I never thought I would say this. I am sick to death of university. Sick to boredom, sick to anaemia, sick to wasting – sickly in every single way except in the way that could be diagnosed and classified, treated and cured.
This is not to say that I am tired of knowledge, that I am exhausted with the art of accumulation. I am a prodigious collector of invisible things. An entomologist of transparent insects that are always interbreeding, always hidden and searched for in the darker and warmer climates, infested with each other and linked through a web with lines and interconnections innumerable.
I once thought that it was this exploration, this archaeology of history and knowledge, that universities preoccupied themselves with. In a way, it is. But you have to travel far up the ladder for that. You have to be elite and I don’t have it in me to belong to that select group. I don’t have the dedication to singularities, to life long quests and passions. I range too far and too shallow.
If I could stay for life, if I could wander into one class room and then drift into another, letting currents take me, without limit, without end, I would have found my heaven, my nirvana, the Shangrila of my once off existence. But I can’t.
Name your subject, nominate your major, a half life of 2 years, career fairs and solicited dreams. What place do I have among all this purpose and limit setting? A test at 2:45pm, two hour duration, slide yourself in, fill in the dots and look on the person next to you, a computer will scan it and spit it out, spit you out, new fodder for the workforce chain, we don’t care that you forget, we have our memory limits, we have the archives that burn themselves down, ashes on a senate hearing floor.
I feel that I have been prepared for nothing. For conversation perhaps, but there is no one to talk to, they look beyond, where the sky is clear and the ceiling doesn’t press down so low. They look beyond to a place where they don’t owe $20,000 and their schedule gets paid for by the hour.
I don’t look towards this open plain. I always look back over my shoulder. Lazy mornings and afternoons spent under blankets with dead men, grave robbing and pencil sharpening. I stretch my legs and yawn, in comfort, in knowing that I know and that no one in particular cares, that all is good and free, that my mind wanders like a beggar asking for a pittance here and a well formed sentence there.
Maybe it has always been a case of me not believing in classification, not being able to see the fine lines of distinction. I believe that each species of knowledge has its own habitat, its own eco-system and economy, I have never believed, however, that these habitats and eco-systems are created by men or women.
I have always believed that it is we who follow the dead, we form a waiting list that moves backwards, we walk in reverse, toe-heel, toe-heel, we start with the cup already at our lips and drink only when we put the cup down. It is strange to imagine those that have gone streaming before us, life boats full of ghosts, coming back to pick up the mangled survivors, those who have stopped breathing. We follow the dead, in an atemporal fashion, but the classifications of history make it so hard for us to comprehend the living as the antecedent of the dead, as the ancestors of the dead - as pre-survivors, as those who have yet to survive.
My time at university could not have taught me this. I think in the breathing spaces in between class, I switch off when I’m expected to think, I listen to their directions and smile when they forget the destinations.
I have to face it. The dead have more to offer. University is way too full of the living.