coldhearted scientist وداد

I have now finished writing a series of texts which could become a manuscript. They are not yet a manuscript, and may not be suitable as an academic manuscript, but they are what I have been writing since I got back from Peru. I started this file long ago and worked on it occasionally, but toward the end of my Peru voyage I became obsessed with wrapping it up.

I have in this time barely slept and I have gotten virtually no exercise, and I have been doing the bare minimum otherwise, but now I am finished. I am going to let them sit while I do other work, and then do something of interest with them. I think they are my real writings and that this is why they are important – they are my real work.

All this time I have been thinking I need to regularize my life. I should be sleeping and working out like a normal person, and getting the errands done. I should be focusing on my job-job and my academic book. But not only did I have the impression I it would be better to finish this first, I was impelled to do it. It took over. Now it is finished and I am calm.

All this time I have found myself thinking the sorts of things one thinks in Reeducation. You are not really taking care of your health, that is self destructive. You are not fully taking care of the errands and garden, that is a sign of going to seed. You are stalled on your official paper, that is procrastination. You are writing until three in the morning and then being wan during the day, that is avoidance.

Really though I think these suppositions are wrong. I think really I have been hiding out from the world not so as to avoid it but so I could find space to concentrate. I think that in fact these texts are what all other strategies of living are constructed to have one avoid. And I think that one major the sign of it is that I have finished and I am ready for the next thing.

I figured this out in between Saturday’s yoga class and Wednesday’s. I shed the idea of feeling worried about working on my real project and replaced it with being proud of it somehow – whether that project comes to fruition in its current form or not. This gave me great objectivity about everything and centered me in life, suddenly, and I realized once again that, pace Reeducation, it is not a crime to allow yourself to take center stage in your own life and to give up self reflection and self doubt. It is not arrogant to say I am awake and my mind is clear.

It is not arrogant to say yes, I wrote and enjoyed writing a very long text of which I intend to make use but which, if I do not, has already served a great purpose for me. It is revolutionary to have done this, to say I have done it, to be glad I have done it, to be proud that I have done it. It is revolutionary to deny that to have done it, and said so, and to be glad, and proud, amount to arrogance. In fact I do not even care if it is arrogant to say I finished a text which is mine, invented for my own pleasure and edification first, and only then for others. The question Reeducation, which is punitive, wants one to ask is what are you avoiding, but that question is loaded with duty and negativity. I would replace that question with some less judgmental ones: what are you rejecting, and what are you looking for?

I am slightly destroyed physically, and slightly behind in other things, but I feel as though it is the last time, as though I were getting into my real groove. I am not saying it has to be the last time I annihilate myself physically and practically so as to get something done, only that feels as though it is, and it seems I have come to the end of something. It feels as though this has been the last time I needed to HIDE OUT – go to a foreign country or wait until everyone else is asleep – so as to do my work.

Axé.