Its about four months since I paid to have my blog printed. I wanted to have something solid that felt like work. I have managed to write once a week or so for three years which is in itself an achievement of sorts. I read it over three days in chunks as some of it was not that easy. It holds the journey and it holds to an extent the disappointment of Covid in all its affects. At points looking back without the detail the pandemic feels like an excuse but reading my thoughts from the time I feel the sheer scale of its impact running through the last 2 years.
In the middle phase of the blog I seem to fall into a slightly manic state where I worry about myself. This is a good reminder of the time when I was building the loose parts play platform and reading 1000 plateaus; diffracting their affects through the event. I create Tim as a Socratic interloper or Jungian wise man who occasionally visits me with advice. We talk of Shaman and bodies without organs and I ask him questions of life, death, magic and enchantment.
In the middle of reading it I was amazed how coherent it seemed as an object and how it mapped a journey in and out of darkness. It needs a close reading and a level of forgiveness and immersion yet it does contain at many points flashes of knowing and perhaps even brilliance. I do not know what to do with it but as it contains my best work. Part of me wants to edit and reference it and submit it along with my platform and say here is the best I can do as a PhD. I know it is not really a PhD but it does contain something between the building and the thinking. Many parts of it are not banal.
As I move towards the end of next year I suspect the only option I will end up with as the the puddings proof is in this writing. The blog is full of excuses and false starts but it does not read as if I have been at all lazy. I seem to have fitted the work in and expanded the field of my practice. held within the blog is growth thought and challenge. The brilliance within it is in the struggle and the mess and the struggle never really seems fruitless it just does not produce anything that could be called insight or clarity. It is a stream.
When I get to moving house and the new puppy there is a lull. Interestingly the first real lull and also some repetition the ideas from the start take center stage again and it feels a little circular . Covid is fascinating as the time that is now condensed into a single raindrop stretches out again and the anticipation, disappointments and fear that are now forgotten are mapped out within the text. It really was a bit of a shit storm and we were more worried than we remember.
Although the best bits are in the middle they would not work without the start or the end the flowing into and out of a certain type of madness. It is at least a thing but I have no idea at the moment where to take it. As it is the whole of the residency in all its relations I wonder if I can edit a chapter or two directly from it. It would be an interesting thing to do but without the in between bits it would lack the journey and its strength lies within its journey.
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