I am conscious that I moan a lot on my blog. I tend not to do that in my field notes where I leave little messages to my future self that will cheer me up when I read them. On my blog I tend to vent a bit and even though I can see that nobody is reading them I have a misguided idea that at some point posterity will choose to discover them and unlike in my field-notes I want to be wearing metaphorically clean underwear. I also choose to write here when I have nowhere else to write, when I can't quite think of my writing as field notes or academic discussion -this somewhere between writing is helpful. Somewhere between a diary and an auto-ethnography and personal notes and a story; somewhere between fact and fiction and right and wrong, heaven and hell the playground and home. This is not too dangerously claim it's from any middle - the writing is between unhinged and bolted down it is not really for anyone even the future me.
The rightness of the previous three weeks of early morning Joe Wicks exercise plan followed by close reading of a Thousand Plateaus followed by some esoteric writing on this blog followed by practical building at the playground has necessarily started to fade. It started to slip away when the chinks and gaps in the territory I had been beavering away within began to get pried apart by the bogie man of writing for a PhD.
I'm reading the Plague by Camus it's great and there is a character in it who is always writing and complaining how hard it is to say what he wants in words. The doctor who is at the moment the main protagonist goes to visit him as he wants to share where he has got too after months of dedication focus. He has written a single sentence it is something like.
"The woman rides by on a chestnut horse and her hair blows in the wind."
It reminded me of the poet played by Steve Buscemski in the film Big Fish. He spends a lifetime trying to craft a poem about the toxic yet perfect small American town of Splendor where people get stuck because of the sheer impossibility of moving anywhere better. The poem he writes is perhaps a pastiche of the New York poets cut back style but Buscemski delivers its perfection in three words " Splendor is good' . It is perhaps the lifetime of struggle that takes us to these three words or more likely its a joke at the expense of poets in either case it sticks in my head.
'The adventure playground is good.' there is a truth in this and perhaps it is more than a truism but it is not a poem or a PhD.
I am trying to keep positive but my struggle to start writing proper PhD stuff and not blogs or very short true poems is weighing heavily on me. This is mainly because I am sitting doing this blog to displace the looking at the literature review document I started yesterday. The normal thing I would do, actually the thing I am doing is just to give myself time where there is nothing else to do but start writing. This works because if I don't start to write it I have literally wasted my time. I am not good at wasting time as luckily my time is generally my own and I tend to cherish it.
The last time I tried to write a literature review I wrote a few thousands words on why I wasn't ready to write a literature review. I can't do that again so will need a positive approach. I've been trying to get started for a week now and although yesterday I did get started I dare not really look at what I wrote today in case it's not really a start " The literature review is good." I did however find a quote from Lukac that I copied and pasted and it ended up pasting a bit like a concrete poem as it was from a PDF . it reminded me of an important thought I had had and then forgotten.
At this point I realized that I am an old
school materialist and find speculative and neo materialism Bourgeois , a word I will always struggle to spell - its the same with plateaus - just write the first bit then all the vowels you know in any order twice.
A
spider
conducts
operations
which
resemble
those
of
the
weaver,
and
a
bee
would
put
many
a
human
architect
to
shame
by
the
construction
of
its
honey‐comb
cells.
But
what
distinguishes
the
worst
architect
from
the
best
of
bees
is
that
the
architect
builds
the
cell
in
his
mind
before
he
constructs
it
in
wax.
At
the
labour
process,
a
result
emerges
which
had
already
been
conceived
by
the
worker
at
the
beginning,
hence
already
existed
ideally.
Man
not
only
effects
a
change
of
form
in
the
materials
of
nature;
he
also
realizes
his
own
purpose
in
those
materials.
And
this
is
a
purpose
he
is
conscious
of,
it
determines
the
mode
of
his
activity
with
the
rigidity
of
a
law,
and
he
must
subordinate
his
will
to
it.
(pp.
283-°©‐284;
quoted
in
Lukács
1980,
p.
3)
No comments:
Post a Comment