On nearly concluding a email to my tutor I stopped and realised the absurdity of what I was doing, or at least contemplated doing, stopping not out of complete choice but more out of sheer exhaustion which is the price a sleep deprived student such as myself pays (though considering my marks for what exactly I’m not as yet sure). I thank the lords of British comedy, in particular Mr Fry and Mr Laurie, for keeping me sleepily entranced nights previous, therefore ensuring that I would fall into a deep slumber before I was able to send the accursed email.
All being fair it was not so much the content of the email that was wildly inappropriate but more the sentiment; an unashamed and obvious cry to be intellectually reaffirmed by an experienced male superior. For my humble ambitions to be held tenderly, metaphorically speaking, in the arms of a positive and successful masculine subject, and the affections that would likely ensue reaffirming my own ability to achieve such lofty aims, or at least a positive indicator that I could, if I actually ever got around to doing so (though it’s likely that all I really desired was the affirmation itself and would be happy to sit and dream as if I had did it through the intangible possibility alone).
If I’m making little sense I apologise both for being incoherent and for the likely fact that I will remain so for the rest of this post, as it seems near impossible for me to squeeze into what remaining space there is the vast catalogue of my experiences, thoughts and desires. That being said one of the primary aims of my beginning this blog was to avoid the comfortable sanctuary of nonsense that I too often descend into, attempting to justifying it with incomprehensible cries of authenticity: ‘life and ideas are complex, why should I bother to put things simply!’ ect.
I will not hide that to be incomprehensible was my dying aim as of late. This was in part symptomatic of the delight I took, and to a lesser extent still take, in observing others struggle to comprehend rationality the intentional absurdity of my thoughts and actions (keep in mind I was drama student), though to a greater extent and the reason why I now see little or at least reduced virtue in such a method, is that above all else it comes from a lack of discipline. To write ridiculously and in a mildly entertaining manner is not a hard thing for me, I’ll even go so far as to say that for me to not do so is near impossible. Despite confessing above that I like to intentionally obscure meaning in my writing, why I or anyone would do that in a work that is produced specifically to be marked, and therefore adequately comprehended by another, is something of obscured meaning itself.
This fear was exactly what compelled me to begin to write to my tutor late last night, and in order to firmly secure the impossibility of it actually being sent please excuse me as I quote from the draft of it below:
‘It occurred to me that I forget to mention explicitly the very thing which has terrified me through-out my undergraduate experience, and of which I may have indicated at during our talk yesterday but likely had not the guts to admit. I should probably preface this comment by saying that for every substantial piece of written work I have submitted and then received back, my latest essay marked by yourself not excluded, I tend to in equal parts be both castigated and complimented on for my writing. This oddity has lead me to believe that perhaps my writing is all I have going for me, the true mediocrity of my thoughts hidden behind the faux-intellectual performative way I express them. Or put bluntly maybe I write in such an obscure manner in order to obscure the lack of substantial content being written. Think the theatre of Tom Stoppard, except I’m aiming for rational meaning rather than the lack of it. You say different sets of tools in the same academic toolbox**, but I can’t help but think I’m just waving around a rainbow ribbon on a stick (except I’m too short and the ribbons too long and its getting caught under my heels).’
As you may already be aware, semi-aware, unaware or have a vague inkling towards, I am an compulsive liar. A habit inextricably linked to my tendency for artistic flare, general inclination to be caught-up in the spontaneous, or ‘heat of the moment’, and a general distain for truth, as both an ideal and a reality (maybe I’d like to prove that the idealised absence of truth in my own reality is reflective of the truth of reality at large, though inherently that appears to be an obviously self-defeating kind of ideal, [as most ideas of ideals usually are]. The point of that was to say that I lied at least twice in part when I said ‘the very thing which has terrified me through-out my undergraduate experience’: (i) because I’ve been terrified for likely quiet longer than that, as far back and further even than my late high-school methamphetamine induced days, in which writing nonsense whilst drugged to the world got me better marks than the affected crap I managed to spout when sane, and (ii) that to speak of being terrified in isolation is essentially dishonest, as often I was well aware of such behaviour and rather intentionally fell back upon it in laziness and with only five hours left till the said assessment was due.
To say that such a fear has reached its height of late is no lie and I will again evoke writings past to demonstrate the temporality of such dread. The following is taken from a journal I kept in a bout of inspired discipline, to write for ten minutes both as a way to start and end each day, this particular thought was expound on the night of September 9, 2011, after just finishing the chapter on Oliver Schreiner in Claudia Roth Pierpont’s ‘Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World’:
‘Beavouir said that women are often willing enough to ‘play’ at work, but actual work they will do not. *** Such statement of course evoke in me a sense of embracement and fondness, the later in remembrance of childhood games acting out that or this profession, extending themselves so far as into tangible fantasies of hope of potential careers; brain surgeon, archaeologist and marine biologist come directly to mind, as both equally entertaining and ludicrous in nature.
The embarrassment steams deeper though, leading all the way up to the present, not just of the years and months recently past, but of this moment, this instance of time that we denote as ‘now’. I try critically to examine what actual achievement I may, or at least claim, to have attained in my two and a half years of study (forget school, that lot of bother can safely be neglected to the cannons of self-indulgent drivel, void of discipline or direction) and I ask myself am I merely playing here too, the ‘student’ that is, of ‘philosophy’ nonetheless. And what as I said of right now, this moment within a trite and essentially meaningless routine, am I not playing at the ‘writer’, choosing to speak in a nonsensical shallow manner about daily trivialities instead of beginning the book I’ve always intended to write?’
That fear of the now of course comes to supervene on the now at present in which I write this post, the entry itself an attempt to justify and critique my personal pursuit of writing, encapsulated within it the wider attempt to establish meaning and purpose in my life. Have I done right in sharing these things with others, considering that this post came out of the need to not submit to my irrational desire for affirmation from an isolated male, my rejection entailing in it a recognition of such affirmations being essentially meaningless due to the potentially deceptive way that I went about attaining them, to the extent that I question how successfully I have neutralised such a threat by communicating them instead with a community of strangers, or likely, no one at all.
*in my attempt to be honest I’ll openly confess that it so happens that I did end up sending it, this afternoon though rather then last night though, which could have the effect of undermining this entire piece but considering I’ve spent the better half of this day composing it like I’m going to give a fuck right now.
**this is a reference to his interpretation of the continental/analytical divide in academic philosophy, something which I had the blissful pleasure of being all but ignorant of till recently (a staunch analytic will say that’s because I had my head so far up continentalisms arse, but then probably not because they’re not huge fans of abstract metaphors or emotional value-judgements, at least not ‘in theory’) though will undoubtedly be exhaustively covered in greater detail in posts to come. Just to briefly clarify in the most simplistic of terms, though my tutor acknowledges the arbitrariness of the divide he is a partial believer in it, insofar as he associates himself firmly with the analytical tradition, if for nothing else but as an indicator of two different types of philosophical analysis (clear, distinct, logical v. abstract, florid, metaphorical), but this is going too far and inadequately into ideas that deserve at least their own post if not five or ten
*** the exact quote as given in Pierpont’s book and taken from the ‘Second Sex’ is: “Women is ready enough to play at working.[...].but she does not work; believing in the magic virtues of passivity, she confuses incantations and acts, symbolic gestures and effective behaviour.”
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