can someone please find my enthusiasm?

The problem with writing a PhD thesis is the same problem one has with writing anything: sometimes your enthusiasm or inspiration or muse-like-angel-creature for the project decides to pack up and leave, and you’re left straggling after it, desperately trying to bribe it with treats to hang around a little longer; some morsel or promise of revealing it to the world as the thing that drove you. In other words, you promise it a kind of fame, an acknowledgment of its existence.

However, it mostly just looks at you curiously, as if it doesn’t know you anymore—doesn’t want to know you anymore—and potters gently off. Where? I couldn’t tell you, and if you know, could you please tell me so I can go and fetch it back. I suspect you can find it in the vast mental space beyond our own heads that we can never hope to fully grasp—like the little differences between you and me. It perches there, outside of reach and suddenly invisible to your needs, contemplating nothing but what you want to know and express, holding, or jealously guarding, all this beautiful information for itself.

            This abandonment, far from being sudden, is a curious, utterly self-aware process of deflation. It is a process I have been undergoing in the last couple of weeks as I grapple with trying to produce some vital, theory-driven chapters that had been clear in my head a week or two ago, but have now become this convoluted mess of facts and contradictions, quotes and misquotes, my opinions and others. My enthusiasm used to sort out all the riff from the raff for me; making clear what I needed and what I didn’t; making the process of reading my notes enticing, rather than the utter bore against which all other bores are compared. And my inspiration made writing it all a constant process of illumination, as if with every word I learned something new about my topic—and thus myself and my intellect—I didn’t even know was present.

            Despite the dryness of an English Literature PhD thesis, the presence of this muse figure made the whole thing significantly more interesting and alluring than it otherwise is in the steady, somewhat stately, course of its mostly sterile creation.

            I’m curious now as to how it ever actually entered my head. How did I reach out into space, past the poetry I am supposed to be analysing and the words I am writing, and find something there that helped me locate the aspect in my work that kept my interest balanced delicately on this peak from where I could see the process of my writing as a means of expressing something that I wanted to express; that was important enough to warrant expression?

            Writing is work. This is certain. You can get lucky occasionally: a moment grabs hold and, such is the opportune appearance of this moment, it occurs in close proximity to a notebook or a computer or a typewriter for it to be divulged into and onto. From here, however, you actually have to work the essential idea or image or quote or whatever into something broader than its momentary flash. This is the work of writing: to hold tightly onto this inspiration after its startling materialisation. Alternatively—and this is the more likely establishment of this inspiration—you must entice it out through the repetition of you just being present and writing in spite of its lack: act like you don’t care and in its need to be loved, be expressed and assume the position of the raison d’être of creation, it’ll come to attention. This is also the work of writing.

            Yet, when you look for it too hard, desire it too much, try to coerce it into some kind of authorial submission, it maintains its opacity and distance, and you are left in the position I currently find myself in: wondering what the hell you are actually doing and what, in the end, it all means. There are words there, but they exist in this strange space lacking the kind of certain structure that we, as conscious humans, need to compile the world into something understandable. It’s a lot like human relationships in this way, I guess: the more desperate you become, the more obvious it is that you are not ready for it or another. This, of course, does not mean I’m not continuing to try and find it, only that it obviously senses my need and probably knows I am not ready at the moment for its graceful, life-affirming presence.

            So instead of working on my thesis, I write this instead, which is imbued with a sense of inspiration and, hence, is much easier to provoke into being.

            All the same, if anyone does see my enthusiasm or inspiration or whatever other ethereal thing that kept me focused day-to-day on my work, could you please promptly contact me with its exact location—as far as I know, it doesn’t bite, but what it has learned in the wide world, separate from me, could make this past truth a falsity—or at least tell it that I miss it and I forgive it and it will be welcomed back with open arms and we can get back to making sense of whatever it is that I am writing about.