Professor Nemesis

Professor Nemesis is obnoxious even in small doses, but especially so when accompanied by his own self-aggrandizement and his personal group of sycophants.  His academic fame was established back in the day, when he'd finessed a multi-million dollar research grant to come to the conclusion that people who use television as their primary source of information tend to be less well informed than people who read newspapers, and that education levels - he likes the word mediated - have a lot to do with this.

He was on all the talk shows, even Larry King.  His methodology was impeccable, indeed elegant.  I often heard him bragging about it over the din at lunchtime in the staff canteen, explaining that the data collection itself was a display of logistics that would have inspired the heart of any sergeant major.  The world owes a debt of gratitude to Professor Nemesis and this is a fact that he misses no opportunity to communicate.

            Don’t be too quick to accuse me of bitterness.  It’s just that I grew to know his classroom methods very well.  His main tactics are intimidation and ridicule and he uses both very liberally and with sadistic skill.  He speaks an ugly language, using lots of abstract nouns that activate my spell checker; nouns like textuality, discursivity, supplementarity, synchronicity, plurality.  At one time or another, I had every one of his graduate students weeping and snivelling and blowing their noses into tissues in my office over the burning humiliation they felt in his presence.

            “Why haven’t you read Goffman?” he’d thunder at them across a silent, anxious seminar table, pointing an accusing finger; though Goffman wasn’t on the reading list, only things authored, or more accurately, co-authored with earlier generations of graduate students, by Nemesis himself.

The Age of Reason

The age of reason was six, we were told, my first grade classmates and I.  With it came the ability to distinguish evil from good, right from wrong, and the state of sin from a state of grace.  Our baptisms had freed us from the guilt of original sin, a guilt that even then I wasn’t willing to acknowledge because it wasn’t fair.  Now, through confession and the Eucharist we would be fully members of the one, true, apostolic and universal church, unlike the poor, dead, un-baptized African babies who were condemned to the spiritual and sensory deprivation of Limbo.

            While far away in Moscow, Khrushchev was denouncing Stalin, and in New York City, Charlie Parker lay dying, painstaking preparations drilled us in our catechism as if we were a flock of talking parrots and set us to commit to memory the Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be, and mea culpa, the Confiteor, the confession of faith.

            We were told the Mysteries.  Ah, the Mysteries; the Trinity, the Immaculate Conception, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the Ascension, the tongues of fire and the infallibility of the Pope.  And somehow I began to acquire the elements of an image of the source of all evil as a large, black, monstrous apparition with horns on his head, cloven hooves, ass’s ears, claws, fiery eyes, gnashing teeth, a huge phallus and a sulphurous smell.  All this before the Second Vatican Council, when the priest turned around and started speaking English instead of Latin and we were told not to say Holy Ghost anymore, it was Spirit, Holy Spirit, because we didn’t believe in ghosts.

Looking at Pictures

Look at this old photograph. We sense its age from the texture of the patina on the platinum. In it, a girl reclines on a divan. She is just eight years old. Her eyes are closed. Her left arm falls limply across her stomach, her hand resting just below her waist, in the folds of a loose-fitting silky satin dress or nightgown that has come off at one shoulder, exposing the upper part of her chest, but not quite her nipple. A loose strand of hair tumbles over the other shoulder. Her legs are bare.

Like the girl, the picture itself is charmingly beautiful. Its composition is informed by the trials and errors and triumphs of five centuries of European painting. Textured fabric is set off against skin. Rich sepias contrast with ivory whites. The arms of the divan gently embrace the girl, who, we naturally assume, must be fully aware of our gaze because she is so obviously posing for the photographer.

We stare at her uncomfortably, through the disquiet of a century of now discredited but still potent, Freudian analysis, our understanding of which has come to us through the self-effacing, sardonic wit of the early Woody Allan films. At the time of course, Freudians had a field day interpreting Wonderland’s rabbit holes and tiny keys and the bit about Alice growing and shrinking.

Here’s another photograph, contemporary, high-definition, glossy, colour. She looks fourteen or so. Aside from a long blue frond that hangs over her right eye, her hair is cut brutally short into black spiky tufts that give her an angelic, yet deviant sexuality. Lips slightly parted in flashbulb surprise, she wears multiple ear rings and a discrete tattoo.

On the edge of right now, she fills her blue-jeans-with-the-knees-ripped-out like a surgical glove. Her tiny breasts beckon for gentle caresses through the t-shirt with Just Do It! printed across the front. The intermittence of skin flashing between these two articles of clothing, between t-shirt and jeans, this is the flash that seduces. Through her eyes and in the very gesture of her stance, she implores, and this impels us to purchase.

The Distant Past

I can still remember how it ended. The twentieth century, I mean. We were free to make whatever moves the constraints of physics and chemistry permitted. Amid dreams and visions, signs and wonders, everything was relative, value neutral. All behaviour was culturally relative and socially constructed.

We all knew, after all, that social reality is a kind of collective evolving fiction, constructed and maintained by the processes of socialization, institutionalization, tradition and everyday social interaction, all through the medium of language, the jostling world-views of different social classes, religions, cultures, media exposures, and so on, to be escaped only through drugs and alcohol, religious transcendence, psychotherapy perhaps, schizophrenia or love. Only then do our hallucinations and fantasies become real, and metaphors become literal.

Thus everyone's actions were morally equivalent to everyone else's actions. Heroes acted out of self-interest, just as criminals did. The guy who risked his life racing into the burning building to save the child was no better than the arsonist who had set the blaze. There were almost no taboos left to transgress. After Tito died, the Croatian authorities renamed the streets after Fascist leaders.

Some of us aspired to a refined hedonism, a celebration of luxury, of the pleasure of satisfying desires in the most refined way, with no expense spared. Others of us scrounged in litter bins, hoping to find the remnants of a Big Mack or a sweet-and-sour takeaway that the flies and rats had not already commandeered. There was the texture of plastic and new-age philosophy, the re-release of Star Wars and the re-appearance of flared trousers, all parts of a kind of nostalgia industry for the increasingly recent past, to fill the void that lay at the heart of experience.