Victoria Sees It by Carrie Jenkins (love letters to the dead TXT) 📕

me to do something, I do it. So I began seeing a therapist. He was called Jeff, and he was a kind man. A soft man. I didn’t mind seeing him, feeding him a digest of my life. Another half-bullshit story I had to tell, for someone who apparently needed to be told.

After what had happened with Associate Dean Jarre, I didn’t talk much anywhere except in Jeff’s office. At the philosophy department’s monthly meetings, I sat silently at the back while others discussed all the small changes that were needed. There were many. These meetings were always held in the same under-heated, white square room that had once been the scene of my little disintegration on camera. But it didn’t matter. None of it mattered by this point.

As we crawled down through the agenda items we would reach a solid consensus on each one: something should be done. Indeed, the problem was becoming rather urgent. Then after much discussion—sometimes ice-cold, sometimes angry, sometimes tearful—it would transpire that we could not all agree on any particular direction in which to move. So the meetings would end for lack of time. For a week or two afterwards, louder colleagues would be overheard in the hallway taking a few supplementary bites out of one another, then the issue would quietly disappear from agendas for a couple of years until a new faculty member arrived and asked why we had such a baroque course structure, such a dysfunctional photocopier, such an ugly and unused faculty lounge. And these things would go onto the agenda again. These small monthly dramas were therapeutic phlebotomies, serving no purpose but to vent fluxes and fumes which might have been less toxic kept inside.

Sometimes we would discuss the graduate students. Who was “brilliant.” Who was “struggling.” Anyone deemed “brilliant” was assumed to be on a trajectory towards an academic career. I had a student deemed “brilliant” who didn’t want to be a professor. It didn’t matter how many times he told them, they always assumed he would be “going on the market” like a piece of prime real estate, sure to be snapped up as soon as he finished his dissertation. I stopped correcting them after a while, and just let them talk about his prospects. In their minds, he was irrevocably bound for the life they knew, the only future that made sense for such a quality individual. Once, I had thought this blinkering must be a sign of how wonderful it felt to be a professor: they literally can’t imagine anything better. By now, I suspected it was a terrible thing, to only know one story.

At the meetings, I cocooned myself in my camel cashmere scarf. And after a while, the ambient sound would become grey, the auditory equivalent of letting one’s eyes fall out of focus, releasing your grip on them, looking past the magic-eye picture until you see the dolphin, or the acid smiley, or whatever. To perceive without interpreting. Hold symbols softly. Let them go if they want to go. It’s such a strain to be constantly processing signs.

The quincunx is an arrangement of five dots. You know the sign of five on a die? That’s it. A strong symbol. It has to be—it represents all kinds of things. It is a good planting for apple trees. Prisoners wear it as a tattoo, a mark of the self incarcerated within four walls. It can mean being alone in the world. The centre dot is often semantically distinguished from the other four. The heart of the quincunx. Without it you have a terrible hollow, a nothing where the core should be. A mere four: something “stable” the way my mother was in the home, a blank space inside the brick square. The square college courts (not “quads”—Oxford calls them that, the other place, the not-us).

We can get very comfortable with four. Our four dimensions, three spatial and one temporal. The ancients made another four-map of reality: earth, air, fire, water. Four has a finality to it. It’s closed. Perfect. Deathy. The quartus paeon is a metric foot, short short short long:

U U U __

Tap it out. Listen. That’s what death sounds like. Beethoven knew this. His so-called Fifth Symphony. Another misnomer, another signal that something here doesn’t fit. He knew. Five makes people uncomfortable because it’s not dead. It refuses to be over. Hum a few bars of “Take Five” by Dave Brubeck. Compare that to the doomsound of the quartus paeon. You hear it? Five is odd. Prime. Undone. A zombie number, unkillable. It’s been there, done that, and it’s still going.

The dead emptiness of four keeps us calm, contained. We see a straight shot to the grave: a long corridor with no exits. Eyes on the road. No ups, no downs: round and round and round she goes. In our department meetings, the pattern was to worry about something, put it on the agenda, fail to agree on anything we could do about it, then shuffle it off to be dealt with some other time. The deathy square dance of our scholarly dreams. We didn’t mourn them exactly, or at least if we did so we each did it privately, not together. But I think we shared a vague sense of our common loss. The parts of ourselves we’d had to chop out. The price we paid, to do whatever it was we were doing there.

The bright-laugh lady says he went through “a real low point” between marriages. Yeah that was me. A real low point mind you. No fakes here. And it was not between marriages. Not by my calculations.

You know how the more people talk, the less of it’s true? Signal and noise—percentage-wise, I mean, the ratio suffers. You should listen to the ones who aren’t talking, only the problem is you can’t hear them. Those ones whose story is very together, they made it do that. Like his giant face on TV. Not TV, whatever they call