Servetus colligens

Plus points for you if you know the multiple meanings of colligo, colligere (also conligo, conligere), many of which apply in this situation.

By this time of the summer I am usually in Germany, ensconced in my favorite library. By usually I mean every summer for the last thirteen years — a little less than the last third of my life. Oddly, I don’t miss it so much as I thought I might, as I think of the current dollar to euro exchange rate, and then the hassle of getting there and the travails of flying economy. My friend and colleague the former Cambridge professor tried to fly to London last week and got stymied for three days not by the volcano in Iceland, but by the domestic weather and its consequences. That may happen to me, too, of course: I drive right straight through OK City and Joplin to get home, though I’ll be staying with friends along the way and hope to be worried more about the price of gas than the threat of severe weather. Joplin: every time I hear about you on the radio, I say a little prayer for you all.

My major activity now: packing and getting ready to move. Movers came May 30; apartment lease up today, though I’ll be in there for a few more days, sleeping on the floor; cleaners come next week. I can have my office a little while longer (and will probably need it) but it’s to my huge financial advantage to get out of here soon, as I can live much more cheaply with my parents. I’ve got a grad student to superintend the last pieces, so if I am not completely done I don’t have to hang around. And my mother really needs me to get home soon, if I understand her hints, as she needs someone to spend more time with my father and someone assertive to speak to the doctors. He seems to be fishing rather intensively. In idle moments I wonder if he and I could actually learn to talk to each other, but then I remember that fishing is a mostly silent activity and that’s often one reason men like it so much. He’ll teach me how to put his boat in, and I’ll learn how to be silent. Seems preposterous, actually, that I could learn to be such a different person.

“Getting Ready for Christmas Day,” from Paul Simon’s new album, So Beautiful or So What, which is getting great reviews. Despite the unseasonality of the song, I like its practicality. We’re getting ready for something big, but daily life is what it is. We’ll all get there, somehow, in the end.

That’s the current Servetus plan: June in Wisconsin with the intention of a relocation there for the foreseeable future. There are a few complicating factors — the need for a job and health insurance, for instance, and my lack of training for a lot of the things that would get me that kind of job — I’ve never taken a single university course on pedagogy or child development, for instance, so can’t teach school — and the ongoing question of what I should do next — if I am going to retrain, I probably should do it in Texas, the state of which I am resident, because of the huge tuition break I would get — and then there’s the “can I really accept an identity as a non-academic?” problem and the “what does G-d want for me?” problem and and and and and … but in any case, I’m moving to Wisconsin. Now. Yesterday, really. So I gotta pack.

John Porter (Richard Armitage) packs for his mission to Harare in Strike Back 1.3. My cap. Porter knows how to pack and live light, but still there are some things that are precious to him, like the picture on the wall.

I pack a lot. I’m particularly adept at the different modalities of the transcontinental move. Pursuing my career has demanded constant moves, to cheaper apartments, for education, for research, for a new job, for a better job, for a research leave, and so on. And while other people sometimes said, “no, I can’t leave my family, no, I’m not prepared to do that,” I always made them. I have not lived at a single physical address for more than eighteen months since May, 1991. It’s a long time to spend, moving every year. You’d think this kind of thing would make me into a better mover, but it hasn’t really done that. Instead, it’s sort of burnt me out on commitment to any one place. Why settle in if you know you’ll just have to pack up your stuff in nine months? Why bother to have anything that’s wrong altered, if you’ll be gone soon anyway? One reason I’ve spent so much time in my office, I fear, is that it was a refuge that felt more constant than my own “home,” a place where I could have things the way I liked them.

That should have told me something. Over almost two decades, I have systematically destroyed my capacity to make a comfortable home for myself. In my latest apartment I never cooked, never invited anyone over, unpacked very little. Things accumulated — books, papers, clothes — where they fell. Every now and then I collected an armful of books and sold or gave them away, or picked up clutter or trash that had accumulated and threw it away. The movers set up my bed in the living room and I left it there. I scheduled a moveout clean, but told the cleaner she doesn’t have to do the oven. I’ve never put a thing in it, or on the stove. The microwave sat for the entire period of the lease on the counter, untouched since I cleaned it out for a move to Germany in 2006.

John Standring (Richard Armitage) moves into Sparkhouse Farm after marrying Carol (Sarah Smart), in Sparkhouse, episode 3. This is the kind of move I’d like to do some time, i.e., without packing too carefully.

Now, the one aspect of moving to look forward to is “the great purge,” as a friend calls it — the scads of things that you look at and discard, the feeling of knowing that at the end of a move you will have fewer things than before. I didn’t quite manage that with my apartment this time, but I estimate that I have something like two-thirds less stuff by volume than I had when I finished grad school. I had a lot of rickety stuff accumulated from relatives or friends, and as it fell apart, I just didn’t replace it. But the real challenge stems from my office, and there, more specifically, from the books. In ways I can’t describe exactly, books are important constituting factors of my identity, much more so than clothes or any other object I interact with regularly. If that hadn’t been entirely clear to me, it would have become so in the fall of 2008. When things started getting really bad here, I started to have regular dreams — every three weeks or so — about burning down my office, interspersed with dreams about hurling the books at my favorite library down flights of stairs in order to ruin their historic bindings. I read these as “I want to trash my professor self and start over” messages from my subconscious. And yet, I hang onto books especially in defiance of logic, even though I know I have to get rid of them.

With this move I’m really trying to get rid of a lot of stuff and I’ve been learning about minimalism. It’s so attractive — the idea, for instance, that one could have only one key. Anyone who owns a lot of books can’t really be a minimalist — not least because of the bookshelf problem — but I’m trying. The key is apparently not to think about what you can afford to throw away, but rather to conceptualize the space that you’re moving to. You think about what you want to have in that space and eliminate the remainder. The problem there, of course, is that I’m not sure what space I’m moving into. My parents’ household won’t accommodate most of this stuff. Some books are going there, but the majority will stay here, stored with my household until the final destination of my relocation is certain.

The real question, though, is what intellectual space I’m going to inhabit and which books belong in that space. I really believed myself to be a scholar. I’ve got the kind of books that even many university libraries consider too obscure for their collections: a complete seven-volume run of the political correspondence of a territorial sovereign who figures prominently in my work, for example, of which there are fewer than a dozen copies in the entire United States. I also own a two-volume, thousand-page-plus study, written in German, of the social and political significance of every imprint and manuscript that survives from the city of Tallinn from 1505 to 1657. Or obscure references: a famous German reference that helps you compute or convert an old-style date into a modern one, and a long compendium of conversion rates for different currencies common in western Europe from 1300 to 1800. (Yes, scholars have spent entire lifetimes studying these issues.) If I continue to pursue my research, I should keep these. If not, I should donate them to the campus library here before I leave and not ship them to yet one more location. Some pieces of this distinction are clearer than the others. I’m selling books on topics that I had to know, but didn’t love studying (early Christianity, early modern apocalypticism, the Holocaust) and anything that I only kept because I thought I might have to read it with a graduate student (Judith Butler, the general crisis, Rawlsian liberalism). When I find books I’m neutral about but I know someone who would love them, I set them aside to give away. I’m keeping any book I remember being fascinated by, no matter the relevance of the topic, and I’m keeping the core items from my research field: those things will be shipped to my parents and hopefully I’ll find space for a few bookshelves there. I’d actually leave the research stuff in storage, but a wrinkle emerged a few weeks ago: a major journal in my field commissioned an essay from me. I’m thinking of it as my swan song, the proof that I left the profession on an upbeat and not in defeat. But I’ll need those books during the summer.

Guy of Gisborne (Richard Armitage) hangs on for his life as the Sheriff threatens to push him off the roof of the castle in Robin Hood 3.6. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

The book sales have been liberating. I just sold my copy of Bourdieu’s Distinction, an item that the average mortal’s never heard of but which is almost certainly on the shelf of every other professor in this building. We all suffered through it in graduate school. Getting rid of it is a real sign of shedding an identity that doesn’t really fit anymore. But there are so many gray areas. I’m keeping all the books about the historical Servetus, about whom relatively little is known, but what about the studies of other anti-Trinitarian heretics? Or what about the books on topics that I knew little about, but would love to know more about, and didn’t read, but are still sitting there? Where do I hang on to what I was? Where do I let go and let myself fall back into whatever comes? It feels scary. Most of all, how do I accept what comes? Or alternatively, where do I do a bare-knuckle act to hold on to what I have, to the pieces that really are part of me?

Keep or sell or toss or cling? I’m abandoning “professor,” but I haven’t replaced it with anything except maybe “daughter.” The problem is that if you don’t know exactly who you are, you don’t know exactly what you love, and what you should keep. Or is it that if you don’t know what you love, you don’t really know who you are? I think my problems in the last few years have been rooted in the first question, deciding what to love based on who I thought I was. I need at least for awhile to ask first what I love, and then, given what I love, who I might be. But the relentlessness of this job and of the personal events that crushed me in the last five years made me forget how to love, even on a simple level, or how to feel certain kinds of elevating pleasure, and then, gradually, how to feel anything at all.

Lucas North (Richard Armitage) tells Sarah Caulfield that he hasn’t been able to feel anything at all, in Spooks 8.4. My cap.

That’s something that the experience of watching Mr. Armitage called forth in me again: the capacity to feel unreserved love. Sexual attraction is a piece of that, but it’s not the whole story: it includes appreciation of things like beauty, but also of ugliness and pain, and perhaps, most importantly for me, because it’s the piece of my personality that unites intellect and emotion, the capacity he provokes to consider, analyze, absorb the amazing detail that Armitage is so much the master of. It’s the thought that there could still be something in the world worth looking at with care that made me feel my gaze wasn’t gone, that made me think, “I can still love.” I’m still frightened of the fantasy and someone rather perceptively said to me today that no matter its charms, I’m probably not ever going to be capable of ignoring reality for very long. But my renewed perception of my own capacity to love — attentively, abstractly, physically, emotionally, aesthetically — is the reason why that for me, in the struggle between mind and heart, between reason and desire, in the fight for an identity that won’t kill me, piece by piece, for a sense of self that I can live with, the fantasy of Armitage remains so central.

~ by Servetus on June 2, 2011.