I hit my thumb with a hammer. I am not sure when I did this but it was probably while mending the arial runway at the playground a week ago. I was up a ladder and, as it turned out, just starting to get Covid symptoms. I had high adrenaline levels due to fear and had to do some difficult hammering, at angles, while holding on with one hand. I am pleased it isn't totally black, though from experience I know it will take a long time to grow out. I once dropped a padlock on my toe while wearing sandals, the black mark crept forward at an infinitely tiny incremental pace like an ultra slow motion penny fall machine at the seaside. Black fingernails are a reminder of hitting the wrong thing with a hammer, dead blood under the nail. As well as my multiple digit injuries I am recovering from my first Covid infection. Ten days in isolation and all that goes along with a strange illness that has had its major teeth pulled yet still has a good go at gumming you to death.
It is an important week as I have had my last PhD payment. The job of work has now detached itself from the funding. Not that the funding made me get on with it any more than not getting funded but now it seems like a point has been crossed. Getting the funding is no longer the point, getting the Phd is the point so perhaps the point will change.
My phone sent me a word today
IMMANENT
It means
1. Existing or operating within, inherent.
2. (of God permanently pervading and sustaining the universe)
I thought I had heard this word a lot and thought I knew what it meant but I was confusing it with imminent - something that was about to happen. This doesn't really matter as I think you could probably work with both definitions and in context I must of read Immanent nearly properly - God is about to happen and it is within this future orientation that his true power resides. However it is another thing that makes me feel slightly thick and out of my depth.
I found a very old literature review methodology piece of writing I had done yesterday, it actually seemed rather good when I read it. It came from a time when I was trying to write more PhD like so it wasn't actually that good but it did look a bit like a piece of PhD writing. I was tempted to pick it back up and work into it. Somehow though it read like it came from a different pre-Covid world, it read like an echo that had been bouncing around in Plato's cave for a couple of millennia.
My PhD is Immanent, it is permanently pervading, it is existing and operating within - it is gestating. It's not Imminent or about to happen, I think this is a good thing.
Two things to notes
Sarah Trueman suggested I submit the platform as part of my PhD - the thing not an image. This is clever and I like it.
Research creation potentially develops a way to work with philosophical ideas and animate it through arts practice without taking on the full weight of its context. It liberates a concept from its plain of consistency. I might look to using the Phd to activate Glissant's idea of opacity - the opacity of practice - I think that would be a good thing to achieve in writing,
No comments:
Post a Comment