1985 Presidential Address

Let me begin with now, not instant now, 8 November 1985, slightly after one o'clock, but real-time now, Saturday, 26 October, 11:20 in the morning, now as I write. To fulfill my SCMLA office, I have abandoned my LSU office and sit, hunched up, shirt-sleeved, in my wife's office, at her desk, using her computer. I have run away from my LSU office, from the freshman papers that clutter my computer area, the texts I must prepare for Monday's classes, unanswered correspondence, the telephone, from public me. I have run away, too, from domestic me, the checkbooks to be balanced, my weekend household chores, my daughter's soccer game. And so I have arrived here, now, at the familiar, yet exotic psychic space where one reads, thinks, and writes. This space has always felt fetal to me: in the world, and in time, but not quite of either, necessary for life, but insufficient to it. Insufficient because I know that as I enter this space, shirt-sleeved, and try to describe it, I do so in order that, pin-striped, I can stand before you and speak what now I am writing. Lords and ladies, I offer you this double, this superimposed image of me as an emblem for what I want to celebrate. Immodestly, I sing of what is past, or passing, or to come. Eighteen years ago, at SCMLA, I read my first conference paper. The lectern at which I read had been resurfaced with a plank of brittle linoleum. I was so nervous that during the course of my talk I broke off a piece of that plank and, befuddled by embarrassment, stuck it in my pocket. Later one of my colleagues eased my embarrassment by observing that my action augered well for my future. At least, he remarked, I had not come away from my first public reading empty-handed. I certainly had not. From the moment that, two days before, my colleagues and I piled helter-skelter, chaired professors and instructors, into the several university cars provided for the trip to Houston, I began to profit from my first SCMLA convention. Table fellowship, departmental gossip, scholarly disagreements, hints about archival resources, serious talk about teaching, all displayed for me the significance of a community I previously had not rightly recognized. United by a common experience of solitary thought about language and by a shared recognition of the humanizing value of the products of such thought, this