Kiss Me, Genius Boy (No More Dreams #1)

2.11 By Joshua undone

2.11 By Joshua undone

Talent, hubris, and laziness come together in me. That’s my tragic streak, right there. When I graduated high school, and asked my literature teacher to sign my shirt, he paraphrased Shakespeare, writing: “Joshua was by Joshua undone.” I know why. I often liked to underperform, to hold back so if I ever failed I could say, “I wasn’t really trying. I could do much better, if I wanted to, but the task wasn’t worthy, or the moment wasn’t right.” With my prodigious mental energy, I could work like a demon if inspired, but was apt to be so by unproductive things: playing videogames, reading novels rather than writing one. I consumed voraciously, but made nothing.

Come the summer of 2003, seven months before I met Ellie, I was in a slump. I had risen from simply having visions into making a profession of being haunted by them. I was nearly eighteen months into my doctorate on the subject of utopianism in videogames, and writing about what had become of humanity’s dreams for its own future when expressed in an art form founded on high technology. I wondered why our aspirations had diminished since the 1960s, why our dreams of revolution and transformation had died.

Instead, I should have been wondering why my own dreams of love, fame, and riches had yet come to nothing, and why I never spent any time writing my novel when that was supposed to fulfill my destiny. But the answer, as ever, would have been: the time is not yet upon me.

One scorching day that January, I sat in my brown velvet in my living room, back from the window so the sun wouldn’t burn me. I’d brought a chair in from the kitchen so I could stand an electric fan on it, crank the speed up to eleven and point it at my face. On my thigh lay a book in navy-blue cloth library binding. On the spine, the title was gold-embossed in plain sans-serif caps— Utopics: Spatial Play, by Louis Marin. It was the holidays, but postgrads don’t get holidays. Every day of the year they face the choice to work or to procrastinate, and most times they do a little of both.

The thesis was not going well. I was beginning to suspect that utopia had died because intellectuals had strangled it with the insidious tentacles of their impenetrable writing. In the book I held, which was supposedly a modern classic on our human visions of paradise, Marin had reduced utopia into “the zero moment of the dialectic,” and surrounded it with other such nonsense.

“What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence”—that’s Bertrand Russell, summing up Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Wittgenstein’s book is as much hard work as its title indicates, but nevertheless it has a heart of mystical clarity. In my frustration with Marin and his kind, I turned to it for consolation.

I was supposed to worship Marin, Utopics, and the classics of what we at the university called ‘theory,’ precisely because they were so difficult to understand. Obscurity, I should have believed, was the mark of genius. But I thought of Wittgenstein, and formed a suspicion I dwelled on incessantly.

Marin can’t state his case clearly, I thought. Therefore, Marin is saying nothing at all.

And it didn’t just apply to Marin. It worked doubly well for our more famous idols—Homi Bhaba, Giorgio Agamben, and even Michel Foucault—who my department’s professors and their sycophantic students idolized.

No sycophant myself, I started to try the Wittgenstein argument out in public.

“There are only one or two ideas here,” I said of one of Babha’s essays, at a cultural studies reading group. “Just one or two sentences’ worth. The rest is … Dare I say it? It’s bullshit.”

Then another week, I said this of an extract from Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic: “This all sounds very sophisticated, but at the core of it, there seems to be the idea that we were better off before the advent of modern medicine. And that simply isn’t true. Would you rather die than submit yourself to the ‘discipline’ of a hospital?”