The boss battle on this one isn't even that hard.

Oh, dusty blog. Hello. Well -- I did say I was busy. I have a day job, 5 days a week, regular schedule, the whole incomprehensible thing, and it's only 30 hours a week instead of 40, but any late-stage PhD student will tell you, you can't have a normal job and write a serious dissertation. I'm trying, and what's happening as a result is that most the rest of my life has fallen to the side. I already hadn't really cooked in years, hadn't even done anything more complex than adding fresh vegetables to a boxed stir-fry kit, and now I'm even short of that. I manage to fry or scramble some eggs about once a month these days; otherwise it's coffee house snacks, cereal, yogurt, and microwavable convenience foods. Don't ask about laundry or dishes. Especially don't ask about laundry, if you have any decency in your soul at all.

I did get out on my porch to fill up my flowerpots (that was several mornings and several afternoons; I have a lot of pots) and my orchids are doing really well, but I haven't knitted a stitch in weeks. I continue to keep up with CSI in bursts; I wrote a few new poems this spring; I'm in a poetry band now, where a friend and I are doing these electronic-music treatments of recordings of me reading, and that's extremely cool; mostly, though, it's the dissertation and me every night and every weekend day and every weekend night.

It's going to be very hard when it's over with -- honestly. I turned in another chapter not quite a week ago, and told some people, and of course they want to congratulate me and want me to be accordingly celebratory, but my feeling was, as with any major project I've ever declared done and handed off, one of grief and loss. I love the writing; it's hard, it's tiring, but I do love it. The research and thinking and long chattery days of talking to myself that go into the writing, too. The last several years of my life have been genuinely dreadful, overall, beginning from about August 06, maybe earlier that summer, with no respite longer than my London trip last spring, but the hours I've spent researching, imagining, and creating this thing have been some of the best of my entire life.

I keep having the image of the stepping-stone puzzle from whichever Indiana Jones movie it is. The one with all the puzzles in the caves. (Oh, right, that one.) The floor has these tiles in it, and he has to step on the right ones or pieces of the floor just fall away beneath him. If I remember, he has to spell "Jesus" in Greek, which comes out "IESU" and not "JESU," and, inexplicably, the world-traveled, highly-accomplished archaeologist forgets his Greek alphabet and fucks that up on the first step, sending a bunch of tightly-fitted stone pillars crashing out from under him. It's like that: every step forward is a dangerous guess, and with every step, more of the floor falls away -- only there are no right or wrong tiles, it's just that every time I move ahead, I'm doing away with huge chunks of the ground beneath me, and eventually I'm going to hit that last tile and then I'll just be in free fall in the ancient pitch dark. That's how finishing my dissertation feels to me. You can't tell me you'd be able unequivocally to cheer yourself going through that.

Incidentally, I think my deepest psyche figures death as being in free-fall and life as flight. Lots of irony there, given the full set of meanings to "flight." Anyway. That's a poem or ten.

I told a friend about this, and about how uncomfortable it is to be congratulated on something that feels so much more like a loss than an achievement. Not that there's no enjoyment at all, but what I love is still what's in the chapter, not the fact that it's done. If people wanted to sit around and talk about what I've written, and I'd get to get star-eyed about how I'm making these points that count as major critical interventions in the field, and supporting them in all these excellent ways, that'd be marvelous. But the interest isn't in the insides of the thing, where I'm happy, but in its departure. The friend to whom I was lamenting all this (oh, boo hoo, I finished an enormous piece of writing, boo hoo, I'm so alone -- like that makes any sense -- sensible or not, though, it's how I feel) pointed out that he doesn't know many graduate students who have as positive a relationship to their work as I do. For most people, by the time they get something like this ready to hand off for review, it's laden with misery. It's been cut to ribbons by someone else or several someones; it's patched together in what they know is a thoroughly unfinished fashion but they don't know how to do it any better; the work was hard without being rewarding all along because they weren't rapturously into it like I am with my stuff. So on. When someone in that situation hands over a piece, it is in fact a tremendous relief, and they're hugely happy to get back to their life; quite the opposite for me, because the dissertation is the best part of my life, and the more of it I finish, the less of it I have here with me.

He's very right, and I think this is one of the biggest reasons I have so much trouble making friends in my field -- I can't have the neurotic conversations grad students have about how they can't work, which is a primary bonding activity for the vast majority of us. I can work. I can't do anything else most the time, but I can work. When I defend (October; date set to within a couple weeks), I'll no longer have the one thing I can do, hence grief. Honestly, there's nothing else in my life that's stable and positive. I have almost no relationship with my family. My finances are a ruin. I didn't land a professor job this past year, and while my office job is fine, and the people I work with are really cool, it's not a reason to keep going when I feel like I can't. There's poetry, the writing-it side, but that's so hard for me to give myself permission to do without any other (external) encouragement, and sans teaching/academic job, there's not much of that. I don't even really have friends; there's no one within hundreds of miles I can ask to coffee like that's a normal thing, and other than the guy doing the poetry band with me (who is also extremely cool, but very busy), there's no one I talk to at all outside work. I have these old-maidish hobbies, and people on the internet. I have heaps and heaps of thoughts no one cares about. Even more heaps of words no one has any reason to read. And I have my unhappiness, which does seem to be rather a constant for me, but it's one I prefer to keep at bay by putting other things between myself and it. That's it, though. So I lose the dissertation, I drop from purpose and structure and enjoyment into radically solitary, lightless free-fall.

The friend in this conversation with me gets all this, and fortunately he skips over the part I stop at, where you say, "uh, doesn't all this just mean you're extremely lame?" It does. A good poetry critic, maybe, but a very damn lame human being. He asked me if there were ways I could carry on the work after the defense, so the dissertation is a stage and not (really) a finished thing I have to leave behind. YES. Yes! If I do get a tenure-track position, publishing a book will be mandatory to get tenure, and generally people publish some worked-over version of their dissertations. If they get tenure-track positions. We hope I do. That's been the plan all along; I just hadn't been keeping it before me. Sections of the thing are circulating as articles and more will be within the next several months -- so it already continues to live, in some ways.

Even that is a little short, though. First, I learned in quite a cold-water sense this year that I am by no means guaranteed a tenure-track job, not even with an award-winning book of poems on a major university press, very good creative publications, and stellar recommendations. No one thought I'd come out without a job, but I have, and the consensus of all the grayer heads than mine whom I've consulted is that the market is just actually that tough. Frightening. So publication isn't my best hope for, well, hope, because scholarly publication is primarily meaningful via my academic CV. But there is this -- just a couple months ago, I discovered a strong throughline connecting all (all, really all) my work, the short version of which is that I want to turn from teleological approaches to literature to an ontological approach. Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, etc., come in with fundamental ideas about the purposes works of literature serve and then discover (or, necessarily, perhaps without acknowledging it, construct) the ways particular texts meet those purposes or don't. Perhaps because I'm a poet, perhaps because I'm perpetually running into problems because people expect me to be things I'm not and manhandle me as a result, I want instead to look at what gives rise to something like a poem, what its nature is, coming from that origin, and what its capabilities are then. I don't want to give texts purposes or presume they have them, although I still see them as having effects -- subtly, but importantly different. I want to look from what they are before articulating them into any systems. Apostate starts that project. It's the first bright section of the arc, the light that's describing this track. The whole thing is broader and deeper than poetry, much more than my career, which may in fact no longer exist in academia after my defense. Even without having to be a book, then, worst case scenario, the project doesn't have to die. It won't.

My friend said I ought to think of myself not as finishing the dissertation so much as potty-training it. This is stellar, first because I delight so in the ridiculous, and a dissertation in need of potty training is wonderfully ridiculous, second because it's accurate as a metaphor (they do kind of piss and shit all over themselves and scream for your attention at all hours til you're done with them), third because it's a metaphor at all, and finally because it gives me a way to recognize and even -- oh, look at that -- celebrate finishing things without having to put weight on their being gone. So. I'm potty-training my diss. We get to get her into big-girl panties in the fall, and believe me, we're all looking forward to that. See? That, I can get on board with.

As soon as we were having this conversation, the cave sequence in my head got a different ending: now, when I step off that last tile in the dark, I spring forward onto a new one, small, spotlighted, with just the slightest dark hint of more ground in front of it. It's a leap, but according to the video I make it, basically like Samus Aran or any other hero of your favorite platformer. (Don't tell me you don't have a favorite platformer. I can't even talk to you anymore if you don't. Mine was actually Faxanadu, but no one recognizes that one, and they do recognize Metroid, and Samus Aran is unbeatable as excellent gaming characters go. So there she is in my story.) Now -- my hand to god, this is the truth -- the feeling is that I'm going to run this out, tile to tile, taking little short jumps when I need to just as they fall away beneath my feet, and I'm gathering the speed to make the last adrenaline-charged jump across the chasm flawlessly. Classic move. No game should be without one.

I am going to beat this stage without even using an extra life. I know you're jealous -- I'm sorry. Skills, man. You got them or you don't and I have the carpal tunnel to prove I earned mine.

(PS, if any Prince of Persia game was your favorite platformer, I also can't talk to you anymore. Fucking horrible. You aren't even allowed to read my infrequently-updated blog if you like those games. Go back to Uwe Boll movies or oven-roasting catshit or whatever other unholy things you fill your days with.)