At 8 in the morning my eyes are still not used to the light, and it is time for the “Zoom” meeting, as my “Contemporary Questions in Free-Will in the Analytic Tradition: Seminar 472” class is about to begin. The radiation from the laptop screen burrows itself into my retinas and lodges – with much resistance – in the back of my skull. As the computer boots up the sun begins to spread his rays along the tops of houses all lined in rows, it flashes fire in the windows of houses and parked cars; a glance of this sight through the window is a gasp of relief, and for a moment, it washes a salve across my pained eyes.
“Gooood morning class!"
The suspiciously young professor intones this greeting with his usual thick coating of Evangelical agreeability (this tone persists with perfect constancy with no regard to the subject matter). And the rows of digitized faces make no response to our host’s greeting, the professor waits in vain with a frozen smile for a reply, and in these few awkward seconds I perceive his round pale freshly shaved face gleaming with some sort of strange light (it flashes bright with every smile). With a sigh he launches into the morning’s itinerary: today we debate free will by unfolding dilemmas and scenarios, arguments and counterarguments, syllogism and sentiment – all spoken of in an entirely hackneyed language born through decades of desire to sound more scientific and constructed than our predecessors who wrote in such amateurish plain terms… great, same as every other class. To immerse myself in the sea of this jargon is like learning the constructed languages of children, good for gaining entry into a rather exclusive group but good for nothing else, really its usefulness just depends on whether or not you think the group is worth it.
Through the computer screen my grinning professor begins to cut a thousand incisions of distinctions into my tired mind, and now – in an effort to distance myself from this onslaught – my eyes wander to this class’s textbook which lies beside the screen on the desk. Its cover is painted in a curious variation of turquoise adorned with slanting black text, and in its lower corner, is printed some kind of graphic that could not have been anything other than a rejected logo of some failed 1990s tech company. My mind now too drawn away from the Zoom meeting I come to the sudden realization that the cover of “Free-Will: An Anthology of Contemporary Texts” was designed absolutely perfectly, to an extent that is almost frightening. Its newspaper sized text has been sparingly browsed for my own mental wellbeing (to put it lightly), but the few pages read and the terminology absorbed idly through the Zoom classes spoke volumes to me, and it bled through the turquoise cover.
The words sounded like the creak of white paneled flooring now only found in the halls of decrepit public schools, they are yellow now but cannot truly die. The colour brushed with here is that of old cigarette filters and the mysterious type of plastic used to house screens and drivers in the bygone days of the cathode-ray. Here are the thoughts of a fidgeting man in a fitted white dress shirt made of printer paper, no tug of the sleeve, no pull at the collar can bring any relief. He flies through office hallways stoked up on caffeine (and pills of dubious origin) to publish memo after memo, emails, attachments, notices, follow-ups, carbon copies, documents, files, appraisals, reports: all through the screen. This relentless chattering and clacking of keys begins to be all I can hear through the headphones I now wear.
What a perfect cover...
This state of mind and the revelation that dawned upon me was only amplified by the medium of the class, the realization surrounding this cover, the ephemeral nature of the colours on the screen and the words filing into brain seemed like an astrological convergence: synchronicity; even the pain of my mild hangover seemed to play its role.
The professor put his coffee down and looked more intently at the bright window on his screen that contained my pale, astonished, frozen face.
"Are you okay -----?"
The sound of my name brought me back yet again. I was dizzy and slightly sick; it was now little over 10 minutes into the Zoom class, 2 hours and 50 minutes remained.
No comments:
Post a Comment