Four Zero Four: Archaeology

[This is something I wrote more than a decade ago. I do stand by what I wrote then.]

Once upon a time, back in the Long Ago, when I was a newly-created PhD, I walked into a lecture hall at a southern university one morning at 08h00 and looked up into the banked seats at 120 faces staring back at me. I rapped on the lectern, stepped out to give myself room to pace, and said, "Let's begin." 

That was my first day teaching. I'd never felt so alive. I knew exactly what I was doing, and I felt absolutely in control.

A few years later, at 07h30 on a cold January morning, I walked into a conference room with thirty US Army captains and majors and lieutenant colonels looking at me. I nodded and put my lecture notes down, then looked up at the maps on the wall.  And I started lecturing. Again--- I was alive and knew exactly what I was doing. 

There's a big jump from lecturing to talking about one's fears of phone sex, but I of course can see the connection. Both things are about being coolly professional, about knowing that you have something worthwhile to say and knowing exactly how to say it. 

There was never a day in my life in front of a class when I didn't think I was good at what I was doing. Not for a moment. Undergraduates, grad students, Army officers, Turkish security police---- I lectured to all of them and knew that I knew what I was doing. 

Another time (yes, I'd gone back to school for an additional, and very different, degree) when I felt like I knew anything at all was a class where the instructor had each of us stand up and speak on an assigned line of cases for an hour. I got up on the podium and began talking. After about ten minutes, one of the other students-- like me, an older student ---shook his head and grinned and said, "Not your first rodeo, is it?" 

How is that like doing phonesex with a lovely girl late at night? Well, for much of my life--- at least since my own undergraduate days, I'd always thought of phonesex as the same kind of thing: something where I knew what I was doing, where I was good at presentation, at bringing my listeners into the world I was creating.  As something where I felt in control--- I knew what I was doing, I had something to say, and my listeners knew that I knew what I was doing.  Whatever my social failings may have been, my students knew that I had a skill---- and the same was true with lovely interlocutors late at night on the phone. 

I knew how to tell stories, create worlds, convey information. I knew how to do those things. My lectures, I knew, were good. No question. If you were ever here watching like a ghost in my flat on Friday nights, you'd see that. Yes--- a few drinks, then prowling my rooms or the upper deck outside, lecturing to invisible audiences. Okay, yes, sometimes with my Japanese sword in hand; everyone needs a prop. But lecturing--- this is how national identities form, this is the way Homer developed the Greek idea of heroism, this is how the July Crisis of 1914 played out, this is how Russian literature dealt with the wars in the Caucasus in the 1840s... I can talk about those things and know--- know ---that I have a clear idea of what I'm saying and why.  We live in a world where Kylie Jenner can nominally author novels and I can't get a full-time teaching job, but...still. I know what I'm doing--- I still know what I'm doing. 

But for the other thing, for phonesex... I've lost that. My fantasies aren't good enough, or they can be mocked as problematic. Or I'm not good enough--- not ranked high enough in the social hierarchy ---to have or present good fantasies. One of the things that stopped me from publishing was that I knew that my idea were good, but that I personally wasn't good enough to publish--- didn't own a suit, didn't come from a cool place, wasn't handsome, didn't own a house or have a wife, wasn't in any sense a Grown-Up, a serious person. That's spilled over into phonesex now. I can't do it any more. I can't imagine that I'm good enough to do it.