If I knew that the best way to get an appointment in an institution was to run as fast as possible away from it than I would have never have given the career advisers so much respect. Not that they have said anything I could respect but I had always held out for the possibility of such an emotion. I still do. They could have been useful had they known a little less about careers & a little more about life but they know where their strengths lie. With their minds on the straight & narrow.
One career’s adviser laughed at my studying ‘media studies’ saying how difficult it is to get into the bbc. This is true; it is difficult to get into the bbc, but he did not seem to realise that it is much more difficult to get away from the bbc.
Studying ‘media studies’ isn’t good for going on to a career but it is helpful for going on to live. The career’s adviser, however, is not interested in living & that is very sensible for living is very frightening. A course in ‘psychology’ taught me that the greatest fear human beings have is not for death but for life. Psychologists being some of the most frightened beings of the simply unexplainable phenomenon hoping against hope that it does not bear anything of significance, that it does not contain anything terrifying meaningful.
Psychology having argued out the mind I thought that the best way to argue out of life would be through a knife. I was wrong, of course, because the best way to argue out life is to become a career’s advisor.
It’s easy being a career adviser, just as it is easier being dead, because people come to you when they have no career; therefore you do not need to give out advice. One career’s adviser wondered if I could work in a shop, “Does Weston have a hmv?", if only her advisory talents could have equaled her prophetic talents. I would have found her much move impressive.
“they are there to be helpful,” but for whom they are trying to be helpful is unclear. Better to say “they are only trying to live,” because corpses cannot raise our sympathy without our help. Although it does help enormously in focusing one’s mind on life after staring death in the face, realising that dying begins at nine & ends at five.
Imagining a life under a career is like trying to imagine grass under concrete. It’s difficult to imagine because it’s under concrete where the imagination rests. Actually the imagination is very restless under the banality of thought & the triviality of rubbish because it knows so many different types of plants. Career advisers may like gardening but they know it’s the house they sleep in. they may enjoy the grass to walk on but it is the road they drive on; & they only get to work by car.
A career adviser is a hollywood film adaptation of a classic book: flat in character development, full with insipid jokes with the complicated elements smoothed out & ending with an implausibly happy hero resolutely not despairing rejecting humanity for horses. They may be entertaining, for that claim hasn’t quite yet disappeared, but absolutely not for basing your life on. They miss the cinematic for the cinema.
They try to understand poetry but poetry isn’t there to be understood; poetry is there to poetry & needs no defence from me. It stands up well enough on its own. It’s the career advisers that fall over & call cracking their heads on the reasonable concrete ‘helpful’. If they are so helpful then let them help themselves get better jobs than career advising because I do not need their impression of the idea of advice. Their advice barely applies to having a career & not at all to life.
‘don’t be so hurtful’ if you don’t know what it is like to stare a man in the face knowing he has your life in their hands & watching them spend as much time & concern on it as a crossword puzzle then you would understand how dignified & controlled I am being. If I could I would hang the career advisers, I would burn them, scar them, drown them, push them over cliffs, strangle them, chase them with knives & trap them with fire; but, of course, and I know this o so well, that there is no point in killing what is already dead.
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