Writing writing writing- stumped

 I have spent this week writing.  It has felt very unproductive.  So much so that at 5 yesterday I had to go out and try and dig up a tree stump.  I used a mattock and the dog kept barking and getting in the way, after removing half of it I left the rest for another day.

I am working on a literature review and it does not feel like it is going well.  I am procrastinating although I have focused on it for three days.  It was a document I started two years ago and have returned to now. I couldn't face an empty page with the title literature review.

I spoke to Kate briefly on Tuesday as I think things were getting to me a bit.  I keep trying to put some sort of framework in place for the future that I can feel better about but it doesn't seem to work very well.  Kate said I should keep things simple and as I try and write with some of the theory, the overarching philosophical content it all feels very out of touch with the work on the ground.  This is the issue I am addressing in the writing but it does not make it any easier.

 My literature review needs to frame why I am using research-creation as a method and that I am inquiring into the idea of the artists residency in  relation to nomadic  thought - or perhaps what Glissant would call Errantry.  In relation to what research -creation can do I am choosing two pieces of thinking or concepts and putting them to work within the body of the project.

The writing of the the fumbling literature review has at least brought me to this point - In a way what I am writing now may end up as a single paragraph that explains a focus and a gap in the literature.  I will  then have to turn the focus on a few bits of reading which I will have to do well and unpick in more detail and relate to practice. And do a much better scoping of where they emerge in secondary writing and this will become a second layer of the lit review.

This is feeling like a sort of plan - a plan in a long line of plans that only just seem to get started.  At the moment I'm reasonably happy with this one.  The stump is only half removed

literature Review

 

I have spent a big chunk of the last 3 days trying to write my literature review.  I have not got very far and I am feeling somewhere between lazy and distracted. 

I have always had a problem with the lit review for a number of reasons.

1. Whatever I write doesn't really look like a literature review.

2. Whatever I give Kate and Laura to read does not seem to cut the mustard.

3. The literature I have most enjoyed reading does not condense well.

4. The PhD is really about trying to work with a set of ideas and concepts in context.  This is messy and I can't seem to write anything that does not abstract theory from context I'm working in.

5. It is a task that seems a little pointless - technically I think its purpose is to convince the reviewers that I have understood to the extent required the literature's I am drawing on. As I have chosen some difficult texts I am not confident I have done this or demonstrate it within my writing.

In the gap between thinking and writing something has started to emerge but there is a lack of clarity and purpose.  I thought today that I should write as simply as possible what I want to say and hold points or the point of it in short glimpses or flashes of practice.  This may work well if I adopt a slightly more practice orientation and limit the concepts I tackle .  So the point of the literature review is to give some context to the concept.  So it isn't just floating - The key thing to all this work is territory and capture, after a more general introduction that contains the why it is into these two concepts that I will need to dig a bit deeper.

Eric's Funeral

 I went to my friend Eric's funeral today and said my public and private goodbyes. I will miss him as a person in my life and as an easy friend. His service was very similar to what I would hope for for myself.  Secular in a lovely spiritual building, surrounded by the people he loved and who loved him.  I will have my body present at my funeral though. I need its visceral already decaying flesh, absent of any mind, to allow my spirit an unlikely chance  chance to attend.  My sadness has gone but the funeral was a reminder of it, pulled it back from the edges and into sharper focus.  Death has an uncanny way to thrust itself into thoughts in a way that takes your breath away.  I would never use the loss of a friend to make a point within my writing yet in writing anything at all serious about life it is difficult to keep death at bay.  In a modern world filled with rationalism it is difficult not to feel that death is a passing, a stepping across some sort of threshold. An extreme edge of at least a singular life, a life that is bounded enough to have an ending.

I did a projection on the Crucible on Saturday and I  have been trying to write for my PhD.  I think last week was constructive, Although I got very little done on my literature review.  I almost felt  like I was at school struggling with my childhood shyness and dyslexia a little embarrassed.  Trying to hide  the bits I don't like about myself from myself.   This is the long journey to having something that looks like a PhD to submit though and I did put the work in. I made a start.

When I read through my blog I noticed some points where I had tried to draw attention to a serious thought or a step change.  This provided a texture and a structure to the writing- it also felt like I was trying to pay testament to a moment. I have gradually stopped doing this so I thought I would have a go at reviving the practice.

 My PhD is about residency as method, there is something residency can do for art practice that helps to let it live through time and space. It is a line of flight that allows art to escape the object in all its ontology.  I have been mapping terrain for an arts practice that unfolds through time within social research.  This is a space I have occupied before but there were no maps and therefore the space was unknown.  My blog and my writing and my thinking has started to map the terrain differently - chart some new waters because the ideas are located in a unique space.  My residencies only exist in all their relations making this new terrain and unique.  There are similar spaces, similar practices but they hold different maps and different insights.  I have woven a series of Deleuzian folds that generate a baroque pattern, a mesh work, a practice, a set of relations.  There is some strong writing some new things, a level of banality and what I can feel now, a raveling towards some degree of closure.

It feels like things are moving on and I am growing ideas that will develop into an acceptance of where I actually am and what I can contribute.

Reading my Blog

 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.

Slow progress

 lots of pictures today as one of my hard drives with loads of image backups gave up on me last week. I felt like I needed some virtual backup of PhD stuff in the cloud.  I'm feeling a lot better from my Covid 19 but not actually better yet.  My black fingernail is slowly growing out and also starting to fade.  I have two days with a clear dairy to write, then a supervision and then a clear Friday so it is a week of taking stock and deciding where I am.

After this blog I am going to try and enroll for my writing up period at MMU.  The graduate school like most other things at the moment seems to be struggling to cope with the demands of our questions  and life in general .   I can live with this, at least in the short term.  I am currently looking for some discipline , I have quite enjoyed the recent spells of writing when I manage to sit down and do it, and time folds.  I'm also consistently surprised at how many ideas seem to arise within the writing process rather than emerge in my brain and then get written down.  I am not sure if it is an excuse but I only really seem to have a limited amount of writing in me in any given week.  Will Self and Coleridge's 500 words a day perhaps.   My current writing is nothing spectacular but I have a feeling it is something that hasn't been written about much before.  There is a danger it could be romanticizing the joys of manual labor and there is a danger that at the back of some of it there is some sort of male arrogance about shaping the world and bending it to a will. In many ways though this undercurrent that surfaces in manifold ways is what I am writing about and it is probably for this reason that the cut that happens when trying to reshape the world does not get written about very much.

I am writing about something that is not my PhD at the moment.  When I say this I am reminded of my friend Johan when he says that things are cooked and raw.  I think he is referencing Saussure - the relatively well known story of holding up a carrot in a field and saying' look I have a raw carrot.'  In this sentence you are defining the carrot by saying it is not cooked and so defining it by saying what it isn't and in  the process pointing to what it could be - cooked and on a plate.

This is the real point of the current phase of my writing. To hold back what is the PhD work by writing about something else yet to keep the text permeable enough for the writing to help shape and define what the thing is by outlining what it isn't.

On another note I went to a different adventure playground last week in Ferrybridge.  It was not the same as ours but was also great.  They had a bigger building and slightly more risky play equipment.  They also had quite young and active staff who had trained in play-work at Leeds Becket Uni.  They had a large loose parts area with pallets and junk but it didn't really seem to be in use.  A bit like ours there was a pile of stuff that looked great on photos and as it is actually a gold standard for free play the workers there initially said it got used a lot by the kids.   When I dug a bit deeper the staff said it didn't really get used that much and they wondered if children actually played differently now.  I felt the pull of conventional research, talk to staff, talk to the kids ask a set of semi open interview questions, observe observe observe record, perhaps make an intervention and flow into an action research cycle.  Get the staff and kids involved in it.  Write up some findings and see if loose play is still relevant and what the best ways to animate it as something young people would go to and explore independantly.

I really think if my PhD was to look at loose parts play then this " bringing of research to the table' would be an effective way of approaching the problem.  Some kind of structure we can call method, some kind of epistemological distance, an intervention and close observation and a way of reporting back that seems more than opinion. This isn't my PhD though yet the thinking about it may help in describing the carrot; whether cooked or raw. 

Winter is coming.

 In the time it has taken me to get back to writing this blog the winter storm outside my window has subsided and the sun is breaking through the cloud. Gods golden fingers are stroking the freshly mowed grass in our garden. I have cut it for the last time this year and run the mower out of petrol so it does not lose its volatility over the winter months.  Septembers warmth seems to have lasted an eternity and I am still wearing my shorts, though more from habit than good sense.

It is 12 days since my last post and it has really been a time of recovery. I have done a few things including a planning session at the playground about animating the loose parts area. I have days booked in the diary, events unfolding. I started to make a film  with the young people to try and promote what the playground does.  This was nice and easy and felt fresh but it can't form part of my research. It has to sit outside, but it is a good reminder of what we are missing.  It is clear to me that I can't use film as data and work ethically within research. The intention of my art/research is opaque, there is no real way to predict where it may end up so there is no ethical way to ask for informed consent.  I find this decision quite liberating and as ever within academic work it gives you something to write about. Making a film and actually working directly with young people on my PhD project feels like it may be impossible.  I can live with this and the films and conversations can fizz at the corner of everything - Like a glass of bubbling Berocca to save you from the hangover that it is difficult to wake up from.

Winter is a time for writing.  We are moved in now, feeling more at home and each morning when I wake up I am not driven to do a thousand jobs on the new house.  To walk down the steps of the old house, to fill the Volvo and to walk up the step of the new house.  It felt like 3 months of groundhog days, I kept other things ticking over but lost proper concentration. 

Today is Monday morning and its nearly October.  I have planned a final two weeks in  at the playground finishing with a Halloween light event and then I will be in my writing up period.  I keep thinking about how far I have come and the journey of a PhD. I have moved into another stage of life in some ways, the old ways of working had to end as the game of getting funded work was starting to tire me out.  I loved the freelance life, I loved its unpredictability but it was always a little stressful and lacked the throughline of thought and practice that I was consistently craving and regularly inventing.   

I have a chapter to write about mending the Arial runway at the playground - it is a chapter to capture the spectacular and the mundane and it will be problematic but it is a chapter I'm hoping will act like the kick-starter on a motorbike. I will kick it off and leave it on the stand to tick over so it warms up before shooting off on it and going to the woods.  It is a Honda 90 and not a big powerful thing but it is reliable and economic transport that gets you where you need to go.  And this is the thing. Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance would not be the same if we replace the Harley Davison with a Honda 90.  Although the book does focus on the Zen of motorbike repair there is always something exciting about the bike itself.  My contribution to new knowledge will be about maintaining and riding the Honda 90, a step into the mundane and practical everyday of keeping something ticking over. A moped, an adventure-playground, a life.

Marking Time

 

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,