And sometimes compromise just doesn't work. For instance, this afternoon I couldn't decide if I wanted pad thai or green curry and opted for green curry over noodles which was not good at all--no rice to soak in the spiced coconut milk, no coalescence.
Old ascot in red, tweed coated teacher, turtleshell eyeglasses and a voice that shakes under its own weight. I'm in a room that might be older than the Magna Carta, than the Mona Lisa, than Venus born from a seashell. And these ideas are ancient in the way that we refute anything that doesn't accelerate, make some ascent, and this old-age Marxism is extinct mostly, but lives in the slow beating heart of one Professor Therborn who has an implacable accent and a sullied old ascot.
His voice sounds like an echo of his voice and not his voice at all.
Likely it is just that--words that he shouted out in his youth when his ideas bounced through that corner in the new left and now those walls have all but crumbled but he is still listening for their return, an ear to the floor, an eye for the past that might become the future yet…
Still, there is a simple satisfaction in sitting here, cold classroom with high windows and only the grayest of light. And I don't have to be here at all. This course is part of the one I thought I ought to have taken--the MPhil with a title as grand in the most grandiose sense: Modern Society and Global Transformations, but I opted for the tangible even though it is only tangential to the trajectory I'm drawing in dust for myself. It keeps scattering, collecting, got fistfuls of the stuff. But there is a coalescence here, convergence, and I'm happy to connect dotted lines...happier with this than the lunch that sits like a lump in my gut.
I'm finding it hard to accept this erudite, esoteric sense of academia. My syllabi list seven books a week and who knows what I am to do with them anyway. I pour over them in that reading room above the river and watch as every sentence boards a boat and sails away to some deep depth I'll never be able to find again--the eye of the storm even.
But I am here and I am trying to be here.
I tore through time to get here, gnawed on the ropes that held me back and now I am here. Now I am…trying to listen to the words of this lecture though they mix in the air, swirl and shake like so many irretrievable, irreverent bits of dust.
