I have been away again and it was nice to have a break. I have properly enrolled for my final year and nearly officially have an extra six months to complete my PhD before I submit. I am not that sure how I feel as we enter tier 3 lock down rules. A mixture of quite enjoying the elongated extension, the pause in the state of things, coupled with feeling frustrated with the sense of waiting for something to happen and the rain.
Tom's home and we are nearly about to set off to the playground to probably touch base and have a chat about where we are. The platform is very nearly finished. This is good as it has taken long enough. I think it is at the center of things - it is a new affordance, in that it holds potential. It is a thing that is new and material and made by mainly my hands. It is unquestionably present within the project. I think that perhaps on the advice of Beth St Pierre I need to drop research as a term and play with enquiry/inquiry as a process of finding out.
I have lost the affirmed certainty of reading a Thousand Plateaus, diffracted through building a large platform with a tree in the middle of it at the playground. I felt like a real scholar/artist for an instant, my mental and physical blood, sweat and tears smeared on the door handles of our house by half sanatised hands. These were perhaps the good old days when I developed a new relationship both to making and to death. The finishing off bits, the handrail and exposed bolt heads in the mud, in the rain are not really doing the same thing for me. The carefully mapped diffraction patterns of the two waves of making and thinking erode into the slight ripples of entropy on the beach of acceptance.
And this is happening because I've started to try and write something that looks like a PhD and it is a bit shit but has consumed an enormous amount of time . I thought by this point I would be 2 years into an elephant like gestation period ready to give birth to a baby elephant that I would nurture with elephant milk and grow into something a spectacular spectacular in the vernacular. As chairman Mao said even a PhD of 90 thousand words starts with a single word. As Paulo Freire so aptly commentated we make the road by walking it - yet these optimistic quotes are always best heard in the retrospect. When the long march is well underway and the road is partially made through it's walking. They are nostalgic psychological props that are not really that much help at the real beginning of a journey.
The plan then is to contain the writing and to try and start some chunks and share them with Kate and Laura. Thursday writing group is going well although it clearly is nowhere near enough time to spend writing. I think I will need more structure than this and I will need it very soon. But first to properly finish the platform and then to let its edges bleed.
On another note I'm reading Tim Ingolds latest book - its strange as his main influences seem to be Manning, Massumi, Dewey, Rancierre and a bit of not that well represented Deleuze and Guattari. It is all my key thinkers that have underpinned my thinking from the start. The most applicable bunch and I think I could work with some of his ideas- lets see where it goes with his lines and categorizes and demarcations.
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