Finding A Way Back To Research

Quite some time ago when I told my friend Sandra Johnston about my Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable project and interest in work attributed to Damien Hirst, she recommended I read Gene Ray's 2005 book Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory, particularly the essay about Hirst's more morbid works involving live, dying and dead flies and so on. I was in the full throes of the research in late 2019 / early 2020 and writing my draft work up in these blog posts on a weekly basis with the aim of compiling enough to form the basis of a book manuscript to structure and edit. Then came the enormity of the cumulating pandemic in March last year. 

There was a week that month when Newcastle University - my partner's employer - went from announcing 'business as usual' on the Sunday to giving staff less than two days' notice to clear out of their offices by the close of business on the Friday. The library invited its members to ransack its shelves with the promise of open-ended loans, and so began the 15-month occupation on my shelves of Ray's book, which is vastly beyond my budget to purchase.

The next hiccup was the brain fog that clouded my mind as the overwhelm and anxiety set in last April and May. Determined to continue writing about something, anything, my weekly posts became more personal with the most tenuous of links to the arting about of its name. I am still clawing my way back to what I was working on as this latest of human disasters spread. In those acts of clawing I have felt a compulsion to declutter and address the prior unfinished business of even earlier research. I achieved that to an extent with my posts amounting to a long essay about the television archive in the films Good Vibrations and No. I've also been making videos from my old lectures that have been steadily releasing on YouTube this year. This was something I intended to do four years ago and I just didn't have the head-space. Now I have the capacity, but not quite the memory, but it's better than nothing!

What has me trying to poke at Ray's text again - and let's face it, I'm talking around doing this more than I'm actually doing it yet - is simply that the sun has finally joined us in the North East of England and I want to get warmed up in it while doing something vaguely productive. I just cannot be idle, especially when I never know when fatigue will strike.

So here I am, jotting in my notebook dedicated to the Treasures research - a freebie from Virgin Money, no less - struggling with tinnitus and other unpleasant ear issues (not great for a podcaster), dancing around my re-entry by telling an invisible, perhaps imaginary, audience these rambling thoughts. I do this because I have come to value visible process. This is how the work happens, and why hide that? Why should my research odyssey be erased, even the waiting-around-poking-at-the-edges bits? Is it not as interesting and meaningful as the argument and findings? Why should the sciences have all the fun? And why must everything in the arts and humanities be mystified? This kind of work is surely anthropologically relevant. Do people think humans have reached their pinnacle? That we are no longer evolving? Is arts and culture research not a subsection of the study of humans, and is it not, therefore, a science?

Maybe in the next post I'll have stopped procrastinating and got round to actually re-reading Ray's essay. I aim to report back then.

back in the fray