Yesterday, after working on my paper for 4 hours and not making a lot of progress, I went over to the undergrad campus and sat in the sauna for 15 minutes. I guess maybe that helped to loosen tangles in my brain, but I wasn't really able to accomplish anything else for the rest of the day.I tell myself that the tasks (the paper, moving, finals) I have set up in front of myself are Gordian, and I imagine a cathartic, tragic release of failure, like Alexander's sword slicing through the knot. But Alexander slicing through the knot symbolized a solution to intractability. I guess that means that I see some sort of success in accepting defeat as a scholar, as an academic.
But I drift further than that. I imagine myself down and out, beyond recognition to my friends, beyond the reach of my family. I'm gristly and grizzly, with thick, cold-hardened hands, cracked skin, and clothes that fit me like the the skin of the rhinoceros at the end of Kipling's oh-best-beloved fable. I wander the streets, muttering to myself through a bushy, nicotine stained beard, endlessly sorting out problems that have lingered for years, arguing with a faceless buddy who has stood in my way at every corner.
A breakthrough? This faceless other, the misfit doppelganger who opposes me: is he just the disinterested, undiscriminating universe, patently unaware that I want the world to adjust itself for my comfort? I bet that's it.
If that's the case, then back to work. I have to do things that need to get done.
