Shrunk to Fit

When I was little, I used to have a recurring daydream/nightmare. There'd be a thrumming in my ears; my whole being would vibrate and my tongue would dry and cleave to the roof of my mouth.

And I would shrink.

I'd shrink til I fit between the bottoms of the doors and the doorjambs in my childhood home. I'd be so small I'd have to climb over the fingerprints of my sleeping siblings, as if I were scrambling over sand dunes. The whoosh of the slightest air current could send me sailing, thudding into passing dust motes, until I landed, helpless but unhurt, on a giant, woolen tuft of carpet or a vast runway of floor tile.

That feeling has begun to return as I get hooked into various academic listservs and get buried in an avalanche of inquiry, analysis and cerebral tedium. The amount of information (or what passes for it) that must be produced, consumed, digested, analyzed, pored over with forensic ferocity, then reanalyzed, repackaged and resold to the mental marketplace -- it's completely overwhelming.

I am now a snowflake in this avalanche, and the onslaught of memory at my childhood miniaturization comes rushing back at me like an angry bull.

Feeling as though I had to learn to play this academic infogame, I submitted my first proposal for a paper, to a graduate religion symposium at Indiana University. To my astonishment, my proposal was accepted. I learned one of the graduate student's first, most valuable lessons:

Don't propose a paper for a conference unless you've already written the paper, or at the very least, researched the topic.

The symposium seemed like a natural fit for my interests: the topic is religion and the arts. Or, more accurately, the "Art of Religion." As someone who once worked in the arts and now studies religion, I figured I could opine with the best of them. I might even sporadically know what I was talking about.

I proposed a topic that appealed to me, even though I had nothing to back it up: Lee J. Cobb's performance as Willy Loman in the original production of Death of a Salesman, I said, was actually a prophetic act heralding the death of American Jewish identity. Seen as one bookend of a cultural moment -- the other being Cobb's testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee, three years later, in which he named more than 20 names -- I proposed that Miller's play and both Cobb's performances were deeply Jewish expressions of a desire to belong, to a society that was about to punish them for their particularity, and more specifically, for bringing redemptive and even messianic passion to their desire to change America, at a time when America feared change fomented by outsiders (among which Jews numbered).

I spent dozens of hours researching -- hours that had to be squeezed in with the thousands of pages I've been reading on other topics like Spinoza, Mendelssohn, medieval Jewish study of the Bible -- and the study of both French and Hebrew (long story).

I became aware of a virtual forest of academic journals, clubs, conventions and societies; a universe of online databases containing thousands of dissertations, catalogued according to author, subject, boolean phrase and keyword; and a vast web connecting academic libraries, departments, collections and digitized volumes all over the world.

And I felt that thrumming in my head and the dryness of my tongue, and again the doorjamb loomed above me like a wooden wave. And I began to clamber over it . . .

The paper on Willy Loman and Lee J. Cobb and the death of American Jewish identity is spectacularly uneven, but it's done. I present it at the graduate religion symposium at IU on March 6. The responder to my paper has published a scholarly article in which he says that "the Bible is a weapon fashioned under the exigencies of coloniality."

I fear the conference may be another shrinking experience for me.

--T.A.

Comments

[Charlie (Colorado)]

Heh. On the contrary, never write a paper until it's accepted somewhere. You can always fail to submit, but in the mean time, there's an actual deadline, and a paper you can atually expect to have published. it's like pitching an article to a magazine editor -- who wants to write something for which you wont get "paid"?

But then read David Lodge's Small World in which, by typographical error, the main character proposes an article on the influence of Shakespeare on he American Western [or something like that, I forget the exact plot point] but what gets accepted is a paper on the influence of the American Western on Shakespeare: afraid to write what he really meant, he writes a postmodern reader-interpreation theory paper on how people see Shakespeare through their experience with Westerns as so don't read the same Shakespeare as Shakespeare wrote -- and becomes the new darling of the theory world.

So you neer know.

[David]

Charlie: I gotta add that to my reading list.

[karen]

I looked up boolean in the dictionary.

Trust me, the quality of your research and writing is totally in proportion to your hunger and humility.

Which is to say: you will do a thorough and fantastical job.

How do i know this? I just do.

Good luck:0).

[Mom]

Welcome to Academe, home of obscurantist intricacy: "Weapon"?
"Coloniality"?? Trust me, clear thinking and straight talk is STILL admired by thinking academics; they may be few in number and soft of voice but they manage to endure. Could I read your paper some time?