As I mentioned a couple of posts back, I have been doing a lot of writing lately. I have written an essay about the present perfect tense in Spanish, memory and nostalgia in a Nicaraguan play and the vision of female subjectivity in the poetry of Reina Maria Rodriguez. My fourth and final essay (that I’m working on right now) is about a novel called A Thousand Deaths Plus One (in Spanish, it’s called Mil y una muertes). I have enjoyed writing each of these essays for different reasons, but each time I have struggled their lack of relevance to the real world.
In the fall I posted something about why I study Spanish and the things I enjoyed about reading medieval literature. Some things that I learned in each class are related to the rest of the world but so many of them are not. When I was writing about female subjectivity, I tried to explain myself to one of my friends and it took me about ten minutes to get to the bottom of my essay topic, as what I was saying was so far into the land of literary theory and so far from reality. This made me a bit sad, as this essay was one of my favourites and because this poet had and has important and relevant things to say about herself, her country (Cuba) and life in general. I even felt that had my essay been written in English, it would have been intelligible to the average educated reader. Clearly I was mistaken.
This points to something that I think I will continue to struggle with: how to make my life and work relevant to what is going on in the world. If I continue to focus on writers who I believe are relevant but write in an overly academic way, only about five people will ever read me; on the other hand, if I write in an everyday language, I will not be advancing my academic career. Awareness of this problem is not good enough. I need to strive to communicate what I do and why I do it to others. (First, I might have to get a better grasp on what that really is…)
I understand the struggle to find some sort of ‘relevance’ for academic study. But the criteria for relevance should not lie in your ability or inability to communicate your ideas easily. Perhaps I am wrong but I have no doubt that my ventures into ‘theory’ are forming my worldview and my sense of reality. This often results in subtle shifts as opposed to pragmatic results. My imagination is broadened and so I am able to encounter reality in, hopefully, a more engaged and active fashion.
We should probably not stop struggling with this relationship but I would also not feel a sense of despair over it so long as your mind and spirit remain engaged in these pursuits.
There is no time limit to how long we must remain in complexity before some sense of clarity comes … if ever it does.