Some thoughts after handing in a dissertation

1. On Cloud Nine
Sometimes, late at night, I lie awake and listen to the cargo trains rumbling by. And as my bed
shakes and the glass above my head hums itself back to sleep, sometimes I think, about this and
that, in staccato thoughts, which match the rolling wheels, into the dark beyond. They never
quite fit together.
Lately, I’ve thought a lot about mental illness. Isn’t that a strange sentence to write? Words that
somehow cast doubt on their own ability to have been articulated clearly. Anyway, I have some
railroaded thoughts that seem fit for transport, so here they are:
1) Why is mental illness - and student welfare - such a big topic at the best universities around
the world? An inordinate amount of my time in England has been spent under the shadow of this
friend’s or that one’s mental sickness, or my own. Is my generation somehow weaker, somehow
a whole lot more insane than any other generation to have walked the Earth? Have we somehow
devolved?
2) Related to this: why is it that the one thing the English Faculty at ‘Oxbridge’ (my
appropriately fictional university) is really world-renowned for is History of the Book - in other
words, the field of literature most closely aligned to the study of institution?
3) Is it possible that the reason Oxbridge English students are so well-versed in the institution of
literature (both as noun and verb - see I can’t stop myself) is not because the courses here are
particularly well-taught, but because the experience of institution is so total, so overpowering,
that it gets written into your very psyche, entrenched into every academic space you enter until
nothing but boxes and rubrics are left to fill or fail? It would seem that we marketize higher
education only to create academic spaces that, due to the competition they actively foster, are
almost intended to fail people. And what sort of a pedagogical attitude is that?
4) How can it be OK that our ‘best’ institutions are places which actively make it as difficult as
they can to pass, based on some out-dated, ‘meritocratic’ notion of education as a way for the
rich (oh, sorry, I mean ‘talented’) to get ahead, rather than improve the lot of every human being.
How is it that academics most renowned for their appreciation of the problems of institution are
incapable of acting upon and attempting to solve the problems within their own institution?
Oxbridge, and universities like it the world over, is sick. It has been sick for at least fifty years. It
has been critical for at least the last twenty.
5) And I don’t mean sick as in perverse, I mean it as in diseased, decaying, near-death. How can
it be that these most intelligent of academics cannot see what it is that people in their positions
are perpetrating against an entire generation of the ‘best minds’ humanity has produced,

2. enfeebled though we may be? For what they are doing is nothing short of driving us insane. And
it’s criminal.
6) This is because what is expected of us and what we are capable of producing are so far out of
kilter that it makes no sense for any genuinely sane person (do they even exist?) to attempt to
split the difference. I do not have a hope of recalling concepts and memorised information as
well as my grandfather did, I do not have a hope of ever reciting the log table, as my father still
can, and I cannot focus on stuff for nearly as long as I should be able to. But I can pull together
vast volumes of information, collect and collate it in interesting and engaging ways and share it
with people to whom it will matter. Why does the way I have been educated not reflect this?
7) Most people in the older generation will tell you it is because the education system is failing,
because standards aren’t what they used to be, because our attention spans are short, our
demands incessant and impatient, our egoism unbound. But the truth is that people who may or
may not live to see the flood which will engulf 250 million people in Calcutta can afford to talk
about ‘the generation of instant gratification’ because they do not grasp that unless we do things
as fast as possible, our world will die because of their inactivity. The truth is that they often have
no idea just what it is we are capable of, this generation of ‘snap your fingers, and it will happen’
(which brings, of course, it’s own problems).
8) That’s just climate change. The point is that all the institutions of which we are a part (and the
world-order these institutions were built to promote and protect) are making us sick. Genuinely.
Pursuing a career in academia as it is currently run is more likely to drive you insane than
perhaps any other line of work other than climate science. And if it doesn’t achieve that, it will
almost certainly leave you bitter and cynical.
9) Does this mean we shouldn’t pursue careers in academia? Not necessarily; people with
passion and desire have always had the ability to change their worlds for the better and we need
not be the kind of teachers who drive students to counselling. What is for certain in my
overtaxed, tired, and stressed-out mind is that counselling constitutes the cure, not prevention
(which is always more effective). It is not the students who are sick, and it is nothing new:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the
machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

3. who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on
tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light
tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New
York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos
night after night
[...] yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand
years.