The Oxford Don
With Anthony W. Johnson, Oxford Don, January 18, 2014
The morning after the defence of my second doctoral dissertation, In Cite: Epistemologies of Creative Writing, for the degree of Dr.Phil. – a notch higher than the PhD – I sit with cards, champagne, a dog, and an Oxford don. Having borrowed the man’s cape for the sake of demonstrating a point, I think of what accomplishments I celebrate and the implication of 'having done it,' a number of things, and then the actual premise for having done it.
I can say, 'I've done it,' celebrate 30 years in Denmark without succumbing to the urge to belong, to integrate, to serve prejudices, or feel hurt by people's invented stories about what I am and what I do.
'I've done it,' achieve the highest degrees possible and the highest university appointments, only to go my way and eventually start my own school, Aradia Academy, teaching people to read like the Devil.
'I've done it,' consorted with masters, dead and alive, who contributed to a few precious realizations. I think the biggest must be the lesson that instructs in complete self-reliance. You are what you are. Your place is with that, with your own goddamn perfect confidence in the fact that the most interesting is that you're a perpetual foreigner, and that you like that state in its supreme manifestation.
These days, in addition to teaching critical studies, I teach the blessings of getting rid of any expectations to belong, and instead rejoice in waiting for others to come to you, only so you can ask them, 'what can I do for you?'
Of temperament and Zen inclination, I was never afflicted by the curse of having to belong anywhere other than to my own good self, but I see that a lot of worldly misery is related to the idea. There's plenty of nationalist crusades out there forcing foreigners into the belief that they don't belong. Good luck to them, for they fail if they meet perpetual foreigners like me. For we will all be asking in return: 'what makes you think belonging is what interests us?'
How I love the art of baffling... How I love the face that drops: 'but I thought that you...' I tell the bewildered: 'You're thinking too much. Breathe, and stop belonging to me'.
In Cite: Epistemologies of Creative Writing is all about this, actually, about writers who didn’t belong on purpose, who instructed without a method and by stumbling into grace. In order to get what they were doing, I tried to make myself dumb, so that any constructed cleverness wouldn’t come in the way of receiving a direct transmission from their writings.
I had fun with this lot, and I even got to speak in the voices of the writers I mention in the last chapter of the book, a tour de force dedicated to prose poetry. The flow in Zorn’s Lemma is different than the one in the fragment that precedes it, In Praise of Pandemonium. We’re here with epistemologists of creative writing, the ones that belong to the idea of sacrificing what you love the most, so that a perfect vision of non serviam is served in the name of the art that touches the heart.
January 18, 2014
