There she goes, my beautiful world – 1st October

Me, I’m lying here, with nothing in my ears
Me, I’m lying here, for what seems years
I’m just lying on my bed with nothing in my head

There she goes, my beautiful world – Nick Cave

There is something sort of annoying and definitely ironic to WordPress calling the chunks of ‘content’ we write into on a post being called ‘blocks’. Writers blocks. That’s where my mind has been, off and on, for some time. What is the block? What can be done.

I prevaricate, procrastinate and/or pretend. Eventually, often unhealthily close to a deadline, I confront. I confront the block, the difficult feelings. Sometimes I even feel like I may have changed the habit. No such luck… yet.

Today we had an online session in my department with a coach. We talked about writing. An interesting part of the conversation happened at the very beginning when we were invited to summarise our relationship with writing in a word. After a pregnant pause, words came. They included – fraught, frustrating, unrecognised, slow, challenging and many others that are, I think, broadly around feeling dissatisfied and perhaps unhappy. The follow on was to try to identify words to express what we would like our relationships with writing to be, with enjoyable, meaningful and spacious words that I can recall being suggested.

I sometimes reflect on the nature of the ‘vocation’ of academic life, and what sometimes feels like a disconnect between the actually existing daily life of working in a university and the expectations we variously harbour for the role. For some it remains not only a lifestyle but a way of life, without wishing to be pretentious – what some used to call the ‘life of the mind‘. A solitary and earnest existence that relates mostly to the humanities, perhaps – as Arendt more or less argued in her work of the same name, quoting Cato (as she did in The Human Condition): “Never is he more active than when he does nothing, never is he less alone than when he is by himself”. And while Arendt argues that vita activa entails a withdrawal from the world it also, necessarily, involves an engagement with it.

For some, the vocation of writing, as an academic, is aligned more with the creative act of writing songs or poetry than, say, the pragmatic act of writing a report. As Les Back noted in his Academic Diary:

Sometimes, like this morning, I wake up at 4.30 a.m. and suddenly a link or a connection I was trying to make in something I am working on becomes clear. I find that I have no real control over that process because ideas can’t simply be willed to come. Leonard Cohen commented once that he didn’t know where the good songs came from because if he did he’d visit that place more often.

As PhD student I both admired and was fearful of the senior colleagues in the department who seemed to embody this sort of academic vocation. For a little while I think I probably saw myself on a trajectory towards being able to ‘think difficult thoughts’. Perhaps some academics still do. Where I have got to is, at least for me, a peculiar slightly uncomfortable compartmentalisation of the ‘thinky thoughts’ of research squashed into the moments in which it is possible and then the pragmatic doing of ‘life’. I don’t wake up at 4:30am with inspiration. I (mostly) wake up at 6:30 to everyday domesticity – unloading the dishwasher, herding children, making coffee. Please don’t misunderstand me, I am happy and wouldn’t have it any other way. But I don’t think I really know what that academic vocation is, at least for me.

Returning to Les Back’s Academic Diary and to briefly, in my mind’s eye, revisit the various fictional universities of the campus novel (a somewhat guilty pleasure), I cannot help feeling like I am reading about a completely different world. I don’t know anyone, personally, who has the kind of career Back recounts in his book. I’m not saying people don’t, its just not part of my own lived experience of working in a university.

What is ‘an academic’ meant to be then? For many of my colleagues, and I, are not the figures I have covered so far. I am not a clerical hermit in the Ivory Tower that Arendt both praises and critiques, neither am I the affable and politically astute Professor of Back’s world, or, I hope, the ethically problematic and weak-willed lecturer that populates the pages of David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury novels. All of these are White men, of course, and there remains a significant skew in that direction within universities. To an extent, I am the beneficiary of that. However, the pages of scientific journals are more diverse. The voices heard in academia are becoming more diverse. The kinds of writing being published are also beginning to reflect that diversity.

The criteria by which we judge ourselves and one another, whether derived from things like job descriptions, promotion criteria, governmental research quality assessment exercises, journal impact factors and citation counts are, ultimately, not very health for the individual academic worker. The struggle to write, to be ‘productive’ might not always be the best measure by which we should understand our own worth.

It may be a naive or, for some, defeatist form of consolation but I am inclined to think that sometimes it is ok not to have something to say. While ‘my beautiful world’ is not always readily accessible, I may struggle for words, perhaps that is not a bad thing. Other voices can and should be heard.