Accenting Some Other Thing

I try to keep in touch with a relatively small cadre of old, close friends. In the course of conversations, I almost always find myself impressed with them, or, at the risk of sounding weirdly paternalistic, proud of them. Mostly I think it’s because I have a compulsory question that I ask of them, and without fail they manage to answer it in a way that makes me happy: “Cool. But what else are you doing?”

I say “compulsory” because I think I mean I feel compelled, and maybe the word “compulsive” gets closer to overtone I’m trying to express here. The thing you do is what pays your rent and puts food in your mouth, but the “what else” is the thing that’s interesting, that’s supposedly expressive of some striving tendency in a person to do something that puts aside he practicalities of keeping your body alive, or sometimes even works against that tendency. I think I find myself compelled to ask the “what else” question because the “what else” is the really hard thing to do. And at the same time it’s the most necessary thing, because, paradoxically it lives and breathes outside of the space of necessity, and (at least for people in my tax bracket) sometimes directly opposed to necessity.

Whenever a friend tells me they’re starting a band, or blowing all of their savings on a really long trip on another continent, or acting in a new play, I can’t help but question my own “what else” – and as of right now, there’s not much of a what else at all. Maybe that’s because of a certain tendency I have that I’m just starting to recognize. It’s scary and it has something to do with my wanting to go back to grad school, and going through the enormous pain in the ass of applying and gaining admission to one (well, two, so kudos to me). Because it seems that I have a big problem formulating the “what else” in terms outside of some vaguely nonsensical concept of, for lack of a better, smarter term, “identity.”

Here’s where we run up against the problem of pragmatism. I’m no Louis Menand, but I’ve understand pragmatism as the basic idea that what we do constitutes the whole of what we are, and that notions of belief, self, etc. are all equal to the sum of the action we take – sort of like the existentialist credo, “existence precedes essence,” but somehow less abstract. To point out a really obvious example, you can’t be a writer without actually writing something. Fair enough. But if the idea that action wholly constitutes self holds any water for you, and you, perhaps like me, find yourself hard up when it comes to motivation, you are, by definition, in a pretty serious crisis. My solution was to go back to school.

That’s not the only reason obviously – I do feel like studying literature, theory, philosophy, etc. is pretty much what I do best (not that I know all that much about those things), and I find it fulfilling and exciting … still. It’s hard to come to terms with the fact, though, that I work best within the academic structure. On the one hand, it’s good because I’ve put myself in a position where I have to work. On the other hand, it’s scary because, well, what the fuck does it mean that I need an immense and regimented system to actually make me do something? What is the status of my “what else” if I need all of academia pushing me into productivity? This is why I say I’m compulsive about asking “what else,” because I need to know that it’s possible, and it’s sort of gratifying seeing other people doing it, even if I, myself, sometimes feel stuck at the lab – if that makes any sense.