ask if he’d got round to reading it yet.
Nothing. Silence on top of silence, in fact.
It seemed too needy to write again, and yet I felt a bit horrified at the thought of having put so much work and time into such a throwaway piece. Was it really as bad as all that? Perhaps so. Perhaps he was looking for something more scholarly, less popular in focus.
The fact of his site being little more than a glorified private blog had perhaps misled me into thinking that the elaborate mandarin discourse beloved of my former colleagues would not, this time, be required. I itched to rewrite it, to replace that ‘loser’ label with something more along the lines of ‘repulsively brainy egghead.’
Perhaps I should have studied the site more closely. I had skimmed through a few of the pieces on it, which had had rather an academic tinge to them, but it hadn’t occurred to me that such generalised subject matter might require treatment along similar lines.
But the subject matter was his idea – that was the problem! It was he who had given me the topic for the piece. It would certainly not have been my choice, but – used as I am to external direction – I’d simply sat down to write according to the brief, without considering it further.
How long should one wait after sending out a piece before you can ask about it?
A month to six weeks was the formula I’d always worked by – but that was back in the days of print journals and self-addressed envelopes. Surely, in the electronic age, a couple of weeks would suffice?
Which is when I found out about ghosting.
Ghosting, as no doubt the rest of you already know, began as a term for the phenomenon of suddenly cutting off all contact with someone you’ve gone out with a couple of times, or have been corresponding with on a reasonably regular basis.
All of a sudden, without warning or explanation, your calls go unanswered, your texts are left hanging, and – in extreme cases – your access to all social media accounts is cut off.
There’s a certain cruel practicality to it, admittedly. It removes the need for self-justification, those painful last meetings, generally conducted in restaurants or other public places to inhibit embarrassing rage or violence on the part of the dumpee. Nor does it require any further subsequent monitoring or action by the dumper.
I first discovered the term while reading an article about job applications. Not that I’m particularly concerned with those at present, but I have spent a good deal of my life preparing and agonising over CVs and cover letters of various stripes, so it is a subject that interests me.
Apparently it’s now become normal for candidates to advance quite some way along the selection process – to be interviewed by their prospective teams and employers, given details of remuneration and even, in some cases, relocation – only to be dumped abruptly, at the last minute, without further contact, let alone explanation.
The devastating effect of this can only be imagined. All of us are used to sending out polite letters of inquiry which receive no reply, but to be nursed so far along the road only to be erased from consideration at the very last minute surely verges on deliberate abuse?
Apparently not. A number of employers have justified this procedure for its economy and practicality. All along they’d had someone else in mind, but while they were waiting for that person to make up their mind, it was only reasonable for them to prepare a proxy or two. ‘Here’s one I made earlier,’ as the TV chefs used to say.
Employment applications, job interviews, relationships, even legal contracts – ghosting is now a feature of all of them.
As well, it would appear, as the world of editing.
It’s true that in the past I’d sent out whole books to publishers and never heard anything back from them – I guess because it was too much trouble to reply.
Not unsolicited manuscripts, I hasten to add. I quite understand that simply adding to some major publisher’s slush pile is insufficient reason for blaming them for their failure to respond.
These were occasions where I’d sent advance letters of inquiry, to people I knew, asking them if they’d be interested in seeing some work along these lines. It was only when assured that they would be that I’d committed my work to their keeping.
And then nothing.
Critiquing a whole book to its fond parent’s face is, admittedly, quite a big ask. That rejection letter is bound to be subjected to literary criticism on a scale never contemplated by its author. Every word will be subjected to careful scrutiny – and niggling deconstruction – for weeks, possibly years to come.
So, yes, much though I resented it at the time (and continue to resent it, if the truth be told), I do understand their silence.
A trivial little piece for a blog, though? For a poxy little blog that nobody reads, run by a nobody, for no-one?
Why had I been stupid enough to send it in the first place? That was probably the most vital question, but what worried me was the extent to which it had taken hold of my mind.
I literally couldn’t sleep at night for composing long sarcastic letters in my head to my putative editor. Some of them were actually pretty good, but I understood that getting up to transcribe them would be one step further into madness than I cared to take.
Worst of all were the short, cutting letters. I spent so much time polishing and crafting the mots justes, just the right statesmanlike words to pass on the burn to my adversary, that my eyes began to take on the hooded scowl of the chronic insomniac.
So what to do? Should I actually send one of them? Should I simply try to move on? The online authorities appeared to be divided on this question.
Certain common themes did, however, stand out:
- Don’t try to justify or second-guess your feelings: accept them for what they are
(in my case, bordering on psychotic) - Don’t rant about it on social media, or start to troll your ex-friend
(good advice – received just in time, luckily) - If they do reestablish contact, don’t ask them what happened – just listen to what they have to say
(easier said than done, I suspect – not applicable in this case, anyway) - Do talk about it to people you trust
That last – probably the most useful piece of advice of all, was luckily the easiest to implement.
Hence my invitation to Carl to drop over for a beer and a chat, and hence my hijacking of said conversation to read out the whole of my piece to my longsuffering neighbour. Fortunately he’d run into his fair share of eccentrics both in the Air Force and the Health Services, so was well equipped to talk lunatics such as myself off the ledge.
– So what should I do? What’s your advice?
– Why do you care about it so much? Does it really matter if it appears in print or not?
– No, of course not. It’s just the contempt it shows, the fact that he’s calculated that he can get away with not answering me ever, and he just expects me to take it.
– You know the best revenge is living well.
– Yes, yes, I know all that. Psychobabble is not a foreign language to me, I assure you. But it’s no good saying ‘don’t let it bug you’ to someone who’s asking you how to stop something bugging them.
– Fair point. What do the psychobabble sites advise, then? I take it you’ve consulted some of them?
I outlined the four points listed above.
– Is there anything else they tell you to do?
– Well, it sounds a bit ridiculous. One of the more chatty ones did have a bit of extra advice.
– Which was?
I didn’t mention these ones in my list, as I must admit I was rather embarrassed by how immediately attractive I found them. The site in question had outlined two possible scenarios:
- Write a letter and don’t send it
- Talk to a cushion on a chair
– Talk to a cushion!
– Yeah, I knew you’d find that amusing.
– No, no, I see the point. The cushion is intended to stand in for your friend, I take it?
– Not friend: acquaintance. Ex-acquaintance now. Not even a colleague, really.
– Whatever. So they say you should either write out everything you’ve got to say to them, or (maybe for the less literate among us) harangue a proxy version of them?
– You got it.
– And did you?
– Did I what?
– Did you write a letter to your friend?
– Of course I did! I’ve written tons of them! That’s the whole problem, really: stopping myself writing letters to him.
– But did you keep any of them? Can I hear one?
– No. I knew you’d ask that. I destroyed all of them after writing them. [Lie]
– Did you try the cushion scenario, then? How did it go?
– No, I thought I’d try the ‘phone a friend’ option first. I’m beginning to wonder if I shouldn’t have done it the other way round, now, though.
– No need to get shitty. I am trying to help. I just need to know the parameters of the problem.
That, too, was a lie, as you’ve no doubt guessed. I had tried the cushion experiment. It was a pillow rather than a cushion, actually, as I found that its floppy, rectangular form made it easier to anthropomorphise as a sentient being.
I’d started off more or less as I kicked off this story, above. With a brief account of how things had looked from my side of the ledger.
The trouble was that the pillow kept on interrupting. Time and again I was forced to lift a hand and shout out ‘let me finish!’ as it started to justify itself. Man, it was the most talkative, self-justifying pillow I ever met.
Which got me talking faster and faster to get it all in. I got jumbled up with the time sequence, events from the far past coexisting with the matter at hand. Luckily my phone camera cut off after a while, or I would have been left with a lo-res cinematic record of the whole thing.
I did get a good deal of my final peroration on film, though. It ran as follows:
I realise you may not have meant to do what you’ve ended up doing, but you’ve treated me with complete contempt, as a nonentity unworthy of your or anyone else’s time. I spend my life trying to be considerate, to put people at their ease, to avoid making them feel worse about themselves. You, though – you waltz through life as if there’s no-one else in the universe. You’re ready enough to use people when it suits you, but you have no real belief in their independent existence. For you, the universe is a huge echoing void with only your own quacking voice grinding relentlessly on at its centre. You are the supreme monad – the primordial atom at the heart of your own big bang story. And yet you’re so pathetic! Such a nothing! You would never dare to refer to yourself as a loser, even though that’s what everyone else thinks of you. You see yourself as a victim, but actually you’re a bully; as an intellectual, when really you’re a pompous dolt; as a spiritual beacon, when in truth you’re a solipsistic baboon …And so on. You can see, perhaps, why I wasn’t anxious to share the results of this experiment with Carl.
And yet it did get me somewhere. It showed me just how very near the edge of the abyss I was. Nor did it help that in the digital age it’s so terribly easy to find out where somebody lives. I’d already started to fantasise about staking out his house. Waiting outside till the opportunity came to – what? Torch his letterbox? Egg his windows? Let down his tyres?
– Have you thought of seeing a counsellor?
– What?
– Well, I don’t know what more I can advise than I’ve said already, and most of that has just been asking you questions about what you’ve already tried. Nor do I have much to suggest beyond what the sites themselves have to offer in the way of decompression techniques.
– Have you ever felt this way yourself about another human being? Someone who pushed in line in front of you, then laughed in your face about it? That kind of thing?
– Well, of course. Of course I have.
– What did you do about it?
– Moved on, I guess. Certainly there’ve been some ugly moments at work: screaming matches and standing-straight-at-attention in front of the C.O.’s desk as he tears strips off you.
– So you must have some way of discharging emotions, of shifting gears in your head.
– I suppose so, yes.
– How did you do it? It can’t have been easy.
– Well, it’s hard to say. It’s so long ago. It seems like another life, really.
– Another life?
– Yes. The army, then the health service, then the accident, and now …
– The accident? You never told me about that.
– Didn’t I? I’m sure I must have! I mean, we’ve had conversations like this before – haven’t we? It certainly all sounds pretty familiar.
– Tell me about the accident.
– There’s not much to tell, really. I was driving home from work; or was it driving to work? I don’t know. Anyway, I was driving, it was foggy, I didn’t see the stop sign, even though I must have known it was there, it was a route I’d driven a thousand times, and the next thing I felt was this great blow in the back of my car seat. It was if I’d been punched by a giant. I could see the car crumpling around me, and a lot of screeching metal and brakes, or perhaps that was just me screaming …
– But you must have been okay. I mean, you look okay now.
– I guess I must have. I don’t remember. I have a sort of voice in my head telling me about pulling over to the curve, swapping insurance information, giving an account of the accident to the cops, but it doesn’t seem real, exactly. It’s not concrete and exact, like the rest of the event. It’s as if I just made it up as the kind of thing that must have happened.
– Why must it have happened that way? I mean, you could have been knocked unconscious, woken up in hospital …
– Yeah, but I think if that had happened I wouldn’t have remembered the accident itself. Isn’t that usually the way? Don’t you lose at least a few hours of your memory if you’ve been knocked out?
– I don’t know.
– I do remember getting out of the car. I must have managed to steer it to the side of the street somehow. I remember getting out of the car and suddenly slumping over. The people in the other car … I remember them, too. I was a bit afraid they were going to be super-aggressive, maybe give me a punching, but all they seemed concerned about was whether I was okay. They were very young, but just full of concern.
– And were you okay?
– I don’t know. I must have been. There isn’t anything after that.
– How do you mean?
– Doesn’t it strike you as a bit odd, that we should be here, living side by side in this suburb, retired from our jobs, but not really doing anything much, not going out, not getting involved in anything much.
– Except sending off articles to blogsites, that is?
– Except sending off articles. But even that. I mean, aren’t you the one who was so keen on setting up his own website, offering alternative views uncensored by the Academy? Was it the fact that this other guy was stealing your thunder that really busted your balls?
– I don’t know. Now that you come to mention it, I guess I do have a bit of a background in online self-publishing.
– And did you ever ghost anyone who sent you an article you didn’t want to publish, but didn’t really want to discuss with them either?
– I suppose I might have. I’m not perfect. And doesn’t Freud say we most vehemently denounce the deficiencies we suspect are most prominent in ourselves?
– I don’t know about that, but it does seem like it might be a case of the biter bit.
– I was so angry! Positively homicidal. I’d literally started fantasising about killing him and leaving his body with some kind of message written on it: his severed hand shoved down his own throat, or his head left on top of a typewriter.
– You fantasised about it, but you’d never do it, would you?
– I’m not sure … I mean, now that I come to think of it, there is a bit of a darkness. I don’t know how to describe it: a memory shut-down.
– You didn’t do it.
– How do you know? I might have done. I simply don’t remember. How crazy is that?
– I know because I know who did.
– Who did what?
– Who did it. Who killed you, and cut off your hand, and left it lying on top of your keyboard, while the rest of you went into the acid bath.
– What!
– It’s all coming back. About the accident. The one I didn’t survive, and waking up here, next door to you, and getting into these conversations about things that didn’t happen, or sort of did, but not the way we remember. I died. You were killed. You were killed by that guy whose article you spiked without telling him. They put him in the nuthouse. It was a bit of a news story for a while, because the way he did it was so gruesome and picturesque.
– You mean, I’m dead? I don’t feel dead.
– How does it feel to be dead?
– I don’t know. Not like this. Not like … ordinary.
– How is it likely to feel? What else can we feel? Maybe we’re working something out. Maybe this is some kind of purgatory. Then again, maybe it’s just the last flickers of a dying intellect, rummaging through the shelves of its memories.
– Or maybe it’s hell. Maybe I goaded that guy with my silence till he literally made me the ghost I was pretending to be. Maybe it’s poetic justice.
– Maybe it is. But what about me? What did I do?
– I don’t know, Carl. What do you think you might have done?
– I don’t know. I suppose I wasn’t always the nicest guy. I didn’t really listen to other people. Basically I was always just waiting to start talking myself.
– You’re not like that now.
– Are you trying to tell me it’s working? That we’re working on our problems together, and one of these days we might get to go into the light instead of being stuck down here.
– Wherever this is.
– Anyway, I hope you’re feeling better about your problem. A trouble shared is a trouble halved, as they say.
– Much better. Thanks for listening, Carl. Your place tomorrow?
– Sure thing.
As he walked off I could see a faint fog gathering around him. There’ve never been many (any?) cars on our street, but off in the distance I could hear the rush-hour traffic starting to build. It sounded urgent, angry ... something which could come down on you any moment if you just let your attention slip for some reason.
Come to think of it, hadn’t I been married once? And hadn’t she died in a car-crash? I remembered a funeral – closed-casket – and a church full of mourners. When was that? And who was it who’d hit her? Some kind of an ex-military man, full of glib excuses to cover the fact that he’d had rather more than a skinful before heading home.
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