Against the Grain

The difference between how I felt a week ago, contemplating the sharper end of this stingray’s barb of assignment marking that I’ve now stripped of its power and pressure, and how I feel now, is palpable. The same can be said of the difference in my mood between having five further weeks of heavy teaching load to go, and a more modest four.

But still, I’ve been shocked at the way this predictable piling up of familiar stressors has left me feeling so depleted, profoundly doubting my ability to do the job for which I’m paid without losing all my emotional resources in the process. Is teaching ever free of such fearful self-doubt? My attempts to call to mind tangible past examples of my being able to do this thing haven’t been as much help as I’d like.

I have been mopey and shivery and weepy when I haven’t been working, and the pressure of it all is perceptible in annoyingly physical ways, too: a neck constantly stiff and forehead that aches, waking up in the morning in strange poses, as if I were about to start a fist fight, nightmares, socially awkward chronic ailments. I often marvel, during such periods of stress, that this is how I was all the damn time from age fifteen to age seventeen, when I imploded in a big-haired heap of far more serious illness.

Of course, I didn’t know any better then that this need not be my lot in life, but I do now, and I resent the symptoms. At the same time however, if I’m honest, my deep and dysfunctional Protestant animus takes perverse pride in my misery: that I’m working so hard it’s making me sick converts, in this model, to the notion I am merely working hard enough. Look at me, paternal Scots ancestors! I’m contributing to our shared goal of universal higher education, and it’s really hard work! John Knox frowns slightly less and says that, for the moment at least, I’m not quite such a recidivist whore.

I am, as is my habit, late for the taking back of the blog, though not, perhaps, unduly perturbed by this. Tze Ming came out swinging at Public Address, whose comments forum led me to WebWeaver’s World and her thoughtful, articulate, well-informed post on this topic. I enjoy on the internet what I think of as the journaller’s privilege, as opposed to what those who keep a more outwardly-directed blog must weather: journals invite like-minded comments or responses and indeed cultivate empathy, whereas blogs, to my mind, prompt responses more stripped of context–they can become, as WebWeaver suggests, battlefields of opinion, where much is at stake and many fights are dirty.

I will ask here, therefore, the question that I’ve also asked in academic contexts: how can we reconcile those humanising, contextualising qualities of empathy and the benefit of the doubt which inform our journals and many of our real-life settings with the guns-out, balls-out nature of politicised debate? Will the substance of the latter be diluted or distorted if invested with the qualities of the former? I suspect many posters and commenters, of both genders, think the answer is yes, which is why, to my mind, there remains social reward and personal validation in embracing a style of blogging and commenting in which there is any level of acceptability in (for example) sexualising women in extra-sexual contexts (such as political debate).

How do I handle this? In the same fashion as I do in the university: by refusing to be categorisable (except, perhaps, as wordy), by withholding or withdrawing my participation in and from fora where I don’t find there to be a culture of respect, and by investing my internet identity in contexts that bring comfort, not conflict. This is all very well for me, but cold comfort for women whose professional or personal interests reside in fora where none of this is the case, and the concept of taking back the blog itself has made me newly aware that I am not doing a great deal to improve the lot of women–or indeed anyone–on the internet who have ended up in on-line situations that go beyond dispiriting to the truly fearful.

In all of this, I go back to the tenets of the second-wave feminism whose inheritance has infused my self-confidence as a writer and thinker: even though an individual may not be misogynist (and I think both men and women can be misogynist, though perhaps in different ways) we live in a wider culture in which there is still social and political value in letting misogyny continue to exist, as a tool against certain kinds of otherness–the feminine–which challenge both comfort and convention. This state of affairs has been eroded but not overthrown by the women’s movement, and we should beware the complacent feeling that the situation is different.

I make these assertions, contentions and speculations once again in the relative safety afforded by this being a journal and not a blog: I have no desire, for example, to have hateful or insulting comments on these pages and would delete them were they to arise. This is a constructed environment for narrative and creativity, politicised but only sporadically political, an extension of my textual antecedents: the pseudonymous lady diarists. Many blogs, however, are not; they are extensions of public space, and I think the question our culture needs to ask itself is whither the social rewards for hateful behaviour in on-line public space?

With these contentions, then, I withdraw back to my world of squirting virtual ink at the task of personal narrative. Manon and I went to the graduation ball, where the atmosphere was rather more pleasantly festive than I had perhaps anticipated. This was due in large part, I suspect, not only to the event organisers but also the local magic of Stu Buchanan and his Garden City Big Band, who had all on the floor swinging, Manon and me included. This man is a local treasure: how many young musicians has he given a start? Harvestbro, for one. We strutted; we spun; we danced off the substantial meal that we’d eaten in the VIP room (where VIP equals staff). I was proud of Manon for being able to enjoy one of the busiest weeks of her working year, given that she suffers for her schedule even more than I do for mine.

My evening concluded with another episode of my cross-town adventure, which has lasted significantly longer than first I assumed it would. Outside of the necessarily subtextual nature of its substance are still details in which I delight: that the good señor put on a suit, knowing I was arriving in my formal finery, that here is a journeyman who has as many ideas for scams as I do synonyms for journal entries, that together we discussed, in relative seriousness, the question of which first lady it would be most enjoyable to commit adultery with. (After the fact I realised I’d forgotten all about Eleanor Roosevelt.) This man is funny.

Such an adventure reminds me once again of the gap between my family heritage–Christians of genuine piety, marriages mostly long, motherhood as a goal of life–and my own wishes for myself, and how, even as I strike out further in the direction of what I want, I feel that tension between ancestors and individual. I’ve managed it for some years now by reserving my least inhibited behaviour for the company of friends in Wellington, but the fact remains that I want my good time and my familial time to take place in the same city.

I’m no full-scale bohemian–I’d wage a substantial sum that the ‘Burn has none at all living within its semi-industrial streets–but I do want my life lived against the grain, the prevailing conventions, even as I wonder whether my quiet spurning of these conventions will bring down the weight of tradition on my head at some later date. But to assume this would be to assume that both neo- and pæleo-conservatives are in any way right, and that way, truly, madness lies.