Yesterday, I walked the campus of my alma mater. Not an uncommon occurrence in the years since I graduated, but the last time was easily two years ago or more. And so, finding myself in town and early for another engagement, I walked the campus.
Walking a small liberal arts college campus is, as you may know, an affair of perhaps thirty minutes, if you take your time and make stops and go the long way. Blissfully cold and wind-blown, I walked and encountered not a single soul. Yet there was nothing desolate, nothing bleak about the empty campus – the absence of folk, if anything, made room for my own ghosts to emerge and wave at me or walk with me, invite me in or, in a few exceptional cases, warn me off.
Walking in the boots I've worn since my junior year there, sounding their steps on these sidewalks as they did seven years ago, these boots that spent so many hours kicked up on that reading room table (glimpsable through a tall window in the closed library's façade), I watched and listened for my past selves hailing me from around corners, from inside locked buildings (theatres, rehearsal rooms, classroom buildings and department offices – Hello, N.; Hello, P.; Hello, A.; thank you for teaching my past selves –, dorm buildings and the wood-frame house that is no longer there, its own shambling ghost smiling sadly), from sidewalks and lawned courtyards and the wide familiar swath of hill.
There, on that bench in front of the science center, I sat and laughed and talked with L., which I remember so well because it was photodocumented. And there is the courtyard where I played such-and-such a role, there the flagstone where I stumbled and skinned my knees and my hands on opening night. There is the music department, where for years I took voice lessons with a kind and patient man. There also I sang; there I gave my first academic presentation. Here is another department, and another – in that office I argued with one professor in a way I did not know would be formative; in that one I met weekly with my thesis advisor, building my first scholarly self; there in that big corner office I received the first gifts of another's extraordinary generosity. In those rooms I spoke French for several hours a week; from those windows my first-year hallmates and I threw parachute-men. There, champagne-drunk, J. tackled me to the ground for no reason and I laughed even as I cursed him. There, and there, and there, are the quiet out-of-the-way places where I would go to be alone. Here in this house that is no longer I lived and shouted and drank and cooked and cried with S. with whom I've lost touch. There B. and I argued about my boots, the boots I wear now, still. There and there and there and there and there I did things entirely unbloggable. And there is something new, and there is another new thing, and there is the gap left by another thing that is no longer; pieces of my history are disappearing and new histories take material shape of which I am no part. There a terrible thing happened; there a thing surprising and wonderful and fleeting, miraculously preserved in time and space. There are places, too, so layered over with time and memory and meaning that each thing is indistinguishable from the others.
And all the while the wind and the cold and the quiet broken by the rhythm of my bootsteps. Comfortable, at home with my ghosts, content with the distance from that to this, with the confirmation of my sense that here I began, here was formed the self I am now. The empty campus and my ghosts assured me that this place, like a strong and living archive, will store all these things for me, and also that even far from that place, I carry all this with me, that I am still these ghosts.
I am only sorry that the library was closed. Still, I sat on the steps and smoked a cigarette, in the midst of a dense palimpsest of ghosts doing just the same.
Walking a small liberal arts college campus is, as you may know, an affair of perhaps thirty minutes, if you take your time and make stops and go the long way. Blissfully cold and wind-blown, I walked and encountered not a single soul. Yet there was nothing desolate, nothing bleak about the empty campus – the absence of folk, if anything, made room for my own ghosts to emerge and wave at me or walk with me, invite me in or, in a few exceptional cases, warn me off.
Walking in the boots I've worn since my junior year there, sounding their steps on these sidewalks as they did seven years ago, these boots that spent so many hours kicked up on that reading room table (glimpsable through a tall window in the closed library's façade), I watched and listened for my past selves hailing me from around corners, from inside locked buildings (theatres, rehearsal rooms, classroom buildings and department offices – Hello, N.; Hello, P.; Hello, A.; thank you for teaching my past selves –, dorm buildings and the wood-frame house that is no longer there, its own shambling ghost smiling sadly), from sidewalks and lawned courtyards and the wide familiar swath of hill.
There, on that bench in front of the science center, I sat and laughed and talked with L., which I remember so well because it was photodocumented. And there is the courtyard where I played such-and-such a role, there the flagstone where I stumbled and skinned my knees and my hands on opening night. There is the music department, where for years I took voice lessons with a kind and patient man. There also I sang; there I gave my first academic presentation. Here is another department, and another – in that office I argued with one professor in a way I did not know would be formative; in that one I met weekly with my thesis advisor, building my first scholarly self; there in that big corner office I received the first gifts of another's extraordinary generosity. In those rooms I spoke French for several hours a week; from those windows my first-year hallmates and I threw parachute-men. There, champagne-drunk, J. tackled me to the ground for no reason and I laughed even as I cursed him. There, and there, and there, are the quiet out-of-the-way places where I would go to be alone. Here in this house that is no longer I lived and shouted and drank and cooked and cried with S. with whom I've lost touch. There B. and I argued about my boots, the boots I wear now, still. There and there and there and there and there I did things entirely unbloggable. And there is something new, and there is another new thing, and there is the gap left by another thing that is no longer; pieces of my history are disappearing and new histories take material shape of which I am no part. There a terrible thing happened; there a thing surprising and wonderful and fleeting, miraculously preserved in time and space. There are places, too, so layered over with time and memory and meaning that each thing is indistinguishable from the others.
And all the while the wind and the cold and the quiet broken by the rhythm of my bootsteps. Comfortable, at home with my ghosts, content with the distance from that to this, with the confirmation of my sense that here I began, here was formed the self I am now. The empty campus and my ghosts assured me that this place, like a strong and living archive, will store all these things for me, and also that even far from that place, I carry all this with me, that I am still these ghosts.
I am only sorry that the library was closed. Still, I sat on the steps and smoked a cigarette, in the midst of a dense palimpsest of ghosts doing just the same.
tuesday, december 20, 2011
preposterous process
I keep promising to re-initiate the blog. It's getting a bit silly, reader. So no promises, this time.
I write on this too-warm-for-winter day from my advisor's blessing of an office, her holiday gift to me, where I sit overinvolving myself in a close-reading when I should be zooming out, imagining broader. I tell myself that what I am doing today is tying off loose ends, but a more inappropriate figure I cannot imagine.
Because what I am actually doing is reacquainting myself with process, with difficulty, with uncertainty. What I am doing is celebrating loose ends.
If you have been reading this blog for a long time, and if you are a careful reader, and if you have a good memory, you know that the story of the past several years has been the uneven story of how I forgot how to love my work. I forgot how to be curious, how to be invested, how to feel the tug of something irresistible and how not to resist it.
I have been thinking of last year – defined as the period between May 2010 and August 2011 – as a traumatic year. Nothing extraordinary happened – no tragic accidents, no great losses, no radical encounter with the dangers of the world. I simply ran myself ragged in the most banal little way. Difficult teaching, difficult exam-preparation, difficult relationships, difficult dissertation-shaped-project-creating, difficult growth. I forgot to honor that difficulty. I forgot to accept it. I forgot, in some sense, who I was. I have thought of it as a traumatic year. I have said, 'Part of me died last year.' (When I say this to my colleagues who experienced it with me, they nod and laugh-sigh and blow their bangs out of their eyes in empathetic agreement. When I said it to my advisor, she laughed, perhaps out of habit.)
Now I am thinking of that year not only as trauma but as transformation. Perhaps part of me did die. Perhaps it needed to. Perhaps last year was the necessary-but-no-less-painful sloughing off of matter already dead. Perhaps it was the encounter with the basic importance of change that can be so easy to resist, so easy to ignore, so easy to refuse without even meaning to.
It led to a forgetting. Of self, of work, of relationship to self and work and others. And that forgetting led me to shape a project in which I was not invested, which did not inspire me, in which I did not see myself – because I had forgotten that it was possible to live and work otherwise than in a kind of perpetual state of dissatisfaction and anxious boredom. I spoke to others about that project, watched them get excited about it, and was full of curiosity – what is there to be excited about, here? Or: whose project is this? Not mine, surely. Surely this excitement is not for me, this validation was meant for someone else, because this is not my project.
It didn't feel like an incipient project; it felt like a template into which I was slotting a series of prefabricated readings. It felt like a set of steps to follow. The answers were there; I just had to reach for them and put them in their places, one two three, just so, and before me would grow a dissertation. It felt like assembly, not like writing, not like learning.
That is not how it is supposed to be.
It occurred to me in time that it did not have to be this way. I gathered some courage – not a little of it borrowed from a few important friends – and did the thing that is hardest to learn as a graduate student: I grabbed onto my convictions and jumped. I told my advisor to sit down and listen, because this isn't working and something has to change. I invented a new project more or less on the fly. She laughed – she likes to laugh, whether with me or at me, I never know – and said, 'I never really understood why you were doing that other thing, anyway. It's smart, but it isn't you. Give it to someone else. This, now – I see you here. This is you.' I must have looked astonished. She laughed again.
About a year ago, she wrote the following for a BFU internal publication:
I have been trying to take this seriously for a long time, but I think I'm only now learning what it actually means. And now here I am, with a new project whose shape I don't quite know, a project that in some ways eludes me – a project that is in process, a project that is composed almost entirely of loose ends. I do not know where it will take me. I am not even truly certain, to butcher a cliché, that there is a 'where' there at all. And this, I am remembering, is what this is supposed to be like. I have a friend – one of those from whom I am constantly borrowing courage – who says she finds it too easy to forget that what we are doing is learning to do what we do. We have to remind each other of that. Because once you remember, once you remind yourself that you are developing, not demonstrating, skill and knowledge, whole worlds of possibility seem to emerge that were not there in the anxious, bored space that came before. So here I am. Learning. It's uncomfortable, but that's the point.
I write on this too-warm-for-winter day from my advisor's blessing of an office, her holiday gift to me, where I sit overinvolving myself in a close-reading when I should be zooming out, imagining broader. I tell myself that what I am doing today is tying off loose ends, but a more inappropriate figure I cannot imagine.
Because what I am actually doing is reacquainting myself with process, with difficulty, with uncertainty. What I am doing is celebrating loose ends.
If you have been reading this blog for a long time, and if you are a careful reader, and if you have a good memory, you know that the story of the past several years has been the uneven story of how I forgot how to love my work. I forgot how to be curious, how to be invested, how to feel the tug of something irresistible and how not to resist it.
I have been thinking of last year – defined as the period between May 2010 and August 2011 – as a traumatic year. Nothing extraordinary happened – no tragic accidents, no great losses, no radical encounter with the dangers of the world. I simply ran myself ragged in the most banal little way. Difficult teaching, difficult exam-preparation, difficult relationships, difficult dissertation-shaped-project-creating, difficult growth. I forgot to honor that difficulty. I forgot to accept it. I forgot, in some sense, who I was. I have thought of it as a traumatic year. I have said, 'Part of me died last year.' (When I say this to my colleagues who experienced it with me, they nod and laugh-sigh and blow their bangs out of their eyes in empathetic agreement. When I said it to my advisor, she laughed, perhaps out of habit.)
Now I am thinking of that year not only as trauma but as transformation. Perhaps part of me did die. Perhaps it needed to. Perhaps last year was the necessary-but-no-less-painful sloughing off of matter already dead. Perhaps it was the encounter with the basic importance of change that can be so easy to resist, so easy to ignore, so easy to refuse without even meaning to.
It led to a forgetting. Of self, of work, of relationship to self and work and others. And that forgetting led me to shape a project in which I was not invested, which did not inspire me, in which I did not see myself – because I had forgotten that it was possible to live and work otherwise than in a kind of perpetual state of dissatisfaction and anxious boredom. I spoke to others about that project, watched them get excited about it, and was full of curiosity – what is there to be excited about, here? Or: whose project is this? Not mine, surely. Surely this excitement is not for me, this validation was meant for someone else, because this is not my project.
It didn't feel like an incipient project; it felt like a template into which I was slotting a series of prefabricated readings. It felt like a set of steps to follow. The answers were there; I just had to reach for them and put them in their places, one two three, just so, and before me would grow a dissertation. It felt like assembly, not like writing, not like learning.
That is not how it is supposed to be.
It occurred to me in time that it did not have to be this way. I gathered some courage – not a little of it borrowed from a few important friends – and did the thing that is hardest to learn as a graduate student: I grabbed onto my convictions and jumped. I told my advisor to sit down and listen, because this isn't working and something has to change. I invented a new project more or less on the fly. She laughed – she likes to laugh, whether with me or at me, I never know – and said, 'I never really understood why you were doing that other thing, anyway. It's smart, but it isn't you. Give it to someone else. This, now – I see you here. This is you.' I must have looked astonished. She laughed again.
About a year ago, she wrote the following for a BFU internal publication:
With the doctorate, the prospectus is an act of pure projection. It is literally preposterous: it puts first what should logically come last, the description of the thesis before the thesis. [...] When students embarking on their thesis have no trouble articulating a project, my inclination is to probe until they do. This may sound perverse [ed.: here I imagine another laugh], but how – after several years of encountering and grappling with a morass of materials (literary, historical, theoretical) in a discipline of changing methodologies, values, and stakes – can there be clarity and certainty? It takes time for the materials to settle, take shape, come into view. Often the most promising projects are those that are most inchoate at the start.
I have been trying to take this seriously for a long time, but I think I'm only now learning what it actually means. And now here I am, with a new project whose shape I don't quite know, a project that in some ways eludes me – a project that is in process, a project that is composed almost entirely of loose ends. I do not know where it will take me. I am not even truly certain, to butcher a cliché, that there is a 'where' there at all. And this, I am remembering, is what this is supposed to be like. I have a friend – one of those from whom I am constantly borrowing courage – who says she finds it too easy to forget that what we are doing is learning to do what we do. We have to remind each other of that. Because once you remember, once you remind yourself that you are developing, not demonstrating, skill and knowledge, whole worlds of possibility seem to emerge that were not there in the anxious, bored space that came before. So here I am. Learning. It's uncomfortable, but that's the point.
thursday, july 28, 2011
riveting.
It's just a job. Get up in the morning, go to work. Pull on your helmet and your thick hide gloves and rivet things for eight hours. Then go home. It's just a job.
This is a story I tell myself in order to make it out of the house in the morning. In order not to allow myself to be crushed under the weight of my anxiety about this work. It's a job. I'm a riveter. (It helps to think about Rosie, too, Rosie and her incredible biceps and her fuck-you smirk.) I go and I sit at my desk or my café or reading-room table and I read or I write and then I leave. That is my job. They pay me to do that. So I do it.
This is one story I tell myself. It's not a very good story. But, you might say, a story should be judged by its effect. And the effect of our little Moria the Riveter story is that I get off my ass and accomplish something. So perhaps we should judge this story a good one.
*
You are an artisan, and this is your craft. You have been apprenticed for some time; you will be a journeyman; you will be a master. You are still learning. Practice your craft. Attend to it. Learn it. Listen to it; do, when you can, what the master tells you to do.
This is another story. It's a little more romantic, and a little more accurate. But it's not as good a story. Because it is more frightening to be an artisan than it is to be a riveter. An apprentice may never become a master. She may fail; she may destroy all she touches.
And there's always the danger that she may be arrested for vagrancy if she strays too far from the master's home.
*
You are a teacher.
This is the best story of all, because it is sometimes true. Now, however, it is not. My teacher self is off away somewhere, retired and healing a few wounds, waiting for an opportunity to emerge, for the moment she loves when it will be her turn to make sense of all these other selves.
But I repeat it to myself, this story about being a teacher, in order to remind myself why I am here. One day, I will teach again, and these selves will cohere.
*
I tell these stories to protect myself from my relationship with my work.
I cathect. I overinvest. It's what I do; what makes me tick. I have apologized a great deal for that in the past. I think I'm not going to, anymore. But I do get myself into trouble.
One of many things that has happened over the course of the past year or years is that I pushed too hard, demanded too much. I once thought that I could safely invest everything in this work, because this work would always pay me back. That is not true. I put all of myself into my work until I scarcely had a self at all beyond the work. And then, when I was tired, when I was worn down, when I was ragged and vulnerable and needed my self back, she wasn't there anymore. She'd disappeared.
And so to make space for her, I divest for a while, for once. I pick up my helmet and my hide gloves and I go to my job to rivet things. I move slowly and precisely around the workshop, careful of my tools, careful of the forge, ignoring the master's bellowing, and shape my small, crude thing. Whatever it is.
(And there's the bell. The lunch hour has ended. We shuffle back to our stations. We rivet; we carve. Soon there will be another bell, and the day will be ended. And we'll emerge into the cool evening, lighting our cigarettes, laughing.)
This is a story I tell myself in order to make it out of the house in the morning. In order not to allow myself to be crushed under the weight of my anxiety about this work. It's a job. I'm a riveter. (It helps to think about Rosie, too, Rosie and her incredible biceps and her fuck-you smirk.) I go and I sit at my desk or my café or reading-room table and I read or I write and then I leave. That is my job. They pay me to do that. So I do it.
This is one story I tell myself. It's not a very good story. But, you might say, a story should be judged by its effect. And the effect of our little Moria the Riveter story is that I get off my ass and accomplish something. So perhaps we should judge this story a good one.
*
You are an artisan, and this is your craft. You have been apprenticed for some time; you will be a journeyman; you will be a master. You are still learning. Practice your craft. Attend to it. Learn it. Listen to it; do, when you can, what the master tells you to do.
This is another story. It's a little more romantic, and a little more accurate. But it's not as good a story. Because it is more frightening to be an artisan than it is to be a riveter. An apprentice may never become a master. She may fail; she may destroy all she touches.
And there's always the danger that she may be arrested for vagrancy if she strays too far from the master's home.
*
You are a teacher.
This is the best story of all, because it is sometimes true. Now, however, it is not. My teacher self is off away somewhere, retired and healing a few wounds, waiting for an opportunity to emerge, for the moment she loves when it will be her turn to make sense of all these other selves.
But I repeat it to myself, this story about being a teacher, in order to remind myself why I am here. One day, I will teach again, and these selves will cohere.
*
I tell these stories to protect myself from my relationship with my work.
I cathect. I overinvest. It's what I do; what makes me tick. I have apologized a great deal for that in the past. I think I'm not going to, anymore. But I do get myself into trouble.
One of many things that has happened over the course of the past year or years is that I pushed too hard, demanded too much. I once thought that I could safely invest everything in this work, because this work would always pay me back. That is not true. I put all of myself into my work until I scarcely had a self at all beyond the work. And then, when I was tired, when I was worn down, when I was ragged and vulnerable and needed my self back, she wasn't there anymore. She'd disappeared.
And so to make space for her, I divest for a while, for once. I pick up my helmet and my hide gloves and I go to my job to rivet things. I move slowly and precisely around the workshop, careful of my tools, careful of the forge, ignoring the master's bellowing, and shape my small, crude thing. Whatever it is.
(And there's the bell. The lunch hour has ended. We shuffle back to our stations. We rivet; we carve. Soon there will be another bell, and the day will be ended. And we'll emerge into the cool evening, lighting our cigarettes, laughing.)
tuesday, july 26, 2011
begin again.
Let us pretend that I have not been reading the Gospel of John and do not have logics of spiritual rebirth on the brain – let us pretend, lest this post become one of insane ideological fervor.
There is no fervor here, in this chill of marble and air-conditioning where I sit in a borrowed reading room with my battered New Testament and a pile of documents that I can't quite make myself look at. What there is here : deep breaths and slow, careful consideration.
This year has been the most difficult – personally, professionally, intellectually – of my life. Difficulty is something this blog has traditionally prized, but difficulty this time 'round has smashed me around, disoriented me, concussed me. This summer has been a neurotic, unproductive miasma of panic and suffocation. I have considered many times many forms of giving up.
All of this is unacceptable. I refuse it. I have to, or it's going to destroy me.
Yesterday and today, I systematically re-read the archive of this blog and of its no-longer-public prototype. I was looking for the young woman who first confronted this profession and its demands with energy and verve. I found her, and admired her. But I also realized that her desires were different from the desires that I want access to now. She cannot help me. I must build anew.
I return to this blog's mission statement: to be mindful, to embrace the difficult, to refuse boredom and disenchantment. And so I return to this blog. I want it now to be a space for consideration, a space for play, a space for cultivating interest, persistence, and maybe even something like passion, something like wonder. I want now to discover, rediscover, build, rebuild, a space in which I can breathe and work, in which I can dwell. All of that has been possible before, in one way. And now, in a new way, I want to make it possible again.
Radical remaking cannot happen just by willing it; I will not pull myself out of these waters by one afternoon's idle wishing. But I intend to find a way forward. And this is step one.
And do stop in and say hello, reader. I've missed you.
There is no fervor here, in this chill of marble and air-conditioning where I sit in a borrowed reading room with my battered New Testament and a pile of documents that I can't quite make myself look at. What there is here : deep breaths and slow, careful consideration.
This year has been the most difficult – personally, professionally, intellectually – of my life. Difficulty is something this blog has traditionally prized, but difficulty this time 'round has smashed me around, disoriented me, concussed me. This summer has been a neurotic, unproductive miasma of panic and suffocation. I have considered many times many forms of giving up.
All of this is unacceptable. I refuse it. I have to, or it's going to destroy me.
Yesterday and today, I systematically re-read the archive of this blog and of its no-longer-public prototype. I was looking for the young woman who first confronted this profession and its demands with energy and verve. I found her, and admired her. But I also realized that her desires were different from the desires that I want access to now. She cannot help me. I must build anew.
I return to this blog's mission statement: to be mindful, to embrace the difficult, to refuse boredom and disenchantment. And so I return to this blog. I want it now to be a space for consideration, a space for play, a space for cultivating interest, persistence, and maybe even something like passion, something like wonder. I want now to discover, rediscover, build, rebuild, a space in which I can breathe and work, in which I can dwell. All of that has been possible before, in one way. And now, in a new way, I want to make it possible again.
Radical remaking cannot happen just by willing it; I will not pull myself out of these waters by one afternoon's idle wishing. But I intend to find a way forward. And this is step one.
And do stop in and say hello, reader. I've missed you.
thursday, april 14, 2011
ho nyn kairos
Hello, lovelies.
The examinations are over. Twenty-four hours of frantic, frenetic, almost hallucinatory writing, followed after a suspended caesura by two hours of intense, intent talk with my incisive, insightful committee. A marvelous process, but indescribable.
The important part was the part that felt like transformative ritual. Out of the wreckage, and I really mean wreckage in its most vivid sense, of the period of preparation, I with the aid and empathy and generosity of a few brilliant folk pulled this miracle, these twenty-four-and-two hours that felt like thought, belonging, and hope.
Brief, momentary, entirely ephemeral, but nevertheless important. I must remember it and hold it. I wish I had written everything down.
This examination has been my horizon for a long time, more than a year or longer. And now I am here, on the other side of that horizon, adrift. There is plenty I should do – write seminar papers, grade, pay my bills, do my taxes. None of these tasks seems urgent, though all of them are. They lose their shape and pressingness in the face of this new time of a new project.
There is a dissertation, somewhere, in the future. I should reach toward it. I don't know how, so I fumble about. I don't know what I'll catch hold of. I'm not at all sure I will, at all.
This confused space may find some order, soon. It may not, and if it doesn't, I will have to learn how to dwell in this disorder. Or quit. These are the alternatives. That, at least, is very simple.
But now, here, today, in this moment, here, what we have is: sunlight; warm weather; a calm mind if blank; an easy day ahead; a journey awaiting, tomorrow. This is a place to start. If only to start again from somewhere else, and then again. In that, I can settle and make space. In that, I think, I can dwell.
The examinations are over. Twenty-four hours of frantic, frenetic, almost hallucinatory writing, followed after a suspended caesura by two hours of intense, intent talk with my incisive, insightful committee. A marvelous process, but indescribable.
The important part was the part that felt like transformative ritual. Out of the wreckage, and I really mean wreckage in its most vivid sense, of the period of preparation, I with the aid and empathy and generosity of a few brilliant folk pulled this miracle, these twenty-four-and-two hours that felt like thought, belonging, and hope.
Brief, momentary, entirely ephemeral, but nevertheless important. I must remember it and hold it. I wish I had written everything down.
This examination has been my horizon for a long time, more than a year or longer. And now I am here, on the other side of that horizon, adrift. There is plenty I should do – write seminar papers, grade, pay my bills, do my taxes. None of these tasks seems urgent, though all of them are. They lose their shape and pressingness in the face of this new time of a new project.
There is a dissertation, somewhere, in the future. I should reach toward it. I don't know how, so I fumble about. I don't know what I'll catch hold of. I'm not at all sure I will, at all.
This confused space may find some order, soon. It may not, and if it doesn't, I will have to learn how to dwell in this disorder. Or quit. These are the alternatives. That, at least, is very simple.
But now, here, today, in this moment, here, what we have is: sunlight; warm weather; a calm mind if blank; an easy day ahead; a journey awaiting, tomorrow. This is a place to start. If only to start again from somewhere else, and then again. In that, I can settle and make space. In that, I think, I can dwell.
monday, february 21, 2011
field, affect, and what happens at t-38 days.
{If you responded to my questions: thank you, bless you, and I am mulling.}
My reading today, these days, is diverse and in flux. I am thinking about multiplicity and amateurism, as they relate to my own process, here.
About amateurism and its affect: affect – it, amateurism, lives in multiplicity and it carries the threat of excessive, multiple emotion. M. counterposes amateurism to this examination process – M. with her well-ordered mind thinks this process as one of mastery and order. {The names, by the way, of half of the important people in my life all begin with M.} I often do not understand how she moves through her world in the way she does, and this moment is no exception. I tell her that my work in this space is chaotic, frenetic, is the opposite of mastery, and that it is happening almost entirely in affect – happening in desire and dwelling, and not in the (allegedly) more intellectual mode of methodical categorization and synthesis.
I learn, however, that I am not alone in this – and that is no small comfort. Here is this brilliant woman with her brilliant talk, and she, too, says: you are not alone in this. Indeed, she says, you may be on to something.
Here is what I see when I imagine my process here: this and this and oh!, that too, and that and that, and this, here, this and all of these things, all of these sites that I glimpse for a moment and then lose, all of these multiple things, I want to dwell in all of them at once, want to occupy all of them. The connection among them is my desire, my wanting. Their connectivity is merely me and my reading mind and my poor desiring heart.
Here I am with: The Faerie Queene, and you, another M., your desire, too, for my encountering its particularity – particularities: there too another site of abundance; here I am with Lucrece and her rhetoric and ekphrasis and vision; with the bell tolling at the end of Faustus, and the incantation in a roman type of 1616; with Paulina and her beautiful outrageousness, who whispers secretly with Lucrece within the pages of my anthology; with revelation theatrical and poetic; with Paul who will simply never shut up; with gay tables and apocalyptic futurity and little types of Antichrist everywhere and all this plenitude.
Here I am amid all this and here I find that yes, I desire all of these texts; my hand, hands, in their margins, are multiple and ecstatic, traces of multiple desires. Traces of my having dwelled there – there – there – for a moment, the spare moment I permitted myself before I pushed on. This is what I have: these traces. I want to gather them, collect them, give them as gifts. Here, here: have my reading, my process. Have my wanting: let it be yours, too.
I do not know if this is allowed. I do not know if this is enough. But it will have to be. Because this, these traces and this giving, this is all I have, at present, of these texts I so desire.
My reading today, these days, is diverse and in flux. I am thinking about multiplicity and amateurism, as they relate to my own process, here.
About amateurism and its affect: affect – it, amateurism, lives in multiplicity and it carries the threat of excessive, multiple emotion. M. counterposes amateurism to this examination process – M. with her well-ordered mind thinks this process as one of mastery and order. {The names, by the way, of half of the important people in my life all begin with M.} I often do not understand how she moves through her world in the way she does, and this moment is no exception. I tell her that my work in this space is chaotic, frenetic, is the opposite of mastery, and that it is happening almost entirely in affect – happening in desire and dwelling, and not in the (allegedly) more intellectual mode of methodical categorization and synthesis.
I learn, however, that I am not alone in this – and that is no small comfort. Here is this brilliant woman with her brilliant talk, and she, too, says: you are not alone in this. Indeed, she says, you may be on to something.
Here is what I see when I imagine my process here: this and this and oh!, that too, and that and that, and this, here, this and all of these things, all of these sites that I glimpse for a moment and then lose, all of these multiple things, I want to dwell in all of them at once, want to occupy all of them. The connection among them is my desire, my wanting. Their connectivity is merely me and my reading mind and my poor desiring heart.
Here I am with: The Faerie Queene, and you, another M., your desire, too, for my encountering its particularity – particularities: there too another site of abundance; here I am with Lucrece and her rhetoric and ekphrasis and vision; with the bell tolling at the end of Faustus, and the incantation in a roman type of 1616; with Paulina and her beautiful outrageousness, who whispers secretly with Lucrece within the pages of my anthology; with revelation theatrical and poetic; with Paul who will simply never shut up; with gay tables and apocalyptic futurity and little types of Antichrist everywhere and all this plenitude.
Here I am amid all this and here I find that yes, I desire all of these texts; my hand, hands, in their margins, are multiple and ecstatic, traces of multiple desires. Traces of my having dwelled there – there – there – for a moment, the spare moment I permitted myself before I pushed on. This is what I have: these traces. I want to gather them, collect them, give them as gifts. Here, here: have my reading, my process. Have my wanting: let it be yours, too.
I do not know if this is allowed. I do not know if this is enough. But it will have to be. Because this, these traces and this giving, this is all I have, at present, of these texts I so desire.
friday, february 18, 2011
reprieve.
I am writing with the windows open.
I can't tell you what this means to me, reader.
I am writing in a t-shirt and bare feet, with the windows open. I am wearing the ripped-to-hell almost-no-longer-really-trousers that I call my summer jeans. The window is open behind me, and the sun is on my back. It filters through the row of bottles on the sill, the little vase with the wild desert sage that Trixie brought me from the West.
The window is open, and I am writing. I am writing spontaneously, because I know what I am interested in and want to pursue it. I write to make connections, to begin to build something.
And the window is open, and the sun is on my back, and my knees and my feet and my shoulders are bare.
To return to the theme of gratitude: thank you, whoever you are, for this day.
I can't tell you what this means to me, reader.
I am writing in a t-shirt and bare feet, with the windows open. I am wearing the ripped-to-hell almost-no-longer-really-trousers that I call my summer jeans. The window is open behind me, and the sun is on my back. It filters through the row of bottles on the sill, the little vase with the wild desert sage that Trixie brought me from the West.
The window is open, and I am writing. I am writing spontaneously, because I know what I am interested in and want to pursue it. I write to make connections, to begin to build something.
And the window is open, and the sun is on my back, and my knees and my feet and my shoulders are bare.
To return to the theme of gratitude: thank you, whoever you are, for this day.
tuesday, february 15, 2011
questions (3):
{Cluster: Spenser, Shakespeare, Merleau-Ponty, Adorno, Paul, Origen}
The Advisor's questions are impossible, but so are my own. We have this in common, the impossible demands of our minds. Hers has learned how to work, work, work impossible questions into tight argument, shaped prose. Mine has, it sometimes seems, learned nothing at all.
I ask:
How can 'revelation' ever be secularized?
What, hermeneutically, does allegory have in common with metatheatre? How are the dialectically revelatory hermeneutics of allegory and of metatheatre theological?
What can revelation even mean to an aesthetics so disinterested in the cognitive faculties of the subject? (And why do I object equally strongly to the disappearance of cognizing subjectivity and to the perfection of subjective self-presence?)
What are the confessional commitments of a poetics that invests so heavily in the power of the symbolic?
How might it be possible to bring a theory of the embodied experience of pictoral arts to bear on textual semiotics? (Does allegory create its own formule charnelle, an icon of its imprint on the reading body?)
*
The Advisor's questions are impossible, but so are my own. We have this in common, the impossible demands of our minds. Hers has learned how to work, work, work impossible questions into tight argument, shaped prose. Mine has, it sometimes seems, learned nothing at all.
I ask:
How can 'revelation' ever be secularized?
What, hermeneutically, does allegory have in common with metatheatre? How are the dialectically revelatory hermeneutics of allegory and of metatheatre theological?
What can revelation even mean to an aesthetics so disinterested in the cognitive faculties of the subject? (And why do I object equally strongly to the disappearance of cognizing subjectivity and to the perfection of subjective self-presence?)
What are the confessional commitments of a poetics that invests so heavily in the power of the symbolic?
How might it be possible to bring a theory of the embodied experience of pictoral arts to bear on textual semiotics? (Does allegory create its own formule charnelle, an icon of its imprint on the reading body?)
*
monday, february 14, 2011
'you are heroic,' i said again, and he grinned.
I was having a bleak morning – until I walked to campus and found that the man in the vagina suit has returned.
Or rather, a different man in the same vagina suit.
Or: the man in the vagina suit is dead; long live the man in the vagina suit.
Or: the vagina suit's two bodies.
...I LOVE IT WHEN UNDERGRADUATES ARE WEIRD. ♥
Or rather, a different man in the same vagina suit.
Or: the man in the vagina suit is dead; long live the man in the vagina suit.
Or: the vagina suit's two bodies.
...I LOVE IT WHEN UNDERGRADUATES ARE WEIRD. ♥
wednesday, february 9, 2011
thanks.
{Not unrelated to yesterday's post: I was surprised to find this, created 12-15-10, in my drafts file, and a little delighted by it. I had to puzzle out the destinataires of some of these; one remains obscure – the 'unexpected kind spirit,' but it could so readily apply to so many people that I in my embarrassment of desertless endebtedness will let it stand. I think I did not post it then because I wanted to add to it; think that if I tried to tally the further debts incurred in the past two months I would never finish. So I post it now unedited and without further comment, except to say that if you think you recognize yourself here, you are probably right.}
* * *
I am inspired by Emma J, who writes thank-you notes to the everyday. She writes to the inanimate – a habit of mind I have yet to learn. Here, by way of return to this space I've so neglected, I record some few of the many thanks I owe, the debts I've incurred across a semester of extraordinary difficulty.
Thank you for your beautiful theology; thank you for bringing your sweet will to bear on difficult reading. Thank you for the generosity of your inclusive spirit.
Thank you for Aristotle on comedy at the end of the labyrinth.
Thank you for reading with me, for understanding alongside me, for encouraging my understanding to go where it should; thank you for encouraging me to be what I want to become.
Thank you for writing to me across long distances, for caring for me in spite of myself, for your vivid tales of food and books, for your intellectual camaraderie, for your relentless determination and expansiveness of spirit.
Thank you for time as a psalm and for the fruit you stole and now give to me.
Thank you for long hours on the phone, for making me laugh until I cry, for tolerating my vicissitudes, for teaching me to love my inner geek and for turning me into a catlady.
Thank you for your unexpected kind spirit, your good humor, for giving me more than I deserve.
Thank you for this short, sweet mass for three voices.
Thank you for Cromwell and Holbein cracking jokes across a dinner table.
Thank you for laughing with me in calamity, and for sharing with me whiskey, hugs, and strength of mind in equal parts.
Thank you for the best compliment I have received in years. No one else could have given it; from no one else would it have meant so much.
Thank you for setting Isaiah to voices and strings in a major key.
Thank you for being my friend these twelve long years – on three continents, in three languages, across five collective advanced degrees, thank you for never losing the humor and the spirit of this friendship.
Thank you for the labor you have given in exchange for mine; thank you for sharing your energy and your commitment with me; thank you for your patience with Margery Kempe, with Aemilia Lanyer, with all the vast difficulty of this work. Thank you for your huge piles of hard-won words.
Thank you for calling for no reason, and for listening. And thanks, too, for all the syphilis jokes.
Thank you for your beautifully well-ordered mind; thank you for sharing your order with disordered me.
Thank you for the hazelnut; thank you for compassion.
Thank you for your incandescence of mind, for your difficult questions, and for being kind to me when you had no need to be.
Thank you for community, for the spaces I have and the work we share; thank you for lending sense to this life and this work.
And thank you, too, for reading, for staying with me across all these long years as I write persistently or erratically about nothing much at all.
* * *
I am inspired by Emma J, who writes thank-you notes to the everyday. She writes to the inanimate – a habit of mind I have yet to learn. Here, by way of return to this space I've so neglected, I record some few of the many thanks I owe, the debts I've incurred across a semester of extraordinary difficulty.
Thank you for your beautiful theology; thank you for bringing your sweet will to bear on difficult reading. Thank you for the generosity of your inclusive spirit.
Thank you for Aristotle on comedy at the end of the labyrinth.
Thank you for reading with me, for understanding alongside me, for encouraging my understanding to go where it should; thank you for encouraging me to be what I want to become.
Thank you for writing to me across long distances, for caring for me in spite of myself, for your vivid tales of food and books, for your intellectual camaraderie, for your relentless determination and expansiveness of spirit.
Thank you for time as a psalm and for the fruit you stole and now give to me.
Thank you for long hours on the phone, for making me laugh until I cry, for tolerating my vicissitudes, for teaching me to love my inner geek and for turning me into a catlady.
Thank you for your unexpected kind spirit, your good humor, for giving me more than I deserve.
Thank you for this short, sweet mass for three voices.
Thank you for Cromwell and Holbein cracking jokes across a dinner table.
Thank you for laughing with me in calamity, and for sharing with me whiskey, hugs, and strength of mind in equal parts.
Thank you for the best compliment I have received in years. No one else could have given it; from no one else would it have meant so much.
Thank you for setting Isaiah to voices and strings in a major key.
Thank you for being my friend these twelve long years – on three continents, in three languages, across five collective advanced degrees, thank you for never losing the humor and the spirit of this friendship.
Thank you for the labor you have given in exchange for mine; thank you for sharing your energy and your commitment with me; thank you for your patience with Margery Kempe, with Aemilia Lanyer, with all the vast difficulty of this work. Thank you for your huge piles of hard-won words.
Thank you for calling for no reason, and for listening. And thanks, too, for all the syphilis jokes.
Thank you for your beautifully well-ordered mind; thank you for sharing your order with disordered me.
Thank you for the hazelnut; thank you for compassion.
Thank you for your incandescence of mind, for your difficult questions, and for being kind to me when you had no need to be.
Thank you for community, for the spaces I have and the work we share; thank you for lending sense to this life and this work.
And thank you, too, for reading, for staying with me across all these long years as I write persistently or erratically about nothing much at all.
tuesday, february 8, 2011
hello, from beneath this pile of books and malaise.
Reader, believe it or not: I am here. Well, not here, evidently, but I am present to something, if not to this blog.
The story of this year has been, in part, the story that so many of you told so eloquently a few years ago – the story of the slow and long and brutal reconstitution of self and thought that can (and – maybe – should?) characterize graduate school. I proceed slowly and often weakly through this process; yet I proceed. That is worth remembering.
This morning I gave a loose but enthusiastic presentation to a seminar on materials that brought me back to my earliest early-modernist roots, and my enthusiasm – seeming suddenly new, precious, cherishable – prompted the following catalogue, which I transcribe verbatim from mynotebook:
* * *
The return to my own source material – my roots as a fledgling scholar of early texts of English nationhood – as ever this simultaneous sense of a homecoming, a recursion, and of a measure of the distance travelled from that to this.
The sheer joy of the work:
The beauty of blackletter, decorated capitals, marginal headings, woodcut frontispieces.
The pleasure of terms of art.
This work and how it can support and repay me.
This, with the blessing that is [the Advisor], with her blessing: care, respect, loyalty.
The pleasure not only of being well-mentored but of mentoring well, of continuing the chain forward.
The varied inspirations of C[...] on one hand and M[...] on the other: the joy of these friendships that are also intellectual collaborations and also models not for me to follow but to give me shape.
And I feel – it is worth recording for its rarity and its preciousness – that this is a matrix in which I may dwell, and live.
* * *
Now. That said, I have just had an e-mail from the Advisor asking me, "What problems (theological, philosophical, practical or otherwise) are raised by the necessity for the divine Word to dwell in mortal flesh?" I would like to believe that she is joking; I am almost certain that she is not.
So, reader. To work.
And reader: I miss you, and hope you are well. Stop in and say hello.
The story of this year has been, in part, the story that so many of you told so eloquently a few years ago – the story of the slow and long and brutal reconstitution of self and thought that can (and – maybe – should?) characterize graduate school. I proceed slowly and often weakly through this process; yet I proceed. That is worth remembering.
This morning I gave a loose but enthusiastic presentation to a seminar on materials that brought me back to my earliest early-modernist roots, and my enthusiasm – seeming suddenly new, precious, cherishable – prompted the following catalogue, which I transcribe verbatim from mynotebook:
* * *
The return to my own source material – my roots as a fledgling scholar of early texts of English nationhood – as ever this simultaneous sense of a homecoming, a recursion, and of a measure of the distance travelled from that to this.
The sheer joy of the work:
* the pleasure I take in reading, cross-referencing, tracking print editions and their featuresMy love still undiluted of this period and its culture.
* the pleasure of a however-narrow expertise, of sharing it and of having something to share
* the confidence of my own voice and speech in this performance
The beauty of blackletter, decorated capitals, marginal headings, woodcut frontispieces.
The pleasure of terms of art.
This work and how it can support and repay me.
This, with the blessing that is [the Advisor], with her blessing: care, respect, loyalty.
The pleasure not only of being well-mentored but of mentoring well, of continuing the chain forward.
The varied inspirations of C[...] on one hand and M[...] on the other: the joy of these friendships that are also intellectual collaborations and also models not for me to follow but to give me shape.
And I feel – it is worth recording for its rarity and its preciousness – that this is a matrix in which I may dwell, and live.
* * *
Now. That said, I have just had an e-mail from the Advisor asking me, "What problems (theological, philosophical, practical or otherwise) are raised by the necessity for the divine Word to dwell in mortal flesh?" I would like to believe that she is joking; I am almost certain that she is not.
So, reader. To work.
And reader: I miss you, and hope you are well. Stop in and say hello.
tuesday, november 16, 2010
exam-reading: perils of.
DANGER: day spent parsing Donne makes me read real theology into Belinda Carlisle.
Ooh, heaven is a place on earth...
(Do you know what that's worth? ...Seriously. Do you?)
OBSESSION:
At the round earths imagin’d corners, blow
Your trumpets, Angells, and arise, arise
From death, you numberlesse infinities
Of soules, and to your scattred bodies goe,
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o’erthrow,
All whom warre, death, age, agues, tyrranies,
Despaire, law, chance, hath slaine, and you whose eyes,
Shall behold God, and never tast deaths woe,
But let them sleepe, Lord, and mee mourne a space,
For, if above all these, my sinnes abound,
‘Tis late to aske abundance of thy grace,
When wee are there; here on this lowly ground,
Teach mee how to repent; for that’s as good
As if thou’hadst seal’d my pardon, with thy blood.
(See what I'm saying?)
monday, october 25, 2010
not random bullets but bullets lazily unsynthesized into coherent prose narrative.
* I have just posted a sign above my desk. This sign reads,
YOUR WORK WILL MAKE YOU HAPPYIF YOU JUST WOMAN UPANDDO IT
I believe this will be effective. However, since my first impulse was not to start working, but to blog about the sign, I may be misguided in that belief. (And yes, I actually wrote 'woman up.' That's y'all's influence. I claim no responsibility.)
* A friend and I have christened this the Year of Guilt. Coursework makes one feel guilty for not doing teaching-related work; teaching-related work makes one feel guilty for not doing exam-related work; exam-related work makes one feel guilty for not doing coursework; grading makes one feel guilty for not being a good teacher; teaching well makes one feel guilty for not spending that energy on research; doing competent research or writing makes one feel guilty for not spending that energy on one's students; and so on. Guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt. (This is also, more hilariously and less comprehensibly, the Year of Too Many Pope Hats.)
* Another friend whose childhood was marked by armed conflict recently observed that it was easier to live in a war zone, easier to be a refugee, than to be in graduate school. I am uncertain of the extent to which this statement was a joke. The uncertainty alone should tell you something.
* In short, reader, here is what I need: an It Gets Better Project for graduate students. What keeps you going, reader? What makes this all worthwhile for you? I am not asking for rose-colored glasses, and I am not asking for falsely pretty pictures, and I am not asking to be reassured. I am asking: given all the anxiety, the guilt, the endless inferiority complexes, and everything else, reader, what keeps you going?
My answers involve mostly people. A few close friends; a few real intellectual comrades; a few great mentors; a few great role models; a few great students. There is significant overlap among all of these categories. I am, to my very great surprise, a social animal, in the end.
The answers that concern work-itself (and what is that, exactly?) are more difficult to define. But last week, I stayed up until two in the morning parsing a few sentences of Middle English not only because someone had demanded that I do so, but because it was thrilling. I will perform a similar activity tonight, and I feel the thrill in anticipation. I can't quantify – or even qualify – that, but it is real and, somehow, it matters.
Tell me, reader. Why are you here? And what, after all, keeps you here?
* Another friend whose childhood was marked by armed conflict recently observed that it was easier to live in a war zone, easier to be a refugee, than to be in graduate school. I am uncertain of the extent to which this statement was a joke. The uncertainty alone should tell you something.
* In short, reader, here is what I need: an It Gets Better Project for graduate students. What keeps you going, reader? What makes this all worthwhile for you? I am not asking for rose-colored glasses, and I am not asking for falsely pretty pictures, and I am not asking to be reassured. I am asking: given all the anxiety, the guilt, the endless inferiority complexes, and everything else, reader, what keeps you going?
My answers involve mostly people. A few close friends; a few real intellectual comrades; a few great mentors; a few great role models; a few great students. There is significant overlap among all of these categories. I am, to my very great surprise, a social animal, in the end.
The answers that concern work-itself (and what is that, exactly?) are more difficult to define. But last week, I stayed up until two in the morning parsing a few sentences of Middle English not only because someone had demanded that I do so, but because it was thrilling. I will perform a similar activity tonight, and I feel the thrill in anticipation. I can't quantify – or even qualify – that, but it is real and, somehow, it matters.
Tell me, reader. Why are you here? And what, after all, keeps you here?
monday, october 18, 2010
questions (2):
What might be the utility of a study of mystical syntax to the study of the imaginative syntaxes of the early modern theatre?
(Implicitly) related:
What is the relationship (in criticism; in theory; in theatrical texts) between the communal language of the nation and the communal language of ritual?
How is community imagined syntactically?
(Implicitly) related:
What is the relationship (in criticism; in theory; in theatrical texts) between the communal language of the nation and the communal language of ritual?
How is community imagined syntactically?
friday, october 15, 2010
questions (1):
Welcome, reader, to the beginning of your fool's exam-reading process. I'll catalogue it here, but don't worry. I have no intention of attempting clarity or even real communication. You are excused from reading this, reader, or, if you read it, you are excused from attempting to make sense of or engage with it.
—————————
Cluster: {Julian of Norwich : Margery Kempe : Hamlet [ghost] : Lear [Edgar]}
Advisor observes that she finally understands my antipathy (her term, not mine) to a certain Ur-Critic: He sees everything from outside, she says. But you are looking for a way in.
Questions:
How do you find a language you can get inside of?
or:
How can you address a language that seeks to make it impossible for a reader to remain outside of it?
What difference does theatricality make to language as it is felt?
—————————
Cluster: {Julian of Norwich : Margery Kempe : Hamlet [ghost] : Lear [Edgar]}
Advisor observes that she finally understands my antipathy (her term, not mine) to a certain Ur-Critic: He sees everything from outside, she says. But you are looking for a way in.
Questions:
How do you find a language you can get inside of?
or:
How can you address a language that seeks to make it impossible for a reader to remain outside of it?
What difference does theatricality make to language as it is felt?
