An email sent but not received

It happened again that when I came to writing my paper for History and Philosophy of the Biomedical Sciences, whose due date is now quite rapidly descending upon me,  that I again turned to composing an email to an academic that I admire. This time it could be said that the subject of my email is the penultimate academic of my admirations, insofar as she might just be the greatest mind I have had the humbling experience of learning under. 

In a recent survey for my Science and Ethics class I gave the dual compliment-critique that the course content was adequately large in scope and yet did not delve beneath the surface of said width. This comment was no doubt perplexing to my lecture who quoted it in class, followed by the claim that one must necessarily make compromises. 

I raise this point because I believe my request, for both scope and depth, is not so unreasonable. This largely being based on my positive experiences of such in my class run by the very women I referred to above, and whom the email that will follow below was intended to be read by. The intricacies of this course I will not attempt to divulge now, though if I say we started at Nussbaum, went through Elliot and Kafka, ending up at Deleuze, via the likes of Beckett, Bergman, Spinoza and Melville, your starting to get the picture. 

As referenced in the title of my post, unlike my last email which I intended not sending and then ended up doing so (followed by the series of fruitful replies, discussion of which will be returned to a later date), this email I had very strong intentions to send, so much so that I did indeed send it. However, and as I might have guessed, the email rebounded due to a deactivated address. So here I am, posting it all the same to a crowd of strangers (or a vast silence, depending how you choose to read ontological status of the un-read blog), to amongst other things give my procrastination a sense of purpose. 

“Dear J,

I do hope this is not presumptions of me, though it’s likely that it is and that I was already well aware of this fact on beginning this sentence and thus remained, and remain, undeterred. Maybe I’m jump straight to the chase and apologise now for wasting your time and effort, or whatever else makes up your or anyone’s daily existence, asking humbly for your forgiveness for an act I already regret yet am utterly compelled to do (whether it is the regret itself that makes it compelling is another story that you certainty don’t have the time for and I not the stomach). 

I had the brief yet memorable pleasure of being a student of yours in the second semester of last year, whilst attending the course ‘Philosophy and Literature’. I don’t suppose you’ll remember me in particular, though if you’re trying and would wish to place me amongst the many adoring undergraduate faces I’ll say that I was the irrational and rather excitable red-head who did the tutorial presentation on ‘Middlemarch’ and ‘Anna Karenina’, who performed rather ‘poorly’ (oh are the days when a distinction was a mark to cry about) on her mid-term paper and came searching to you for answers. You shared some rationally encouraging words and I ended up not going too bad, though vowing quietly to myself that when next I did a subject under you I’d not make similar mistakes (via. illogical argument structure, unclear written expression, and general over ambition [like trying to replace the role of truth in philosophy with the imagination). None of this you likely remember, but I thought it prudent to share, in an attempt to somehow situate this odd correspondence I am attempting to begin. 

On receiving an email in the mid-year break just past from one nondescript male post-grad student about my upcoming participation in the subject ‘Contemporary Political Philosophy’ I was somewhat perplexed, as I had been under the pretence you were taking said class; that being a major, though not the only contributing factor to me enrolling in it initially. After a brief search of the University’s website, I went from perplexed to off-put, as your name had been deleted from the Philosophy Department listing. I happened to walk around in such an off-put manner for a week or so before I wandered my way into the SOPHI office to enquire where exactly in the devil you had gone. A fellow at the reception reiterated the fact that yes you had left the Department and the University entirely; hinting that you might have left the country also. You might be interested to know that he was not at all surprised at my line of questioning but rather more sympathetic, nodding along with me that the faculty had lost a great mind (which probably doesn’t mean much if anything coming from me, so I’ll rephrase it as, a most excellent teacher [which, though it should be, is not a given and indeed a rarity in lecturers these days).

Thus far all that I’ve written has been only a way of foregrounding some concerns of mine which I will now try to articulate (surrounded with a lot of tangential linguistic gesticulation). I guess, above all else, what I’m dying to know is why you left, and though I understand this is a deeply personal question to ask, and therefore rather inappropriate and intrusive of me to do so, I cannot rid myself of the idea that to know why is somehow utterly important to my own future. I myself manically fluctuate from holding the pursuit of academic philosophy to be the essential road to meaning and fulfilment in life, to despising the abstract irrelevance of it all. This leads to the resignation that I’m either just not ‘made’ for it and thus will never attain the excellence that is required for it to provide such an essential meaning, or coincidently that I’m lazy and don’t really try to begin with because somewhere deep inside I hate it all. 

As you might have concluded by now I’ve developed the inconvenient habit of internalising any and all pieces of philosophy I have ever interacting with (including the idea of philosophy in itself). This is probably largely a result from my initial introduction to philosophy through that of existential feminism (something which only the most logically-devoted male analytic would fail to internalise, at least in part), and what also necessarily happens to anything I think about due to my overdeveloped tendency to empathise.

I don’t suppose you can answer really any of this, particularly seeing as I haven’t really asked a question. Why I decided to share these things with you, a near stranger, is still in part a mystery to me, and though I would hate to admit having a lack of intelligent ambitious females in my life to speak with such things about, the near absence of them is probably a contributing factor. I suppose also that I already know the answer: that it is my life, that I will need to go through and experience and work out if it’s meaningful for me or not. That even if it is for you it might not be for me, and thus also if it’s not for you that doesn’t entail that it isn’t necessarily for me.

I wish that I’d sent this email in more concrete of relations, honours student and supervisor perhaps, and that it could have been less about emotional psychological states and more about philosophical concepts and conundrums (still haven’t let go off my fascination with that brief yet precious space between ‘reasonableness’ and ‘rationality’). Please don’t presume that I’m blaming you in any way, shape or form that it isn’t. I know I could of, and maybe, I hope, that I still will in the future, if you wouldn’t be adverse to the idea that is. 

I feel peerless and friendless, with no older wiser more experienced mentor in sight who could possible give a damn about the same things as I, let alone my internal complexes. And yet I feel that it is these very internal complexes which I so despise and thus battle effortless with, that through the fighting I make stronger, working rather to isolate myself from the others all around.

Allow me to reiterate my apologies from above and also that you are under no obligation to reply, though it would be warmly received.” 

You’ll be right to criticise me and claim that this email had little purpose other than to evoke a response out of my x-lecturer, as such an intention I make no effort to hide, neither in the email nor here. I had hopes of her as a supervisor in honours, and then masters and so forth till I collapsed in a heap of blissfully numbing postgraduate research fatigue. Recent conversations with tutors and lecturers alike has got me thinking, or mostly worrying about honours prospects again, and naturally she, and the hopes she had entailed, drifted back into my toxic concoction of contemplations. 

Don’t misconstrue me by presuming that I thought her as being essential to my post-graduate prospects, this is not so at all. But under her and through her I found an affinity of minds and ideas, as well as the living and active example of a ‘similar’ perusing, and successfully might I add, what I had intended for myself in the future. And still do intend.