The Theory of Everything

 Academia could theorize the life out of anything it wanted- texts, digital media, food consumption, critically examine train timetables, and music charts, or read the cooked egg as a feasible example of versatility- I believe it could do anything but theorize the existence of the liberated human wayfarer, suspended between two places inside a railway coach, carrying 'home' and the 'world' around with them as tangible points in fluidity. 

We are an eccentric lot. We have tea and Austen in the morning, selections of Bukowski, rice and lentils in the afternoon, consume Kafka, Ray, and Marx as appetizers before full course meals of Spivak, Gramsci, or Hooks. We infiltrate years of historical, lived experiences of global communities into hurried ten-minute papers at graduate conferences, and cringe at political 'in'correctness from the ornate archways of paid academic erudition.

 And on weekends, we try and salvage our lives from the tangled mess of ugly academic jargon, and rebuild the crumbling theoretical frameworks that sustain it.

Weeldays are synonymous with “how can you write about the Victorian novel without using Foucault's account of the deployment of sexuality and the hysterization of women's bodies and Gayatri Spivak's demonstration of the role of colonialism in the construction of the metropolitan subject?”. University corridors loom in the distant horizon like battlefields- imagine the conceptions on hybridization of the ghazal as a genre, laying siege to Agha Shahid Ali's Half-Inch Himalayas . 

Do we, I dare ask, need a "theory of everything?" Quantum gravity, postcolonialism, civilization? Yes. But it must be equally possible that at some point in time, every dispirited scholar you have come across and every nervous presenter at a conference will attempt to escape this overarching hypothetical framework, when the temptation of a cocktail version of an old jingle is snapping at their heels?

To escape, in a sense, the ticky-tacky boxes that Pete Seeger talked about in his satire of a song. And how, you might ask, does one navigate the boxes that they are being put in? I remember someone addressing this at an International Symposium, but hey!- we are being a Judas to academia here. For now we will try and stick to the less salubrious boxes provided by one Kelvin Coyne- "Little boxes where you get a bottle of beer for Christmas. Where you're always late cause you're always empty".