Extinction Studies at Boggle Hole

 

Last week was the inaugural field trip of the Leverhulme Extinction Studies Doctoral Training Program at Leeds. Students and supervisors headed to Boggle Hole, a beautiful cove just south of Robin Hood's Bay on the Yorkshire coast.

Day 22: Biological substances (success at last!)

With massive relief I can report that Chapter 7 has been defeated. I slept on it, and conferred with my wonderful ex-student, Dr Will Morgan, and I've found my way to a conclusion I'm happy with. Now I need readers!

The chapter explores the following question: Do concepts of Biological Individuality provide identity conditions for the objects they apply to, or are they defined by 'mere' properties?

Day 18: Failure?

Reader, this is the trouble with public commitment devices.....they can be embarrassing. I was so determined to finish this chapter that i've worked a crazy number of hours these last few days. It wasn't quite an all-nighter last night (i'm too old for that) but the typing stopped at midnight and started back up at 8am today.

The truth is I've *nearly* finished it. Maybe. I've got about 8 thousand words i'm happy with. Ish. But it's that eleventh hour where its traditional for me to get stuck. To oscillate between thinking it's about done, if i only i scale down its framing a bit. and thinking i've hit a fundamental wall and worked out precisely why it was all a pointless rabbit hole.

Is it just me that finds it impossible to measure or predict the pace of completion of my work? I feel like it must be the same with sculptors. You don't start the work when you pick up the chisel. before that you have to have spent hours thinking, looking at other sculptures, having ideas, discarding them, looking for materials, discarding them. The point where the book proposal has been sent off - that's when you find yourself standing in front of the block of marble, chisel in hand. There is no turning back now. You paid for the stone. You  planned out what you're going to do to it. but did you?

Are you half way through the sculpture when half the amount of marble has been removed? Surely not. and surely no two sculptors proceed in the same way. Probably each carving is different.  I often start hacking at the rock without having fully decided what i'm planning to make. Probably some sculptures are the same. You wait to see what emerges from the stone, somehow. 

This morning i'd have said my book chapter was at the point where i've done all the big cuts. I've worked out where the head is going to be, the details of the posture are fixed, the angles, the scale is all there. It's too late to change course - to make a dog instead of a woman, or to start again with different stone. That's most of the way there for me. All that comes after that is bits of polishing. The big decisions have all been sorted out. Some artists would leave it at that, and enjoy the roughcut, impressionistic effect. I may even have submitted such roughcuts to journals at times, hoping that someone else would appreciate the simple rugged beauty of an idea in its virgin, unpolished state (ha!)

But it's never too late to have a crisis of confidence. Is the head too small? Shall i just finish the rest and leave it headless? Or do i need to start over?

The truth is i'm stuck, and its the sort of stuck that only gets resolved when you put the chisel down and go away for a bit. Think about something else. Get a second opinion.

Reader, I didn't finish the chapter.  I'm sorry. But I will.