Anthropologist

So friends--
I made my decision,
signed the papers,
picked one longing over another, at least for a time.
I will be doing a PhD in social anthropology.

What does this mean? Well, one thing it means is that I'll stay on in Edinburgh for another year come September, learning to structure a long term ethnographic research project and freezing to death. Another thing it means is that I'll go to Mondulkiri in the Cambodian highlands for a year and a half and immerse myself in other people's lives and then try to translate that into writing. Which isn't that different a task from the tasks I set myself in my writing at the moment.

Not that it isn't different. It's really different. I need to learn to be logical, for one thing. As in, structure a logical argument. Analyze abstractions. Critique and be critiqued. Terrifying.

More concretely, it means that I am giving up this sort of writing for a season:
I swallowed the Nile to celebrate the day of my birth. Not all of it, of course. But enough, enough to carry the smell of papyrus and the churning of the dark blue water and the gaping yawn of the hippo and the quick stabbing thrust of the African darter that spears fish upon its beak in my belly for a long time hence. If I sway slightly when I walk; if my head rolls like a wave; if I open up my mouth and spew forth water instead of words; forgive me, for I have been baptized in churning white water and have forgotten my name. Ask the river gods of the Egyptians; the hippo-headed god; the crocodile god; ask the steel grey goliath heron standing motionless in the shallows, watching the whimsy of men. I woke the morning after to find three shallow gouges in my flesh where something or someone clawed my arm. I drank the Nile and the Nile drank some of my blood in return. I have been humbled by the power of her waters—I have remembered that I am but a mere mortal tumbling headlong in the vast and churning world.

for this sort:
According to Augee, one of the conditions of hypermodernity is that homogeneity and individuation occur simultaneously.

Is this some sort of Faustian bargain? I certainly hope not. I have been told that I cannot do both creative writing and academic writing at the same time. I hope to rebel. Just a bit. Just enough to build little straw houses of creative writing beside the great ivory tower I have agreed to help build for a season. Little straw houses to keep the wolves at bay. No huffing and puffing will blow my houses down; not if I have anything to say in the matter.

There is a time for everything, the writer of Ecclesiastes said. Why do I always yearn to have everything all at the same time? Greed, I guess.

In other news: I saw my first tufted ducks. Black with grey-blue bills and yellow eyes, otherworldly creatures. And the solitary herons, nesting in a tree and fighting with sea gulls. It's a wild world, praise be.