With the end of the semester coming up fast, I find myself beleaguered and bemused, disordered and disoriented. During yesterday’s constitutional, however, I arrived at something like a thimbleful clarity.
When my time is entirely my own, I prefer to imagine my work in terms of lines and compartments; this is why I’m universally despised. I will take up one task, complete it, then take up the next. Stuff gets done, and all the intellectual energy and focus that I’ve directed toward the project so completed can hypothetically be detached and redirected. I can maintain an infinite number of expectant cathexes as I wait for responses from colleagues, editors, and students; so long as my own responsibilities have been properly addressed, I can keep on truckin’ like the finest of mudflaps.
Since taking up the chair here at Central, however, I’ve been obliged to develop a higher tolerance for waves and shingles. Most of my obligations more vividly ebb, flow, and overlap now, and I’m coming to realize that the linear, compartmental analogy was never an especially good descriptor of the way I do things. In the past week, for example, I had to manage three imbricated faculty searches, bringing one to a close (well, close to a close), clearing the middlemost hurdle of a second, and setting the third in motion. (I speak in managerial terms here, by the bye; I am the least important cog in these searching machines, but crucial nonetheless.) We just wrapped up the curricular schedule for summer on Monday, all the while trying to reconcile the scheduling consequences of the past fall in terms of our budgeting; in the coming week I’ll start work on the schedule for Fall 2012. I knew that administrative work would involve this sort of happenstance helplessness, since most of my work is contingent on the efforts of others. I imagine my own writing in different terms, but to be frank it pretty much involves the same goldurned thing.
When I was walking yesterday I suffered from one of my odd associative seizures. Goaded by the most common of inspirations (a commemorative etching carved when concrete was poured for a driveway), I was able to flesh out a full story structure in about 45 minutes. That would normally be a delight, especially when I’ve got the time to strike when the impression is fresh. At this juncture, however, that story concept is contending with a premise for a poem that I started on Monday and a new story notion that occurred to me this morning (which I’m struggling to recall right now, alas, thanks to an intervening writing obligation). As much as I would like to envision a stately parade of my circus animals, the work under the best of circumstances would seem to involve something more akin to a hunt in a jungle. I can only catch one critter at a time, and I know full well that the rest are running away with a speed I can never hope to match.
