Checking in again I suspect I need to check myself rather than check in with myself as I am treading water at the moment and the tide of time is speeding past me like a rip current on a surfers favorite beach. I am not writing much and the dates on the things I am writing seem quite old - November 2020 version 12, but not much of anything new and nobody to blame but myself and fucking Covid of course. A time will come when there is a return to writing and thinking and doing but it all feels a little impossible at the moment.
If I was going to spin myself a yarn to make me feel better, when I read this back in a week or a year, I could mention the keynote at the national education media conference we successfully delivered last week - here I told stories and quoted Raymond Williams. The last chapter of his final book in prose is called 'Resources for a journey of Hope' and it is to Williams and his long revolution I look for inspiration. I think that to land a tank on the beaches in Normandy and drive it to Berlin must be harder than writing a PhD. My deep respect goes out to the generation of men and women fort this war who as Kurt Vonnegut said it was a nightmare that many of them never woke up from. We also resubmitted an article about research-creation with young people to a journal, hopefully it will get published this time - it has some good bits and some crap bits but there isn't much written about this so I think it may end up been quite important. I sometimes wonder why I find some writing easier than other writing I suppose it's having a purpose but also recognizing my actually skill as a copy editor and speech writer. I am always better at presenting as a diamond in the rough. I do not cut well as it exposes my flaws and these are much more than the occasional spelling mistake or misplaced full stop.
I tried to get a bit of focus today and watched a nice introduction to Plato's Forms on you tube in a series of lectures I've discovered. I learnt about the origin of dialectics which is a way to help us recollect the truth - the higher order of things. It was important as it made me realize that one of the reasons Deleuze liked Spinoza and the Stoics is that they are essentially alternatives to platonic thought. We may not think that Plato remains relevant but boy did he know how to shape a form and the shape of his thinking has stuck to the surface of lived experience like scrambled egg to a pan. Then the dog started to lick the froth from my coffee and I took him for a walk and avoided poison meat.
In the cemetery a man told me that someone had found eight jars buried in the soil up to their lids and filled with some kind of intestines. The police had come and taken them away and tested them, they were pig guts and not human, which was a relief. He then said a couple of weeks after the jar incident his dog had run towards him and tried to get behind his legs, he thought he was frightened by another dog but it was in fact a whirlwind, he described it as a 'tiny tornado,' I suggested 'dust devil' . It had woven its way across the cemetery and then bumped into a wall. The stories were not connected by cause and effect, just two strange things that had occurred in the same place to the same person. I told him about finding a gun in the undergrowth and an armed police unit turning up in what seemed like minutes. We then discussed the poison meat, wrapped in string and pierced with knives. We speculated on whether these were small talisman offerings to the gods or some part of training dogs to fight. None of this can squeeze into my PhD writing. I have in opening a door on what is in the PhD perhaps closed a door on what is out. Yet today was filled with talismans made of meat, tiny whirlwinds that chase dogs and pigs intestines in jars. The world is not a straightforward place.
I sold my welder on Ebay - I haven't used it for years but I like having a welder in the event I would need to use it at some point. It is like having a rope in the car, a practical part of an identity that prides itself on the potential to mend everything that can get broken.
I replaced the bulb in the headlamp on my car - I had to read the instructions in the handbook, although this felt like a great defeat it did make the job much easier.
I also had a walk in the peak district worried about not writing enough, dispelled the worry and wondered what I would do when I have finished not writing my PhD.
No comments:
Post a Comment