No gain...

Late last week on my Facebook page:

Kim is writing a really bad paper on Foucault.
9:36pm

Kim is disheartened at how really, really bad his Foucault paper is. Really. It's shit.
12:07am

John wrote
at 12:15am
Do you need help with kooky Foucky?

Kim wrote
at 10:46am
I don't need help with the Foucster - I've forgotten how to write! I haven't written an essay since 1999, and getting the right words onto the page is bloody painful. I'd rather have a bone marrow biopsy.

In a huge, possibly fatal, blow to my confidence (not really) I have discovered that writing is painful. Like love, it hurts. Only with a pen (or keyboard, or whatever.)

Part of the problem is because I had fallen out of the habit of engaging with complex texts. Part of it is because I don’t start writing until I finish reading. Part of it is because I take notes in point form instead of full sentences. Part of it is because I record ideas the way they’re stored in my brain, instead of converting them to expressive language. Part of it is because I don’t have mastery of my material. Part of it is because I get stuck on the detail – agonising over “compare with” versus “compare to” instead of writing one of them, either of them, and quickly getting on with the rest of the paragraph. Part of it is because I keep hacking away at the tricky bit instead of rewriting the whole section from the beginning.

But mostly it is because, for some reason, I have a physical or emotional response to the act of writing. Sometimes it really hurts when I type something – it’s as if the change on the screen hits me in the head and shakes me. I like that analogy – some parts of my Foucault paper needed so much work I felt like I’d been “rope-a-doped” (see Ali v. Foreman, Kinshasa 1974*).

It’s probably the ADHD when the medication isn’t working. But I don’t have the choice to stop writing when it happens. Maybe I should just see it as a challenge, like hitting the wall during exercise, and work through it.

Perhaps it’s what Barthes meant by the “text of bliss”:

the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), ... brings to a crisis [the reader's] relation with language. (The Pleasure of the Text)**

Cool – I mention Ali and Barthes in the same piece. I can write like Norman Mailer!

* That’s a fight, not a legal citation. Unfortunately it took me longer than eight to get Foucault down on the canvas.
** Then again, perhaps it's not.