À la recherche de recherches perdues*

Maria is back from her annual stretch in China and I shall see her next week. She is now a three-book academic, no mean feat in her field and at her young age (well, she’s older than me, but still). As if tweaked by her presence, one suburb over, my unconscious has started conjuring for me dreams so vivid I don’t know they’re illusions. In these dreams, I am in China: Beijing, Xian, Xuzhou, following my texts.

The China research project I have tentatively initiated will be slow to bear fruit, and rightly so, but things would speed up a little if I could get myself to Beijing for two or three weeks in the northern autumn. For it to progress through its middle stages, I need more language, reading skills and on-the-ground experience than I at present have. I can save the fare in that time but will need to find funding to cover my on-the-ground costs. To trying to find this I am both looking and not looking forward.

Such half-made plans feel to me at present my personal version of the fallacy of trying to have it all. I keep thinking I have quit worrying the unfinished threads that still dangle from my doctoral research, but I haven’t. As much as I prefer working in an interdisciplinary environment, free from the stresses of PBRF requirements, my job well done if students are getting through to undergraduate study proper, I can’t leave my old work permanently alone. At the same time, the fact that I’m not a research academic means that, compared with Maria, whose productivity is fuelled by an impressive singularity of mind which I know I don’t possess, I may as well be jogging underwater and calling it research.

These tensions don’t bother me like they used to, however, and, based on past experience, I ought to have faith in myself that I will get to the mainland yet. Unlike previous abortive attempts to continue my doctoral research, this time I have no illusions about my place in the academy. There might be more personal satisfaction from work done on the down-low, on my own, than trying to form tenuous attachments to other people’s projects. And before all this I have the pleasure of listening to Maria talk about her own work and family, each of which I hope flowers apace.

*By all means correct or confirm the agreement my grammar here.

Tagged as: China, friends, funding, research