By Matty Timmis
There must be a word for this feeling. In limbo? That’s two words. Besides, I think it’s a bit too general. Bittersweet? Getting closer, but it’s not quite capturing the listlessness of this moment. Listless? I’ve always been that, and there’s a surge of emotive force here, it ignores this parade of jaded memories, carouselling through empty, waking nights. Sad?, sanguine?, silly? – Saudade! – Am I allowed a Portuguese word? Well that’s the best I can come up with so lets try and make do (yes I did go on holiday to Brazil, no I never bring it up at parties or in articles).
What is saudade I hear you ponder. Google’s unwanted AI answer-er describes it as ‘a deep, melancholic emotional state of nostalgic longing for a person, place, or thing that is absent – a presence of absence’. It’s one of those wonderful words that needs a slightly pompous and pontificating definition to be translated – I imagine it’s a bit like trying to translate ‘leng’ into Japanese. Let us fall into the clutches of this AI answer then, because I never want to look at the OED website again, and make do with this definition. As life’s locomotive puffs down its rickety rails, lets try and take stock, try and read the smoke signals of the cusp, try and understand these last 3 years.
We’re all, or somewhere around a third of you dear readers at least, are off. Up-up and away – setting our mighty sights upon the big, bad, bold, brave world. Are you shitting yourself? I am, but I’m going to play it off as some trapped wind, and try to keep up the masquerade. But how? There’s no denying that we’re wandering into a pretty gnarled old world, one that has precious little sympathy, understanding, or opportunity, one that would probably have a reduced to clear label on it if it were in Tesco – hey maybe that’s why we’re getting dickie bellies! The good thing is, and what we must bear in mind, is that the £60,000 we’ve spent on these degrees have equipped us with some truly invaluable life skills to overcome these heady hazards. I for one am now an undisputed expert in not doing my washing up, I’ve developed an enviable skill of waking up at 11:30 and sticking my head out my bedroom window for a fag, and am unbelievably competent at lying through my teeth on the mitigating circumstances coursework form.
So did I enjoy uni? Am I glad I came? Am I going to miss it? And what is this pit in my stomach? I suspect folks, that saudade may well be swirling through the smoking area, enveloping us in a wistful mist. What I can tell you for certain is before I had some kind of hazy, ill thought out, more than likely banal purpose, but now I’ve achieved it it’s even less clear what it meant, I have even less clue of what to do with it. Can I confess to being a bit scared of what real life, without seminars and a student loan, is going to make of me and what I’m going to make of it?
As the carnival winds up you’re asked to complete the NSS. I put in my two bits, but only because they wouldn’t stop bloody phoning me. My reflections clarified little however. I mentioned in one of my answers that they seemed more enthusiastic in seeking course feedback than they had ever been in teaching it. I suspect, however, the dear old English faculty is sadly about to be marginalised by encroaching AI to near enough nothingness, and I’m not so cruel as to wind a supercilious old grandpa as he wheezes his last breath.
Besides I don’t think this spell of saudade is derived from the loss of my actual degree. The heavens forbade that it ever took more than a quarter of a rotation of the hamster wheel that powers my mind’s muffled neurons. Being a student is probably more tied up in those cliches; the pub and the park, a pretentious film or a rowdy houseparty; a misguided snog in a houseparty basement. It is wrapped up in your friends, who are unquestionably knobheads, but who, for better or worse, surround your every waking (and sometimes sleeping) moment. It is bound up in the infinite, easy, roll of chances that spring up as you straddle youth and adulthood.
I am not a geographist, but I know some poor lost souls who are, so please excuse this topographical metaphor. Life’s a bit like a river (full of shit pumped in from fatcat companies and parasites); when you are a student you are cheerfully, unknowingly, carving out your v-shaped valley. Life babbles and bounces and flows, and it all seems so effortless, your forward flow undeniable. I fear, however, we’re now entering the middle section of the life of a river, gravity and velocity have abandoned us, we lollop and get lazy, meandering through bullshit, as our flow turns to a crawl that starts to look stagnant on the surface.
So how are we to cope with this strange saudade-an sensation? Should we go chasing waterfalls? Wherever they may take us, and hope that life won’t break us! I for one don’t fancy the spray and thunder of all that drama. As I write this, Alice in Chain’s ‘Rooster’ has come on, striking I find, a much more appropriate, cathartic tone. It’s shit, and it’s all over much too quickly, but what preceded won’t preclude what follows. We’re deep in the soup right now, right in the thick of it, swimming through the churn of feelings all muddled up. As the boil turns to a simmer and distance loosens the flow, I think we’ll probably miss all this more actually. But nostalgia or longing is not what we’re battling. Right now we’re (or at least I am) gripped by saudade, and the further we get from the presence of being a student, the less we’re going to feel the sting of its absence.
There’s smoke on the horizon, I’m sure of it, so put up, plod on, and don’t bury yourself in the field of dreams. Skin up with me and stick on the most angsty track you can think of. A new day is a new world, and whilst we can’t direct the drift, we’ll cast off nonetheless. The past will propel, and we’ll shed the weight of what went wrong. Above all else, remember you can’t hold the stream, the smoke, or the saudade in your hands. If you could, all would be the same, forever. I for one don’t have the time for that kind of eternity.
As a footnote, I could just do an MA and give myself a saudade extension.
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