JHD: A Homeless Thinker | 1994

[(Editor's note: Originally published in the Windy City Times, January 6, 1994 as "A Homeless Thinker." Republished as schizo-file #45 in Damski's dead/qeeer/proud (Firetrap Press, 2001).]


 45"EARTH TO DAMSKI, EARTH TO DAMSKI." FUCK OFF! CAN'T YOU SEE I'M THINKING?...WHAT? OH...REALLY? OK...REMEMBER THAT VOICE IN YOUR HEAD? DO WHAT EVER IT SAYS: THAT'S THINKING.

There is nothing free about being a freethinker. Old Aristotle used to say “thinking is a process that begins in wonder.” My personal experience is that thinking is more likely to begin in horror and end in terror. Thinking is a process that leads nowhere. Your mother was right; you will never make a great living thinking. But that’s also its greatest pleasure. Thinking takes you out of here on a utopia quest.

It is a false notion to imagine that thinking leads people to a common ground. That’s for seminars and fairy tales. Thinking will not put you on the same ground with your fellow creatures. More likely it will put you in the clouds when they are on the ground and on the ground when they are in the clouds. Thinking will isolate you even from your closest friends. They will whisper behind your back: “I don’t get it,” “I don’t understand it.”

Thinking will leave you feeling homeless. It gives you notions and ideas that don’t fit anywhere, politically or socially. You become a displaced person. Like being Henry David Thoreau at the Water Tower mall in the middle of holiday shoppers. You look, observe and don’t buy. The manager thinks you are homeless vagrant, calls security and has you ejected from the store.

Yet you remain kind of child-like in your idiot state; everything seems like a first experience to you. To feel true paranoia, you have to have a mind to go out of in the first place. People with half your mind are always telling you to “think for yourself.” But when you do, they become nervous. You make them uncomfortable, so they try various ways to get rid of you. Calling you a “genius,” as they did Wittgenstein, is a very sophisticated way of getting rid of you. Sometimes, the Blue Meanies will apply simple brute force.

In school, teachers were always encouraging me to “think for yourself.” “Come up with your own ideas on this assignment.” But when I did, I stood the risk of being accused of plagiarism or worse. My teachers would act very puzzled. “This is not like what anyone else wrote or answered.” “How can I grade this?” Sometimes they would give me honors, other times special punishments. They would threaten to fail me for spelling and penmanship and skip over the content.

That’s why my official school records are so checkered. I would either win high honors, scholarships and fellowships; or be threatened with expulsion and sent to the administration with the other dunces, dyslexics and delinquents.

In high school, my senior honors paper in a special class on “The Philosophy of the East and West” got me into lots of trouble–as did a speech I gave in the William Randolph Hearst oratorical contest, which I titled “Lincoln, A Marxian Hero.” The head of the math department was in charge of senior honors. He thought my approach was too “literary” and not “logical enough.” He very much implied I was in danger of failing and caused me a lot of trauma.

Our final papers and test, however, were sent to outside graders who were in the philosophy department at the University of Washington. Surprise, surprise, the papers came back and I received the highest grade. My teacher, being an honest man, despite his personal reservations and warning about my future life, gave me the grade I earned.

My senior year in college I was runner-up for a Rhodes Scholarship and won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. I chose to go to Brandeis University, a Jewish school, majoring in the History of Ideas.

My college adviser thought I had made a poor choice and I was just committing myself to a “weird waste of time.” He insisted that with this kind of fellowship I could go to a good school like Harvard. 


When my senior orals came in political science, my adviser and his department assistant drilled me mercilessly. They, told me point blank that my thinking was “erratic.” (That’s news?) Had they known “how crazy I was,” they would have flunked me out years ago. The chairman of the French department was also on the orals committee. He came to my defense and saw that I passed and was able to go on to Brandeis graduate school, over the objection of my personal adviser.

When I reentered graduate school in classics at the University of Washington, I clearly told them and especially my adviser, that I knew I had a funny way of thinking. I came from the anti-rational tradition of counterculture. It was the ’60s and the whole campus was in revolt. They found me cute and said they didn’t care what, or how, I thought, as long as I performed well at the languages. They assumed that after I got my degree, I would teach in a small college in Ellensburgh, Washington and would never be an embarrassment to their department anyway.

Then, out of the blue, I got hired to teach Latin and Roman history at Bryn Mawr College, one of the top classics departments in the country. Suddenly my adviser and other members of the department took me much more seriously. They couldn’t have such a flaky thinker out East at such a fine place, representing their department. They must straighten out my thinking. Consequently, they put me through not one, but three, grueling Ph.D. orals over a two year period. It was pure hell. 

We mind-wrestled point by point, like guys in a macho straight bar arm-wrestling over a prize. The outside examiners told me later they were puzzled that I kept failing, but because of protocol, were afraid to interfere. My own thesis adviser was the worst culprit, because people out East would say I was “his boy” and he would lose points because of my queer way of thinking.

This was a department that would not acknowledge that Virgil was “gay." No wonder they thought I took “liberties with the text,” because I was also in a process of taking liberation of my gay life.

Over the years I have learned to stand my ground, which is really no ground, with greater humor. Friends and advisors mean well. They want the best for me, which is a life like they imagine they have. They don’t want some queer thinker ruining their show, or challenging their mythical chain of command and being.

But in my child-like state, I still find it curious that such a harmless act as thinking, or mental masturbation, can cause you violent and hostile reactions–so much that you sometimes feel homeless even in the company of friends.

© 2010 John Michael Vore and Firetrap Press.