On the Pleasure of Research
Dear void,
The pleasure of research is in—
I woke up this morning with this sentence forming in my mind
but I forgot to write it down. Yes, I did think it was so good that I’d
remember it. No, I don’t remember it.
Oh, wait. Ha!
I just checked the Notes app on
my phone and I had in fact caught it using the dictation (speech-to-text) feature.
I don’t know my way around the app enough to provide a recommendation to you but I think it does a lot of other good things besides. I
only know that dictation is a great way to catch thoughts and ideas as they
make a pitstop in your mind before they race off into the ether. I don’t really
think this is how thoughts work--I’m a fan of Douglas Hofstadter’s work on
analogy being the foundation of cognition. One of my go-to books is Surfaces and Essences.
My point is that you need to get those thoughts into material form as soon as
you can. Our memories work hard for us all day. Some sort of note-taking device
will give it a break and you’ll be happy when it helps you retrieve later (at
12:30pm) that good thought, that bon mot that you had as you were waking up (at
6:49am).
The pleasure of research amounts to a sort of textual
healing.
I know! Great line, right?
Experiencing my own mind by reading and writing through text
has a musical expression. Marvin Gaye singing sexual healing: helps to relieve
my mind. I’ll keep writing through what I mean by textual healing, beyond
the cute pun that I’ve used in a flirty way in the past, but which I use now in
a more serious way. I’m uncertain of what I mean but it feels true. There is a
sort of healing in it. Textual research is a process of opening up to ideas and
verbal expression and resolving them, somehow, as associative connections to
something already conceived of. It isn’t really a closing of whatever was
opened, it’s similar to a breathing force, a breathing motion; of breathing air
in, taking whatever is needed from that air and expelling the rest.
Something like that. You could also go to analogies like bees gathering and blending
honey or how food is digested to describe the process (see Seneca, Erasmus
&c).
This associative work happens best with time and space
enough to go deep. By deep, I mean giving your attention to those wonderful, energy-giving,
very human processes of association. After a bout of deep rewording (part of a
methodology that I’ve been developing) and consideration of a text, I feel a
kind of high. Or maybe I should say I feel a deep. It’s a deep fulfilled, full-body
kind of high. A deep pleasure from associations clicking into place. Conceptual
constructions being changed or consolidated (I suppose this could be ‘accommodation’
and ‘assimilation’).
 |
| The reading room at the Rare Books Section Fisher Library, Dec 2019. |
Others have said this before but you need to devote time, without distractions, to go deep with your research material. Be fierce about this. Make time and space for the research. (I’ll talk later about the ridiculous and incredibly unhelpful administrative development of making post-grads use . . . hotdesking. Hotdesking! There is NO kind of good knowledge, new or otherwise, that comes from hotdesking! Grrrr)
Stay solid, void.
J.
PS. As I said I would (yesterday), I'm now working my way through JL Austin’s Lecture I on How
to Do Things with Words. Enjoying it immensely. Not from 1962 as I thought (he
died in 1960) but from 1955. Austin was a philosopher of language and talks
about words generating the action they speak. I’d used as an example last week in
my exegesis Hellen’s speech in All’s Well That Ends Well: 'I confesse'.
So, Austin’s work slips right on in there. I’m always happy, and little
relieved when texts meet up this way. The research project as host to a lovely,
lively, garrulous dinner party!
Then, in the afternoon, move to Radio 6 Music
Note
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