Reflections on a Professor:

Reflections on a Professor.

Ali had a troubling inability to simply RELATE. He exemplified the quote by Camus that said that “he professes a love of humanity to hide his contempt of People.” Ali frequently recalled altercations with people he would dismiss with self-righteous indignation. Even his family was not immune. The reports were not specific; he could only describe them as “emotional”, with exasperation. The reports themselves suffice in that way; Ali was incredibly challenged in the assessment of ordinary human emotions, beyond an academic crutch that helped him to comprehend them.

It was with a heavy hand that he sabotaged what had been a meek but effective social tact on my part. A typical neurotic extravert, he insisted that I be more outgoing. I would sit in polite contemplation of his words, evading his eyes when they grew too hypnotic, allowing my own eyes to dart about in pursuit of the very truths that he was spinning all around us, or seeking to remain vigilant, though surely appearing, to him, to be seeking an escape from the lecture. That too was very telling.

For all his talk of women’s rights, for instance, he could only estrange me from women as PEOPLE, as the overwhelming burden of engaging them more forwardly seduced me into the trap of Participation Mystique. My mind began to project upon them all manner of abstraction, a visionary state that was both Kafkaesque and deluding, since I lost my memories of a time when I could gain access to the world of the Feminine Consciousness via the window of the Person.

The blockage was not confined to the female. Men too became alienated by my overzealousness. Extraversion was not becoming of me, as Jung had warned in such instances. Now that I have found solace again, I can again regard every man as an island, whatever the academic claims of some mystic who insists that we are all a continent. The paradox of being both part and whole at once, an individual who is part of the greater Whole and whole in his own right as a part, had not bothered me before I met Ali. I could exchange a wordless sympathy with the cashier at McDonald’s and think the world of it. I could share a fleeting flirtation with a passing female in the city. Every thing was a Direct and Mystikal Encounter. But Mysticism meant nothing to Ali but the butt of an old philosophical joke.

He was probably so obsessed with his own idiosyncrasy that all normality, even a simple adherence to Nature (yet an other of a number of beneficent entities that he had dismissed as a “projection of culture”), was suspect of conformity, to a dogmatic degree. Nature is of course generous; it allows us our individuality, and hence our idiosyncrasy. But Ali did not believe in individuality; Foucault had taught him not to. Ali did not believe in Nature. It was not to be respected for its Otherness; it was to be assimilated or otherwise marginalized.*

Perhaps he demanded expressiveness of me because he was accustomed to a demanding culture. His Irani heritage left little room for subtlety. A man who struggles to comprehend People on an emotional, sympathetic level needs them to be blunt in their emotions, because otherwise paranoia creeps in as the imagination fills in the gaps. The cost is obvious: the emotions are made blunt and therefore dull. The subtleties are lost, the individuality raped, and there is no longer a dialogue, but only a lecture. He was, for all his radicalism, a typical academic: he never left the Lecture Hall, wherever he might go. Fanciful as his lectures might be, he was all ways standing on the same podium.

Dm.A.A.

*If only he could have tapped into its unitive quality, he would dismiss all relative claims towards it, as well as all claims to its relativity, as inferior to the Universality of the Mother Herself.