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back A Truly Professorial Enterprise by Emmanuel Melissaris, Matthew Number of episodes: 10 Words of previous episode revealed to each author: 5 Written between 22 Apr 2005 and 23 Apr 2005 It was bleak, very bleak. Simeon De Lisle, Lecturer (B) in Law at the University of Dullerton was staring from the window of his small, dark office and wondering about his future. Would he ever make it? Would be people recognise his immanent worth? And, if so, would that be imminently? He thought not. Although his latest article, "And another thing ...: Reflections on other things", had been accepted in the Journal of Things, he still had three more articles to complete if he was to be entered into his Department's Research Assessment Exercise submission. What people didn't understand was that things were complicated things, and that three years was really not very long if one was to reflect on them properly. He drew a deep breath, sighed, and was about to turn back to his PC when something in the corner of the car park caught his eye. It couldn't be! No - his mind, active and alert even in the various sloughs of despond to which he was wont - he was not mistaken. There, in the lime green trackies that were his trademark was Professor Torquil Nebuliser, Professor of Very Difficult Things in the School of Reification at the University of San Fernandodando. Professor Nebuliser had, since Simeon's earliest days as an academic been a hero of sorts, however unfashionable that was in today's feminist environment. His monograph, "Things, Things, and a Lot More Things Besides" was the work that had first inspired him to become an academic. Its thick pages and comprehensive index (there were 237 entries under "it" alone), had caused him lieterally to gasp with pleasure. And now, here he was - like a nylon lizard in the car park of his University. Who could he be coming to see but him? What did it mean? It was a few seconds later that I heard the first voices outside my office. I always kept the door shut. What's the point in sharing my idleness and, on this occasion, my puzzlement with all my colleagues? So the voices had no faces, they were crammed in the background of irrelevancy along with pretty much everything that happened outside my own head. But this distraction proved a little more difficult to ignore. The voices got louder and louder and new ones joined them and then a third set and perhaps a fourth one, it was difficult to tell any longer. I couldn't make anything of what was being said out, although, truth be told, I didn't try very hard. It was none of my business, was it? I just kept quiet hoping they would soon go. They didn't. Thirty minutes later they were still there making the horizon of meaninglessness opening up before me even wider and deeper. And then I started suspecting that there is only one way of ending the commotion, of ordering things once again. What was required was an external intervention. Something or someone close, someone neighbouring the chaos, someone who can see and hear the noise and bring order from outside. Me. One word started monopolising my thoughts: leadership. Wasn't that what my new job was all about? It was a leader my colleagues were looking for and that seemed like the time to live up to my professorial status. It seemed that that was what it all meant. I got up, tucked my shirt carefully into my trousers, pulled my wrinkly jacket straight and opened the door. A large group of people was there alright. As soon as they saw me they went quiet and stood there staring at me. "Good", I thought. "Commanding the masses is the key to successful leadership". But I soon realised that there was one problem. I didn't recognise a single face! This was hardly unsurprising. The fog that had been descending slowly was now a thick blanket that covered the delegates' legs up to the knees so that they resembled dwarves floating on a milky sea. Above the fog, plumes of mist circled the heads of the men and women in the near distance, and those further away in the body of the hall were shadowy and indistinct. "Over here Professor!" shouted Simeon, who had been keeping a close watch on the podium from his hiding place behind the thick blue curtain. "Who's that? Where are you hiding?" The Professor's voice had an edge of terror, and his teeth glistened like dominoes between lips that were increasingly blue. "It's Simeon ... Simeon de Lisle - your number one fan!" The look on the Professor's face was one of abject horror. He bent down and started to scramble off the podium, across the rectangular flower pots. "It's no good Professor - all the exits except one are sealed. Soon the artificially generated fog that my friend in the Artificial Fog Department has organised will cover everyone and everything, and it will be impossible to get out. Your aonly chance is to leave with me, now. Quickly!" The Professor considered his options. The lad might be right. Mad, certainly, but if he was the only way of escaping, then so be it. He gathered together his lecture notes and made his way towards the back of the stage, towards the insistent whistling that Simeon was using as a beacon. After tripping over a chair, and a lady delegate with large feet who had also heard the whistling but who Simeon had fended off with a strange digital manipulation he had seen used in Kill Bill!, the Professor finally made it to the aperture in the velvet drapes. His terrified eyes met Simeon's. He found it hard to describe what he saw in them. Was it anger? Despair? Lust? He couldn't stay in the same room with him any longer. He had to run. Without being sure how he got there, he found himself in Hanley. "What a grim place", he thought. "And yet so tranquil in its dilapidated simplicity". Hanley suddenly became his life's landscape. Boarded up windows on buildings that once housed people's dreams like his abandoned ideas about space, time, nature, what it means to be committed to rules; bins overflowing with rubbish like his ambitions for intellectual excellence; flickering street lights like his perception of reality; posters on the walls for concerts that never attracted an audience or never happened at all like his attempts at educating younger people. He shut his eyes. He was numb. If only he could just be transposed by flicking his fingers, just like that. Transposed to a different life. The question was, though: What would that life be? A good life? A peaceful life? A life packed with adventure? Or simply a life full of lots of disconnected Things. That was the real problem - the lack of certainty, the lack of clarity. Simeon had always needed these. His mother had needled him because of this as a child back in Bournemouth. What shall I wear? he would ask. Whatever you like, would come the answer - or would come when she wasn't "entertaining" in the guest bedroom. And this absence of definition on her part, her unwillingness to direct him to the proper clothes, the appropriate shoes, gloves and hats, had been the beginning - he saw this now - the beginning of his need to know precisely what Things were, and what their places in the universe should be. Realising that it was his mother that had been the source of everything was like a brick hitting him between the temples. Simeon sat down on the nearest bench, which was some 300 yards away, and tried to work through the implications. If it was his mother who had provoked his obsession with the "thisness" and the "thatness", surely she was also its cure. He must go to Bournemouth. If that's what he had to do to get his life sorted, that's what he would do. Bournemouth it is then. He boarded the train with a sense of fearful anticipation. He found his seat and realised that he was sitting at th same table with an old lady, who had scattered her things all over the floor, the seats and the table and had stretched her wrinkly legs across. He squeezed in the few inches that the old lady had allowed for him and avoided eye contact. There's few things he hated more than conversing meaninglessly with other passengers. Especially old, female ones. "Excuse me", she said before long. He pretended not to have heard her. "Are you not a professor?" Had she really said that? Did she recognise him for what he did, what he stood for? He looked up. Her unusually bright eyes were looking at him intensely. "Yes, I am. How do you know?" "Oh, I would recognise you anywhere! I have read all your work.", she said with a soft Scottish accent. She must have boarded the train in Aberdeen. The full cross-country experience. Was that a practical joke? She had read his work? "Are you an academic?", he asked. "Oh no, no, no. Just an amateur thinker!" He sat back. Maybe it was not Bournemouth that the answers were hidden in. Maybe it was all in the journey. And what a journey. If the train hadn't been late; and if the points hadn't been down at Guildford, it would all have been so very different. But there it was, and there was no going back. The French had a saying, Simeon remembered: "Il faut reculer pour mieux sauter". This had nothing to do with making crispier potatoes, and everything to do with the need to retrench if true advances were to be made. So it was with scholarship. He needed, he realised, to fall back - to gather his thoughts, to get to the essence of his ideas. But where could he do this, and who would listen? The Professor was no help now. Ever since the incident behind the curtain, that avenue was blocked. Indeed, there was still the chance that the police would become involved, despite his pleas for forgiveness. No, he would have to go it alone. Simeon picked up his satchel, slung it over his shoulder and wandered down towards the beach. On either side of the road the net curtains fluttered behind open windows. The sun shone and riffled his auburn curls as a poker dealer riffles a new pack. This is what this is, though Simeon. This, not that. All these years I have been labouring under the misapprehension that Thisness was the obverse of Thatness, when all along, Thatness is the ever-deferred jouissance which underpins the This, the Now, the Happening. He sat down on the nearest bench, which was some half a mile away, and got his pad out from his satchel. Now is the moment, he thought. Now is the moment I start to write the work by which I will make my mark on the world. Goodbye Dullerton, Hallo Fame and Fortune. Simeon took a pen from his pocket and began to write: "A New Theory of Thisness". What a revelation! General, yet specific. Abstract, yet relevant. Academic, yet sexy. But where on earth to begin from? Thisness presupposes thatness and the two presuppose whateverness. "No", he thought, "I can't start meandering again, I must be a leader, an intellectual leader" He thought back at the old lady on the train to Bournemouth, at derelict Hanley, at his grim little office. How far away everything felt now. Even the sky looked brighter. Was it sunny or was he just happy? For the first time in years, he was smiling. "What are you smiling at, sunshine?" The voice was strangely familiar and jogged Simeon from his reverie. The sun was behind the head of his interlocutor and he was unable at first to make out his identity. "Who is that?" Simeon asked. "Don't you know me? After all this time?" Simeon shrugged. "I've no idea". Suddenly the sky went black, and a howling wind took hold. The birds flew up from the grass and disappeared into the branches of the swaying trees. Geese made geese like noises in the distance. Some, which were nearby, also made the same noise, but more loudly. "I", said the voice, "am God". "God? You must be joking. You are not God. ANd do you know why? Because I AM GOD. I am the one who can explain everything you do and change it. I am the one that people believe in. I am the PROFESSOR. I profess, not confess, nothing less. I order you to vanish now, you pathetic little noone. I exist in the phenomenon AND the noumenon. I am here AND there. I am then AND now. I am god. I am God. I am GOD." The voice didn't reply. Or maybe he didn't hear it. He fell on the ground not being able to feel much. "I am God", he thought but the words couldn't come out of his mouth any longer. Thisness, thatness, whateverness, he had conquered it all. He had beaten God. He had beaten himself. back © All work herein copyright the stated authors.

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