Lights at the End at Last, A History Boy, 04/05/2017

I think, feel, and sincerely hope that the direction of this blog will change over the next little while. Permanently.

I mean this in an optimistic sense. And I’m very happy that I can say this optimistically. You might have noticed that I added a new link under my professional links, Cestar College. This is a career college in northern Toronto where I’ll be teaching Business Communications and Leadership Ethics for the next however-long-I-decide-to-stay-there.

And I may stay there for quite a long time. After all, I trained for years to be a teacher and researcher. I’m still a damn good researcher, and writing this blog over the last nearly four years has improved my writing tremendously. Both for argumentative, casual, and fiction.

I started this blog not just to build a small online profile for myself as an independent writer, but also to keep myself going as a person. The call centre job I’d had since late 2012 spent the winter and spring working me for sometimes 50 hour weeks. I quit around the same time my disastrous round of university sector job hunting exploded. I was acutely depressed and barely left my bed for three days.

My own experience with severe anxiety over the last four years has
made me realize how inappropriate it is to medicalize anxiety as if it
were a disorder entirely in thought and individual neurochemistry. Yes,
it can be treated with medications and therapies. But its causes most
often are social and environmental. Anxiety is a body and personality
reaching its breaking point in being able to handle chronic insecurity.
It's the mental expression of a social and economic disorder. Go read
Anti-Oedipus and see the basics of the dynamic.

I spent the following year working for an online editing farm, where my piecework wages amounted to less than minimum wage. I trained in communications because I thought that was the best business certificate I could get where my talents as a qualitative analyst the writer would be put to the best use.

But I was so out of place as a personality with the culture of the Toronto PR agency that I could never find steady entry level work. I was a bookish nerd in a world of aging frat bros, Lean In archetypes, and a kind of amoral approach to client acquisition and services that I never felt comfortable.

My first paying job after graduating – writing work for the Business Owners’ Council, a spinoff of Inc. Magazine – only ever gave me work on such short notice, I was practically on unpaid call 16 hours per day. And they never even paid me. Nor did they ever send me a non-disclosure agreement, so I can describe their human resources practices without restraint.

I’ve never been able to make a living wage from my business training in corporate communications – only picking up occasional contracts that got me a few hundred each month at best.

For four years, I’ve lived under constant stress from financial insecurity and anxiety over whether I’d ever be able to find a decent job. It hammered my personal and professional confidence so much that I thought my only path to a secure future was working my IKEA job at $13/hour.

I loved the people I worked with, but the job itself was so stressful and draining that I broke down after a year. It didn’t help that I had a therapist who I trusted to help me, but who seemed more intent on condescendingly ordering me not to feel stressed or agitated instead of helping me deal with these states of mind.

The GF and I have been watching Thirteen Reasons Why, since it seems
to be one of those generational touchstones in progress. It's a powerful
narrative, and I deeply admire how camera and lighting blends time
periods and memories into a single flow of imagery. Also how
intricately and precisely the show reveals its labyrinth of relationships.
It's the best mystery show I think I've ever seen.
But I think it's giving me nightmares. And as a 34 year old professional
teacher and writer, I'm decidedly not its demographic. My anxiety
and depression issues make the storyline hit me very profoundly. I can
believe that people whose current experience is closer to the social
media embedded hell of modern high school go through far
worse sympathetic depression.

I actually think my brain has been affected somewhat by the years of continual worrying. I’m now one of the many people who has to take mild anti-depressants to stay focussed. I’m probably not even the only one at my new job who does.

Cestar is the first time since 2013 that I’m actually being paid a good middle-class salary. It’s the first time since 2013 that I’ve been paid a decent living salary at all. It’s the first time since 2013 that I’ve been paid at all for the type of work I spent my 20s training for. The type of work that I’m good at.

I mean, administration stuff is going to be a pain in the ass. But that’s true universally. The point is, I’m a teacher at last. And I’ll be a teacher with a pre-tax salary of around $35,000. Pretty reasonable if you ask me.

Four years. I had to go through four years of anxiety, depression, hopelessness, and worthlessness before getting started. Yeah, a lot of people have it way worse. I see them begging on street corners and in subway stations pretty much every day. But it’s far from fun.

Yeah, those were the years when I met the GF. She’s the love of my life, and I shouldn’t regret anything about that time with her. Without her help, I don’t know if I wouldn’t have made it through at all. But I do have one regret.

I regret that it’s taken me so long to be in a position where my situation won’t stress us both out. I regret all the pain I caused with every career setback, every anxiety attack, every opportunity that turned into a kick to the balls. I regret that I’ve never been able to show her what I can do, only how I can manage.

For the last four years, I’ve been a failure. Not anymore. But all I’ve been able to show her is failure until pretty much the last month. That still hurts me.

Now I have a good-paying teaching job and I’m making my first film. I'm getting married in a couple of years to a woman I love more than I thought I could love anyone. That’s fantastic.

But the scars and pain of the last four years feel like they’re never going to leave me.

The blog, however, will probably take a new direction. I'll be talking about teaching techniques here sometimes, and continuing to work through ideas in my research and writing for different projects. Also, writing about more experiences in my artistic work.

My blog started as a means to keep myself alive and motivated through a depression that I didn't see a way out of. Now, it seems I'm in shape for it to become a chronicle of growing success and happiness.

Teaching the Metaphysics of Physics, A History Boy, 08/03/2017

I’m a big nerd and I sometimes read Nietzsche for fun. If you’ve seen any of the archives in my blog or any other writing before, you know I’m a big nerd. So I cracked open my epub of Human, All Too Human a little while ago, and I read something that brought back some sad memories.

Here’s the passage, from among the first aphorisms of the book.

“That is why there is in all philosophies so much high-flying metaphysics and such a dread of the explanations offered by physics, which seem so modest and insignificant; for the significance of knowledge for life has to appear as great as it possibly can. Here lies the antagonism between the individual regions of science and philosophy. The latter wants, as art does, to bestow on life and action the greatest possible profundity and significance; in the former one seeks knowledge and nothing further – and does in fact acquire it.”

I don’t want to talk about the context and ideas Nietzsche himself was confronting when he wrote this in 1880. I want to talk about an idea for a course I had a few years ago, because this paragraph set off a bitter memory.

Nietzsche's work has been influential and
inspiring to me, but he can be such a
downer sometimes.

The year after I finished my doctorate, I was still looking for work as a university teacher. My own department at McMaster posted two per-course positions. One was a third-level course in the theory of knowledge that my colleague P landed without a problem – it was literally his exact area of research expertise.

I applied to teach the fourth-level seminar on metaphysics. It had previously been a very doctrinaire course on the problem of freedom and determinism, but the university let that professor go the previous summer. So the department was looking for a new direction.

I applied, and came up with a proposal for a course that challenged students to think about philosophy’s right to get metaphysical in the first place. It combined metaphysical thinking with philosophy of science a little, but in a way that encouraged creativity. And in the fairly small class size of a senior-level seminar, we could have gotten really deep with it.

My course would have revolved around the question of what metaphysics can do for science. Metaphysics debates in academic philosophy journals revolved around questions like what universal terms like ‘blue’ refer to, or whether objects were bundles of universals or had an underlying property-less substrate.

But if you went to a physicist with any of these questions, he’d laugh in your face because they make no sense. The really important questions in physics revolve around things like Bell’s Theorem in quantum mechanics, which implies that spacetime literally isn't contiguous in some contexts.

I also wanted to talk about ideas in the intensive sciences like hydrodynamics, ecology, and other fields dominated by nonlinear mathematics because of their unintuitive implications about the nature of reality. And I wanted to contrast this with orthodox approaches to metaphysics that relied almost exclusively on intuitive logical reasoning.

We would have read Tim Maudlin’s Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity: Metaphysical Intimations of Modern Physics, Henri Bergson’s The Creative Mind, and Manuel DeLanda’s Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. Alongside short readings from David Hume, Bertrand Russell, contemporary analytic metaphysicians, Aristotle, Lucretius, and McMaster’s own Head of the Bertrand Russell Research Centre Nicolas Griffin.

The experiments that gave Bell's Theorem its real-
world example are complicated, but here's basically
what they mean. An electron doesn't get a specific
spin until it interacts with an energy field that sets
it. If you launch two electrons from the same
source in opposite directions, they'll still end up
with complementary spin – even though
information about each other's spin would have
to travel faster than light to reach the other. Their
states are entangled without local causal interaction.
That's not literally faster-than-light communication.
It's something much weirder: a demonstration that
contiguous local space is our false intuition.

But the department had already hired one of the previous year’s doctoral grads. And a Rochester-based professor with a couple of years’ more teaching experience had applied for the metaphysics seminar.

Later that winter, I saw his course outline from an undergrad friend of mine who was taking the course. He found it hideous, and he was right to. It was literally just a survey course in the standard canon of Western philosophy’s metaphysics. Twelve great philosophers in as many weeks. A week on Plato. On Aristotle. On Hegel. On Bradley.

There was no time to explore any problem in depth. Barely any time to do anything but get the most basic and mainstream account possible of a thinker whose ideas about the nature of reality produced commentary and reflection for literally centuries.

Even the professors who hired him later admitted that he was a mistake, turning a course far below the complexity level the curriculum required. But he had the most teaching experience of anyone who applied. So they hired him.

Since I was sent into these memories from reading Nietzsche, I find it ironic – or maybe fitting – that I still feel a little resentful over these events.

It was a very personal rejection, because I knew everyone who had made the decision. I’d worked with them for the previous five years. It was the start of a year of rejection from entry-level positions across the region – rejections in favour of people who had already been working, who had more seniority – that effectively killed my career in university teaching.

I was never able to build the teaching experience that would have made me competitive in the university teaching market. I haven’t worked in a university since Winter 2013.

Today, I feel like I can achieve more as a professional writer and communicator working on books and films on the side, than I ever could have strapped into the grind of university-based humanities scholarship. But that achievement is still all potential, all in the future.

Because it’s taken me four years to get from my old career bottoming out to my new one finally getting some momentum. Those have been four stressful, painful, difficult years. If I didn’t have my GF with me for most of that time, I honestly can’t say if I’d have had the strength to haul myself out of where I’d fallen. It's taken me quite a while – thanks to depression, bad luck, having to deal with crap bosses or low paying work – to get my shit back together.

And if that academic career had actually worked out, I never would have met her. And I don’t think I’d be able to accept life without her.

Even on a smaller scale of thinking, I still feel a sense of regret. That would have been a fucking great course. And I was a fucking good philosophy teacher.

So Painfully Fragile, A History Boy, 13/09/2015

After writing my week-long series of posts about two of the most esoteric and difficult writers in the last century of European philosophy, I realized that I actually missed something I said I’d talk about in the beginning. Why I stopped reading D. T. Max’s biography of David Foster Wallace to pick up Spectres of Marx instead.

1. Simply put, it was getting dull. This is the clearest reason why I lost interest in Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story.* Wallace’s own writing is much more interesting than his life was. And it didn’t take much to be more interesting than Wallace’s life.

* Curious that I’d drop a book whose title purposely evoked ghosts in favour of a book that explored in detail the human experience of ghosts and spectral memory. 

Wallace poured his own life into Infinite Jest, which,
along with literary tropes, was really all he had.

2. Wallace’s young adult life was spent going back and forth between graduate school programs (whether as a student or a teacher) and mental health programs and facilities. The chapters I read in Max’s biography described how several harsher critics of Wallace’s early fiction found it disconnected from the gritty details of life.

Frankly, that’s because Wallace himself was disconnected from how most people actually lived their lives. Max is a sympathetic biographer, and Wallace is nothing if not a person deserving of sympathy (except when he isn’t). So he concentrates these early chapters on what Wallace was trying to do formally with fiction. 

Wallace got his MFA in a program dominated by the minimalist realism of the Iowa school of writing. But simplicity was not his cup of tea. Wallace spent the early part of his career pushing meta-fictional techniques and post-modern aesthetics to their breaking point, and combining these playful methods with an emotional heart that’s absent from a lot of what had come before.

That’s an admirable mission for art. Wallace succeeded, powerfully, and we should be grateful for that. But despite Max’s charity and sympathy for Wallace, simply describing the events of his youth paint a picture of a malignant person who was at best a wreck and at worst a tumour. 

3. I think what disturbed me most was his “relationship” with Mary Karr. I remember reading accounts of this period of Wallace’s life written shortly after he died, which described their relationship as genuinely romantic, but volatile and tense. Max’s biography reveals what these other articles, published in the immediate aftermath of Wallace’s suicide, didn’t have the guts to say.

Wallace never dated Mary Karr. He stalked her obsessively, pressuring her to divorce her husband and abandon her child to be with him. He created a fantasy life of meaning in their limited correspondence, and when he confronted her with his delusions, she rightly reacted with fear.

Some of the biggest regrets in my personal life come from the way I’ve treated some women in my life. I sometimes displayed such awkward, awful behaviour that I now know appeared horribly creepy. And at the time, I’d spin narratives of my own motivations and emotions that validated my disrespectful, off-putting behaviour. 

To see Wallace, a person I generally admired, engage in an even more offensive, manic, obsessive form of this behaviour, blasted to a ridiculous intensity by his bipolar disorder, leaves a disgusting taste in my mouth.

4. The last reason why I put down Max’s biography – and why I may never go back to Wallace’s own writing – is because of how strangely his own mental illness feeds back into his writing. Max, at one point, mentions how Wallace accepted an op/ed journalism job with a 1000 word limit that ballooned into an enormous project.

And I realized that was at the heart of Wallace’s maximalism. It wasn’t a conscious style choice. It was all he could do to bring some kind of order and purpose to his manic tidal waves of expression. 

Yes, he happened to be a genius, and that made his manic bipolar word vomit conceptually interesting and beautifully crafted. But that can’t disguise what it really was.

So that’s why I can’t go back to Wallace now that I know more about his writing, his life, and his personality. I see enough similarity between myself and Wallace (middle-class writers from an intellectual family who’ve struggled to different intensities with depression) that he no longer inspires me.

He makes me feel sick.