the sun hangs low and hazy in a freezing gray metal sky. myself, bright-eyed, after a terrible night's sleep in which strange thoughts about other people kept waking me up out of nowhere. weighted with some minor concern, but not for myself - concern of the kind that challenges my ability to draw appropriate clear lines between other people's problems and myself.
back in norway now for a few weeks at least, looking forward to the descent of winter across the island. I like having to regulate temperature upwards, rather than down. come the apocalypse, I think I'll be wanting to live in a northern european palisade village, rather than the tropics.
otherwise, I keep coming across things that block my way but are easily dislodged. big huge rocks, sacks of garbage. I also find myself wrapped in odd chains of hinted coincidence. to pick one that follows up on
an earlier entry, take the theme of snakes.
pick up a biography of
sai baba in a second-hand bookshop a couple of weeks back. I know nothing about him, except I think he materializes rolex watches for his followers, but for a couple of days I get a bit obsessed with him. want to go on a mission to find spiritual rolex watches after I finish my thesis. his totem animal turns out to be the cobra [ - also the animal of
shiva, the hindu ascetic god of yoga, sex, destruction and a few other things. I have a bit of a history with shiva - ] unaware of this, k gets me a rubber cobra for my birthday.
then I go walkabout through scotland to meet the in-laws. k lives near the
findhorn foundation, an ecospiritual community that started in a caravan park 40 years ago and has toyed on the edge of my awareness for 10 years now, ever since I read they grow giant vegetables with the help of devas. want to go on a mission to learn super cabbage skills after I finish my thesis. k gives me two books to read on findhorn: one of them is written by a sociologist who 'turned' and moved to findhorn. and guess what, she is a devotee of sai baba.
the other book is the spiritual autobiography of
one of the founders. while initially deeply turned off by her patriarchal and domineering representation of god, I find that as the story brings her up to the present, the problems and themes she confronts begin to resonate more clearly with the kind of issues that have troubled me in the last few years: love without the fear of loss, expressing difficult ideals in human daily life and so on. after her husband abandons her for another woman, she draws up a checklist of problems near the end of the story that I could have written myself, point for point, some six months ago.
her key pattern for the new age is the transition from relations of mutual dependence and complementarity, the yin-yang of nuclear marriage, to relations between independent, autonomous and self-sufficient entities. this is an idea that you find absolutely everywhere- my landlady in finnmark was dead keen on it. she also considered herself and the healing farm part of a global 'network of light', guided by higher powers to construct magnetic centres. I am assuming that unless the spiritual world is made up of rivalling corporations of light operating under free market rules, that both she and the findhorners would agree that they are part of the same 'network'.
how's this for a post-doc. 'rhizomes of light: the magnetic geopolitics of the new age'.
there is more to be said about odd timings here but I'll keep it to myself for the time being.
my point to myself is that of course, this could be linked to the
proliferation of snakes back in september. of course, and equally, there is nothing tangible.
all there is is hints, hints and suggestive hints of some kind of pervasive connectedness. coupled with a sense of juncture, or density, or flow.
this goes all the way down to the fact that while discussing a particular issue over IM the connection breaks down unexpectedly, just at the point where I start saying something that while appearing superficially helpful, is in fact moving in on the domain of things that are for the other person to sort out, and threatening to foreclose it.
there is something in the air.
In a sense the PhD is quite an odd endeavour with which to begin academic life. It's about 4 years researching one topic for one piece of writing, whereas I get the impression that academic life is faster paced and more varied. Lecturers are producing articles for research assessment purposes, they're teaching, doing conferences - and even writing that final magnum opus monograph isn't allowed to take up 4 years non-stop. Probably a better way to live, really.
flats - 24 11 06 - 23:06
Oh yes, I also recall you saying something about the Saami thinking Tim Ingold talked a lot of shit... My dissertation seems to be being about mapping, which makes mentioning him rather necessary - any chance you could tell me who the main criticism of him are by? Obviously he's some acid-addled hippy ("native people are so much better than the West, maaan!"), but I can't get satisfactory supporting evidence to legitimately put that in an essay... Thank you!
flats - 26 11 06 - 19:19
Amen, flats! And even over in our school of education, where we're always talking about how poorly education is matched to the work it ostensibly prepares us for, there's no attention paid to solving mismatch. I have moments when I think academia is doomed.
gus () - 17 12 06 - 00:11
http://bean.plasmator.net/random%20pix/p..
flats () - 20 12 06 - 18:35