Why oh why must it be this way
Before you can read me you gotta learn how to see me …
Free your mind and the rest will follow.

— En Vogue, 2010

As a culmination of my two years of graduate study in English at Georgetown, I set myself a project of answering the question, “Why dork around with books?” – meaning, Why read literature? Why concern yourself with literary texts, particularly those deemed canonical, those that have somehow been knighted as comprising that vexed entity, the capital-C Canon? I had wanted to answer this question in both an intellectual mode (how the canon has been made, changed, challenged, and by whom; and also whose and what ends it has served) and in a personal mode (why do I, one particular being on this planet with one particular history, care?).

But as I’ve contemplated the completion of this project (in academic parlance, a “capstone”), it has become increasingly daunting. Partly this has to do with my own individual mishegoss (Yiddish for “craziness”) around the completion of anything, around the effort of herding the various small sheep in my mind into something resembling a coherent flock (of ideas, of theses, of arguments). And in part, it has to do with the impossibility of summing up in any way, shape, or form my two years of graduate study in English at Georgetown.

First, on my own personal difficulties with coherence: Although contemporary academia has long since acknowledged the impossibility of a unified subject, a certain kind of formal coherence continues to hold sway. The exigencies of citations, footnotes, Works Cited lists, MLA style (and as a former copy editor and current teaching of writing in the making, I respect these exigencies and well know both their advantages and their weaknesses) remain the framework into which even the most unusual or revolutionary ideas must be stuffed. (Of course and somewhat ironically, this very essay is part of a digital capstone project, which has exigencies somewhat different than those pertaining to traditional written essays, articles, and theses.) As I have pursued my studies at Georgetown, I’ve come face-to-face with my own fractured brain, which makes the journey toward coherence at best a forced, tortured march and at worst, an impossibility.

I’ve long struggled with a way to talk about my brain and what ails it (or, some might say, what is “different” about it; I vacillate between these two very different descriptions, but in the current context, I think the negative “ails” is the pertinent term). Although I was diagnosed long ago (at age 30) with would now be called an “invisible disability,” I am still not comfortable with public discussion of it and have disclosed to very few. Indeed, as is by now obvious, I am taking great pains not to use the specific medical name for my diagnosis. I had originally intended to include in my capstone an essay on this very topic (what the diagnosis really means to me, the form it takes, how it affects my life, why I still find the idea of stepping out of the closet so difficult). But alas, I find that the idea is, at least right now, just too painful, too difficult, and instead direct the reader to an essay I’ve written (“Contested Condition, Contested Genre”) on three memoirs of various invisible disabilities. Although that essay is about others’ memoirs, my story is present there – in between the lines, a ghost hovering over the paper or screen on which the words appear. (Late-breaking news: I have Something to Tell You.)

And second, on the impossibility of a summation or culmination of my graduate studies: I came to Georgetown at an unusual time in a life (that is, midlife) and for unusual reasons. I told people, told myself, that I was doing it in order to read all the books I’d never read (or at least some of them). As I perfected my elevator pitch on the subject of why I was returning to school, I began to say that I was “hitting the re-set button” (very 2016, very modern life, very much the glib double-speak of corporate retreats, branding, self-actualization). With some people, I would embroider the re-set button line by saying something like: “Oh you know how middle-aged men get a red sports car and a young girlfriend and drive around with the top down? Well, this is my egg-headed equivalent!” And for more somber, practically minded folks, I spun the “I think I might want to be a teacher” tale (not false).

All of these reasons, explanations, “lines” were true to some extent, but the other reason, the big, unstated (except to a very few, and even then, only after a cocktail or two) reason, was that I’d hit a very bad place in my life and was having trouble finding my way forward. I’d tried or rejected all the usual (and unusual) ways someone of my demographic uses to find a way out of a dark place: psychotherapy, meditation, spirituality/religion, new career, a move to another country, a divorce, an affair, drugs, drinking, travel, a retreat, the devotion of insane amounts of attention to exercise or a hobby (in my case, swimming and cooking, neither of which came anywhere near to doing the trick), the devotion of insane amounts of time to television, both “good” and “bad.” But somehow, when I hit on the idea of graduate school, I heard an internal click. I was at first a bit tentative, but when I got the unexpected call while in a Whole Foods parking lot that I was to be the recipient of a full funding package, I embraced the idea as destiny or a message from god – if only I believed in either).  (Here is piece – what some might call “creative nonfiction,” a category I do not love – that sheds some light on this state of mind: “The Lost Thread.”)

Joan Didion famously wrote in her essay “The White Album”: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live. … We live entirely … by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” Following on Didion, it might be said that I came to graduate school to, yes, tell a few stories but also to study the stories of others, to dork around with books.

And I have done just that. The years of study have been a good experience, a fruitful, worthwhile, productive – indeed, life-saving – experience. But it is beyond me to sum it up, to culminate it (if only the rules of grammar would permit me to say that), other than to simply gather here on this site some fragments, mementos, relics, artifacts of this period in my life.

Some Notes on the Idea of Completion and Incompletion.

The idea of completion – of entirety, of encapsulation, of finishing – is enticing. The notion of walking the entire Appalachian Trail or trying all the fromageries of Paris or reading every single one of Jane Austen’s novels holds, for some, a decided allure. In a certain antique formulation, some writers talk of  “finishing” in regard to sex. In  a contemporary workplace, a meeting leader might speak of “wrapping up” – with the implication of “Our work here is done.” During the decade-plus when I lived on the Lower East Side of New York, I used to fantasize walking all of Avenue B or all of Avenue C, from Houston to Canal streets. Not as ambitious a project as eating all that Gallic dairy product or hiking every last inch of the AT, but there is a related conception at work. We (I, some people) like to think we can swallow something whole (echoes of the various whales – cf. Jonah, cf. Ahab), take it in, own it, possess it. Although of course, the whole is always already, forever and a day, out of our (my, their) reach. And even if it weren’t, the question that’s begged is: What do we accomplish by swallowing or being swallowed, taking possession, being taken possession of? We sometimes say we’ve killed something, as in “Let’s kill it,” of a bottle of wine. Or, in more contemporary argot, “We killed it,” meaning, “We were a great success.” Either way, we’ve finished it, we’re done with it (the bottle of wine) or indisputably brought the thing under discussion (performance, game, test) to a triumphant conclusion. And then there’s that old editor’s adage: You’ve got to kill your darlings.

As I contemplate the end, or the stopping place, or the culmination of the crazy midlife caesura that has been my two years at Georgetown, I am – as is often my case – stymied, stuck, at a loss. For if I couldn’t read all literature, all books, all texts (go ahead, laugh!) in my precious couple of dozen months here, if I couldn’t achieve the vastly lowered goal of reading just a few “great” (canonical) 18th, 19th, and 20th century Western novels, then what to say?

I think of the iconic lines of Samuel Beckett from The Unnamable: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

And the way in which I will go on is to embrace the very incompleteness, the unfinishedness of my project. I have not read all, not everything. In fact, I’ve read very little, and microscopically little of the canonical works that were my original aim. But I have read some. I have thought, I have written, I have talked and discussed and chewed over and digested.  I ended up writing creatively as well as in a scholarly mode. I ended up taking pedagogy courses, as part of my nascent desire to start a new professional life as a teacher. I ended up encountering the field of Disability Studies, which provided me with a pop and a shazzam – an “aha” moment, as the feminists of the 1960s used to say ­– that I hadn’t dreamed of. A new intellectual path – like a new sight (a mountaintop! a desert at dawn!), a new drug (remember them?), a new physical sensation or life experience (sex, birth, the list goes on) is a great thing, and it’s all the greater at midlife, when the tendency is to think that you’ve seen and done so much that no surprises could possibly lie ahead.

Not being a scientist, I ran into the mathematician Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems of 1931 in the pages of – where else? – a novel, Zia Haider Rahmann’s brilliant and underappreciated In the Light of What We Know (2014)  (not to be confused with the exceedingly over-appreciated All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, published the same year). These theorems – or rather Rahmann’s litterateur’s representation of them – struck a deep and resonant chord with me that I think is relevant here. The idea that knowledge is always incomplete, proofs are impossible, consistency unattainable was (is) Beauty to me: sunset streaking the sky, organ notes in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, a once-tasted croissant tinged with the flavor of orange. I embrace this idea, and it is what enables me to proceed.

My 17-year-old son, as much a STEM person as I am a being of words, abhors the current fashion for what he calls “humanities types” taking scientific ideas and using them for their own ends. Guilty as charged. And with that admission, I want to add that just as Rahmann may, for all I know, be misstating Gödel’s work, I am certainly abusing Rahmann, twisting his words a bit, taking them just slightly out of context (but what on earth else is there to do with words, other than play, making meaning, making new meaning?). His novel concerns two characters – friends, mathematicians – one from Pakistan, one from Bangladesh. Gödel’s work meant a great deal to one of the friends, as narrated by the other:

I felt compelled to ask what he considered the most beautiful mathematics he had come across, and perhaps that is what he had intended, that I ask this question – I cannot tell. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem was his unhesitating answer, and though I remembered the statement of the theorem well enough, I nevertheless failed to perceive why he regarded it as particularly beautiful. Within any given system, there are claims which are true but which cannot be proven to be true. So states the theorem. So simple. In its implications, it is a shocking theorem, granted, and some time later, that is to say in the weeks following his sudden reappearance on our doorstep, years after that July day in New York, Zafar would explain to me in simple terms why Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem mattered so much to him and why, if I may be allowed to interpose my own view, the world was foolish to ignore it…[italics mine]

In other words, some things (claims) can’t be proven to be true; necessary information or conditions are lacking, ergo they are incomplete. Always incomplete. Already incomplete. Forever incomplete. There’s something wonderfully freeing about this supposition, for me at least: Why even try to be complete if it is an impossibility, a mirage? Just go ahead and do what you do, do something – maybe not just any old thing, but something.

A concomitant query rears its head, however: What is too incomplete? What is so far from perfect as to be ruptured, broken? The difficulty of telling the difference brings to mind brings to mind a passage in Michael Sandel’s The Case Against Perfection, which I used in a Disability Studies essay to discuss the slippery slope between “normal” and “not normal” in the context of so-called invisible disabilities (those that are psychological, emotional, neurological – in other words, not readily visible to the naked eye). Sandel talks about the philosophical concept of the “sorites paradox”:

Suppose someone asked you how many grains of wheat constitute a heap? One grain does not, nor two, nor three. The fact that there is no nonarbitrary point when the addition of one more grain will bring a heap into being does not mean that there is no difference between a grain and a heap. Nor does it give us reason to conclude that a grain must be a heap. … Baldness is a classic example. Everyone would agree that a man with only one hair on his head is bald. What number of hairs marks the transition from being bald to having a full head of hair? Although there is no determinate answer to this question, it does not follow that there is no difference between being bald and having a full head of hair.

Reading a work that is fragmentary in nature, such as Maggie Nelson’s shape-shifting work of memoir and criticism The Argonauts (2015), I find myself wondering: What can rightfully be termed elliptical and what is more correctly labeled in need of repair? For me, Nelson’s delicious book falls firmly in the former category. But even for me, it does raise the question.

If I free my mind, perhaps the rest will follow.