Right so it’s this time of day again. I need to think about something interesting to write about. Even though I’ve been cooped up at home in front of my laptop all day trying to work. I’m also quite worried about my meeting with my supervisor tomorrow because I have failed to produce any concrete result. I need to explain my vision in cogent terms. I also need to start enacting this vision and write. I’m guessing that tomorrow is the do or die moment of my thesis. If I come out feeling positive about the whole thing then I will need to kick my brain into action and work non-stop, or at least mostly non-stop, until I have the 4 chapters written by october or November.
If I can do that. Then there is still hope. I will need to work for two productive hours while my mom is here if I am to do this. She’ll be fine with it, I just need to be able to do it right.
No one tells you before you start your PhD what a roller coaster it is. You hit the heights of ecstasy and the depths of frustration in rapid succession. You are consumed by this feeling of guilt whenever you aren’t working on your thesis. Hell, you’re consumed by it while you’re working on your thesis. I’m not working, I’m not working enough, I’m not working fast enough, these are the things that keep nagging in your head, all the time.
I sometimes wish I had a 9 to 5 job. The kind that I can leave at the office and not take home with me. But this, this is with you all the time. No matter what you are doing it is there. You live it, think it, breath it, dream it, and then some.
Of course when you have a result out of it, it can produce the best feeling in the world. When you present your work and are praised for it, that is a feeling that cannot be toped. I remember when I used to act back in school or when I used to play music for an audience. It is the same feeling. That feeling of pure unmediated joy. That feeling of ecstasy and content is unparalleled. I keep reminding myself of what it’s like to create thought, because this is what we do. We produce knowledge and thought. We create.
Academia is a funny thing. It is supposed to be the place where people share and produce knowledge in order to help humanity. Yet it sometimes has its head stuck in its own arse too much and forgets its own purpose. This is why you get papers that are written by specialists for specialists, filled with jargon that only someone who is versed in that area of thought can understand. I know my thesis does that sometimes, because otherwise it wouldn’t be “serious” enough, or in the “right” register. What is this “right” register except the register of the pomposity of academia.
I love academia. I think it has one of the noblest purposes, but it needs to remember its origins. The academy was founded by Plato, whose teacher was Socrates. Socrates used to walk around the Agora, the Greek market place, and bug people by asking the why? The academy stems from that. It comes from the child like amazement at the world and the all too human impulse to try and understand it and ascribe some sort of order and form to it. But more importantly, it is not about a clique that’s in the know. It is born out of conversations between people in the market place. It must therefore be accessible to the greatest number of people.
Somehow we have lost sight of that. We forget that our purpose is to produce knowledge for all, or at least most, of humanity, not for this or that clique. We need to write and teach and produce for the masses. That doesn’t mean that we need to dumb down our work. But we need to stay away from jargon and this idea of a “right” register. We need to elevate people by giving them the highest standard of knowledge in a way that they can all understand. This of course cannot happen overnight. But we need to work on it through all the media that are now available to us. We need to devise new ways of teaching, from the nursery onwards. We need to change our whole approach to knowledge if we are to live up to our mission as academics. But in the mean time, I need to write these chapters and get my PhD.
Arab Rhizome 