2013 | 0 point

I haven’t written much either on or off the blog this year. To be honest, I’ve been quite distracted working through my Saturn Return. This has involved shedding outmoded beliefs and understandings of myself and the various worlds in which I live or aspire to live, cultivating passions, finding new ways to ground myself, and, perhaps most challengingly, trying to develop intellectual, ethical, and personal practices and forms of discipline and punish focus that will sustain me as I slog through The PhD.

On that front, I’ve been deep in the comp swamp, reading books of ‘philosophical import,’ negotiating the nebulous fog of questions regarding my purposes and intentions; seeking personal truth among the perils of the professionalization process; examining why I felt it necessary to tackle “giant men” of philosophy in a sort of Kill The (mostly already dead and unkillable) Idols effort. If nothing else, I am learning that I love a good takedown piece, even if I never actually get around to writing it. I’m also learning that reading Deleuze is a lot like doing calculus in High School; something I find it ‘good to know’ so I can maybe never think about it again when I’m done. Though, it is useful to know core texts inside and out for moments when I am forced to parry Philosophical Manspeak.

When it comes to QUE, I still think I haven’t found a centerline for how to use the site. Archive building? Vanity project? Echo chamber? Wandering notwithstanding, it remains refreshing to have something which I can attend to only when it feels right, with out too much self-consciousness. It’s a nice antidote the more scripted processes I have to negotiate on the daily. And so, most of my posts in the last months have been a mashup of media, ‘wordartpoems,’ and photos.

As the year draws to a close, I find myself on the brink of starting a more dedicated writing practice, not only in preparation for my dissertation, but also because writing is the craft I’d most like to develop, the skill I think I’m most prepared to hone through practice and failure. I certainly don’t expect my dissertation to be an exhaustive creative effort, so I’d like this site to be a space of other kinds of writing, other kinds of experiments.

With that in mind, considering I’ve got so many ‘saved drafts’ regarding turning points and transformative emotional, intellectual, embodied, and spiritual moments this year, I thought a good place to start would be with some of the most challenging, beautiful, and lasting moments of 2013. Over the next ten days, look for a series of short posts with moments culled from memory, notebooks, and the saved drafts folder. I love a good processing sesh, don’t you?