Idling On the Path

July 4th was when this blog last received any attention. Three and a half months ago. In terms of cyber-time, this equates to about five thousand years. A billion transnational kisses on facebook, a billion email handshakes. Online communities, whole civilisations, have risen and fallen several times over. The forces of entropy have turned my neat little scribble pad into a nightmare of neglect: dishes everywhere, toilet blocked, backyard overgrown, outdoor furniture incognito, all items wholly repossessed by the high grass. Time for some overdue autumnal maintenance.

After a much better summer than last year's no frills slumfest, I'm hitting the pitch black: exactly halfway through Cambridge. Light at neither end of the tunnel; just pure unadulterated tunnel. The received wisdom of PhD students everywhere prescribes one of two courses for the following year: deep 2nd year blues, or comfortable hitting of stride. Or strands of both. Speaking from one PhD year down, though, these possibilities feel like nothing new. The sense of narrative form you gain from conversations with peers and immediate elders has an air of futile clutching at normative shadows: a kind of attempt to introduce a comforting undergraduate progression of 1st to 2nd to 3rd year, pass, into what is really a frighteningly amorphous lump. One day I'm reading Derrida on Heidegger on animals; another I'm trying to make insightful comments in the margins of a student's essay on a text I read badly back in 1905. Does that go in the first year report? Where am I at? Where is that in relation to other wheres I could be? Where will I be? Where can I invent as a destination? Where is the dvd remote so I can forget about all this and watch the wire?

Perhaps it's just the way we all do things nowadays, but in some (slightly self-centralising) sense, the (humanities...ok, classics...ok, classical literature...ok, my own) PhD seems to be an exercise for the age. It's isolating, competitive, and most of all, scatter-brained. Not only do long tracts of time at an internet-ready computer encourage flitting coquettishly between worlds of stimulus, but the non-procrastinatory aspect is also unstable. One of the most common questions I'm asked is: classics? how do you ever say anything new? I stifle the answer I secretly harbour in my heart of hearts ('indeed, I suspect we don't say much at all, new or otherwise'), and usually dribble out some lame schtick about 'Classics and Theory' vel sim. But the answer I probably should give is something like 'interdisciplinarity'. Because I like to keep two steps ahead of the OED, which obviously isn't quite interdisciplinary enough to believe in the noun; but also because it's closer to the mark. Being a classicist involves - and whether this is unique to the discipline I'm not disciplined enough to say - a deep belief in the connectedness of all disciplines. You want to read that bit of poetry? Well, you damn well better get a handle on the historical context. You want to get a handle on historical context through a frame other than literature? Well, you damn well better get some skills in deciphering inscriptions, reading architecture, thumbing coins. Learn something about philosophy while you're at it - all your favourites were schooled in the basics. And of course you won't be able to get your head around the otherness without doing some religion. Hop to it young squire. Don't come back until you've mastered everything.

The ever ramifying trees of knowledge you feel you need to climb as a classicist are daunting, unclimbably so. But there is something enabling about an undisciplined discipline, an area of study that has little respect for its own boundaries. The zeitgeist is not, of course, unique to classics; I could pick a PhD student, any student, and I'm sure they could tell me they work at 'the intersection of x and y'. Through the marriage of seeming incompatibles a new idea baby is born (more often than not aborted, more often than that hideously deformed). Fine. But I still feel as if there is something wonderfully, maniacally cross-fertilising about the subject. Not that it happens much, but I feel the potential that I could read a line of Goethe and shed some mind-light on that fragment of Furius Bibaculus. I could read some philosophy of time on top of Ausonius and see what came out. I could read some quantum physics, not understand any, and invite a slap from the stern fat mother in my head: 'What do you think you're doing? Get back in your corner, boy!' You get the idea.

So classics, my classics, is a subject of hyperlinks; you wouldn't think it, no, but a subject with the illimitable sideshadows of an internet cast across its wriggling Promethean form. Perhaps whenever I say classics now, I have to mean '1st year PhD classics' - for I've had what the euphemists might call an 'exploratory reading year'. I haven't kept off the academic grass. I've enjoyed the transgressions immensely. But in the last few weeks, I've tried to reimpose some kind of order - and it hasn't been pretty. I thought that wide reading would pump up my sickly horizons, give me a thousand new methodologies to work with, revolutionise the reading of poetry. But the coup never came. My mind is still my mind, still doing those things it does, silly interpretative pivots, overinterpretation of puny puns, jimmying loose intratextual connections out into the open. Marching around the hermeneutic circle, the only thing changed being my hung-headed embarassment that I'm still marching it. Trying to dip myself into the text and see patterns in the splotches that survive. Playing the game I ultimately like to play: writing about words I don't quite understand.

The interdisciplinary engine stalls under the stress of production. I convinced myself I could go anywhere. But, stripped back to true colours, facing the monumental task of sorting and synthesis, I betray myself: I was a classicist all along. Off the grass and back onto the path: plodding, idling towards that unimportant box marked 'PhDs here'. One box among many others like it. Interchangeability, a comfort like no other.