Once upon a time, I think, we all thought we were super action figures. That we could juggle a million little pieces of a broken puzzle that somehow fit if we just had the time to sit down and calm the chaos. But that once upon a time, I am finding out, is one that few ever get to attain.
My dad is a lecturer, and I critiqued his every move. Now, I am in his position, and I am doing everything I once criticised.
The deadline for the handins of essays was Monday. I have a stack of physical essays I need to mark. I have marked 7 or 8. The essays are 3000-4000 words. And my brain is soup. I cannot fathom how people do it. It is either that they merely skim the papers, or those philosophers are long dead who actually read everything.
I have stopped doing all of the things that produced the very philosophy that got me to this position. A couple of months ago, I thought it would be a good think to post every day. I thought it would get the proverbial creative juices flowing. Hive, after all, produced one of my articles I hope gets published this year. Or stated otherwise, one late night after drinking one too many whiskeys, I penned down the ideas that actually became the article.
I thought, okay, let me use this opportunity to post every day, once in a while I might get something of value for my academic work. I put in the same effort I always did; but the proverbial creative juices did not flow as anticipated. Instead, I ended up hitting that wall most academics fear.
The wall is a beautiful artwork of despair and exhaustion; one in which words float on a page. Rather than show logic and analytic rigour, the words become artworks that entice you to see things that are not there, that entice you to conjure metaphors rather than physical entities. The wall is something magical because it kills you slowly and you are privileged to witness the death in slow motion. The wall produces this text I am writing rather than a philosophical one that could be turned into a philosophical article filled with jargon.
The matter of the fact is, I am running at 100% and the breaks have failed. The wall is coming closer with every day passing. I am three months behind on my Ph.D. schedule. Luckily some of the work is in the article I mentioned. It is now a moment of will I survive marking 50 papers (i.e., 170 000 words). Obviously, I will survive. The marking is done at a slow pace (tell that to my brain), but the amount is staggering. It is more than two Ph.D.s of work the quality not even a 12th grader would produce. Okay, that is a bit harsh. But people cannot write to save their lives (and I might include myself into this list, but somehow I managed to make it this far in academia!).
I tell the students, lie with confidence. That is, write as if you know the answer but as a philosopher always proclaim a kind of Socratic ignorance of "I do not know". The problem with this advice is that when you get to the point where I am, where you wrote your way into the system you convinced yourself you know nothing about, you should pretty quickly make something up because everyone is looking at you.
Alas, here I am, in the position, I thought I'd never get. I am writing a Ph.D. (I am at the halfway stage, 40 000 words!) and I am lecturing on the module based on the writing of my Ph.D. What a joyride it has been.
But the price I paid was steep. I lost the ability to do all the things that got me here. The garden, photography, writing, and so on, all got pushed to the side, and now they are gathering dust just like all the Stephen King books I thought I would one day read.
I hope you are well, stay safe.
The photographs are my own, taken with my iPhone. The words in this post, albeit written on that beautiful wall, are my own.