Outlining a Life Crisis, With a Bonus Paper Idea!

What will I be writing? What a loaded question. Maybe I baulk now because this means something, there is a stake here – a publication, a conference, a chapter. Maybe my brain is simply taking a non-paid vacation, leaving its staff completely composed of those hired by temp companies because, for once in its life, there’s pressure.

As a place to be honest, I ask you to bear with me through the potential melodramatics of the next few paragraphs as you watch a small academic spiral take place right before your eyes.

As children, we are encouraged to be creative, but once in school where playtime is no longer an active part of curriculum, we’re encouraged to be listeners. Followers. Obedient children who please the teacher. I was a master at this from ages four to twenty-two. Never a foot out of line, never a paper not crafted to please its reader. But then you hit graduate school, and suddenly teachers want you to create your own path, to be leaders, to stray against the grain and not follow every instruction set forth (but also please do follow the hazy outline). They want you to clear a jungle without having given you a butter knife, never mind a machete.

So, where does that leave me? Stranded on a beach at the jungles edge, I suppose. Choking down salt water and praying a boat sees my SOS. I’m in a vulnerable place, maybe one where I become the blood sacrifice to the god Janus to ensure the success of those other academics who have ideas, creativity, paths to blaze. Maybe the once-gifted child now becomes burn-out fodder for the others to stand upon, look better than in comparison.

All because she’s stuck on an idea.

I have topics – mass graves, bog bodies, deviant burials, the body as gift (as sacrifice). But I have no burning questions, and certainly no ways to answer them. I’m in quicksand, and when you wiggle in quicksand you get more stuck, but how else does one get out? How do I compose something meaningful, something worth existing, when all I have is others peoples data and an interest that is better explored by others? How do I compose something of value when what I like to write are weird little thought pieces tying together philosophy and something else – but I can’t even think thoughts right now? And when no one cares about anything without cold, hard data.

My writing is good – and I will die on that hill. I do not believe I am a wolf in sheep’s clothing, I am who I say I am (I could never lie well enough to be an imposter). My writing is not my problem. Anything can be my muse and be written of with a certain beauty and finesse all my own. But no muse will step into the writers room right now. She must have gotten lost (I never have been good at giving direction).

Beginning is my problem, and no one teaches you to be a good beginner. They teach you to be a good worker, a good finisher, but never beginner. Maybe my brain just doesn’t think the way it needs to, but no one has ever tried to teach it to be elsewise. And so, I make camp here on my beach, and pray it doesn’t rain too hard to make the sand quick.

The current assignment is to create an article or conference paper “directly in line with [my] own scholarship.” So, dead people and their graves. Wonderful. In theory, I can do anything I want with my dataset, but I stare at it and draw blanks. Scotland has a suspicious amount of occupation on its stones. England has a lot of daffodils. And I can do nothing with this. The things that intrigue lead nowhere.

Can someone please hand me a branch so I can get unstuck?

The big, final monster of a deadline for this project is April 14th. Seems like a world away, but is really only a measly three months. Our first draft is due March 19th, the second is (aptly) April 2nd. Of course, this is not my only class, and the other has large deadlines, too, the first of March so far. Reading break is February 21st, and grading for my teaching assistant course will likely begin right after the break.

Deadlines are hard for me. I love and loathe them at the same time. I know they are fake – I have never been able to trick myself something is due earlier than it is, because I know it is not, and I cannot lie to myself that way. My brain knows better. My brain also knows they are arbitrarily assigned by, if not myself, a professor. However, without deadlines, I can get too comfortable and think I have all the time in the world, until I do not, and then I have to panic to get it all done. So, tentatively, here it goes:

Research concluded: February 15th
First draft: February 25th
Due in class: March 19th
Second draft: March 23rd
Due in class: April 2nd
Final edits: April 4th
Final deadline: April 14th

I have been asked before in regards to my master’s thesis – “Does class play a role in how people are putting up these graves?” and here may be a good chance to answer it. By looking at Ancestry, it is possible to ascertain the socioeconomic status of the deceased in cemeteries in Perthshire, Scotland, Orangeville, Ontario, and Cambridgeshire, England. For this project it would be a small sample, but potentially one large enough that the data acquired would be sufficiently robust to support a generalized conclusion. But the problem with this paper is it caters to others and what they have asked of me, not what I think is fun to write – and I’m trying to get over that. But how?

You will notice this blog does not answer the question “what is the outline for my project.” You’d be correct. And I will happily hand one over the moment I stop getting gutted at the behest of the gods and have a Thought. A good Thought. Until then, at least the sand on my beach is warm.

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I make an addendum here, because by the grace of whatever is watching over me, something snapped in my desperation. And it was nothing. The nothingness of a stone and the nothingness of a baby are infinite in potential in the exact same way. So I will attempt to make this make sense in an academic manner – tabula rasa and the grave.

Exploring – in albeit, so far, a storytellers tone – the connection between the Lockian idea of the ‘blank slate’ at birth and the connection to a Sartrean existentialism, I want to see if I can make a case for both (pardon the upcoming philosophy insiders joke) Being and Nothingness.

Having already looked at stones being an expression of the Other as opposed to the self, I hope to work to entangle these two concepts. The stone being an objective material record of the self, as created by one’s own actions (making the slate they are born with no longer blank, allowing the stone to follow suit) but also being a reflection of the choices of the Other who erects it. This will be further reflected in infant deaths which bear no markings of individuality except those placed there by grieving parents, oftentimes not even having been given a name in burial. Given the informality of the current forward to my draft, I aim towards more of a conference talk than a polished publication piece. Maybe this is my first child, and an article is my second, after I’ve had a little practice and learned from my mistakes with the first one.

This is rough and far from ready. I may deviate to favouring Sartre again, or to going wholly for Locke (maybe this combination is also a later endeavour). I am ready to be told by both those qualified and unqualified in philosophy – usually more so the latter – that my understandings of one or both concepts are flawed. And to that, I say mind your own business. That entire discipline is built on messy translation, misinterpretation, reinterpretation, and argument – and you are no better than I am, I no better than you, neither are better than the philosopher himself, and frankly, he no better than us either.

Right now I am simply pleased to have an idea. I do not promise perfection of it – which hurts my soul to say. This will be, for my poor tired brain, a (pun intended) grave endeavour. But my muse has now at least knocked on the door, and I would be an ass not to at least open it. I simply must remember – life is not that serious. Neither, it seems, is death.