The Fight for Synchronicity

It would really be worthwhile knowing whether one couldn’t poetize oneself out of a girl…It could become a quite interesting epilogue, which in its own right might be of psychological interest, and besides that, enrich one with many observations.
–Johannes, The Seducer’s Diary

As a proper prospector restores the mountain to its original form after withdrawing his livings, so the good psychoanalyst reconstitutes his subjects after bringing them to oblivion.  The boulders are restacked; the soil replaced; the trees replanted.  In short, the outer must be made exactly as it was before, commensurate with but opposite to with the wholesale transformation of the inner.  This holds even for casual relations, where this transformation takes the shape of mere discovery.

Jon Kyst was once a proudly public Communist in his native Denmark, whose Slavic obsession owed as much to his love of the Soviet Union’s promise as to its heavily present culture.  In my Russian literature class with him, this private fixation is more difficult to identify.  He wears designer jeans, Harris Tweed jackets, and what look to me like Italian loafers.  Frequently they are thrust into my face through the legs of the chair in front of me, as he jumps up on the table and nestles them down, eager to arbitrate our arbitration of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and Bulgakov.

“I was punk when I was young.  Of course we all learned English as our second language, but then we had our choice of third—the responsible ones did German, of course French was a possibility.  But if you were really punk you took Russian,” he explained over tea as we ostensibly discussed the class.  Professors at DIS are required to hold an election for two class representatives, who inform the professor of the other students’ opinions on the curriculum.  I personally think this reflects an anxiety of DIS regarding what students think study abroad should be versus what they are able to provide…but this would be getting into DIS politics, which I have as of yet taken care to avoid.

Jon was in Russia during perestroika as well as the 1991 Soviet coup.  “I was with my future wife at the time.  It was still courtship.  There were tanks everywhere and we just looked at each other and said, ‘I don’t know where or when I’ll see you again…’”
Jon paused for a moment, looking at his Earl Grey.  He had told us a week before that he had managed to quit smoking not through nicotine or slowly reducing his cigarette consumption, but by retreating to a cabin in the Kattegat and just going fishing every time he needed a smoke.  “Yes, cold turkey,” he said, miming a fishing line with his right arm.

This kind of detail, these truths for which I could live and die, are normally in quite short supply, and especially so with Prof. Kyst.  His corpus is lacking.  Perhaps this makes it all the more valuable to me.  Regardless, our classroom discussions seldom rise above vapidity.

During our mid-class five-minute break, I asked my seatmate Richard about the parental impetus for his first name, which seems more rare among my generation.  He made a sly grin.  “It’s awkward for me because the only other Richards I know are middle-aged Jews.”
I scoffed.  “My dad’s name is Richard and he isn’t a middle-aged Jew.”
Suddenly, Jon bent at his fulcrum in our direction.  “Not middle-aged? Surely he is.  Surely all your parents are.”
Richard began to snigger.  Jon flashed his eyes at him before turning back to me.  I hate when teachers do this: commit intentional awkwardness to appear helpless in order to make a clueless pupil laugh, when on the inside their mind is preparing today’s lecture.  Pedagogic play-acting.  For a moment I loathed Jon.

But I tried to restrain myself.  “I suppose he is middle-aged, but he isn’t Jewish.”
Jon leaned in farther.  “Excuse me, I forgot my hearing aid today.  Could you repeat that?”
Richard began to outright snort, and I was losing patience.  Two can play at this game.
“I said…” I cupped my hands around my mouth.  “He isn’t JEWISH!”
Everyone stared at us.  Jon backed up.
“Yes of course.  I hate my hearing aid, it’s so inconvenient.  I forget it all the time.”
Bullshit.  I wear glasses, and I forget them maybe twice a year.  Jon forgets his hearing aid every other day.
I cupped my hands again.  “I DON’T LIKE IT EITHER!”

Richard could barely contain himself, almost falling out of his chair with the giggles.  Jon nodded slowly and gave me a modest smile before quietly returning to his itinerary sheet.  Yes, I had beaten him at his own game.  But I felt like an ass.  Of course people acquire shells and inhabit roles deliberately, but as I now saw, not arbitrarily.  Teacher-Jon and Jon-Jon were simply different people, and I had wounded the divide with my own callous, sardonic bridge.  The teacher-student relation should steer clear of brinksmanship; each must respect what the other brings to the table.

During the daily breaks that followed, I tried to make amends.  I struck up a conversation with him about why Nabokov hated Dostoyevsky so much.  But this was a stupid thing to do, as I take Dostoyevsky too personally.

Jon was in his usual element: “What you have to understand is that Nabokov was a modernist.  And the modernists could not respect—you know—how normative and ideological Dostoyevsky could be.”
“But there were modernists who loved Dostoyevsky.  Joyce, Woolf…I mean, come on.”

Jon took a step back.  He nodded in acknowledgement.
“Yes, but remember that Nabokov also emigrated to the United States and made his name there.  He was in a different creative environment than those that did love Dostoyevsky.”

“But there were American modernists that loved Dostoyevsky too.  He’s all over Faulkner.”
He took another step back, pursing his lips this time.

“Look, the French existentialists saw all these ideas at work in Dostoyevsky and wrote about it, and Nabokov didn’t get their attention.  He was jealous.  Okay?”  He glared at me.
I sat back in my chair.  “Yeah…that makes sense, Jon…thank you.”

Jon went back to his itinerary.  Strike two.  Of course, I think Nabokov knew that Dostoyevsky was a transcendentally brilliant writer, but it was impossible for him to own that reality.  Dostoyevsky’s Slavophilic polemics had become conflated with Nabokov’s ambivalent feelings towards the country in general, and he resented that so many Westerners could lose themselves in Crime and Punishment but still go out for hamburgers.  They had already claimed a writer who, should God have given Nabokov a more tranquil life story, could have belonged to him instead.  Dostoyevsky, like a foreign cathedral, was remotely beautiful and appealing but ultimately inaccessible to the author of something as caustic and black-hearted as Lolita.

And in my defense, it is very difficult to talk to a professor who hides, presumably out of pragmatic necessity, behind generalities.  I really started to wonder if I could crack through his exterior without bringing down the foundations as well.  Inside him lurked a story that I wanted to elicit…there was marrow there that deserved to be sucked.

Yesterday, we began our discussion of The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov’s insolent masterpiece on the trappings of Stalinist Russia.  Jon seemed more excited and jumpy than usual, like an AIDS victim after a full blood transfusion.  As usual, he delegated in a clockwise direction so that my group to cover the last chapter for discussion; as I had assumed, no one around me had advanced that far into the text.  So I waited, listening to the occasional groans of understanding the other groups achieved through their discussions.  Richard shuffled his feet, put on a pair of sunglasses, and reclined.  Quietly I took notes on the text.  Jon occupied himself with his calendar but was clearly listening to the voices around him.  How much easier it must be for him to see right inside us, having the credentials to demand insight and critical thought, than us for him…I do wonder if teachers realize how powerful they are.

“Okay, let’s hear what you have come up with,” he said peremptorily, his legs nestled and butt plopped right in front of me.  We went clockwise as usual, so that my group was the last to speak.  “Now, let’s hear from the chapter twelve group.  What did you have to say?”
Richard looked at me.  The others doodled on their notebooks.  I stared, blankly but knowingly, at Jon, who eventually looked down at his own copy and flipped the pages absently.  Clearly, the silence did not bother him in the least.  Somehow this was interesting to me, more so as the seconds ticked by.  After a quarter of a minute I finally chirped.

“It’s about how Woland—the Devil—puts on a black magic show in a theater, before several thousand Muscovites.  But they just think he’s a magician…he even says he’s just a ‘professor.’”
“A professor?  Oh, how interesting…” Jon leaned in.  There it was again, that pretended surprise Jon practiced so sanctimoniously.  But for some unknown reason it didn’t annoy me this time.  Somehow it itself had become the topic of discussion.

“Yes, and the Devil shows off his anthropomorphic cat, makes money appear out of nowhere, and decapitates the theater emcee.  The emcee had demanded that Woland reveal how he did the magic trick, as all Soviet magicians were expected to, because for the Soviets there was no magic or mysteries and everything had to be rationally explained.”
“Now this is faaascinating.”

I smiled.  “So, the chapter is called ‘Black Magic and its Exposure.’  But the Devil refuses to explain the magic, or really, he doesn’t have to, because the audience is so enamored with it that they just want more and more.  So he makes a Persian rug shop appear out of nowhere for their amusement, and they all run up on stage.  He turns them bourgeois.”

Though I was sitting at the front, I could sense that the rest of the class was fast losing interest, already checking their own travel itineraries and flight information for the journeys they were eager to undertake.  Jon, however, had his eyes glued on me.

I continued: “So there is an exposure here—he’s exposing them as the hypocritical, secretly-materialistic proletariat they truly are.  That’s the irony that’s being cultivated.”
Jon slammed his legs onto the floor.  “That’s right.  And we should remember that Bulgakov will be doing this throughout the novel.  One of his goals was to unmask this time period for what it really was, and—“

I knew where Jon as going, but finally I had found a way to put us both on the same page.
“But wait, Jon.  I was just discussing how the Devil had been doing that to his own audience.  Now you’re saying that this is authorial intent.  So who’s the real author, the Devil or Bulgakov?”
As usual, Jon took a step back, looking at the ceiling.  He leaned back in to face me.  But then he paused, in a distinctly un-Jon-ish way, and the left side of his mouth turned up.  He didn’t lean back again but just paused, suspended, before my desk.

“That’s a good question, Tom.”

And so, my task finally complete, I listened to Jon’s lecture with deliberation and presence, hanging on every word, and seeing past himself into himself.  For I finally knew how far Jon, on his own path, had gone.