I have been feeling off. And overwhelmed. I am at a stage in my research - which is just in its embryo - where I feel I have so much to read, there is so much I don't know, and so much I need to know and definitely not enough time. I am also aware that there is so much out there in terms of research and theories and concepts that there is bound to be something that has already been written about what I am interested in, so... what is the point of my research?!
This is where I am at. I am surrounded by piles of books I skim through; I pick up one and then I put it down; I read one chapter from one book and then I write down some notes and then I pick up another tome and read something and feel guilty that I haven't fully read the previous book. I feel like a fraud. Hence, I am surrounded by cadavers of half-chewed books and half-absorbed theories written in a language I find hard to comprehend. I feel I am fighting against something ethereal, all by myself, while feeling unheard and unappreciated about my amazing theories no one has heard of yet.
And then, there is like a glimpse of light and as a mad woman I seem to make some desperate connections and you can see me observing my brain linking words, people, ideas, options... what did Carl Sagan write in that book? Because I can connect that with something I found in the Agnostic Gospel of St Thomas, a passage from the original writings of Schoedinger about his cat, and a quote from an episode of "My Life is Murder". Coz it all makes sense...
Thank God this is happening now and not in March next year.
I woke up one day with this "theory-of-a-thing" in my head and at 4am I was writing stuff up, frenetically, like I were pulling words from a dream I had just almost finished but not yet archived. There were still vitality and ideas and vibrations I wanted to record because it made so much sense in my suspended dreamland.
Fortunately, it still makes sense now and I have happily tested my theory with some people and it works, which makes me extremely happy. My fear is that I just pulled together theories I have read somewhere and this is ultimately nothing new and hence not my theory. Fortunately, I have supervision next week and I will be told if what I downloaded from dreamland is original and totally "farina del mio sacco" as we would say back home, or if I have inadvertently stolen it from somewhere else.
Till next week then, and as per usual:
onwards and upwards,
mx
READINGS:
Bennett, J. (2010) The force of things. In: Vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. Durham, Duke University Press, pp. 1–16.
Miller, D. (2005) Materiality: An Introduction. In: Materiality. Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, pp. 1–50.
Anon (2019) Being material. Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press.