Retrogression

 For my 33rd birthday—the start of my rosy crucifixion year—my dad compiled a slideshow of all the photos of me he could find on his computer, arranged in roughly chronological order. I was deeply touched by the gesture, but somewhat destabilized by the result. Not that I objected to each and every photo of myself. But seeing still images from your life arranged in sequence, you can't help but interpret them as a kind of story. And the story this sequence seemed to be telling was one of potential unrealized and promise unfulfilled. 

More specifically: there was a long sequence of photos at the beginning showing me as an adorable child. What a normal-looking and perfectly acceptable person, I thought. What promise! His whole life ahead of him. Then, it's like you can almost pinpoint the moment where it all starts to go wrong. And this coincides, of course, with the onset of puberty. 

"Oh, everyone has an 'awkward stage,'" my mother reassures me. But what if mine never stopped; it just continued right along to the present? The photos don't entirely bely this version of events, no matter how long I stare at them. It's like: from ages zero to eleven I was on a clear path to normality. Then I chose—and indeed, it was deliberate, as I recall—to veer off. Instead of the awkward age therefore appearing a kind of temporary dip in the graph, it is the fork of a branching path. Perhaps there is some other universe in which the blond 11-year-old in the photos grew up to live an utterly wholesome and successful life; but it is not this one. 

Okay, but is my life really so disgraceful as that? No; or at least, not to a degree that isn't shared by millions of others. A friend was lamenting to me the other day: "I still need to talk to my therapist," he said, "about my fall from greatness." He looks back on his life during his twenties, he tells me, and he is astounded by how much he accomplished. Where did it all go? What did it all lead to? He takes it for granted that it did in fact go wrong, and that whatever his current life entails—though viewed by me from the outside as a perfectly stable and happy one—must be terribly inadequate. I tell him I empathize.

But then I ask: "Is this not simply how everyone feels?" And this is the point in the post in which I trot out Orwell's line about how every life viewed from within looks like a failure, and so on. But even if we grant all of this, we might nonetheless also be forced to agree: some of us fail harder than others. 

Am I such a one? Surely not. Surely there are much worse cases than mine. And if I'd seen the sequence of photos even a year earlier, I might not have interpreted them in the same light. I don't actually think I am going backward in life. The problem is just that, in some realms of adult progress, moving forward requires a temporary retrogression. This is especially galling when it has the character of remedial work: the effort to patch in a gap that one probably should have filled long before, in order to succeed in one's chosen field: in my case, getting a law degree. 

I've written recently about the curiously infantilizing experience of returning to school in one's thirties. Even if that school is a professional one, one might still find oneself on a typical day seated next to a classmate and talking to them about their lives before law school, and they drop a reference to how the pandemic interfered with their third year of college. One suddenly realizes that one went to college roughly a decade before they did, and that one is far closer in age to one's instructor than to the child sitting next to you, and you feel abruptly that some terrible mistake has been made. 

I found literary consolation for this experience in Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke, you will recall—a visionary satirical tale in which the grown author is abducted and forcibly re-installed in a school for little boys where his adult identity is stripped and he is subjected to a deliberate and thoroughgoing infantilization. More recently still, I find that Donald Barthelme has told a tale with a remarkably similar premise, in his postmodern fable "Me and Miss Mandible." Here, a man in his mid-thirties is incorrectly assigned to a school room and forced to toil through exercises that he thought he had put behind him decades earlier. 

A recurring motif in Barthelme's stories is the distant, irrational, authoritarian father. Another, closely-related motif is that of the distant, irrational, authoritarian father-surrogate—the bureaucratic institution that subjects its powerless charges to pointless routines. One of these is school, as in "Me and Miss Mandible." Another is the army, in which Barthelme served during the 1950s period of the mandatory draft. In the "Miss Mandible" story, Barthelme has his lead character draw the comparison between the two institutions explicitly. And in a later story, published the following decade, Barthelme tells a remarkably similar story of an army recruit who is mistakenly re-assigned. 

"I wasn't really supposed to be there at all," says the recruit—a man Barthelme's age who had served in the army decades earlier, just as Barthelme did, but who had long since been discharged. "I said [...] that I'd done all this before, that it was all a mistake." And later: "I did all this [...] once, twenty years ago. Why do I have to do it all over again?"

My own father—as the opening anecdote of the post perhaps reveals—is in no way a Barthelmean father. But I have had the same negative experiences as others with the bureaucratic father-surrogates. They are unavoidable in complex society, where we have all traded in some of our natural freedom for the protection from external dangers that the state claims to afford. One tolerates some of the arbitrariness and absurdity of school as a young person, however, only on the implicit promise that one will some day be relieved of duty—but this then makes it all the more galling when one finds oneself dragged back into the hated establishment and re-infantilized all over again. 

That is the process that leads to the conviction that it is all wrong. "I did this already," I cry, with Barthelme's protagonist: "Why do I have to do it all over again?"

Why do it, then? Why choose to go back (for it is, I have to admit, a choice in my case, unlike how it goes for the characters in "Miss Mandible" and "The Sergeant," who are assigned to infantile or infantry duty without their consent)? For the same reason that Barthelme's protagonist in "Me and Miss Mandible" starts to actually like the school experience and its arbitrariness, given enough time, and eventually stops protesting. It is because being re-infantilized offers a second chance to get it right this time. It is looking back over that photo reel, finding the image at age 11 or 12 before it all went to seed, and returning to that spot and intervening to make it go right this time. Give me another crack at it, please!

Reviewing his own mistakes and missteps in adult life—all the places where he went wrong—Barthelme's protagonist adds: "Small wonder that re-education seemed my only hope. It is clear even to me that I need reworking in some fundamental way. How efficient is the society that provides thus for the salvage of its clinkers!"

And so the very sense of retrogression that makes me dread the return to the school is exactly what I was seeking. I have no right to complain. I could have just kept going along the same timeline that branched off from the earlier sequence at age 11. I chose not to. I chose to go back and see if there were other pathways still recoverable. 

And it wasn't even, it has to be admitted, that the previous pathway was bad. It was really quite nice. But it became clear to me over time that it ended—like all adult pathways—in eventual death, which made it seem too like failure. And while going to law school may not solve that particular problem, it can preserve the illusion of keeping it at bay. And so the institutions are not to blame for the re-infantilizing process: it was exactly that for which I came back pleading!