Primordial: An Abstraction

19

The University is embossed in trees. The Office of the Provost is in the nicest building on campus. All of the administration buildings exhibit a gothic beauty that flirts with the Kantian sublime, unlike the instructional buildings, which are essentially tenements, lanky and oxidized and in some cases rubbled. Because of low wages, most faculty can’t afford rent and must live in their offices, often with their families; laundry streams out of the windows on frayed lengths of twine. Administrators, on the other hand, enjoy unlimited creature comforts, ranging from high ceilings and Scandinavian furniture to walk-in humidors and spitshined bidets in every bathroom.

I need to talk to the Provost to find out how long it’s going to take to get my Ph.D. back. Nobody told me. I assume a certain span of time will have to elapse.

I don’t know what the Provost’s job entails.

At the institution that retrograded me, the Provost’s job entailed lumbering around the cafeteria and commenting on people’s food. He did this all day, every day.

His motives remain uncertain. All I can be sure of is that he enjoyed the poststructuralization of food.

If the Provost eyeballed a meal that intrigued him, he proceeded to deconstruct it with Derridean rigor, and he even employed Derridean rhetoric during moments of special excitement or angst, reducing the food to a mere figment, an effigy of its former self. By the time he had finished, you couldn’t help feeling badly for the food, as if it were a living, sentient organism, wrongfully punished, robbed of its precious ignorance, aware for the first time in its life that it was a voided, vacuous superzero.

While my experience with Provosts is limited, I assume that most Provosts have duties beyond the scope of antagonizing food and, by extension, the people who eat it.

One of my elderly roommates had told me that the Provost at the University would be able to apprise me of my standing and future as a student. The roommate is an ex-Ph.D. too. I didn’t take his advice seriously. If I didn’t know anything about Provosts, how would he know anything about Provosts? My underclass roommates didn’t even know what a Provost was. They accused me of making the word up. As I beat them, I realized “Provost” was indeed a strange word. I looked it up in the OED.

Etymology: Originally post-classical Latin propositus; subsequently reinforced by the Anglo-Norman provolt, provot, provout, Anglo-Norman and Old French provost chief magistrate in an area (c. 1090 in Old French), chief dignitary of a collegiate church (c. 1174), the archangel Michael as leader of the heavenly host (c. 1174), the commander of a legion (1272 or earlier in Anglo-Norman), reeve, steward (a. 1377 or earlier), overseer (14th cent. or earlier). Post-classical Latin propositus prior or abbot (6th cent.; from 8th cent. in British sources), reeve of a manor (from 9th cent. in British sources), reeve of a borough (c. 1280 in a British source), head of a college or university (1457 in a British source in propositus collegii), alteration of classical Latin praepositus PREPOSITUS n. Old English had also prafost (directly classical Latin praepositus PREPOSITUS n.), used interchangeably with profost (it is probably only accidental that the former is attested, but the latter is not, in sense 4a).

I decide it won’t hurt to at least visit the Provost, if only to discover what tasks he performs on a daily basis.

The only person I encounter as I enter Recitation Hall and walk up two hundred marble stairs to the Provost’s office is a student who has gotten tired climbing the stairway and sat down to rest and have lunch. I stop and talk to her for awhile and pour us two small glasses of Malbec from the wine tote I carry around. I teach her about the assorted flavors in the wine and how to detect them with different parts of your mouth. We have another few glasses. I run out of wine and she asks me if I want to go play Frisbee golf. I tell her that would be nice but I have to go talk to the Provost first about something.

“Wait here.”

Upstairs I have a similar interaction with the Provost’s secretary, who is drinking a glass of wine at her desk. I introduce myself as the Dean of the College of Something-or-Other and I inform her regretfully about my lack of wine. She gets another glass out of the drawer and gives me a liberal pour. We discuss what she likes best about the accoutrements in the ladies room and about how students are irrevocable nuisances and we keep drinking and drinking and exchanging pleasantries until her wine is gone.

“Excuse me.”

As she stands I kind of take her in my arms and play with her ears, but she pushes herself away and with a coy giggle runs down the hallway to the ladies room, heels clacking against the crystal floor.

I enter the Provost’s office.

He’s sitting behind a stately, elevated, custom-made desk playing a long Pan pipe.

He stops playing it. “Yes?” He glances at me, at his lap, behind himself, then back at me. “Yes?” he reiterates.

On the desktop is a medieval goblet.

“What are you drinking?” I inquire.

He frowns. “Wine. Chardonnay.”

I wince.

He lifts the goblet with two hands and takes a dirty sip. “Who the hell are you?”

I tell him who I am. The Provost shakes his head.

I walk across the office and sit in a chair on the other side of the desk. It takes me about 15 seconds to get there. I can’t see him because his desk is too tall and the chair is normal-sized and hence too short.

I get up and stand on the chair. Now I can see him.

“Are you standing on the chair? Please don’t stand on the chair.”

I step off the chair. I don’t sit down.

I can see him.

“Who are you, sir?”

I remind him.

“What can I do for you?”

It takes me about an hour to explain my situation. It shouldn’t take this long. My situation is cut and dry: I was In, then I was Out, and now I need to know how long it will take me to get back In. But when I talk at length to administrators I deploy a lot of techno-jargon and magniloquence.

The Provost goes through nearly two bottles of Chardonnay during my monologue. He offers me a glass on at least six occasions. I don’t drink white wine and politely decline the offer every time, with the same response, and the same expression, in the same tone: “No thank you. I don’t care for white wine.”

At last I say, “How long will it take?”

The Provost doesn’t know. He doesn’t think anybody will know. He thinks it’s rather strange that I had my Ph.D. taken away in the first place. He’s never heard of such a thing. Even stranger, he thinks, is that I returned to college to get the Ph.D. back. “Is this common praxis in the industry?”

I scrutinize his obtuse eyes. They’re not bloodshot, but something’s wrong with them. “You never leave your office, do you.”

He peers around the office.

I leave the office.

The girl on the stairs is still there. She passed out.

I sit down next to her and watch her sleep for awhile, admiring the tilt of her eyebrows. Then I wake her up and we go play Frisbee golf. It’s fun. I win.