Metaphysics and its discontents
1.
Ad Astra, the name that someone bestowed on it, has always struck me as being at odds with its plainness, arising at it did in a nondescript district of this city, a mostly postwar concoction, a necessity given how it was left after those dreadful years, virtually leveled.
I’m a metaphysician, a follower of Whitehead. Ad Astra’s Department of Metaphysics stands alone in defending the Great Outlier, as we think of him, our Swedenborg. (That I’m a Swedenborgian, too, goes unmentioned in my dossier.) We’re a tight group, a “school” in the patois of academia’s historians, a throwback or a survivor, depending on who’s assessing us. “A school” feels right, despite its hint of retrospect. “Neo-Whiteheadians,” a student recently declared, but the term has yet to catch on. (Her desire to take us back to Aristotle is getting more traction.)
But back to Ad Astra, this self-styled city university in its uniformly Brutalist surroundings, if this term isn’t too grand for a place so diagrammatic, almost a child’s drawing . It wasn’t my plan even to come here, let alone stay, but academic life is what it is, and now I’m a professor, not a tutor, a reader, or a senior lecturer, as I would have been at some grander institution. No, I have my rights and privileges, my office with its bookshelves and its partial view of the building’s courtyard, the building we share with other Humanists, Persons of Letters, the rearguard that follows in the wake of science and engineering, law and medicine, and the lesser professions. We, the metaphysicians, are only barely ahead of the theologians, holdovers from earlier moments when the devout endowed the chairs and fellowships out of religious fervor or the need to assuage consciences all too complicit in the affairs of Empire, another set of names to be erased in this new age of recrimination and reparation.
The building is as hulking and anonymous as the others, built by the same combine that regenerated the city in its ferro-concretely modern form. It’s big enough that there are lifts as well as stairs whose landings were once handy for a smoke, prelude to other forms of recreation, but all this has ended. I am a professor, as I mentioned, but remarkably at odds with my environment, practically emeritus only not.
As such, I have the right to drive here and park, but the traffic is dreadful now, so I take the train in and walk unless the weather is too daunting. If that happens, I go back and forth on the local bus, a line that’s more punctual than the train, in reality. I’ve organized my life like Kant, loosely speaking, but it’s really the nature of the beast, Ad Astra, its tempo.
I live at some distance, as the city itself is a place from which one wants to get away. It’s something of a miracle that a train still stops there at all, and then only in commuting hours, sporadically otherwise. I go in three days a week, Tuesday through Thursday. I should say “I come in,” but my mind has shifted. I glance out my office window to bring it back.
2.
How did I become so enamored of Whitehead? It was an encounter with a divinity student, a woman. She glossed his argument to me and it sounded true. An actress or at any rate a performer, she went on to other things, the absolute opposite of mine. I stayed with it, this project to restore metaphysics to a world that had stripped it away. But how do you do this?
Drained it away might be more accurate, yet the husk remained animate, even lively, while the blood sat in jars that the metaphysicians rearranged. Some fall in a separate category, what “Neo-” seeks, desiring to make it actionable in the world, this thing everyone else abandoned. I see the Swedish teenage agitator as her fellow activist, throwing the blood they drained in their husky faces. I too was once an activist.
I loved my actress friend, in a way, but learning is sped up by such attachments. I made myself useful, the saltpeter of such longings, and she moved on in time, on to other things, as noted, while I came here. Ad Astra was in some sense unavoidable, owing to its allegiance to an encyclopedic ideal, a universe so vast that a school as arcane as ours slipped in. In the flood it was similar, I imagine, Noah and his wife too pressed to care past a certain point who joined them.
This student should really be called a colleague, as she’s been present for years already, with her final degree and her leave to stay, but no love of this place or of us, since we barely pay her and yet she’s stuck here by virtue of her country of origin.
That we exploit her shamelessly is the sad truth, as she has a big heart and is a gifted teacher whose nature cannot refuse her students anything, even if we pay her next to nothing while we, the faculty, are paid for doing very little. I have my several books, but my heart is at home in my garden or in my chair by the fire reading. I take the train in, I lecture, but she is the real thing and I’m a facsimile of it. Not that I lack knowledge, but she wants to do something with it, the way the Swedish adolescent wants to do something with it, seeing as the world needs it.
“Whatever it is,” I could add, but Whitehead rebukes me on every page. Whatever it was, he saw it clearly, and she sees it, too, plain as day, what’s missing that makes all the rest, everything that’s not our school or perhaps everything that’s not what was originally our school’s subject, empty in a bad sense, whereas Whitehead saw emptiness like Zen does. (I could add that this building is like Taoism’s original block, only there are windows, mine with its partial view. Such added thoughts constantly arise in me.)
My informant also saw it and infected me, a knowledge like fecundity: you can only interact with it, attach to it, let it transform you of its own accord in its own sweet time. (How is it, then, that I’m incongruously here in this blockhouse amid others of its kind, Ad Astra and its city both?)
3.
Recently, my inner calm was roiled by a diagnosis. I was unperturbed before this to take all my position grants me to supervise the graduate students and give my quasi-colleague a pittance although she did the work and, what’s more, they were grateful to her and, word reached me, condemning of me. Yet even then I unmoved, but this diagnosis, this heightened sense of my mortality, brings me to my senses. It’s remorse, I recognize.
What’s more, I see that despite her anger towards me, my diagnosis leads her to put it aside. I look for ways to pay her more, but Ad Astra is set up, I now remember, to reward exploitation. It may be a feature of academia in general, that these matters are subject to administrative oversight.
I manage to pry something loose for her. Just getting it approved is more labor than I’ve expended in years, but I do it, prodded by my diagnosis.
Mortality does this, even if, materialist that I am, I foresee no Heavenly Judge, only the judgement of my peers when I, in absentia, am a subject of talk, a future conditional sort of thought, mere speculation, but this is the sort of thing one thinks, so diagnosed.
If I were younger, I would step out to a landing and light up, look around to see who else is there, a scene that reminds me of Italian films of a earlier era when a man with a cigarette had a certain charisma.
4.
Ithaka, Cavafy called it. She wants to go there, a destination that’s emphatically not here, not this city nor this region. Here is where I am. I have no faith in distant places, except my own small house and garden, my town that isn’t here, either. It’s enough for me and not enough for her. She has come far and this is a waystation where she’s delayed, here against her will, she says, and yet also her home these many years, a milieu steeped in familiarity, one of the gathering places of those similarly infected, but unlike my own infection, she and some of them have this urge to act.
Ad Astra is my Alexandrian library before the fire, this school is desks and shelves or however they stored their pre-codex collections. I was a scholar. Before my diagnosis, I thought I was a poet, too, but a librarian is what I’ve become, nodding sagely and pointing to this ancient text or that.
