Sabbatical 2

Cover image from Jillian Tamaki’s excellent graphic novel, BOUNDLESS.

I end my second week of my sabbatical with a further eight thousand words of THE BIG RESEARCH AND WRITING PROJECT committed to paper (or at least to the screen) and a real sense of momentum on the work. What’s nice is seeing it go in completely different directions than I had anticipated and feeling the joy of discovery alongside the frustration of trying to get the fragments of what’s inside my head into some sort of coherent shape. The reading is doing what it’s supposed to do and leading me to new and interesting places. My central hypothesis remains the primary focus, and my overall inquiry unchanged, but there are unexpected twists and turns along the way, detours and outposts, and the very question of structure - what comes first, what comes next - is itself an adventure that requires thinking and rethinking and influences the direction of the argument’s travel.

At the same time though, I continue to struggle with self-doubt. Why am I doing this? Who am I writing this for? What’s the point? At least when I did my PhD, I knew that my supervisor at the very minimum would be an audience. My viva panel. Maybe a bored administrator doing the binding and taking a peek? And there were the reading groups, the seminars, where unfinished ideas could be shared, discussed and improved. And when it was all said and done, even if it sat for the rest of its life gathering dust in a drawer (instead of eventually forming the basis for the excellent book - Authentic Democracy), at least I would have a qualification to show for it. A PhD. The transformation from Mr to Dr. Here, with no one telling me to do the work except myself, no forum for feedback, and no guaranteed end-game, it is always possible the only audience is me - and I already know what I am writing. If no one reads it, what was the point? Sure - I enjoy it, and it’s helping to clarify and understand more fully some of the ideas rattling around in my head. The point, maybe, is simply doing the work itself. Self-satisfaction and nothing more. But to do so, and nothing else, is clearly a privilege and I’m not entirely sure why I deserve that privilege. Just because when the rest of my generation were spending their money on children and my wife and I decided we didn’t want any? The money we would have spent on nappies and nurseries helping us pay the bills during this period of self-indulgence? It’s lovely to have it - but am I taking the piss? There is also the fact that the topic area - philosophy of education and political philosophy - is specifically about the real world. I write not merely to explain, although that is part of what I’m doing, but to identify problems in that real world that I believe should be changed. Problems with prisons, policing, and schools. If no one reads what I end up writing, then change will never happen. But then again, nor is there any guarantee of it happening even if they do. It’s been two years since my book on anarchism was published - has a drift towards anarchism been the result? Has anyone even read it and had it change their mind? Nor do I even know for sure yet what it is I am advocating to be changed, as that’s for the final chapter when the rest of the research is done and the argument made about what exactly is wrong. So at times, researching and writing my philosophy alone in my house all day, it does feel rather like maybe I’m insane. Like, just because the books and articles I’m using to support and test my claims are academic ones, how different am I really from some crackpot conspiracy theorist in their room putting wild ideas down on paper? I don’t feel like a crackpot conspiracy theorist, and my ideas have excellent scholarly backing. I’ve written books and academic articles and have a PhD that tells me I know what I’m doing. But isn’t that just what a conspiracy theorist would say too? Ultimately, we’re both just weird people with ideas sat alone in our rooms, barking at the world. I hope, at least, that my self-awareness of the potential for lunacy here is guard enough against it. That what keeps me in check is the knowledge that I must be kept in check?

I was heartened this morning listening to Lauren Ruth Ward being interviewed on Shawna Potter from War on Women’s ‘But Her Lyrics’ podcast when she talked about becoming a musician full-time before she’d ever actually recorded anything and how she felt mad telling people what she did now when it didn’t quite feel real to her. She’d lost a bit of her identity and self-assurance without a real job that could be understood by people, but persevered with her crazy dreams to make music and the dreams became reality. I need to remind myself of that when I feel like a lunatic working on my research in my study: I am writing, I am a writer. I am doing philosophy, I am a philosopher. And it’s OK to believe in yourself even if it’s not something common that everyone can wrap their head around.

What all the self-doubt means though, is that I start the day very motivated and positive, do a bunch of good work before lunch, but then spend the late hours of the afternoon suddenly looking around at myself - books and notes strewn about everywhere - and going: why am I allowed to be doing this while everyone else is at work? To just sit around thinking and theorising all day - doing philosophy just to do philosophy? It’s lovely - but with no maintenance or research grant, no book deal, no deadline, and only savings by which to fund it, how can it be real life?

I believe this might be what they call Stockholm Syndrome: I’ve come to love and depend up the captor that is our oppressive economic system. I’ve internalised its logic of external reward and motivation and grown suspicious of intrinsic, internal drive.

Or maybe, in freedom, I am realising what is missed within the constraints?

I think often of my improv comedy background. Why do we teach rules when doing improv that shut down certain approaches to offers in scenes? Why do we do things like ask audiences for suggestions that lock us into certain choices against our will? Because if all we did on stage was have absolute freedom - we could do anything - the options of what we could do become so great they lead to inaction. By setting parameters and goals, the choices become manageable and the scenes start to flow. The rules and parameters can change, and they can be broken, but they are imposed - by agreement - to help.

Choosing to spend this time working on THE BIG RESEARCH AND WRITING PROJECT is one such goal I have set, which shapes out some purpose to the empty days. This blog is another. Philosophy Unleashed each week too. Even making lunch at a certain time or doing laundry on a certain day - it all adds up to make routine and order out of the infinity of possibilities that come from having nothing specific to do.

It’s nice setting my own constraints and goals. A privilege. But sometimes it’s fun to ask the audience too. Find yourself having to do something random, that you wouldn’t have chosen to do for yourself.

Being honest, the plan when I quit my old job in January wasn’t really a full-time life, living off savings and doing nothing but my own research and writing. I am calling this time a ‘sabbatical’ and not ‘retirement’ because the intention remains that it will eventually come to an end in paid employment somewhere. Whether that is an unlikely job in academia, or the more likely return to a secondary school classroom. It is a lovely break from the norm after over a decade on the same treadmill, but as nice as total freedom is, the more I experience it the more I become eager to teach again soon.

Turns out, as expected, I miss it.

At the end of last week a former student passed a message onto me through one of his current teachers, thanking me for the help I gave them last year. For giving them ‘hope when I couldn’t see any’. What other job allows you to do that? And so frequently. It is a genuinely humbling thing to think about the several students over the years who very well might have done something incredibly stupid to themselves had I, or one of my colleagues, not been there for them to talk to and give them some hope. And then there’s the academic help - guiding a student to see something just differently enough that it unlocks an ability in themselves they didn’t yet realise that they had. This week I was lucky enough to be able to help another student whose school got in touch with me about their UCAS application, because they’ve been reading my book and want to speak about anarchism in their personal statement. It was great being able to do that and hopefully help the student out on their way to university. Having had an entire form of people to help with that task every year since I started teaching, it is a genuine loss this September to not be able to help people on that journey. Next week I’m giving a talk to students at a school about anarchism and I’m really looking forward to it. Indulging in my own research is great, but I miss the back and forth of the classroom. Dialogue instead of monologue. Planning the talk has even made me misty-eyed for planning lessons, believe it or not! When I read in the news that French film director, Jean-Luc Godard died this week by assisted suicide in Switzerland, it was strange not to be updating some PowerPoint or resource about euthanasia and adding the example for a class discussion. And it sure would have been interesting to talk to students about how they were feeling about the death of the Queen, and the response of the British public, its government, and its broadcasters.

I’m still not sure why the BBC, for example, has deemed it disrespectful to the death of the Queen to broadcast the season finale of Canada’s Drag Race, but has persisted in screening things like EastEnders? If Channel Four can show us new episodes of Great British Bake Off and Grand Designs, why can’t we see who takes the Canadian crown? But I digress…

As I learn to live with the freedom and adjust to not being in the classroom, luckily jobs are appearing for the new year which are piquing my interest. This week I applied for one that would be perfect, in fact. That said, as this cartoon I drew when I saw the ad suggests, there’ll always be something and I’ll never be happy:

A true story. I haven’t dyed the hair yet, but I guess the dye is there for me if the job I applied for doesn’t pan out. And it should wash out by January if I get it.

There’s also the possibility of my doing some guest lecturing somewhere in October, which if it pans out will be very exciting. So I guess I have irons in real fires as well as the ones burning only in this weird little book-lined room where I sit thinking, reading, and writing, alone.

But it’s not all deep thoughts and philosophy. This week I also wrote a poem. One so good I decided to enter it into a competition. That means, sadly, that I can’t publish it here yet. Just like the other awesome poem I wrote over a year ago still in submission at a poetry place, waiting to be read. It’s frustrating not to share things immediately when the technology is there to do it, but I also get it. The poems are good. It would be nice if people got to read them.

I also played guitar for the first time in a while, as I’ve been battling a seemingly permanent sore throat since getting back from Scotland this summer. I’m fairly sure I’ve probably got vocal nodules from all the years of untrained punk rock belting out of songs - Rob Wright from NoMeansNo is, after all, one of my heroes - but am hoping its just vocal strain from more recent belting out of songs. We’ll see. All I know is a played a lot of songs and I can still speak today, so hopefully a good sign!

Speaking of music - here’s the playlist that’s been getting me through the week:

And in a beautiful moment of kismet after re-watching that MTV Alternative Nation show from the 90s about punk last week, my friend and fellow Academy Morticians co-conspirator who was influenced by the show with me back then happened to find on YouTube the big and influential first ever Green Day show we went to back then, in its entirety, from the London Astoria. We actually took an afternoon off school to go there. Our parents legitimately wrote to the Head and asked for us to have the afternoon off because music was important to us, Green Day were our favourite band, and it might be something we wanted to do for a career in the future - and we got permission to go. With parents like that is it any surprise I sit in this nutty room believing I could be anything I want to be?

Talking to him about the show, I was reminded of another huge influence to us both back then (he is the author, S R Masters, writer of awesome thrillers The Trial and The Killer You Know) - Clive Barker: The Art of Horror. We caught it one evening on some Sky channel and were hooked. I became a lifelong fan of Clive’s art, whether it be novels, short stories, movies or paintings, and we both learned the snippet of The Damnation Game the narrator recites off by heart for some reason.

So yeah. Nostalgia and newness. It’s crazy to think these odd little bits of culture we plugged into our brains all those years ago still have their impact today. Writing, creating, making music, thinking beyond the limits of imagination, whether in fiction or in political philosophies that dream of a better world. And what is this blog if not an instantiation of the classic Green Day lyric: ‘do you have the time to listen to me whine about nothing and everything all at once?’