How to build the perfect day:
Wake up spontaneously at sunrise. Make coffee, shuffle about, feed the chirping cat, work through the top bits of that pile of unread magazines.
Around 7 o'clock, already awake and refreshed, shower and put on your work scrubs: ripped jeans and a t-shirt you stole from your girlfriend.
Re-fill coffee. Sit down at last in your sunsoaked apartment with your pile of Milton and write a goddamned lesson plan. Take frequent breaks to walk around the apartment, play with the cat, talk to the cat. Distract the cat from her gnawing of your arm, wonder why she hates your work so much, note for the thousandth time that this is what you get for naming her for that cosmically delusional Scythian shepherd.
Come to the conclusion that you can, after all, teach these two books of Paradise Lost and it really, really is not going to destroy you.
Realize, incidentally, that you have the perfect Star Trek analogy for the difference between good and bad angels. Tuck it away for later use, taking pride in your geek cred.
Finish your work precisely on time.
Dressing, realize that your new pinstriped pencil skirt has POCKETS, joy of joys. Feel you have the power to annihilate anyone who gets in your way when you put on your new motorcycle boots. Add a turtleneck and a velvet blazer and realize you are wearing all black; feel like the angel of death. In a good way. Undergraduates beware.
Use your hour-ish before class for an animated chat, swift dispatch of administrative matters, a few quick notes on the copy of your paper a teacher has just returned to you. Note that her comments are the precise inverse of those of the paper's other reader; do not be discouraged by this but rather remember that this is why multiple mentors are important - in the space between them you can find your own voice.
Skitter downstairs to your classroom, toss your books and your papers confidently on the table in front of the room - a gesture that you perform without thinking and yet one that marks today as different from other days, when you sit quietly in your uncomfortable desk next to the heater. Chat amiably with your students before class. Note their excitement.
Stumble only gently through your lesson plan. Resist jumping up and down with glee when one or two of them actually track what you're saying. Blush sincerely when your students applaud at the end of their eighty minutes.
In Afternoon Meeting #1, receive both needed affirmation ("That was as good as it really gets.") and very sound advice. Productive and efficient.
Step out into the finally-crisp fall day for a cigarette, run into the delightful overseer of your library's fierce rare books collection. Chat animatedly for the third time in a single day about the astonishing bit of Hamlet ephemera a friend dragged out of the catalogue; hatch plans to stun your little Miltonists with a heap of old books.
Make some small progress, spend the rest of your brain's weekly energy quota on hard questions, and receive more needed affirmation in Afternoon Meeting #2. ("And really, Moria, publish it! Publish it soon!") And some more obscure advice. Inefficient, but also productive.
Reward yourself: delicious coffee with a brilliant friend, overlooking your picture-postcard cliché of an autumnal campus. Reflect on what is good, to cure the bad. This exhaustion and this hard work, all this difficulty and these scraps of small successes: worth so little unless shared.
Walk home elated. Clean. Cook! Note that your first attempt at spanikopita is not a total disaster.
Dinner, wine, dessert, mulled cider, and warm, exhausted laughter with more brilliant friends. The ease and comfort of real friendship. Note again that you had thought that grad school friends were, by definition, not real friends, and note how terribly wrong you were.
THIS, sigh to yourself on your short walk home, makes all of THAT (cf. below) so completely worthwhile.
--
This was Thursday. The weekend has continued much the same (with, er, a small amount of this mixed in...) My neighborhood is beautiful; my life is full of old books and smart people; it's finally really, really fall; this is the life I imagine for myself.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Monday, November 2, 2009
lazy blogger makes a list: the Unexpected.
Things I did not, really, expect to be doing, now or whenever:
-- Falling down a Julian of Norwich hole. [Holy shit.]
-- Letting go - at least temporarily - of the project that began as my M.A. dissertation, and not feeling more than a slight ache of regret. [I said to a teacher early this term that I thought I would write one more thing on this, because "I need to get it out of my system." I think I have got it out, or worked through the trauma, or whatever it is.]
-- Teaching Paradise Lost to undergraduates, even just for a day. [Frak frak frak frak frak frak frak. Or: did somebody say 'anxiety of influence'?]
-- Itching again to write about performance and nationhood, where my wee undergraduate self got her start and fell in love with the practice of early modernistry. [Heywood and the public theatre, this time, and good lord, so much cosier than effing Jonson and those effing masques.]
-- Straining only a little against emerging patterns that point me toward the study of drama above other forms. [I will have more to say about the how and why of this. But for contrast, see above, "Julian of Norwich" &c.]
-- Related: participating in a seminar at SAA. [Err... huh?]
Everything changes so rapidly; these early years of study have been heady for this reason. This perhaps has to do with a kind of thrill adjacent to that discussed below: an ecstatic acceleration - toward what is impossible to know - or (of?) accumulation. The Unexpected might be recompense for the Unconfronted. I must remember to enjoy it.
-- Falling down a Julian of Norwich hole. [Holy shit.]
-- Letting go - at least temporarily - of the project that began as my M.A. dissertation, and not feeling more than a slight ache of regret. [I said to a teacher early this term that I thought I would write one more thing on this, because "I need to get it out of my system." I think I have got it out, or worked through the trauma, or whatever it is.]
-- Teaching Paradise Lost to undergraduates, even just for a day. [Frak frak frak frak frak frak frak. Or: did somebody say 'anxiety of influence'?]
-- Itching again to write about performance and nationhood, where my wee undergraduate self got her start and fell in love with the practice of early modernistry. [Heywood and the public theatre, this time, and good lord, so much cosier than effing Jonson and those effing masques.]
-- Straining only a little against emerging patterns that point me toward the study of drama above other forms. [I will have more to say about the how and why of this. But for contrast, see above, "Julian of Norwich" &c.]
-- Related: participating in a seminar at SAA. [Err... huh?]
Everything changes so rapidly; these early years of study have been heady for this reason. This perhaps has to do with a kind of thrill adjacent to that discussed below: an ecstatic acceleration - toward what is impossible to know - or (of?) accumulation. The Unexpected might be recompense for the Unconfronted. I must remember to enjoy it.
Friday, October 30, 2009
future self.
Flavia's post on pasts prompts me to think about futures (or maybe future anteriors, maybe the present-as-soon-to-be-past). And after my last post, I think this blog needs something bright to look forward to.
I spent an hour yesterday evening talking with a teacher about the twists and whorls of a paper that I'm trying to tame into circulatable shape for, among other things, SAA in April. This paper requires a commitment to one of its several strands, requires a throughline or as another teacher would say an intellectual centre - yes, centre is better. To sustain the orbits of the various items that circle it.
So this teacher (I need pseudonyms for them all, don't I, but what a dreadful task) of course raises the problem that she does not know I have been circling around, the lamp to my moth (or the bottle to my fly?), the problem of selfhood. She doesn't frame it quite that way, but she says something like this:
You will have to decide what kind of work this is. Not immediately, but soon, and at intervals, this year, next year, and later, you will make these decisions. You will have to decide what kind of work it is that you do.
Of course.
And that's the problem, the difficulty, the real hard knot of this paper, I said - those decisions I can't face, the very condition of being a grad student in course work is that we cannot have answers to these questions.
She brushed off my dilemma or my terror. But it's so exciting! Suspense: where will you go? Who knows!
And laughed.
Thrill in suspense, she thinks, is how I should view this problem of unselfhood. Easy, for the senior professor who has watched twelve zillion grad students do this same self-seeking with every possible degree of success or devastation, easy to say this, to view every new amorphous scholar-self as an exciting experiment.
And yet also right: there is a kind of thrill. Sometimes it's the thrill of agency, of seeing a pattern and acting to shape it, and sometimes it's the thrill of driving into a bank of fog at high speed, and sometimes it's both. The thrill, I think, is the way out of the fly-bottle.
But first there must be coffee and quiet, unthrilling, comfortable course reading: oh, love, and a return to my roots - there's a past self creeping in, right there, and god knows she had no idea she'd drive out of the fog into my current self's present.
I spent an hour yesterday evening talking with a teacher about the twists and whorls of a paper that I'm trying to tame into circulatable shape for, among other things, SAA in April. This paper requires a commitment to one of its several strands, requires a throughline or as another teacher would say an intellectual centre - yes, centre is better. To sustain the orbits of the various items that circle it.
So this teacher (I need pseudonyms for them all, don't I, but what a dreadful task) of course raises the problem that she does not know I have been circling around, the lamp to my moth (or the bottle to my fly?), the problem of selfhood. She doesn't frame it quite that way, but she says something like this:
You will have to decide what kind of work this is. Not immediately, but soon, and at intervals, this year, next year, and later, you will make these decisions. You will have to decide what kind of work it is that you do.
Of course.
And that's the problem, the difficulty, the real hard knot of this paper, I said - those decisions I can't face, the very condition of being a grad student in course work is that we cannot have answers to these questions.
She brushed off my dilemma or my terror. But it's so exciting! Suspense: where will you go? Who knows!
And laughed.
Thrill in suspense, she thinks, is how I should view this problem of unselfhood. Easy, for the senior professor who has watched twelve zillion grad students do this same self-seeking with every possible degree of success or devastation, easy to say this, to view every new amorphous scholar-self as an exciting experiment.
And yet also right: there is a kind of thrill. Sometimes it's the thrill of agency, of seeing a pattern and acting to shape it, and sometimes it's the thrill of driving into a bank of fog at high speed, and sometimes it's both. The thrill, I think, is the way out of the fly-bottle.
But first there must be coffee and quiet, unthrilling, comfortable course reading: oh, love, and a return to my roots - there's a past self creeping in, right there, and god knows she had no idea she'd drive out of the fog into my current self's present.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
wit.
If you had visited during the wee hours of this Sunday morning, you would have seen a post full of emotion, tears, and bad film-reviewing. The emotion had to go somewhere, reader, so I put it here, but it accomplished nothing, so I have taken it down.
I was in the state I was in because I finally, after having the Netflix DVD sitting on my coffee table since May for Chrissakes, watched Mike Nichols' film of Wit. You can guess, if you have seen it and you know me, where I started weeping openly, and you can guess where the weeping turned to violent sobbing, pillow-clutching, and some mild wailing.
What I should write, what I would like to put here in place of last night's fresh tears and salt-encrusted glasses, is how this confrontation between me and Emma Thompson's Vivian Bearing happened, what I saw in this film that so wracked me, but I can't do that.
I dreamed through this film, or rather dreamed through the waste of emotion the film left me with. I dreamed that I sat on a porch overlooking hills in fall, a perfect Vermont fall afternoon in Adirondack chairs, with a friend and her partner and sister and a beautiful brother she doesn't have in real life, and the partner and the brother and I smoked fine cigars that the brother produced out of the pocket of his unusually lovely trousers. We were all dressed, yes, very finely, and we drank wine and smoked and talked in the low, tired, vaguely smiling voices of exhausted people who have just spent a great deal of time in each other's company. Something terrible had happened to us all, not recorded in the dream, and we were recovering together, recovering and talking about John Donne. My friend and her partner turned to me with an idea, the perfect integration of Donne into the project I've been thinking obsessively about.
Something, of course, about salvation, annihilation, apocalypse, and punctuation. Perfect and clear, and I clutched it close, this perfect idea.
I woke up early this morning clear-headed suddenly after a quick but violent cold - all that weeping must have cleared my sinuses - but with an emotional hangover that I can't quite describe. The idea about Donne, so clear in the dream, is, of course, gone.
But something has come to replace it, which is this: that emotional confrontation, late last night with this film, was just a particularly powerful version of a confrontation I've been having somewhat too frequently and somewhat too strongly this term. It's a confrontation with the reality of this profession, and with my life as a scholar, an attempt or a desire to see clearly where I am and where I am going (and why), and what I want and what I need. None of this can be seen straight on, only glimpsed around corners or in warped mirrors, sometimes with a thrill, sometimes with nausea, but always only half-apprehended.
This is, yes, about having access to self, about self-building and self-knowing, but it is something else, too, something more rattling even than that. It is facing what a life of thought, teaching, and administrivia actually is, or might actually be. But being a grad student in coursework means is that you do not get a chance to sit and think these thoughts - pushed or pulled in a million directions at once, with little control over your own work, you sort of pinball from task to task blinkered by urgency.
Meanwhile a little cloud of anxiety - but who are you and what are you doing here and why? - gathers around the edges of whatever you're doing, but you don't give it its time and so it grows until you don't quite recognize it, you mistake it for something quite different than it is. It might, then, become the reason why suddenly, seemingly inexplicably, your hands begin to shake violently in seminar (you quietly hide them under the table and go on speaking in what you hope is an even voice), or the reason why, startled, you find yourself crying in the women's bathroom not knowing how you got there.
This little cloud is the Unconfronted, and the work of confronting it seems so daunting that you put it off in favor of your more urgent tasks.
Then one night some external thing, some film, say, does the confronting for you. It wraps its fist around your brain (and your sinuses) and shakes you so hard that you do what you have never done before: you dream an intellectual dream, and in it you discover what it is you need to be doing with John Donne, and never mind that you lose it. You wake up to find the cool, crisp fall day replicated in your windows (though your view is the wall of another city building - no mountain vistas for you) and however all that emotion hangs exhausted around you, you have found something at least, or you think you have found something, in the aftermath of confrontation.
There must be a less violent way to do this, a way that doesn't force me around myself into the second person, that doesn't require a minor apocalypse or a dream-vision. There must be, and there is more to be said about this, but for now there is this bright morning, these tasks (however many and however daunting), this solitary quiet.
I was in the state I was in because I finally, after having the Netflix DVD sitting on my coffee table since May for Chrissakes, watched Mike Nichols' film of Wit. You can guess, if you have seen it and you know me, where I started weeping openly, and you can guess where the weeping turned to violent sobbing, pillow-clutching, and some mild wailing.
What I should write, what I would like to put here in place of last night's fresh tears and salt-encrusted glasses, is how this confrontation between me and Emma Thompson's Vivian Bearing happened, what I saw in this film that so wracked me, but I can't do that.
I dreamed through this film, or rather dreamed through the waste of emotion the film left me with. I dreamed that I sat on a porch overlooking hills in fall, a perfect Vermont fall afternoon in Adirondack chairs, with a friend and her partner and sister and a beautiful brother she doesn't have in real life, and the partner and the brother and I smoked fine cigars that the brother produced out of the pocket of his unusually lovely trousers. We were all dressed, yes, very finely, and we drank wine and smoked and talked in the low, tired, vaguely smiling voices of exhausted people who have just spent a great deal of time in each other's company. Something terrible had happened to us all, not recorded in the dream, and we were recovering together, recovering and talking about John Donne. My friend and her partner turned to me with an idea, the perfect integration of Donne into the project I've been thinking obsessively about.
Something, of course, about salvation, annihilation, apocalypse, and punctuation. Perfect and clear, and I clutched it close, this perfect idea.
I woke up early this morning clear-headed suddenly after a quick but violent cold - all that weeping must have cleared my sinuses - but with an emotional hangover that I can't quite describe. The idea about Donne, so clear in the dream, is, of course, gone.
But something has come to replace it, which is this: that emotional confrontation, late last night with this film, was just a particularly powerful version of a confrontation I've been having somewhat too frequently and somewhat too strongly this term. It's a confrontation with the reality of this profession, and with my life as a scholar, an attempt or a desire to see clearly where I am and where I am going (and why), and what I want and what I need. None of this can be seen straight on, only glimpsed around corners or in warped mirrors, sometimes with a thrill, sometimes with nausea, but always only half-apprehended.
This is, yes, about having access to self, about self-building and self-knowing, but it is something else, too, something more rattling even than that. It is facing what a life of thought, teaching, and administrivia actually is, or might actually be. But being a grad student in coursework means is that you do not get a chance to sit and think these thoughts - pushed or pulled in a million directions at once, with little control over your own work, you sort of pinball from task to task blinkered by urgency.
Meanwhile a little cloud of anxiety - but who are you and what are you doing here and why? - gathers around the edges of whatever you're doing, but you don't give it its time and so it grows until you don't quite recognize it, you mistake it for something quite different than it is. It might, then, become the reason why suddenly, seemingly inexplicably, your hands begin to shake violently in seminar (you quietly hide them under the table and go on speaking in what you hope is an even voice), or the reason why, startled, you find yourself crying in the women's bathroom not knowing how you got there.
This little cloud is the Unconfronted, and the work of confronting it seems so daunting that you put it off in favor of your more urgent tasks.
Then one night some external thing, some film, say, does the confronting for you. It wraps its fist around your brain (and your sinuses) and shakes you so hard that you do what you have never done before: you dream an intellectual dream, and in it you discover what it is you need to be doing with John Donne, and never mind that you lose it. You wake up to find the cool, crisp fall day replicated in your windows (though your view is the wall of another city building - no mountain vistas for you) and however all that emotion hangs exhausted around you, you have found something at least, or you think you have found something, in the aftermath of confrontation.
There must be a less violent way to do this, a way that doesn't force me around myself into the second person, that doesn't require a minor apocalypse or a dream-vision. There must be, and there is more to be said about this, but for now there is this bright morning, these tasks (however many and however daunting), this solitary quiet.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
wish.
too wiped to blog actuals. so i blog desires. i have wilder ones. for now i'm satisfied with the simplest.
my wish list of Now:
- higher professional presentation value. as it stands, i get the job done. usually. now, i want smooth edges. maybe some dazzle. related: a planner, a filing system, and a few bits of software. (anyone got a good mac-friendly alternative to excel?)
- work for pay. lots of it.
my wish list of Someday, Probably Not Soon:
- an office, no matter how small, with a window and a door that locks.
- to teach. really, really, to teach. design my own syllabus. run my own classroom. indoctrinate young minds however i please. make my own mistakes; live with my own consequences.
- discretionary income. for: travel and old books. (and boots.)
- multiple large computer monitors for viable on-screen reading. (EEBO on a MacBook screen = mmmmleh.)
- expertise. in anything, really. related: reading competence, however limited, in latin.
my wish list of Never:
- to walk down the street at any hour, in any city, and not hear a single car horn, catcall, whistle, or other form of hey-baby. seriously, assholes, i'm too fucking tired of you even to tell you to give it a fucking rest. (who knew the same stupid act could simultaneously piss me off and bore me senseless?) related: a big fucking gun and a concealed-carry permit.
my wish list of Now:
- higher professional presentation value. as it stands, i get the job done. usually. now, i want smooth edges. maybe some dazzle. related: a planner, a filing system, and a few bits of software. (anyone got a good mac-friendly alternative to excel?)
- work for pay. lots of it.
my wish list of Someday, Probably Not Soon:
- an office, no matter how small, with a window and a door that locks.
- to teach. really, really, to teach. design my own syllabus. run my own classroom. indoctrinate young minds however i please. make my own mistakes; live with my own consequences.
- discretionary income. for: travel and old books. (and boots.)
- multiple large computer monitors for viable on-screen reading. (EEBO on a MacBook screen = mmmmleh.)
- expertise. in anything, really. related: reading competence, however limited, in latin.
my wish list of Never:
- to walk down the street at any hour, in any city, and not hear a single car horn, catcall, whistle, or other form of hey-baby. seriously, assholes, i'm too fucking tired of you even to tell you to give it a fucking rest. (who knew the same stupid act could simultaneously piss me off and bore me senseless?) related: a big fucking gun and a concealed-carry permit.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
artes liberales, i will always love you.
Notes on last night's four-hour meeting of the general body of BFU's graduate student government:
1. "University" is not, despite some frightening indices to the contrary, equal to "for-profit business," and that is as it should be. To the MBA students who wish to run university bodies as though they are for-profit businesses, I say: this proves that you do not belong in a university. Go get a job, assholes.
2. Chemists, musicologists, and literaturians really do have more in common with each other than we as a group have in common with business, medical, and law students. Miss Wants To Be A Twelfth-Century University Rhetorician here rather likes having this suspicion confirmed.
3. My misogyny-dar is even more finely tuned than I thought. I can pick out an Underminer Of Women In Positions Of Authority with only half a glance at the back of said Underminer's head. (The collar of the cheap pinstripe suit jacket helps.)
4. Weber is right. My idealist undergraduate self is wrong. I'm sorry, Max - you're very right. I am a cog. (An attractive, intelligent, highly social cog, but a cog.)
5. Next time, I will not scruple to bring my pile of grading, and I will never again wonder at faculty members who walk into meetings with needles and yarn.
1. "University" is not, despite some frightening indices to the contrary, equal to "for-profit business," and that is as it should be. To the MBA students who wish to run university bodies as though they are for-profit businesses, I say: this proves that you do not belong in a university. Go get a job, assholes.
2. Chemists, musicologists, and literaturians really do have more in common with each other than we as a group have in common with business, medical, and law students. Miss Wants To Be A Twelfth-Century University Rhetorician here rather likes having this suspicion confirmed.
3. My misogyny-dar is even more finely tuned than I thought. I can pick out an Underminer Of Women In Positions Of Authority with only half a glance at the back of said Underminer's head. (The collar of the cheap pinstripe suit jacket helps.)
4. Weber is right. My idealist undergraduate self is wrong. I'm sorry, Max - you're very right. I am a cog. (An attractive, intelligent, highly social cog, but a cog.)
5. Next time, I will not scruple to bring my pile of grading, and I will never again wonder at faculty members who walk into meetings with needles and yarn.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
when work is joy.
Today, I and some of the smartest women I know gathered around a table in an elegant reading room with six early English printed bibles on the table and got our exegesis on.
As we walked out (forcibly ejected, or we'd have gone on some time more), one of those women exclaimed, "Can you believe we get paid to do this?"
I'm a little more cynical than she is about grad student remuneration, but she has a fucking point, reader.
Why I am here: intellectual labor, combined with intellectual camaraderie, as a route to elation. That's what we had today for two hours in its best possible form.
God damn it, but I love it when that happens.
As we walked out (forcibly ejected, or we'd have gone on some time more), one of those women exclaimed, "Can you believe we get paid to do this?"
I'm a little more cynical than she is about grad student remuneration, but she has a fucking point, reader.
Why I am here: intellectual labor, combined with intellectual camaraderie, as a route to elation. That's what we had today for two hours in its best possible form.
God damn it, but I love it when that happens.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
crazy.
Eight months ago, I wrote giddily about moving forward on work from a seminar paper.
Temporarily suspended, this project has been gnawing away gently at a corner of my brain, growing unexpectedly and just gently gnawing, reminding me of its presence.
Five months ago, I realized that that project had something astonishing in common with a newer paper. The idea, whatever it was, was too big to articulate, but I knew it was there.
And then in July, giddily again to say that I had found the connection between these two bits of work - still too big to articulate.
Now, the newer paper is, I hope, going somewhere. On Friday, I said aloud for the first time that I think these two bits of work might just be food for a dissertation. It's a relatively small claim, on the surface: the work I've done so far is only just a spark, or a kernel, or the first little pre-foetal cell, or whatever figure might be appropriate. So why, then, did my heart leap, and why did I look then at the friend to whom I said it for reassurance that my head hadn't exploded or my eyes shot fire, on the moment of pronouncing (casually or agitatedly?) this claim?
I don't know. I went home and tried to work on a miniscule task related to this project. It made me a little... really the only word for how I get at moments like that is crazy. Agitated, verbally incoherent, distracted, obsessive. Crazy. Sometimes that mode is productive, but Friday night it was only madness. I tried to put it to rest by reading. I picked up a book vaguely related to the project, by a scholar whose work is newly very important to me. I read the first two pages - two! - and they so bent my mind, so made my already agitated heart race, that I threw the book down and fled the quiet scene of my bedroom for the courtyard and a cigarette.*
Not just agitated now but simply unhappy, disgusted with myself for believing this paper deserved my ambitions for it, I rolled over those first two pages of this astonishing book in my mind. The intensity of the prose and its quality, the bare bigness of its ideas... It happens rarely, reader, that I open a book and am punched squarely in the face by the recognition of the kind of scholarship I would sell my soul to write - rarely, but when it happens, boy do I know it. Sitting in the cool mist in the courtyard, smoking, I thought I should blog about this. I resisted, because I knew that trying to write about inspiration would lead to writing about - and through - the devastation that accompanied it.
I didn't know how to think about this intellectual-emotional turmoil. I didn't like myself for experiencing it - there is nothing more irritating, after all, than the agony of a young scholar who thinks too highly of herself (and of her agony). I called it plain insecurity, impostor syndrome, and agitated myself further knowing that wasn't right.
This morning, sleepily, coffee in hand, cat passed out next to me, lady passed out in the next room, this gray-rain-light-suffused quiet domestic morning, I had nearly forgotten this experience. Then I opened my RSS reader and found this post by (appropriately) Dr. Crazy, who provides her own name for a similar experience: "the downside of thinking." She writes:
Wow. Yes. There it is. Combine that intensity and that uncontrol with my usual brand of explosive emoting and you get something incredibly volatile. Unfortunately, just chucking this intellectual napalm at a blank page accomplishes nothing toward writing. But Crazy makes an important statement: this isn't just the downside of thinking, it's an important and integral part of thinking, and it must be recognized and accepted, managed to the extent possible (so as not to damage anything/one who might be nearby when it approaches). As I indicated in my previous post, I have learned to recognize and accept other sorts of spell (usually the existential malaise sort), let them run their course, accept them and treat them. Now, I must teach myself to absorb the angry intensity of this inarticulate moment of new thought, absorb it and put it to its productive use.
Or rather, not now. That's too much for now. NOW, I am going to go sit somewhere quiet and watch the rain and read a pretty play by William Shakespeare. Then, I will face this difficult thing.
--
*You may recall my having quit smoking. You're not wrong. The trauma of my 50-book undid all my work toward quitting. I told my exam chair that if she hadn't asked me, preposterously but in good faith and very much expecting an answer, to "theorize the relationship between religion and the nation" (true story), I wouldn't have started again. Between puffs of smoke, she told me I was full of shit. She's not wrong, either.
Temporarily suspended, this project has been gnawing away gently at a corner of my brain, growing unexpectedly and just gently gnawing, reminding me of its presence.
Five months ago, I realized that that project had something astonishing in common with a newer paper. The idea, whatever it was, was too big to articulate, but I knew it was there.
And then in July, giddily again to say that I had found the connection between these two bits of work - still too big to articulate.
Now, the newer paper is, I hope, going somewhere. On Friday, I said aloud for the first time that I think these two bits of work might just be food for a dissertation. It's a relatively small claim, on the surface: the work I've done so far is only just a spark, or a kernel, or the first little pre-foetal cell, or whatever figure might be appropriate. So why, then, did my heart leap, and why did I look then at the friend to whom I said it for reassurance that my head hadn't exploded or my eyes shot fire, on the moment of pronouncing (casually or agitatedly?) this claim?
I don't know. I went home and tried to work on a miniscule task related to this project. It made me a little... really the only word for how I get at moments like that is crazy. Agitated, verbally incoherent, distracted, obsessive. Crazy. Sometimes that mode is productive, but Friday night it was only madness. I tried to put it to rest by reading. I picked up a book vaguely related to the project, by a scholar whose work is newly very important to me. I read the first two pages - two! - and they so bent my mind, so made my already agitated heart race, that I threw the book down and fled the quiet scene of my bedroom for the courtyard and a cigarette.*
Not just agitated now but simply unhappy, disgusted with myself for believing this paper deserved my ambitions for it, I rolled over those first two pages of this astonishing book in my mind. The intensity of the prose and its quality, the bare bigness of its ideas... It happens rarely, reader, that I open a book and am punched squarely in the face by the recognition of the kind of scholarship I would sell my soul to write - rarely, but when it happens, boy do I know it. Sitting in the cool mist in the courtyard, smoking, I thought I should blog about this. I resisted, because I knew that trying to write about inspiration would lead to writing about - and through - the devastation that accompanied it.
I didn't know how to think about this intellectual-emotional turmoil. I didn't like myself for experiencing it - there is nothing more irritating, after all, than the agony of a young scholar who thinks too highly of herself (and of her agony). I called it plain insecurity, impostor syndrome, and agitated myself further knowing that wasn't right.
This morning, sleepily, coffee in hand, cat passed out next to me, lady passed out in the next room, this gray-rain-light-suffused quiet domestic morning, I had nearly forgotten this experience. Then I opened my RSS reader and found this post by (appropriately) Dr. Crazy, who provides her own name for a similar experience: "the downside of thinking." She writes:
[S]ometimes [...] I embark on a path. I come upon an idea or set of ideas that really overwhelms me and intrigues me. I'm not just screwing around, floating, but rather I commit. And that commitment produces an excess of energy. When I'm really having big new ideas, when I'm really working through tough intellectual questions and really in the process of formulating my position within and relation to a text or texts, I go a little crazy. And because I don't know what to do with all of that energy, my go-to response is to translate that feeling as being pissed off.
However excited I am about a project - and really, there's a lot of excitement bound up in this - there's also an angry, upset edge to it. It's intense, and it's difficult for me to control. It's this mix of obsession and fear, of passion and insecurity. It's important, but it's not pleasant.
Wow. Yes. There it is. Combine that intensity and that uncontrol with my usual brand of explosive emoting and you get something incredibly volatile. Unfortunately, just chucking this intellectual napalm at a blank page accomplishes nothing toward writing. But Crazy makes an important statement: this isn't just the downside of thinking, it's an important and integral part of thinking, and it must be recognized and accepted, managed to the extent possible (so as not to damage anything/one who might be nearby when it approaches). As I indicated in my previous post, I have learned to recognize and accept other sorts of spell (usually the existential malaise sort), let them run their course, accept them and treat them. Now, I must teach myself to absorb the angry intensity of this inarticulate moment of new thought, absorb it and put it to its productive use.
Or rather, not now. That's too much for now. NOW, I am going to go sit somewhere quiet and watch the rain and read a pretty play by William Shakespeare. Then, I will face this difficult thing.
--
*You may recall my having quit smoking. You're not wrong. The trauma of my 50-book undid all my work toward quitting. I told my exam chair that if she hadn't asked me, preposterously but in good faith and very much expecting an answer, to "theorize the relationship between religion and the nation" (true story), I wouldn't have started again. Between puffs of smoke, she told me I was full of shit. She's not wrong, either.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
gatherings.
Imagine, reader, a plain but elegant book, well-bound in cloth, sparingly but lovingly impressed with gilt, octavo sheets expertly sewn (not glued) and freshly cut, printed in a fine, crisp (if slightly dated) type.
Now send that book flying out of a twelfth-story window and watch as its corners strike the sidewalk; watch as the silent power of a strong wind picks it up and thrashes it against the concrete, against a tree; watch as it bounces away down the street and those expert stitches loose themselves and the sheets separate and out-fly the binding on the wind; watch the whole disarticulated former book come to rest in a vast scene of scattered paper and mutilated boards.
This, more or less, represents what takes place in my psyche on a weekly basis.
The other day, I sat outside with a friend chatting animatedly in advance of our department's rather rambunctious yearly gathering, which we call, for some reason not available to me, "Collation." A non-attending fellow grad passed us and bid us be nicely collated, and not get our sheets out of order. It was a good joke, so I laughed.
But there is also something to that. It provoked a memory, long buried: one of the most intense, and most bizarre, anxiety dreams I have ever had was about, precisely, collation. One night in the summer after I finished undergrad, I stayed up late reading the apparatus of the Arden 3 Hamlet. I fell asleep on my book (what else) and dreamed as follows.
A vast table of distressed wood, in the gray-blue light characteristic of certain understated pre-war reading rooms, the bright rectangle of a window beyond the desk, and in the foreground the brassy light of a single lamp. Spread across the table, several early copies of King Lear in various versions. I see the table alternately from a slight distance, and a slight vertical advantage - face myself sitting at that table - and from the perspective of self-at-table. I see my hands on the table (my veined Italianate hands, my mother's hands - always so vivid in dreams). I try to identify my task: I must collate (in the editorial sense) these copies. But they keep coming unbound, the sheets spreading across the table, intermixing. I am responsible for these very old and very valuable books and there is some very important scholarly matter at hand that I can't quite remember, can't quite seize in a single frame, but I must get the sheets back in their proper places, each with each, must restore these books and then collate them. But just as I think I might have the books recreated, just as I see them complete on the table, then in the next frame they've come apart again - not a process but a sudden undoneness. And I can't remember what I must do but it must be done, and all keeps being only undone. And so on.
Reader, this terrified me.
Lesson one: no more textual-editing histories before bed, ever.
Lesson two: a useful metaphor.
Another friend asked me, mid-Collation-event, how I figure my de-stressing process: "Do you decompress or defragment?"
Neither, I realized in the moment, as I recounted that old anxiety dream for the second time in two hours. I collate. I collect the scattered fragments and restore them - a task I could never accomplish in the literal sense, having no fine motor skills to speak of and little ability in material arts, though even in the figurative sense this work does require some editorial skill. And I more blessed than the most expert of book-restorers or textual editors have this luck: the final product is always not just restored but improved, both perfectly original to itself and also somehow more.
This is how I will spend my morning, reader. I will take my Marvell to my coffee shop and I will sit outside in the sun, pretending to like the weather, and I will read slowly for a few hours and then I will walk in the sun to campus, all the while folding paper, gathering, stitching.
Now send that book flying out of a twelfth-story window and watch as its corners strike the sidewalk; watch as the silent power of a strong wind picks it up and thrashes it against the concrete, against a tree; watch as it bounces away down the street and those expert stitches loose themselves and the sheets separate and out-fly the binding on the wind; watch the whole disarticulated former book come to rest in a vast scene of scattered paper and mutilated boards.
This, more or less, represents what takes place in my psyche on a weekly basis.
The other day, I sat outside with a friend chatting animatedly in advance of our department's rather rambunctious yearly gathering, which we call, for some reason not available to me, "Collation." A non-attending fellow grad passed us and bid us be nicely collated, and not get our sheets out of order. It was a good joke, so I laughed.
But there is also something to that. It provoked a memory, long buried: one of the most intense, and most bizarre, anxiety dreams I have ever had was about, precisely, collation. One night in the summer after I finished undergrad, I stayed up late reading the apparatus of the Arden 3 Hamlet. I fell asleep on my book (what else) and dreamed as follows.
A vast table of distressed wood, in the gray-blue light characteristic of certain understated pre-war reading rooms, the bright rectangle of a window beyond the desk, and in the foreground the brassy light of a single lamp. Spread across the table, several early copies of King Lear in various versions. I see the table alternately from a slight distance, and a slight vertical advantage - face myself sitting at that table - and from the perspective of self-at-table. I see my hands on the table (my veined Italianate hands, my mother's hands - always so vivid in dreams). I try to identify my task: I must collate (in the editorial sense) these copies. But they keep coming unbound, the sheets spreading across the table, intermixing. I am responsible for these very old and very valuable books and there is some very important scholarly matter at hand that I can't quite remember, can't quite seize in a single frame, but I must get the sheets back in their proper places, each with each, must restore these books and then collate them. But just as I think I might have the books recreated, just as I see them complete on the table, then in the next frame they've come apart again - not a process but a sudden undoneness. And I can't remember what I must do but it must be done, and all keeps being only undone. And so on.
Reader, this terrified me.
Lesson one: no more textual-editing histories before bed, ever.
Lesson two: a useful metaphor.
Another friend asked me, mid-Collation-event, how I figure my de-stressing process: "Do you decompress or defragment?"
Neither, I realized in the moment, as I recounted that old anxiety dream for the second time in two hours. I collate. I collect the scattered fragments and restore them - a task I could never accomplish in the literal sense, having no fine motor skills to speak of and little ability in material arts, though even in the figurative sense this work does require some editorial skill. And I more blessed than the most expert of book-restorers or textual editors have this luck: the final product is always not just restored but improved, both perfectly original to itself and also somehow more.
This is how I will spend my morning, reader. I will take my Marvell to my coffee shop and I will sit outside in the sun, pretending to like the weather, and I will read slowly for a few hours and then I will walk in the sun to campus, all the while folding paper, gathering, stitching.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
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