Robin Seaton
Thinking about a recent Jonathan Ross interview with Ringo Starr the other week, I found myself using the half-comprehending undergraduate poststructuralist’s word of choice: ‘discourse’. In consequence, I was desperate for someone to wash my brain out with soap and water.
Possibly John McCain’s mother would have stepped up to the plate - she was deputed by the candidate for the Republican nomination to wash Chuck Norris’s mouth out, and as such should have no problems taking on my little brain. This incident more than almost anything else has persuaded me that it is about time I left university and returned to the sort of places where the only discourse about ‘discourse’ takes place via cries of “just shut up, you prick”. A request with which we can probably all sympathise where poststructuralism is concerned - including, notably, Michel Foucault, who I believe once demanded the same of Derrida, who proceeded to slap him about his bald scalp with a freshly deconstructed kipper.
The other major factor in persuading me to shove off has been a number of interactions with first year medics in my capacity as some kind of living cadaver for them to practice their infernal techniques on. All of these people, who were still screaming inarticulately when I had already learnt to walk, eat and defacate on my own without the assistance of a parent or guardian, have learned far more of use in a term and a half than I have in four years here: “So what do you do?”, “Oh, I write about witches and pirates and things. Sometimes I drink tea, then I eat cake. Sometimes I do all this simultaneously, just because I can”.
Next to these youthful paragons of social utility I feel uncomfortably like a parasitic bubo on the body of society. Why on earth is the Daily Mail not railing against me (yes, I mean personally) instead of against asylum-seekers? I’ve got no legitimate reason for being in York. No-one was persecuting me in back home in my native Portsmouth. I face no show-trial, no execution or genocidal mob on my return. I just felt like using up large chunks of taxpayers’ money for the sheer unadulterated hell of it.
Someone else whose brain would appear to have been addled through over-thinking is Plato (did someone just shout ‘”hubris”?). I read this week that he believed the uterus to have a sense of smell and a power of movement all its own. This revalation sent me into something of a post-prandial reverie (for it was just after lunch) in which the nation’s uteri gambolled happily through the woods, searching for truffles, while their owners, blissfully unaware, slept soundly.
Linking their Fallopian tubes, small groups danced in circles, while yet others sat on tussocks making daisy chains. What on earth this says about the deeper reaches of my subconscious mind, or even about the freshness of the ingredients which constituted my lunch, I really have no idea. However, should you be unfortunate enough to make prolonged eye contact with me as I wend my merry way across campus, experts advise that you should point over my shoulder, shout “Look! A truffle-hunting uterus!” and run in the opposite direction. It would save everyone an awful lot of confusion.
