The best there is… if that’s what you want. (Image by Samuel Ramos, via Unsplash)
So yesterday, I used my lapsed bowling career as an example of the distance between people who are merely reallyreallyreally good and people who are at the peak of whatever endeavor they’ve chosen. I think, in principle, that the same general logarithmic distance is true in whatever field of practice we might consider. Every step is a mile, and there are a lot of steps to take.
But bowling is limited in its utility as a model, because it’s objective. Scores are scores, tournaments are won and recorded, and there’s no argument about intentions or values. There are lots of endeavors in which we might excel in ways that aren’t as easy to know, or to agree upon.
I’m enough of an elitist to resent being labeled a “local author.” But certainly the objective record of my fiction writing is exactly that. I’ve not had fiction published, by a major house or a minor indie. I do it because it’s a meditative act, because the craft matters. Using language to render complicated lives in complicated circumstances… there’s nothing that absorbs me more fully.
But if that’s my motivation, why would I inflict the outcomes upon others? Why not just leave it on the hard drive? That’s the point at which the questions of relative quality emerge. Is it good enough to share? Am I proud of it? Will the person I’m sharing it with enjoy it? Will they TELL ME they enjoyed it? It’s just an ugly smoothie blended from mixed ingredients: vanity and generosity, validation and hope.
One of the thoughts I’ve shared with my writing group a few times is that for me, giving someone one of my books is like making them a meal. I just want them to have a nice evening, and I have enough confidence that my cooking matches their tastes to make the offer. And ohhhh, does one of my colleagues hate that idea! It demeans the craft, it doesn’t take the work seriously. He’s also said that he’s terrified of dying, though, and I think he wants something to live on when he’s gone.
I don’t, oddly enough. When I’m dead, everything I ever could have done, generous or otherwise, will be done. The rest will be compost. So because I’m not in the game of “legacy,” I have a little less interest in comparing quality. It’s as good as I know how to make it.
What I need is to be acknowledged, by an audience larger than my friends and neighbors. And that’s a sad fact to sit with.
The Dunning-Kruger effect comes into play here as well. When I was a Level Three bowler, I thought I was going to be a professional. Once I got to Level Five, I recognized that I wouldn’t. Not because I’d stopped trying or gotten lazy, but because I knew so much more that I could appreciate how much broader the chasm was that lie ahead. The more you know about something, the more you know you don’t know. The less you know about something, the easier it seems. I mean, everybody can write, right? Everybody can sing, everybody can drive a car and ride a bike. Being a professional at those things must just mean doing more of it.
You have to go a long, long way down the road to realize how vast and complicated the road is. And by that time, you’ve dedicated most of your young life to the journey. The craft matters to you, you’ve given yourself to it and received so much beauty in return. But there will come a moment when you realize that you will never be Simone Biles, or LeBron James, or Yo-Yo Ma, or Lewis Hamilton, or Emma Stone. There will come a moment when you realize that your ticket won’t take you to the final station, that you’ll disembark in some one-dog town along the way.
They’re all remarkably high. One of them is higher. (image by Rohit Tandon, via Unsplash)
I hate to bring us back to eleventh grade, which at least for me was miserable, but I want to talk about logarithms. (Sister Claudette would be pleased that I remember what they are.) Specifically, I’d like to talk about logarithmic scales of measurement, of which the Richter scale for the measurement of ground movement is the best known. For every digit increase in the scale, the actual amplitude of ground movement is amplified by ten times. Thus:
Magnitude 1 = 10^1 = 10
Magnitude 2 = 10^2 =100
Magnitude 3 = 10^3 = 1,000
Magnitude 4 = 10^4 = 10,000
And so on. As the amplitude increases, the likelihood of occurrence decreases. Magnitude 1 earth movement is almost constant, completely imperceptible without advanced instruments. A Magnitude 9, like the Alaskan Good Friday Earthquake of 1964, happens three or four times a century.
I think talent works that way, too.
Half of every profession is below average. And that’s the proportion of the people who’ve actually trained and been accepted into that profession! The rest of us know very little, and probably ought to admit it.
Out of a thousand art students, maybe five will make a living off their art, and perhaps one will be known outside her city. That’s not a condemnation. It’s the nature of fame, real quality, and genuine influence to be rare.
This fact of logarithmic levels of art has been on my mind for a long, long time. It first occurred to me on a weeks-long bike camping trip. We stopped in at some nondescript grocery in a nondescript Missouri town; some kind of bland retail music was playing. But I’d been on a music-starvation diet for three weeks by that point, so it caught my attention. In particular, there was one syrupy, abysmal arrangement of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” every bit as awful as you might think it could be. But it struck me that all of those players were remarkably skilled, even though doing undemanding work. They’d been given their sheet music twenty minutes earlier, probably; had run through it once; and then recorded an errorless take and moved on to the next. Each of those musicians, in a lay environment, would be by far the best musician we’d ever met. And no one would ever know their names.
I once thought I was going to be a professional bowler. I was wrong, though I didn’t know it at the time. So let me put forth a Richter scale for bowlers:
Level 1 — has bowled once or twice at a birthday party or a drunken Saturday college night
Level 2 — likes bowling enough to have joined a league and bowl every week.
Level 3 — has made a conscious decision about which bowling ball might suit their game, and practices once in a while outside of league.
Level 4 — bowls in more than one bowling center, and thus learns different conditions.
Level 5 — has enough variability in strategy and equipment to be able to reliably score 200 or more on most conditions.
Level 6 — is reliably top ten in their city. Has joined the Professional Bowlers Association.
Level 7 — is reliably top ten in their region. Participates occasionally in professional tournaments that come through their area.
Level 8 — reliably cashes in professional tournaments.
Level 9 — has won a professional tournament, and no one would be surprised if they won again.
Level 10 — has won five or more professional tournaments, might be mentioned in Bowler of the Year conversations.
Level 11 — has won twenty or more professional tournaments, might be mentioned in barstool arguments about “the best bowler of all time.” (There’ve been about 1,900 professional tournaments in the past 60 years. These fourteen people have won about a quarter of them.)
I was at about five and a half on that scale. Which means I would probably have been the best bowler you’d have ever met. And I was infinitely far away from Level 9, which is kind of what I thought when I said “professional bowler.”
I know so, so many people on the middle ranges of their various scales. People with remarkable talent and dedication, years of experience, accumulated wisdom. The logarithmic scale shows just how many of us there are, and explains why we’ll go unnoticed beyond our neighborhood.
Two new PhDs being sent away by their advisor, who now has more important things to attend to. (Image: “Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise,” by Benjamin West, 1791)
See the glory Of the royal scam
Steely Dan (Donald Fagen/Walter Becker), “The Royal Scam,” 1976
We had no reason to imagine that our doctoral hoods were merely emotional courtesy prior to execution. The blindfold before the guillotine.
Most of us in academia, eighty percent or more of all new research doctorates, will be exiled from our adopted home. Will be shot directly from the most vertical rise into a vast, airless nothingness, jettisoned into the silence just as we imagined that we were about to be cleared for a new stage of flight.
Those of us who’ve been associated with graduate education have a very specific, lived, daily experience of the holy land. We know its pleasures, and we know the ways in which we could imagine making it even more sublime. Every one of us comes to the work with our own specificity in detail—in names, institutions, disciplines, graduation dates—but with a remarkable uniformity in the wonders of intellectual life. We have all lived within, and helped to manufacture, heaven.
None of us were prepared for hell.
Aside from the various mythologies—of burning pits, sulphureous lakes, being herded by demons with forks—the most basic concept of hell is that it is a full removal from the presence of God. Academic hells are like that. The particular experiences might be unique to each of us, but what they have in common is the absence of specific emotional qualities that we have come to love.
It is this sense of absence from the divine that binds us so closely, even after our condemnation, to the enterprise that has banished us. Online trolls plague every discussion of adjunct life with some variant of, “well, if they’re treating you so badly, why don’t you just leave?” And the easy psychological response will have something to do with identity—that we have framed a particular kind of self (and self-narrative), and are bonded to that identity in ways that we shouldn’t be expected to easily abandon. But I think that there’s a second force at work, which is that we hope to be paradise-adjacent. To hold at least a gauzy, pastel version of the vivid pleasures we once knew so well. To imagine that there is, after all, one last final exam we might pass in order to be welcomed home.
Let’s examine nine specific blessings from which we will be held apart.
The First Circle of Hell: “Your Call Is Very Important to Us…”The abandoned scholar will no longer have software, either general nor discipline specific, at her disposal. She will not receive updated computers, will not have automated backups, will not have a local-area network, will not have an IT team on call. She will not even have a photocopier, or a cabinet of pens and legal pads. She will not have a single W-2 at the end of a year, but instead a scatter of 1099s. And this will lead toward a greater understanding of what it means to be part of a community, a specialist contributing to and supported by a team. She will know instead what it means to surrender time to tasks that she would have expected to outsource. What it means to be a sole practitioner rather than a member of a professional culture.
The Second Circle of Hell: Banished from the Garden.The abandoned scholar will no longer have a free on-site health club, nearby food service, or a beautiful campus landscape within which to walk, with its own grounds crew, its own public safety service, its own transit system. And this will lead toward a greater understanding of the aesthetic nature of the academy, the ways in which beauty and generosity have been core facets of the academic enterprise, from the Groves of Academia to the monasteries and private libraries and collections that gave rise to the modern university. The abandoned scholar will do without the unnecessary but ennobling powers of beauty which are so often foregone in workplaces more dedicated to purely economic principles; will no longer have places, and lives, that are outside the simple demands of maximized production.
The Third Circle of Hell: Each Day the Same as the Next. The abandoned scholar will have no recourse to the liturgy of the seasons: the year that breathes between the opening and closing of semesters, the programmed temporal movements between immersion and recovery, between service and discovery. And this will lead toward a greater understanding of the rituals that make a calendar into a sacrament. We will instead live within a flattening of time, in which the pressures of “time is money” have made all hours and seasons into fungible commodities.
The Fourth Circle of Hell: Non-Member Rates. The abandoned scholar will have no access to the common heritage of intellectual life. The library—its books and journals, its databases and collections, its invitation to browse freely rather than be solely strategic—will be supplanted by Google searches for the random, pirated PDF copy of an important article. The abandoned scholar will have no support for memberships in scholarly societies nor to register for and travel to their meetings; their professional community will be replaced by email and LinkedIn. And this will lead toward a greater understanding of serendipity, of bringing intelligent people together to talk freely, and thus to discover fruitful intersections that power new ideas. The abandoned scholar has not merely been abandoned, but undergoes the active process of cashiering, of dishonorable discharge—the ritual disgrace of the fallen officer, stripped of sword and stripe; the service record stricken from history.
The Fifth Circle of Hell: Free Agency. The abandoned scholar will no longer have a daily community of the like-minded, a cohort that has set aside worldly concerns for the unreasonable pursuit of wisdom. The daily exchange of the secret languages and iconography of one’s field, the collective effort to continually redefine one’s discipline, all will be set aside for the blunt intersections of the co-worker: the project update, the check-in, the annual review. And this will lead toward a greater understanding of the commonality of wisdom, the awareness that intellectual life is communal more than individual, that the debate and argument and peer review of scholarly life are all mechanisms through which a community both rises and binds together.
The Sixth Circle of Hell: Billable Hours. The abandoned scholar will no longer have the freedom to take her work wherever her interests might lead, to spend months or years chasing an idea to its natural conclusions. Research will be reduced to fact-finding, strategic planning, product R&D, client service, market forecasts. And this will lead toward a greater understanding of the power of curiosity and exploration, the importance of having an entire profession of people who specialize in the things they don’t yet know, the benefits of whose work might arrive in years, or decades, or generations.
The Seventh Circle of Hell: No Thru Traffic.The abandoned scholar, having finished her dissertation, will now find her intellectual path truncated, her enormous work leading to none further, the ladder reduced to a stepstool with no higher levels. That imagined family tree, bearing forty or fifty further years of discovery, has instead been uprooted and burned. And this will lead us toward a greater understanding of the increasing sophistication of thinking that becomes possible with sustained engagement, of insights that can only fostered by accumulation and repetition. It will lead us toward thinking about the meaning of life, of setting a trajectory of values rather than merely accomplishing goals.
The Eighth Circle of Hell: Barren.The abandoned scholar will have no leverage with which to influence a new generation of young thinkers, will never have a second or third course with a particularly lively undergraduate, will never have graduate students, teaching and research assistants, dissertation advisees. And this will lead us toward a greater understanding of the lineage of ideas, of the personal evangelism and encouragement that brings new initiates into the faith.
The Ninth Circle of Hell: Ghosted.The abandoned scholar will be excluded from a machine expressly designed to offer all of its participants regular feedback, with extensive individual commentary and recommendation. Whether course grades, student evaluations, peer-review judgments, or tenure and promotion structures, the academic structures of individual appreciation and growth will now forever be closed. And this will lead us toward a greater understanding of the powers of admiration and recognition, of the emotional value of being meaningfully appreciated.
I can’t count the number of times when some tenured faculty member, hearing about the indignities of adjunct life, said something about how hard life is for us on the inside, too, you know… To which I can only say, “Trade you.”
Cultures are lived from the inside, but understood from the outside. So it’s no surprise that faculty members might become blind to their blessings, and instead attend to small nuisances. They can take for granted the continuation of things the rest of us can only remember.
I’ve often been criticized for not holding out hope for collective bargaining for adjuncts. And it’s not true. There’s absolutely no justification for paying someone three grand per class with no expectation of renewal, no justification for eliminating someone’s course the day before the semester begins and thus removing even that meager income. I’m all in favor of banding together to change the compensation and work security of the majority of college teachers, and I think that it can actually work a little bit. But for me, the economics have only been a small part of the ache of banishment. Far more important is being told for decades that we belonged, only to discover that paradise was provisional at best. Far more important is being exiled from a community and its language, its patterns and its tools. It’s important to see heaven clearly, to burn its pleasures into mind, so that at least we can comfort ourselves with the paradise we once had.
Herb Childress 