Hilary: 8th Week: Chiasmus

Hello,

I was more than a little pessimistic last time I posted, as a result of a rather melancholy, stagnant mid-Hilary; a three-week period that passed in a manner redolent of not so much wading through treacle as sprinting through it; a rather exhausting, frustrating feeling born of trying to get a colossal number of things done in an increasingly decreasing window of time. When combined with the concomitant feelings of exhaustion, frustration and being generally modcearig, it is perhaps unsurprising that I was disinclined to note anything especially positive about my Hilary term. Thankfully, a very productive, pleasing Eighth Week helped to remedy that overwhelming sense of fatigue and listlessness somewhat. A number of things happened that turned a mediocre term into one that I am able to look back upon, if not fondly, with enough positive memories to keep me rather in love with the Oxford Experience.

I’ll structure this entry chronologically, which I’m sure makes a pleasant change from the Miscellany of memories that have constituted most of my posts this term; it is a pleasant change for me, at any rate. In fact, I shall cheat a little and start with Saturday of 7th Week, in which I was playing yet another game of football for the Hall. For the first time in what felt like weeks, even if it was not, British Spring had deigned to make an appearance, so I was able to play in the sun; a lovely change. The game was away at Hertford College for the 3rd XI, again a little short of players. It has appeared to me over the past few years that my form mimics that of Chelsea’s Premier League form; once March appears and the moving forward of the clocks becomes imminent, I suddenly begin to play better. Perhaps this merely shows that I lack the stoicism to play well in wind, rain and conditions of below ten degrees. In any case, I added four to my season’s tally in a 5-3 win, and even when the opposition are poor to mediocre, scoring threes and fours (and sevens) is always good for the confidence of a center-forward. Perhaps if Chelsea were to loan Torres to Morecambe or Barnet, he would regain his form and confidence – though I fear that his decline is as inexorable as the addition of ‘LOL’ and ‘chillax’ to the Scrabble dictionary.

After this extremely enjoyable hour and a half, I returned to work on Samuel Beckett’s plays, tucked away in a corner of the Teddy Hall Library. I have been trying to familiarise myself with the annexe known as the Vestry recently; the Vestry is the one part of the library that remains open after the 1 A.M. closing time, which means that anybody who is mad enough to work past one o’clock or anybody who is in the throes of an essay crisis remains there into the night. To fail to do so leads to the unfortunate situation that one of the Teddy Hall Aesthetes experienced; that is, he was locked into the library (if I remember correctly, in the tower) into the night, with only the sound of the rats that inhabit the Crypt for company. In any case, I foresee myself spending a considerable amount of time in the Vestry next term, so that is where I spent most of Saturday after the game. For the Eighth Week essay, I chose to compare Waiting for Godot with Endgame in the light of Arthur Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theories and hermeneutic.

In the end, the essay became slightly rushed due to the combination of too much sport and too much other work, but thankfully my tutor seemed pleased enough. Eighth Week was odd, insofar as Tutorial Partner was doing her essay on Irish poetry that week (returning to her heritage, she said), meaning I had my tutorial with two second-years, both of whom were doing Beckett as part of an English and French course. Far from being daunting, it was an interesting departure from the normal tutorial system. Though my tutor had strong objections to Schopenhauer, for reasons that I am currently attempting to research, she seemed to receive my essay well. This was no small relief; it is always worrying when one chooses to focus upon an idea or critic that one’s tutor does not like, because it means that one feels incredibly vulnerable. There are few things more unnerving than sitting in a tutorial and hearing one’s tutor say, ‘I’m not quite sure that I like that…’ Even more worrying was the word ‘Yuck!’ in the margin of one of my marked pages. To my immense relief, it referred to the theory of Schopenhauer’s I was paraphrasing (I hope).

Next up was Teddy Hall Relays, on Wednesday of Eighth Week. For those who are unfamiliar, Teddy Hall Relays is a running event held every year in Eighth Week. I’m sure most people reading this, if not all, are well acquainted with the relay format; Teddy Hall Relays, as opposed to being 4 x 100m or 4 x 400m, is four ‘laps’ of six kilometers. Now, lacking sagacity (where has that been heard before?), I resolved to do all four legs alone. This was partially due to my inability to find a team to do the event with, partially due to my masochism, and partially due to my wanting to use it as a measure of my form going into the Richmond Half Marathon. I was not expecting much, even taking into account my 18:08 in 6th Week. In the event, however, the result exceeded my expectations; I came through the event unscathed, went through 21K (the half-marathon distance) in 1 hour 27 minutes, and completed the course in 1:36:47. Given I was attempting to go through in under 1:45:00, I was obviously delighted – all the more so when it transpired that i had won a prize for the fastest person running individually. How many people were mad enough to do all four legs alone, I do not know, but the bottle of Oxford’s finest beer will remain in my fridge as a memento until my father finally drinks it.

On Thursday, I even managed to go some way towards rectifying my inexcusable misanthropy this term. The Kelly/Emden contingent and I (Emden is the name of another, slightly more aesthetically pleasing building at Teddy Hall) went for a very agreeable meal at Byron; surprisingly, everybody was able to attend, which is something of a rarity in Oxford (or, perhaps, I only believe so because I so rarely left Kelly Building this term). After two hours there, I went to the end-of-season Football Awards Dinner, which will stand out as one of the highlights of Hilary. The event was held on the upper floor of a rather quaint pub off of Magdalen Roundabout, the Cape of Good Hope. (Symbolic? Perhaps.) It was lively and jovial without ever becoming disagreeably raucous, and it was perhaps the only occasion where the entire regular 1st XI were together that term (again, I cannot attest to this with any great certainty; my attendance at Football Drinks has been as sporadic as my attendance at Park End this term). The awards themselves were some of the most interesting moments of the evening, partially due to their iconoclastic lack of political correctness (‘The Jimmy Saville Award for Touch’; ‘The Adolf Hilter Award for Inspirational Speeches’, and the like. Quite frankly I associate Hitler with other attributes, but there we go.). I was incredibly surprised by the number of ‘awards’ – in inverted commas because the prize for winning one was drinking half a pint – I managed to win; ‘The Lance Armstrong Award for Potential Doping’; ‘The Oscar Pistorius Award for Hasty Shooting’; ‘The Anders Breivik Award for Accurate Shooting’, and ‘The Alf-Inge Haaland Award for Most Likely to Bottle A Tackle’. Aside from these more humorous awards, I was absolutely delighted to win the Golden Boot – which readers know was my goal from the start of Michaelmas; runner-up for Goal of the Season, and, most pleasing of all, Young Player of the Season. By far the biggest compliment was being made Vice-Captain for next season. It was something I never expected, and something I’m hugely looking forward to taking on next year – after all, we English students must find something to fill all of that free time other students spend working… To conclude briefly, football has been one of the definite high points of Hilary term; playing in an environment so much more positive than my school team has been a welcome change, and though it has taken up a colossal amount of time on occasion – namely Sixth Week and Seventh Week – it was worth it; twenty-six goals and sixteen assists in twenty-four games was a return infinitely beyond my expectations and the end of Michaelmas, and I look forward to attempting to emulate the rugby team and win Cuppers next year.

To finish the term, only one noteworthy event remained; Principal’s Collections, which is a brief meeting with the Principal of college along with one’s tutors to discuss the progress that has been made over the term. As I mentioned in my previous post, I had large reservations regarding my performance in Hilary; I thought that it was at best inconsistent and at worst a considerable deterioration from my Michaelmas performance. In the event, it was far more positive than I’d imagined it; there are still considerable problems with my essay style that need to be rectified if I am to achieve my targeted Distinction in Prelims, but both of my tutors were mostly positive, and both estimated my term’s work at a borderline-First level. In fact, reading that I’d managed to produce First Class work on more than one occasion in Hilary was probably the highlight of Eighth Week, because it was perhaps the most reassuring thing I’d read or heard over those eight weeks. I had one very important, very helpful meeting with my Personal Tutor afterwards to discuss the essay issue in more detail, and whilst I cannot underestimate the problems it may cause me, I left the meeting feeling better than I’d felt about – well, everything – since the last week of Michaelmas. The term afforded one last highlight on the day of departure – a title-deciding game for the MCR against Kellogg College. Teddy Hall needed to win and better Jesus’s goal difference to win the league and seal promotion; in the end, we won 9-0 and thus a league title was added to the promotion gained with the JCR team.

This resulted in my leaving college rather later than everyone but the Law students, who were unfortunate enough to have Prelims at the end of Hilary. One of the eeriest things about life at Oxford is how quickly everyone is gone and how quickly you yourself are gone once term reaches its conclusion. It was utterly disorientating to return to a virtually empty college after the game, and a sense of ennui returned in a rather large degree. There is something very lonely about college before the start and after the end of term, and the overwhelming thought in my mind as I wandered around college and Oxford waiting for my father was Quomodo sedet sola civitas.

So, where does chiasmus come into this entry? Well, the more pertinent term would most likely be ‘chiastic structure’, but I felt that it did not read as neatly as ‘Chiasmus’. Chiastic structure, for those who are unaware, is an application of the literary device ‘chiasmus’ to a narrative, and I feel like this provides an apt analogy for my time at Oxford thus far. The first ‘A’ of the A-B-B-A structure would be the period in early Michaelmas, which is in itself analogous to Charles Ryder’s first months in his Oxford and Brideshead idyll; a time where he found ‘that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened onto an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any windows, in the heart of that grey city’, a period where ‘the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer’. Like Charles’s idyll, though, the Christmas Vacation served as the first ‘B’ of the structure, where Brideshead is deserted; Sebastian’s alcoholism and depression causes a disjunction of a beautiful union, and Oxford loses its lustre: ‘The autumnal mood possessed us both as though the riotous exuberance of June had died with the gillyflowers’. The ‘Brideshead’ analogy unfortunately breaks down, as Charles finds brief solace in Julia; the start of Hilary brought no such equivalent to ‘the forerunner’. The start of Hilary continued the desolation and sola civitas; the days were imbued with not so much an autumnal mood as a wintry chill: ‘The avalanche was down, the hillside swept bare beside it; the last echoes died on the white slopes; the new mound glittered and lay still in the silent valley.’ And the end of Hilary acts as the second ‘A’ – albeit an etiolated, poor equivalent to the initial period of ‘idyll’ – a ‘monochrome, monotone sequel‘, perhaps. In fact, here the Brideshead metaphor does work to an extent; after all, there is the brief period in the epilogue where Charles finds solace in memory – ‘It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians. And there I found it that morning, burning anew among the old stones.’ 

Thus, that concludes my Eighth Week entry, but, in lieu of a postscript, I shall briefly note some of the things that have happened since I came back down. Just to reinforce the notion that my Oxford narrative currently exists in chiastic form, two things occurred that seemed to be something of a regression to the early-Oxford weeks. Firstly, my plantar fascitis has returned, and in vicious form; I completed the Reading Half Marathon in a rather dreadful 1:34:24, but the pains in my shins, calves and plantar fasciae were notable from the third kilometer, and the last three miles were – if my readers will forgive me the hyperbole – nothing short of agony. Thankfully, it seems to have been in rather speedy remission since Sunday, and I may be able to run on Saturday if I take a painkiller or two. Secondly, a few hours after coming down – oh, how contrived this seemed – I heard from ex-Girlfriend for the first time in over three months – a brief text, merely to see how I was doing. The truth would have no doubt opened a rather large can of worms, and, though she was good enough to give me the option of not replying, I felt weary of resentment (‘Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so, so tired of being cynical!’) so replied. The action of a blundering fool? Well, perhaps. But, quixotically or not, I do not feel on the verge of a second entrapment, and I feel strong (or self-preserving: which?) enough to preclude such an eventuality happening again.

Finally, I met an old friend of mine from my quondam school last week, and could not resist dropping in to the English Department after doing so. It was delightful to catch up with the teachers who were such a help to me, especially during my second application. It resulted in them asking me to come in and give a lecture/class of Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Brideshead Revisited on Friday; yes, it has added to my workload, but I was rather flattered to be asked. How useful my insights will prove to be is another matter entirely; I have re-read Brideshead, because it is one of my very favourite books (no Lolita or Sense of an Ending, but wonderfully written and so, so pertinent currently (See: A Twitch Upon the Thread) – but have not read Tess fully since I did the A2 myself – thus, I shall have to trust to my memory. Disaster may ensue.

On that note, I should probably conclude. Revision is currently a categorical disaster, and I would hate for the chiastic structure to repeat itself, and end Trinity in the same manner I begun Hilary.

Regards,

Jack

Hilary Term: 4th Week – 7th Week: Teleology and Temperament

Hello,

After the turbulent, straitened nature of the past few weeks, a brief moment of calm has finally arisen in my week, and it seemed like an opportune moment to try and update all of my readers – if any still exist – on how I have spent a considerable portion of my Hilary term. Naturally, this entry will focus on breadth rather than depth in its recollection of events, as, typically, a lot of pertinent things have occurred, and to give all of them the weight they deserve would lead to an entry that read as more of a novella than a blog post. Another problem is that I find my memory eluding me somewhat when I try and recall events in, say, 4th Week. Faithful readers of this blog will recall that I likened life at Oxford to a phantasmagoric blur, and this often makes it very difficult to distinguish clear details such as the time and place of fragmentary moments in the swirling eddy of one’s consciousness.

Regardless, the historian must attempt to make some sense of these fragments, otherwise it would be impossible for anything to be recorded at all, and so I shall simply have to proceed, conscious of the flaws in my recollections. This provides a convenient segue into my most interesting essay topic of the past few weeks: 5th Week, in which we did the dystopian novel. I had been eagerly anticipating this week for some time, due to the wonderful texts available for analysis and exegesis: The Handmaid’s Tale, Nineteen Eighty-Four, A Clockwork Orange and Never Let Me Go, to name but a few. Due to time constraints, I only managed to write my essay on Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid’s Tale, but it was still a wonderfully rewarding week. I decided to analyse the novels through the prism of Julian Barnes’s quotation on the flaws of history: ‘History is that certainty produced when the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.’ Of course, the partial, unreliable nature of history is hugely pertinent to both novels and it was a hugely interesting essay to write. A difficult planning stage was alleviated when a friend of mine, as of yet unnamed in this blog – let us call him Humbert Humbert, not because he has any questionable sexual predilections, or because he is a “shining example of moral leprosy” (well, not that I am aware of), but because he is the quintessential example of the European intellectual – gave me a fascinating book called The Paradox of History, by Nicola Chiaromonte. Time constraints meant that I only managed to get through the first two chapters, but those two chapters were enough to give my hitherto amorphous essay shape and direction. For Chiaromonte, the paradox of history is the paradox of politics; that both processes are predicated on meliorist, teleological assumptions that are constantly undermined by the fact that “things never turn out as they should”. This doctrine – the undermining of a telos in both literature and history – is key to the dystopian novel, and it was this realisation that was key to forming my essay. In the event, I spent most of 5th Week ill with a particularly bad case of flu, and was bed-bound for all of Monday, but my tutor still seemed very pleased with my essay, which, given the circumstances under which it was composed, is satisfactory if not pleasing.

It has been a very strange term for me academically. I find it hard to believe that I am doing badly; my tutors have said predominantly positive things about the work that I have produced, and I have not struggled to get work done, even when ill. Nor have I found understanding any topic particularly difficult, Yet, I cannot state with any conviction that I have made any progress at all. I have had no quantitative means of assessing my progress, so my notion that my work has been at a mid-to-high 2:1 level is merely an unsupported guess. Yet, I am equally certain that nothing of a 1st Class standard has been produced. As such, I am currently undergoing grave doubts that a first-class mark in Prelims is possible. I feel like I have made too little progress this term to feel with any confidence that my writing and interpretation has reached the necessary standards consistently, if at all. Again, this is only a surmise, but it is one that I feel is probably correct. Therefore, the challenging of the notion of a telos has not simply occurred in the novels I have read; I feel like this term, in every aspect of my life, my belief of a telos has come under question.

The same questioning can be applied to my running. I spent most of the first five weeks either injured or ill, so made absolutely no headway after my pleasing 18:24 just prior to coming up. Since then, I have attended sessions fairly regularly, but have not competed. In addition, multiple football matches between the middle of Sixth Week and the middle of Seventh have made doing any sessions at all nigh on impossible. Strangely, I even have to challenge my sense that a teleology in my running has been undermined this term. For in 5th Week, in the throes of my illness, I got utterly fed up with sitting inside and went down to the Iffley Road track, to run a 5K alone. I managed a time of 18:06, which is my best since last July, in the middle of summer, when Oxford was still a hazy abstraction and untrammelled hope for everything – running, life, academia, love – still seemed possible. This extremely pleasing performance is a mere twelve seconds off my best of 17:54, achieved in the midst of those heat-hazed idyllic months, and has me believing that, with a singular focus on running from the end of this week, my goal of 17:30 will be possible in Track Cuppers. In the interim, I need to spend the next three weeks training in earnest for the Richmond Half Marathon. (Apropos of nothing: I am reminded of an amusing comment that Humbert Humbert made upon seeing my old race numbers pinned to my wall: he asked whether the numbers represented a teleology. I responded ‘Not as much as I’d like.’ I hope that is proved wrong over the next few months.)

Since I’m focusing on sport, now seems an apposite time to turn the focus to football. This will have to be sped over, because since my last post I have played twelve matches, including five in four days between last Thursday and last Sunday, and seven in eight days. I shall speed over the highlights: we lost Cuppers to Lincoln on penalties. It was a highly disappointing performance. We did not do ourselves justice at all and allowed ourselves to fall into the trap of playing the archaic, basic, anarchic football that Lincoln wanted us to play. I played poorly in the match but scored my penalty. Given our two Blues players and superb German central midfielder leave at the end of this year, our best chance of winning Cuppers is probably gone: once again, my belief in a telos has been undermined. Other highlights: scoring the only goal in a 1-0 win over promotion challengers Balliol College; scoring two goals in a 3-2 win over rivals Queens, including the winning goal after a goal that I am hugely proud of – a run which took me past four players, before applying the finish; and scoring seven goals for the 3rd XI against Magdalen College in an 11-4 victory. That game was an utterly joyous affair, in which everything seemed to go right. Yes, it was only a 3rd XI game, and yes, Magdalen’s performance was pathetic, but seven goals is a personal record and – I am currently waiting for this to be ratified – may well be an OUAFC record for most goals in a single college game. My statistics for this season, thanks to a prolific recent period, reads thus: twenty-two games played, twenty-one goals scored, fifteen assists made. Nine of those goals have been for the 1st XI, in fourteen games. It could have been a little better, but I am still hugely satisfied with how this season has gone. Twenty-one goals puts me easily clear of the next Aularian top goalscorer, who has scored ten (and all for the 2nd XI). The next highest scorer in the 1st XI has five.

Before I leave the topic of football, I want to look at the other preponderant topic in this post: temperament. I have, with no small amount of disquiet, observed myself falling victim to the weaknesses in temperament that have not existed since I was fourteen or fifteen. On the pitch, I have found myself becoming increasingly ruffled and agitated by small things. For example, playing for the MCR, I became increasingly irked by defenders holding my shirt. Upon one shirt-pull too much, I, in the most ludicrously infantile manner, gave the defender a little elbow in the stomach to force him to let go. A minor, inconsequential incident, one might suggest? Well, no. For so long, I have managed to play football in a completely disinterested manner, attempting to rise above the juvenile fracas and friction that underlie most games I partake in. Little has been able to rile me on the pitch over the past three or four years; as a result, these otherwise negligible lapses in temperament are a little disconcerting. I wonder whether it is the manifestation of extraneous (to football, that is) frustrations exhibiting themselves in an environment conducive to these puerile displays of anger and irritability. Regardless, I am extremely disappointed that I have begun to let myself fall victim to these momentary compulsions, and restraining my occasionally capricious temperament is undoubtedly a goal for the next few months.

I do not desire to give readers the impression that all I do at Oxford is work, run and play football. I have done a number of other things in addition to these predominant activities. In 6th Week I attended a lecture entitled ‘A Cure for Ageing?’, held at the Sheldonian theatre. As a title it is reasonably self-explanatory; in the event, it proved to be just as much a discussion on semantics as it was biology. The two keynote speakers both believed in the efficacy of attempting to cure ‘ageing’; where they differed was in the approach to doing so. For they wanted to draw an important semantic distinction between ‘ageing’ and ‘age-related disease’. The former approach, propounded by Aubrey de Grey, endeavoured to cure ageing – that is, extend the human lifespan through improving of the mechanisms that, upon deteriorating, cause old age and death. The latter approach, expounded upon by a scientist whose name eludes me, aimed to cure age-related diseases – the typical diseases that are concomitant with ageing – and thus extend lifespan this way. Their opposing viewpoints were stimulating and interesting, but unfortunately the debate descended into juvenile ad hominems which acted to the detriment of the discussion. I also wanted to go to another Scientific Society debate, focusing on the causes of obesity, but work commitments precluded my doing so. Similarly, I greatly desired to attend a production of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (a play I studied and admired at AS-Level), but again found myself without the time to do so.

Finally, there was one more hugely interesting event – to me, at least – that occurred over the past four weeks. I took part in Teddy Hall’s Writers and Artists’ Day, and was asked by my tutor to perform two pieces of work. The first, Fleur-de-Lys, will be familiar to anyone who has read this blog over the past eight or nine months. The second was the rap I wrote for Teddy Hall’s Got Talent, back in the halcyon days of November. In the end, it was a wonderful day; rapping in the Wolfson Hall to a group of Teddy Hall alumni and academics (including Stewart Lee, who I had the fortune of meeting in person in the college bar) was an experience I did not predict when applying to Oxford. Conversely, the experience of reciting an extremely personal poem in the Old Dining Hall – a gloomy, typically Oxford-esque room, adorned with portraits of past Principals and academics – was an unforgettable experience, and hearing the work of writers infinitely more gifted than I was a reminder of what can be achieved here, irrespective of the Teddy Hall inferiority complex that is somewhat endemic here.

I shall update again by the weekend. Today is a day of renewal for me; after five consecutive nights in which I have been up until between 03:00 and 03:30 working, I have resolved to manage my time so as never to have to do it again. I am looking forward to studying Modern Drama this week, including Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. I am using tonight to recuperate; drinking tea, planning my Easter revision and reading Pablo Neruda’s sonnets, which a friend of mine in Emden Building was kind enough to provide me with. I refuse to give up on my goal of a Distinction in Prelims, but if I am going to rescue a term that has meandered, lethargic and laconic, the rescue attempt must begin immediately. If nothing else, it proves that, as Dawkins so rightfully notes, the propensity of humanity for teleology is unavoidable – no matter what might happen to challenge those beliefs.

Regards,

Jack