Train of thought this morning:
*I am feeling very uninspired about this paper I need to write.
*Remember what your undergrad thesis adviser said: "don't get it right...just get it writ'."
*I wonder if my thesis adviser is still teaching at Pomona? (brief visit to Pomona's website)
*Wow, Pomona has a lot of new profs, and from the looks of it a pretty awesome English department right now.
*I love reading the "interests" paragraphs on English department staff bios: T.S. Eliot, Marxist and media theory, the history of vulnerability, the development of the maxim, food studies, digital culture (seriously, these all appear on the staff bios page...I can't make this stuff up).
I kind of miss studying literature.
It goes on from there, but let me pause here to briefly highlight the metaphor "train of thought." I always associated that with the idea of forward motion--progressing on a track. Not until this morning, when I was doubting whether that really accurately reflected my thought process, did the idea occur to me that a train is in essence a series of discrete but linked cars, each coupled to the next. The idea of picking up (and releasing) cars as the journey progresses...now that has some metaphorical resonance. Why had I never thought about it like that before? Is that how everyone else thinks of it?
Anyway (I'll show some limited restraint and only allude to a pun about getting "derailed"), where I've ended up is feeling a bit nostalgic for the days of novels and verse. I was complaining to Drew last night that all of my thoughts these days are very concrete. Academic musings focus on EPA regulations, governance structures, economic history, activism strategies, coal mines...and even my personal reflections are tending toward the material, with thoughts on timing transplants for the garden and materials lists for the planned renovations on the house this summer. The sort of running abstract, emotive commentary that's usually going in my head is strangely absent these days.
Drew suggested this might be a function of the fact that all of the reading I'm doing lately is academic--texts on research methods, advocacy planning handbooks, articles on the coal industry, planning guides for community development program monitoring and evaluation, and the like. It is interesting to realize that at the height (or depth?) of my previous higher education experience, I was engrossed in Henry James and contemporary poetry--equally academic but entirely different. One might expect an overall different effect on the psyche here, in a social science oriented graduate program focused on training practitioners to work in the field. And while hours spent pouring over Finnegan's Wake did at times strike me as fascinating but frivolous, the time now devoted to analyzing the dynamics of conflict in various contexts can seem unremittingly relevant to the point of tedium.
I've always had a great admiration for career activists--people who seemed to be completely fulfilled and fed and inspired by working on the ground, day after day, to change things for the better. At the same time, those folks always seemed like the "other," in a sense, even after I spent five years doing grassroots nonprofit work. That passion for the concrete work of making things better is something I aspire to and have moments of, but not so much my default setting.
And of course being, for example, a poet and an activist are by no means mutually exclusive. I always defended the intensive study of literature as a way to look at how human beings talk about what is most important to them. And most great novels have some element of examining the interplay of the personal and the political/contextual. It's just that I'm still working on the integrative process on a personal level. How do I take all that beauty and theory and get it dirty? How do I hold the concrete forms of real life up in the light of aesthetics and emotion so I can appreciate their intrinsic luminosity? How do I decompartmentalize the world, dissolve that false barrier between the mundane and the transcendent (which, after all, is kind of a stodgy, enlightenment-era, Eurocentric, imperialist sort of orientation to the world on some level)?
I guess I'll consider that after I finish my paper. Sigh.
"There are to be no more secrets, say the new theorists of surveillance, meaning something quite interesting: that the era in which secrets counted, in which secrets could exert their power over the lives of people (think of the role of secrets in Dickens, in Henry James) is over; nothing worth knowing cannot be uncovered in a matter of seconds, and without much effort; private life is, to all intents and purposes, a think of the past."
ReplyDelete"What is striking about such a claim is not so much its arrogance as what it inadvertently reveals about the conception of a secret that prevails in official quarters: that a secret is an item of information, and as such falls under the wing of information science, one of whose branches is mining, the extraction of scintillae of information (secrets) from tons of data."
"The masters of information may have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible."
J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year
I bookmarked that passage last night and have been turning it over in my head, thinking of you.