…or at any rate a couple of days. On Monday, I gave a paper in a research seminar. A shambolic, dog’s breakfast, Frankenstein’s monster of a paper. A paper so bloody awful that the only reason I’m still walking around in public is that it was on the other side of the country – you can be sure that I’m not planning to attend any national conferences in the near future. If they charged admission for such things, there would have been riots to demand refunds, and I am still half-expecting to be sued for malicious time-wasting and/or psychological abuse. The fact that I was still bought dinner afterwards is clear evidence for my hosts’ wonderful tolerance and sense of duty.
This godawfulness was, so to speak, over-determined. It’s been another stupidly busy term, and this month in particular has been hectic – hence the silence on this blog. So, wasn’t able to start doing any research for the paper until a week or so beforehand, and then only in short bursts, and because it was a new topic – tailored for the seminar theme, rather than something I was actually working on – I devoted a lot of this time to trying to get to grips with the existing scholarship, getting dragged down a succession of rabbit-holes in the hope of finding something that I could talk about, or at least grasp why everyone else was focused in these apparently pointless debates.
On top of a complete lack of anything original or even interesting to say, a week’s worth of insomnia, partly but not entirely caused by stressing about the paper, meant that I wasn’t even in a condition to bullshit persuasively, spinning the illusion of coherence and direction out of a few meta-theoretical questions and some random bits of reception, inventing an argument in the moment. It was enough of a struggle to ensure that one end of a sentence bore some relation to the other.
“What does Thucydides have to say about ‘sacred history’? Not a lot,” I began. “So we can all go down the pub now.” No one laughed. But I really should have stopped there.
And now? Suddenly everything has fallen into place. I know what I should have talked about, and how I should have framed the whole thing; I’ve had a couple of new ideas that put everything else into a different light. I still don’t have a huge amount to say about the specific topic of ‘Thucydides and sacred history’, but I do have lots of things to say about my key example, the plague episode – and thankfully I have the opportunity both to write this up for a volume I’ve been asked to contribute to on the discursive potential of epidemics, and I’m giving a paper with the same title in December so I have a chance to get it right, or at least less bad. I can start rebuilding my reputation, or at least a bit of self-belief.
What happened? Clearly a significant part of this was just a matter of time – that my brain was quietly working away on processing a load of new information, and once it had been assimilated then new ideas could start to emerge – encouraged by the fact that I spent the train ride back to London doing what I should have done before, simply re-reading the relevant bit of Thucydides’ narrative. It wasn’t that I needed to read one more thing and it would suddenly all make sense; I needed to stop reading, and let things sink in and brew for a while. Would coulda shoulda; if I had only started a few days earlier, and not spent Saturday cutting the overgrown hedge, I might have escaped making a fool of myself in public. Whereas now what I need is a time machine and a memory eraser, so I can go back and deliver the paper I should have delivered…
I appreciate you sharing these thoughts. It’s good for the rest of us (who have had some version of that experience) to hear.
L’esprit du chemin de fer…? Sorry. Sounds like a tough crowd, too. Coincidentally was re-reading the plague narrative (and, separately, reflecting on an unsuccessful talk of my own) this morning, so am particularly interested to see what you have to say about it.
Actually the crowd was fine – or any rate I’ve decided to interpret the very long series of “Have you thought about x?”, “Might it be useful to compare this with y?” etc as being genuinely constructive rather than “Dear gods, Morley, do you really not know anything?!?”