The Only Thing I’ve Ever Wanted
1.
The only thing capitalism is selling that I’ve ever wanted to buy is “illness.”
2.
The only thing illness is selling that I’ve ever wanted to buy is “being taken seriously.”
3.
Neither of these things is true, because I’ve never “only ever” wanted just one thing from something in my life.
4.
Both of these statements are imitations, taken from Johanna Hedva’s hybrid-genre collection Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain. In their opening essay, titled “Euripides Is Not A Genius. I Am,” Hedva writes: “The only thing the patriarchy is selling that I’ve ever wanted to buy is ‘genius.’” I read it and thought, Yes. I read it and thought, Wow, to start an essay like that. To know yourself like that.
5.
It doesn’t matter whether I am teaching a literature course, a composition course, a creative writing course, a course on gender and the mother, I always ask my students to write imitation essays. Simone Weil called Aristotle a bad apple, but it’s probably no surprise that a woman who has spent her life toeing the line between truth and lie, illness and health, beauty and the grotesque, god and nothing, that I fall on the side of Poetics, of imitation as learning, of mimesis as insight. “Remember,” I tell my students, “that while you are imitating another text’s genre and form, your content, narrative, and creative goals will remain true to your original piece. The goal of this assignment is to think about the relationship between genre and art, between argument and form, in a new way.”
6.
As far as homework goes, my students don’t seem to mind the assignment so much. They imitate Stacey Waite’s “Becoming the Loon,” an essay examining what it means to be a gender nonconforming body teaching in a college classroom. Waite braids alternating sections of academic argument, personal narrative, and lyric writing exploring the unique qualities of the loon, a bird whose androgyny unsettles, delights, provides a model for Waite herself. My students write essays titled “Becoming the Lion,” “Becoming the Busy Bee,” “Becoming the Kitty Cat,” “Becoming the Alpha Wolf,” “Becoming the Lyrebird.” They write about desire and striving. They write about the fear of desire and striving: What it means when the lion is just read as angry, or the busy bee as silly, or the kitty cat as sexy. What it means when the alpha wolf is actually afraid, or the lyrebird just copies others’ songs.
If I had read enough of Roberto Calasso back then, perhaps I would have responded with something about how even rote copies can lead to something new, however ambivalent the results. Think of Hera, Calasso writes in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, think of the necessity of vendetta set off by Zeus’ desiring of Io, a carbon copy of the goddess. Think of how Zeus chose the imitation because she was both familiar and a “fake.” Calasso tells us “he wanted that minimal difference which is enough to overturn order and generate the new, generate meaning.” For Hera, it was precisely the similarities with priestess that set her on a warpath of revenge. “Fake it till you make it” takes on a new a level of violence and self-sabotage in Calasso’s telling, and we’re back at ambivalence, aren’t we, is what I might have had said, but I hadn’t read enough back then.
“In the end, many of us are just faking what we have until we make it in the world—no one really knows who they are or what they want,” my lyrebird student wrote to conclude his paper. “I grew up not knowing what to think, but rather, only knowing what not to do. I simply sang whatever song reverberated the loudest, and prayed it got me further away.”
A reflection on his life and a meta-reflection on the imitation essay itself. A critique, too, on just what it was we were all doing here, using mimicry as pedagogy, as structure, as escape hatch from childhood, from the body, from the self. In my written response to the student, I focused my comments on the essay’s nuance and braided form, its rigorous research, where he might develop it further. In my brain, I thought, Wow. In my brain, I thought, Thank you. In my brain, I felt sorry for myself, that this might be my last year of teaching, how much I’ve come to love it.
7.
Academics critique “work” a lot, applying a Marxist lens, or post-Marxist lens, or a Marxist-feminist lens, using queer theory and subculture studies, intersectionality and ethnic studies to tackle the correct response to work, and the conditions of work under neoliberal capitalism. Most of the time, I feel like a dumbass trying to contribute to this conversation at all. I haven’t read Marx yet, and I’m never sure whether it’s because I haven’t had time or because I hate the idea of spending my reading time reading about work. I’ve always hated the idea of it, the boredom of it, the need for it. I feel dumb because I bought into all the narratives that I was supposed to be critiquing: “Love what you do and it won’t feel like work,” my dad and every dad ever always said.
8.
The only thing my father was selling that I’ve ever wanted to buy was the idea that work could be a calling.
9.
An incomplete list of things work wants you to be when you are calling it “a calling”: energetic, enthusiastic, excited about everything, willing to work overtime, without pay, or else be underpaid, or else get by on an academic stipend that doesn’t cover all of the month’s bills, willing to take out loans, willing to ask family members for money without flinching, willing to work another job or two on the side, willing to get married, in part for the in-laws’ cash, or else, of course, just be independently wealthy, white, pretty, thin, single, not a mother, young, happy-go-lucky, productive, competitive, dynamic, good at multi-tasking, good at drinking, good at chatting, good at social media, good at being online, on, on, on, all the time, every day, every night, an insomniac, good at drugs but not an addict, good at sex but not in love, good at critique but not of yourself, good at mimicry, my student wrote, good at managing your identity, good at working your angles.
10.
Halfway into my program, I am not managing anything anymore. Regardless of whether I buy the bipolar label or not, I can tell: the mania, whatever you want to call that buzzy-skin, jack-knife temple, no-sleep kind of living. It laced the first years of grad school and has now warped, its tentacles shriveled by a “why-the-fuck-am-I-here” feeling that forces me to my knees in most bathrooms, to my bed on most days, allowing weeks to go by without writing or grading or responding to emails from professors and students and colleagues. Regardless of whether I have read Marx or not, I can tell: the “work as calling” thing isn’t going well. The drinking is bad, the bulimia is bad, my brain is bad, and Kiernan loses his own adjunct position because taking care of me takes up too much of his time.
11.
If you can monetize it, it’s work.
If you can’t, it’s illness.
12.
But the illness part feels wrong too, a bad imitation, and so I tell Kiernan: I am going to get another job. I am going to get a real job. I text an old friend whose husband is the chief creative officer at an advertising and marketing company in town. They’re a growing business, I know, Nebraska’s first B Corps, one of those fancy millennial workplaces that touts perks like unlimited vacation, free craft beers on tap in the office, a mission to give some of its profits to local nonprofits. It shocks both me and Kiernan, how quickly they hire me as a copywriter, offering me a $52,000 annual salary—thousands and thousands of dollars more than I’ve ever made in my life pursuing a “calling” as a reporter, a writer, or graduate instructor.
13.
It shouldn’t shock me. I am good at impulsive. I am good at effusive.
Angela McRobbie on what the new culture industries want: “No need for planning when artistic types have always enjoyed chaotic and disorganized ways of working.”
It shouldn’t shock me. I am good at chaos and disorganization, what the ad agency calls “ideating.” I am good at multi-tasking and conviviality in public, what the agency calls “a positive culture.” I am good at mania, and drinking, sleeplessness, and sped-up conversation, talking and thinking fast, what the agency calls “networking.” When the agency’s culture club throws a spring party in the company rec room, all tequila and neon walls and pool tables, I have to sneak upstairs to sleep off the liquor under my desk. When the culture club hosts a scavenger hunt at a series of bars in downtown Lincoln, I cross my fingers that people from my graduate student life won’t see me. I drink margaritas out of a fishbowl with my boss.
Emily Martin calls the scavenger-hunt kick of creative corporations under neoliberal capitalism part of a larger work culture that is “learning to be manic” and teaching its workers that individual mania, if managed correctly, can pay off, too.
When is mania just corporate mimicry and when is it pathology? Which is to say: when is mania work and when is it illness? Or have I already answered that above?
14.
The ad agency wanted the same thing from me that academia did which is the same thing that the newspapers wanted which is what I hated but knew how to give: productivity, efficiency, speed, a nice smile.
I’m not sure of the theory of this. But it felt better to do it in a classroom, with students, in a spirit of questioning these things, even if the questions ultimately didn’t take us the hell out of there.
15.
Hedva, at the end of “Euripides Is Not A Genius. I Am,” discusses their adaptation of Medea, a performance art piece titled She Work. The most “intimate and committed” of their plays, Hedva notes the adaptation deals with trauma and illness, mysticism and joy, how healing is entangled in neoliberal-capitalism, how “healing” should be replaced with “coping,” instead.
“I can’t stand the concept of healing if you don’t also talk about helplessness, hemorrhaging, the medical-industrial complex, panic, poverty, and boredom,” Hedva writes. “I prefer ‘coping’ because it acknowledges the struggle is real.”
16.
I prefer “coping” to work, because it acknowledges the struggle is real. I prefer “coping” to illness, because it acknowledges the struggle is real.
17.
This is not even an imitation. This is not even a ploy to get out of work.
Cameron Steele (@steelecs) is a writer, editor, and tarot reader in Nebraska, where she also teaches creative writing, composition, and literature courses at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Recent work has been published in Brevity, Poets.Org, SFWP Quarterly, and GRAVEL. Her current manuscript, NO EASY WAY OUT, is a memoir-in-essays examining themes of race, illness, violence, and desire as it seeks to interrupt inherited, normative ideas about work, art, beauty, and belonging.