And again

[via Blind Pony Books]

That time of year --Sonnet 73 underlines my thoughts these days. Unseasonably warm perhaps, but there are yellow leaves, or none, or few.

There are many changes to report, but really not changes, only settlings.

I am married.
I am back on the east coast.
I am in school still -- PhD this time.

These are the outward changes, but really, it is all connected.

I am here again because I need to remember another mode of thinking, another mode of reading, another mode of writing.

I am writing papers and I always find myself hovering back along these pages, trying to recall a thought. Inevitably I grasp at the husk of a thought, just the dead shell which remains, but it is a sign of what once was and I try to find my way back.

This is hard -- finding the way back. There is something fundamentally different about approaching a text or a problem or a question, with the interest of saying something critical, rigorous, and defensible. Before -- in the naive mode (or whatever I should call it) -- I would read, but it would be immersion, it would be full feeling-with. And the move to understand occurred when there was a snag in the understanding -- something incomplete, something foreign, something that challenged. So the process was organic -- read and then understand as it came. That's what I will try to find.

Something to remember: This requires more confidence than it seems. It is always easier to color within the lines, to play by the rules, to answer someone else's question, solve someone else's problem. But this is where something can be tried out, confronted, invented.