It's five o'clock I have submitted my tax return, checked all my emails (3) and had a meeting with Kate. I have also scraped some paint off the wall and moved the telly, bought some paint, cooked a Cesar type salad. Then I got worried I hadn't done any PhD work so read a strange article by Anna- Hicky- Moody that covered new materialism and the Post Human and Deleuze in educational research. Anna hated the Deleuze bit as it didn't give credit to people like Maggie and Liz St Pierre (and probably herself). This made me wonder if this is actually the point of Deleuze, you discover him first hand and apply him naively to the schema of your thoughts. Better this than to find him second hand and try and apply him according to someone else's schema. We need to try not to be like the seagull who has to partially digest fish and then sick it up into her squawking chicks mouths. Perhaps Kate is right to have her daily (sometimes hourly) epiphanies. I always felt that an epiphany should come once in a generation like a referendum or Covid but perhaps it is the newness that Deleuze affords, the robust cut through how we think we currently think, that is the essential thing- the cut, rather than what it reveals. The cut for me is to stop seeing my edges and to think of flow, to enter into a different relationship with my time, to strangely be less concerned with my own death. To really wonder why more of these conversations are not actually about taking drugs and how they change your relationship to everything. It is easy to say these things and to write them as a list, without bullet points. The big thing, the major thing at stake is that all these things and thoughts do not change who you are they change the possibility of what you can become.
I have not got up to speed yet and although its now nearly 5.30 I don't feel like I have done enough today although I have probably accomplished the start of a gradual switch back on. Tomorrow I think I will try and write and finish my piece on research creation. In my mind it is quite good so it will be hard to read the rubbish bits. It is not sloppy writing though it has an intensity of thought that is a moving on. I finished reading Bentos Sketchbook and here too Berger applies a good intensity of thought that helps us to move on, he gives us enough of Spinoza for it to do some work. (only just enough. )
This is why Berger is so readable for artists, we have politics, poetics, philosophy but they reach out to the world. A ripe plum on a branch, a dying leaf, a cold crisp moment. like an Haiku they hang as a drawn poem, a visual movement of presence. Berger does not overdo Spinoza he opens a window for anyone willing to pass through onto some fragments of Spinoza that are held in the texture of rich plum jam. The words are to knowing what honey is to summer. Stored in a layers of hexagonal wax combs so the hive can survive the cold winter. The best words are honey that holds the summer in the winter months.
The new year starts and where shall we go? tomorrow I should write and then read Anti-Oedipus this is the plan for the day I am not sure if it will turn out that way.
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