Sweet Milk

 The sheltered groves of academe are exerting the same baneful influence on my character as they did the last few times I was enclosed in university walls. Part of the problem is that, when one is a student in an institution of higher learning, the only people around one who appear to have jobs, and who therefore must serve as emblems of successful adulthood, are professors. And talking to these professors in turn rapidly convinces one—because they are a profession, and like all professions have developed among themselves a set of self-flattering myths—that there is nothing else desirable in life that one could ever be. (This process, in turn, takes place—I find—regardless of whatever other, non-professorial "profession" the academic program in question claims to be preparing one for.)

The central professorial myth, and the one that proves most useful to them in exercising their spiritual terrorism to keep students on the straight path (something like the myth of hell in the Christian tradition), is that, if one ever sets foot outside of academia, one will kiss goodbye to all intellectual life. There is no intellectual life outside a university, the professors believe. And talking to them, one almost begins to believe it oneself. Even if one has in fact already had a job outside of academia in which one did intellectual work; even if by the end of one's previous job, before returning to the sheltered groves, one's daily tasks had largely been refined down to writing only about things one found interesting—even then the professors manage to convince. 

One starts to believe that, if one has any pretensions or aspirations at all to the intellectual life—to poetry or philosophy or literature or what have you—then only a handful of options are available: 1) One succeeds in becoming an academic, and entering the sacred grove; 2) one departs from the accepted path and seeks a job in the material realm, where one's brain will rot and personality atrophy as penalty for one's exile; or 3) one attempts to live the intellectual life outside the university walls and winds up an abject failure, because one confronts the harsh material law of the scholarly life: in order to perform intellectual labor, one needs a supply of food. And the only way to get bread while retaining leisure for scholarship is to obtain a sinecure from a rich patron, such as the board of regents of a great university. 

So potent is this myth that one can almost forget, for a time, that all of poetry that has any real blood in its veins was wrung from a vicious brawl with vanishing time. That any philosophy or criticism worth its salt was jotted down in intervals between the arrival of different creditors pounding at the door. (The intellectual life, philosophy, is, as Shakespeare's Friar Lawrence contends, "adversity's sweet milk.") To be sure, one needs some time unmolested in order to write. But such can be found in between tasks in any way of life. By the same token, any professor will be forced to spend the bulk of their day in department meetings. Any intellectual life, therefore—even in academia—must be snatched between the dull tasks necessary for living—unless one is Proust, and that required both an enormous private income and a deliberate process of self-immuring. 

Still more, if some leisure time is necessary to write, some threat to that leisure time is necessary no less. I've been reading the collected poems of Northumbrian high modernist poet Basil Bunting this week, and one is struck in doing so by an irony. The poet, whose letters to friends are extensively quoted in the volume's annotations, was often complaining of the "drudgery" of his newspaper job, which he asserted had deprived him of his muse, cost him any time to devote to poetry, and in all had reduced him to "imbecility." Yet, the liveliest stuff in the book is made up, not of the long mandarin exercises in high modern inscrutability for which he is famous, but in the short poems where he is lamenting nothing other than the economic necessity and vanishing time that is preventing his communication with the muse!

Thus, the lack of time and the poetry itself, far from being straightforward adversaries of one another, would appear to be locked in a self-reinforcing dialectic—something like the relationship between the strictures of poetic form and the expansive impulses of poetic matter in verse itself. Each resists, yet each needs the other. And Bunting himself, in one of the finest little squibs in the book, acknowledges as much: "The scholar ought to be like the poet,/an Ishmael, scanted and feared;/a magician, impious to be/consulted in secrecy and shame./[...]/The moment advantage has a/part in his studies or his craft,/his work perishes." 

In short, adversity is evidently the muse's sweet milk too. And this is the dread bargain the seekers after sinecures make: they desire them so they will have time to write. But so soon as they are found—the content to write about vanishes! They seek them so that they will open the path to the intellectual life unobstructed. But, so soon as the obstructions vanish—and "advantage" now gains "a part in [their] craft"—the intellectual life disappears with them!