Processing

So I’ve returned home from AST.  (If you are an English type and you want to know what AST is, drop me an email at reassignedtime at gmail and I will tell you about it and all the reasons why if you’re eligible you should try to do it.)  I’ll be honest: I don’t know how to talk about its awesomeness, or how to explain everything that it meant to me.  I don’t really even know what happened to me, but I feel like it was this serious breakthrough in how I conceive of myself in this profession, in how I value myself as a scholar, in how I think about the work that I really want to do as a literary critic….

But let me back up.

Here is how I went into this experience: I work at a regional university, with a 4/4 teaching load and a substantial service obligation.  I think objectively that I am a fairly productive scholar given those constraints, but I don’t set the world on fire by the standards of… oh, I don’t know… of people who have more resources (time/money) by virtue of having jobs that give more resources.  So I’m not unhappy with my lot in life, but I do realize that my material conditions shape my experience of this profession, shape my intellectual life, and shape the kind of work that I (can) do.  And the way that my material conditions shape those things is that I always feel like I have to carve out a space for thinking/ideas/research in a very conscious way or I won’t have any room for those things given the other demands on me.  My job is not at all about leading “a life of the mind.”  Instead, whatever life my mind has can exist only inasmuch as I force open a space for that.  Which can be really freaking exhausting.  So exhausting, in fact, that sometimes after you force open that space, you’re too tired to do anything good inside of it.

This week was…. well, it was intense (totally) and I was totally immersed in *literature* in a way that I haven’t been since I was an undergraduate.  And the beauty of the week is that AST organized all of the business of daily life: transportation, food, housing, private space for work every morning, the seminar every afternoon…..  All of a sudden, I didn’t have to spend any energy carving out space or forcing open a space.  There was just this giant wide-open space, and my only job was to have an idea (or a thousand ideas) inside of it.  And then to talk with other *exceptionally smart people* about those ideas.  And then have more ideas because of the things that we all talked about together.  And then have lovely martinis.  And then talk some more and have more ideas.  And then write.  And then have more ideas.

My brain was buzzing throughout the week, to the extent that I slept horribly the entire time.  A small consolation was that all of my friends in the seminar reported a similar difficulty in sleeping – I think we were all just too on fire to shut down each night.  On Wednesday, I actually did get to sleep reasonably, but then I woke up after like an hour, burst into tears, and then went back to sleep again.  (Not sure that anybody else had the spontaneous crying, but my point here is that I was really just… overwrought by everything, and the good cry did actually help.)

In the midst of all of this, I managed to refine the structure of my book project, made amazing friends, realized that I can no longer avoid reading Heidegger (ugh), feel entirely empowered to write the book that it’s in me to write, understand now that the reason that I didn’t feel that before was that I was too afraid to do the kind of literary criticism that I think actually matters (and was able for the first time to articulate to myself the kind that I think actually matters) rather than doing the most expedient kind, met and worked with one of my heroes and didn’t make a fool of myself, and just generally basked in possibility – the possibility of my discipline, the possibility of my mind, the possibility that what I do actually matters.

One of the things that graduate school does, or at least that it did for me and for many people I know, is to train you to treat excitement and passion with suspicion.  Now, I’m an excited and passionate person generally, so graduate school was in many ways for me an exercise in tamping that down and learning how to transform all of that naive excitement and passion into “sophisticated” and “careful” critique.  And then one of the things that the job market does, and that getting a tenure-track job does, or at least those things did this for me, is to train you to see ideas in terms of production, and the “best” ideas in that matrix are ideas that are expedient and that translate into publications, for everything is only as good as the line on your cv that is the end result.

AST nullified all of that baggage from graduate school and the job search and the tenure track.  AST reminded me that the reason I changed my major from journalism to English, and the reason that I decided I wanted to go to graduate school, and the reason that I ultimately decided I “believed” in a career in which I would study and teach literature, was because it was exciting and elicited passion in me and because I was curious and because I wanted to think more deeply even if I didn’t, and maybe even especially if I didn’t, know where I’d end up at the end of it.  AST restored my faith that literature matters, and that conversation matters, and that not knowing how it all translates onto a cv actually totally matters, because it’s in the not knowing that you have the potential to do original work.  And my hero who led the seminar reminded me that what matters most is faith – faith in myself as a reader, because without that faith one can’t write anything worth reading.  And that not having that faith means practicing literary criticism in bad faith, no matter how “well” I’m doing on paper.

So, now, I’m back in my real life.  And I’m afraid that I’ll lose all this.  I feel frantic, like I have to get it all down – all the ideas, all the possibilities, all the plans, before real life takes back over.  I feel like it’s important that I don’t let it all slip away, but I already feel like it’s slipping.  July is going to be a busy month.