Underwater

The problem I have most as a graduate student is maintaining critical distance from the material. This is not to say that I am not "critical" of the things I read or hear in class--I certainly am--but rather that I have trouble approaching them analytically, placing them in context, making comparisons between them and other things I have seen and read. I have no perspective--or, rather, my perspective is about two inches away from the text.

When I read, I pore over the words that are in front of me, picking them up, examining them, poking them, reciting them in my head and sometimes out loud, trying to make them reveal their secrets. It doesn't matter whether what I'm reading is literature, theory, criticism, or something else--I work sequentially, my consciousness located and fixed as much as possible in each successive moment of the text. This is McLuhan's "one-thing-at-a-time-ness" of visual space: my mind is focused on one thing, and one thing only: what is it saying? What does this particular sentence, this one right here that I am looking at and repeating in my head, say? I am able to situate sentences within paragraphs, and to a more limited extent I am able to situate paragraphs within pages and chapters, but that is about all. I have a hard time even thinking about how the words I'm reading relate to the rest of the book, let alone to any kind of larger context, such as my own interests and ideas, other things I have read and experienced, the class for which the reading has been assigned, the world.

The same goes for class discussions: I am always focused on the statement (or question or suggestion or whatever kind of speech act) that the current speaker is making. I rarely have a sense of the whole conversation, let alone the work of the entire semester. I have difficulty making connections between each speech act and the reading, or between the various readings that have been assigned. I can't remember relevant examples, counter-examples, theories, historical facts, cultural artifacts--things to say. I have lately taken to transcribing discussions that I realize I don't understand as they're occurring, so that I can look at them later.

This all impacts me greatly as a teacher, too. I look back at my class plans and notice not only that I didn't follow them at all ("no battle plan survives contact with the enemy" and all that), but also that what they contain is what is most lacking in the class: perspective, a theoretical framework for the material, historical background, connections between things I assigned. I look back now at my plan for the first day and the thoughts I had about the class when planning it over the summer, and I see the biggest flaw in the way I actually taught the class: I was unable to maintain a consistent lesson, and unable to say much that wasn't in the readings.

Naturally, this affects me in the rest of my life, too. I think this is why when I remember specifics of history that I learned once and then forgot (the formation of nation-states in early modern Europe, the growth of Manhattan, whatever) it strikes me like a bucket of cold water when I'm sleeping. Exactly like that. It is an experience like coming back to the world from a prolonged sleep. Oh, yeah! That's the world . . .