Thesis Check-In #1

August has arrived. Oh god. Time to freak out.

I have wasted a lot of time this summer in hedonistic folly -- organizing my music collection and downloading new gems with Zune, getting lost in Google Reader (with the fantastic ease it allows for stocking up on information overload!), uploading and rearranging photos, doing small creative tasks, sleeping long hours, and otherwise avoiding the big scary things that do absolutely need to get done. This is supposed to be a catch-up summer, a thesising summer, a productivity summer. And now I'm down to a third of it. Gosh darn it, I went and shot myself in the foot again!

This afternoon, I took my thesis binder out to my little haven in the backyard and reread my thesis self-evaluation, proposed second semester schedule, and drafts. I have two common reactions to my old writing. When I read the stuff, some of it completely disgusts me. Yet I also look at some of that forgotten writing and feel impressed by it, impressed in a way reserved for others' writing, new and unfamiliar (having written some of it in a flash, no wonder that I end up having as little familiarity with it as the next person).

I had planned when I started the thesis process at the beginning of the year (late January, immediately after my return from Senegal) to put up what I conceptualized as "essay seeds" on a routine schedule, with the idea that I would then, over the summer, use any feedback I had elicited to edit them into second drafts, a little less rough. That didn't exactly transpire.

Because I have so much I care about, the essay framework for my thesis seemed as though it would give me the necessary room to cover a tremendous wealth of information. But then I actually started the process. It is even more brutal than I could have imagined, dreading it for all the preceding years, knowing that my words would wind up frozen in the library for years after my senior year had ended. I wanted to write a thesis I could take pride in, that I would not regret for years afterward. But dang, what a treacherous journey! I thought I could transform caring about almost everything into a workable thesis, but it turns out caring about so much can be caring about too much, when you have a finite amount of text and when you want to share the basic importance of your work with a reader (or three, or five) with a Ph.D.. You have to whittle away to the most important thoughts you want them to see. Yup, it's an aggravating mind-game.

I thought I would have a mix of essay lengths, some as short as a page like those of Daniel Quinn in Beyond Civilization, some medium length like those of the famous essayists (Montaigne, Eric Hoffer, Lewis Thomas), some full-out almost chapter-length. Each short essay I intended was deceptively so. I cannot, for the life of me, predict how long a project will take (in time or in words!). This has been re-affirmed through the thesis and in other ways throughout this last year. Every little thing I wanted to do in each essay would expand into a whole little world of its own, with its own individualized galactic bibliography. Either I now have to break those seemingly short essays down into even smaller chunks, actually bite-sized this time, or I have to modify the totalizing scope of the work.

I came up with such a half-trimmed rubric a couple weeks ago, based on the ghastly idea, "If I only wrote ten essays, what would those essays be?" Ten essays, ten chapters, same thing, right? Grrr...I will no longer have a unique approach if I go with my thesis advisor's idea of thinking of my thesis as chaptered, like every other cut-and-dried social science thesis (Perhaps his idea of a chapter isn't as big as I think it is; I did see a thesis with sections, two to four pages long). Ten essays ten pages each. If I finish the drafts for most of them before January, I can spend most of my second thesis semester polishing them up into that something I can take pride in, that something I can appreciate, something I can bear to have out in public, in its permanent place in the school library. But if I want to do that, I have to get to work, after all of that foolish dawdling.

I'm thinking about trying to get an introduction drafted this week, even though the whole has hardly come together. After all, this is one of my advisor's suggestions, that I start with an introduction that explains my rationale for bringing such disparate topics together. The thing is, for me, it all ties together without feeling initially disjointed, and it frustrates me that I have to divide up into pieces something that makes sense holistically, only to show how I stitched it all back together. Well, I didn't. There was no "back together" necessary. No stitching involved. Our relationship to food does not exist in some separate realm from our relationship to spirit, nor does our society's style of governance function in some kind of suspended plane from our value system or from our manners of resource use. But I have to forego the intuitive interconnections of things to cater to the interests of the disciplinary system of Academia. I truly do not understand why students in traditional colleges are not all trained to be fiercely interdisciplinary scholars (to the extent that we wouldn't even have the desire or ability to make sense of the concept of interdisciplinarity). It's really rage-inducing how microscopically-focused we've allowed ourselves to become. Alas, as much as I roil at this state of affairs, I too have fallen prey to the ever-increasing-fragmentation syndrome. Gah.

I could ramble my disgruntled thesis reactions for some time. But the important thing is that I get to writing again. Building on what I've learned about how to keep up a routine (with blogging, at least!), I will devote my main blogging energies to writing thesis content, great and small, and posting it here throughout August. I will have to reconcile myself to the fact that, if I want certain essays (explorations on a theme or question) to be as short as a book page, only a couple paragraphs long, then short writing (only a paragraph or two) will have to become ordinary (and if so, all the better, for this will deflate the pressure of writing; if I write constantly, in little portions, I will rarely have to confront the behemoth of a massive assignment). I will write other posts to diversify the offerings this month on the blog (though the thesis itself covers quite a gamut -- ecovillages, neo-tribalism, permaculture, animism, social theory, and on and on), just in case my draft work gets too caught up in one subject (Oh so very unlikely! C'mon, are we even talking about me anymore? Sheesh!). In the off chance, then. The highly unlikely off chance.

What is very obvious to me, and amazing, too, looking back on my years, my work, my interactions, is how much I've failed to chart any sort of progression. I just teeter all over the place, dabbling in new favorite subjects, connecting new puzzle pieces to the more and more unusual whole, starting and stopping new endeavors, never quite catching on to the how, the mechanics of the mystery surrounding how other people ever manage to be organized, disciplined, productive, and overall on top of things. In this context, my intentions for sharing my thesis check-ins, posting thesis drafts (or essay seeds), and adding content regularly to the blog (especially as I make the transition back into semester insanity) are all ways in which I am trying to get the hang of consistency, the most elusive but also the most essential of my summer goals.

Off to write out a loose posting schedule! Happy first night of August!

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Missionaries

I met some Mormon missionaries today on the walk back down to the house from the end of the trail, where I'd finished my run. I caught sight of them down the block before they approached me, initially hoping that if I didn't make eye contact and stayed on my (opposite) side of the street, they wouldn't approach me. Well, that proved impossible, perhaps our encounter even seems inevitable, since they were missionaries after all.

I decided to speak to them cordially, acknowledging their human-ness as with any other fresh interaction with strangers. I have a hard enough time as it is curbing my mean-spirited streak, attitude-heavy. Before they spoke, I contemplated making some mention, rather unpleasant and not even accurate or deferential (to indigenous spiritual practice), that I believed in and practiced the original Native American spiritual traditions already, and in their proper form, thank you.

They went through what felt like an excruciatingly long introduction (since I had already taxonomized them) about being from a church in town, missionaries from The. Church. of. Jesus. Christ......(excruciatingly long pause).......of Latter Day Saints. Did I have time, blah blah blah.

I came up with the following response (not my best, but afterwards I considered how I might respond in the future, and nothing nearly as cordial or fitting came to mind; for instance, "I am a student of philosophy and theology and have spent plenty of time studying questions of faith. At this time, I feel perfectly comfortable and content with my own spiritual experience and so do not feel I need to hear any new message. Thank you. Good day." And perhaps even one day, I could say "Actually, I've read The Book of Mormon" and then see what happens!): "Well, I'm not really in a position to hear such a message right now [I had hoped my disheveled appearance from finishing a jog would have spoken well enough for itself, such that they wouldn't approach me, for apparently being out of place and not near a home in which they could speak to me, yet somehow they weren't dissuaded], but I've met with groups of missionaries in the past [which was perfectly true]. Sorry."

Then the guy asking said to me (it really felt as though he were about to fall apart), "Do you at least happen to know anybody around who might be willing to hear our message?"

Not a regular resident of the area, I had to deny them this, but I offered that perhaps since it was a nice summer evening, and there were plenty of people out enjoying it, they would find someone who was. And I wished them a nice evening.

Another exchange, in which they asked if there was anything they could do for me (I found this a bit odd, off-kilter), a bit of grandiose gesturing from me dismissing this strange inquiry, and another smiley, breathy, "No, no, I just hope you enjoy your evening."

Missionary work was one of the first big turn offs for me from the Baptist church in which I grew up, and in an extension of that swearing off, a dismissal of all of Christianity as a whole, for a time. I have chronicled my spiritual journey elsewhere, though perhaps it's time to bring it back to the foreground here in my blog. Anyhow, my early inklings as a history and anthropology student instilled in me much guilt for living just past an old creek bed in a house where no house used to sit and tribes used to roam freely, and it also aroused much suspicion and disdain in my being when, at Children's Sermon, a special interlude in the service where the pastor spoke to the kids, who came forward and gathered round for stories, magic tricks, puppets, and all sorts of marvelous, enticing stuff, little pieces of cardboard were produced, which could be turned into little houses or plain boxes with lots of colorful print about religiously-oriented mission work in places like India, quickly-assembled cardboard piggy banks to donate to such abomination organizations.

This bothered me to no end. Did not the people of India already have Hinduism, a perfectly valid religion, to follow reverently in their land? (At this time, nuances about the populations of Muslims, Buddhists, Jains, and other spiritual minorities or sects in India did not have especial prominence in my knowledge.) In any case, it was a step on my way to being swept up with Daniel Quinn's writing, which wove together so much of the uneasy feelings I'd already developed about the trajectory and ambitions of this culture into a coherent, acceptable (to me) whole. Missionaries rely on archaic views of the Other and what exactly that other needs in terms of assistance in physical and spiritual nourishment, and otherwise.

There was a lot of interesting material in the most recent part that I read of If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways about several common misconceptions of reality tied to Christianity, old premises that don't hold up to scrutiny, a topic I felt pleasantly surprised to find Quinn addressing, as I've spent so much of my time since Ishmael learning about logic, partly to find how Quinn fits into the intellectual precedent as a writer not officially of academic books, though heavily grounded in the findings of biology, anthropology, history, etc..

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Globalization, a Millenia-Long Process

"Globalization isn't a recent policy; it's been in place among us for thousands of years."

This one's obvious, but for whatever reason, often escapes the awareness of those bringing it up in a discussion. Globalization sounds to many like a process no more than maybe twenty years old because it wasn't discussed so much before then. That doesn't erase the processes of transformation that dispersed humans across the globe and the very incendiary processes that dispersed the culture borne of the Agricultural Revolution 10,000 or so years ago. Daniel Quinn's writing in Ishmael helped me understand this simple concept years ago, and I especially liked how he put this in If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways.

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