#essayism

I am entirely consumed by my dissertation. After months and months of stagnation and brain fog, to work so hard at something and actually see progress is bliss. 

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“There was something in Ulrich’s nature that in a haphazard, paralyzing, disarming way resisted all logical systematizing, the single-minded will, the specifically directed drives of ambition; it was also connected with his chosen term, “essayism,” even though it contained the very elements he had gradually and with unconscious care eliminated from that concept. The accepted translation of “essay” as “attempt” contains only vaguely the essential allusion to the literary model, for an essay is not a provisional or incidental expression of a conviction capable of being elevated to a truth under more favorable circumstances or of being exposed as an error (the only ones of that kind are those articles or treatises, chips from the scholar’s workbench, with which the learned entertain their special public); an essay is rather the unique and unalterable form assumed by a man’s inner life in a decisive thought. Nothing is more foreign to it than the irresponsible and half-baked quality of thought known as subjectivism. Terms like true and false, wise and unwise, are equally inapplicable, and yet the essay is subject to laws that are no less strict for appearing to be delicate and ineffable. There have been more than a few such essayists, masters of the inner hovering life, but there would be no point in naming them. Their domain lies between religion and knowledge, between example and doctrine, between amor intellectualis and poetry; they are saints with and without religion, and sometimes they are also simply men on an adventure who have gone astray.

Nothing is more revealing, by the way, than one’s involuntary experience of learned and sensible efforts to interpret such essayists, to turn their living wisdom into knowledge to live by and thus extract some “content” from the motion of those who were moved: but about as much remains of this as of the delicately opalescent body of a jellyfish when one lifts it out of the water and lays it on the sand. The rationality of the uninspired will make the teachings of the inspired crumble into dust, contradiction, and nonsense, and yet one has no right to call them frail and unviable unless one would also call an elephant too frail to survive in an airless environment unsuited to its needs. It would be regrettable if these descriptions were to evoke an impression of mystery, or of a kind of music in which harp notes and sighing glissandi predominate. The opposite is the case, and the underlying problem presented itself to Ulrich not at all intuitively but quite soberly, in the following form: A man who wants the truth becomes a scholar; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?”

—Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

Yes, Robert — what should we essayists, we who are afflicted with amor intellectualis and poetry, do? It reminds me of the time Harvard sent me a letter in grad school advising me to give up poetry and be monogamous with scholarship. I find myself unable to give up scholarship or poetry, even though I consider poetry to be the higher form of knowledge. The one time I tried to be solely a Poet I failed miserably (dropped out of a poetry MFA) and went running into the arms of Scholarship, where I found great solace in the fact that scholars are informed and not merely whimsical about the workings of the world.

If only I could attach this passage to my tenure file to defend against the charge of having an output that is “incoherent,” though I doubt such self-justifications would pass muster with my dean, who suggested I consider leaving the poetry out of my file all together.

Right now, I am ripping fear's skin off and looking right into its eyes and saying "You can't kill me". I must keep saying that it can't kill me...so that...it can't kill me.

-bachul junejo