Octavia The Living Thesis

[Eustacio Gadit]

Earlier this week, I was talking to a friend who spent a number of years in Italy, learning to carve and sculpt stone. He\u2019d originally traveled there for a job teaching English, but then enrolled in a fine arts program and decided to stay. How did living there change you? I wanted to know.

He thought for some time. \u201CI left with an appreciation a sacred care around time and food. Italians have a strong sense of working to live, and living fully,\u201D he said. \u201CIt\u2019s a sensual culture, with a romance for all things beautiful, almost to the point of corniness to an American sensibility. Italians find space for irreverence.\u201D

Irreverence sounds just lovely while living in a picturesque villa off the Amalfi Coast. Me? I live in Central fucking Harlem. I work a 60 hour week on top of a full graduate course load and three pets who aren\u2019t about to start vacuuming themselves. All week I pinball between Queens, Harlem, and Lower Manhattan, inhaling tuna salads while I pull off of the FDR Expressway. Time is short. As I stared down a mountain of day-jobbing, writing, and lesson planning I thought: I don\u2019t have time for romance, buddy.

Midweek, my neighbor texted; she\u2019d defended her dissertation:

Come out for a celebratory dinner on Friday night?

Then my friend Jeanie reached out:

Saturday hike in New Jersey?

And then my running buddy:

Sunday morning jog and donuts?

I hesitated. In martyrdom workerville, weekends are sacred. I\u2019m in class or at my day for twelve hours Monday through Thursday, and I\u2019d blocked off my whole weekend, intending to do nothing but work. Then, for whatever reason, I lit that plan on fire. I strapped on a pair of heels and a silk summer dress and rode the train to the West Village to toast my neighbor\u2019s Ph.D. over club soda and charcuterie. Jeanie and I picnicked in Harriman State Park, dipping our fingertips in the cool lake water while my pup, Casino, catapulted herself into a nearby stream.

The work didn\u2019t go anywhere\u2014I paid the price for it Tuesday night, tweaking slides until 1 a.m., knowing full well my alarm would still come for me at 6. I hobbled my way through much of this week, sleepy but full.

I am nowhere near the point at which my life holds balance. It is totally out of whack. It will continue to be for some time\u2014and I can live with that. But I cannot live without irreverence, if even in small moments.

I got through my first two weeks of teaching, made progress in my writing. And that\u2019s great. But what stays with me were the tiny islands of decadence: Pausing before I dashed out the door to lather lotion on my freshly-shaven legs. Swinging into the corner store and nabbing a bouquet of bodega daisies for my neighbor. Standing at the Northeast corner of Central Park, sweaty as hell, and inhaling a mango chili donut.

The capitalist machinery tells us we are our jobs. Our apartments. Our business. That this is how we extract significance. I spent much of my ten years on the road believing, on some level, that I was not worthwhile unless I was impressive. At the cost of my health, my friendships. I\u2019m writing this as a way to remember, to try to do things a little bit different now.

I have more work today. But first, I wanted to write you. Tomorrow I\u2019ll get back to the thesis, and then I\u2019ll steal time for a bad movie, a late-night date. Because for all our striving, what I am learning is that to be with good people\u2014and co-create that irreverence\u2014is what makes all the work worthwhile.

Sometimes, we forget. And then sculptors remind us. Poetry reminds us.

You can\u2019t always prevent chaos, and you certainly can\u2019t stop change. But you can work from within it. So how will you do that?

How will you create paradise amidst chaos?

Martin Delrio is a name that most scholars would not recognize. In fact, if you search him up on Google Books, there seem to be only two books published on Delrio in the last two decades. Delrio was a Spanish-Dutch Jesuit scholar, traveler, polemicist, classicist, theologian, humanist, politician, and demonologist who lived from 1551-1608. Current research on Delrio focuses on his texts about demonology, witchcraft, and magic. With the help of the Eddings Grant, I would like to contribute to the presently minimal scholarship on Delrio by researching and partially translating his biblical commentaries, on which there is no published English translation or thorough research. I would also like to visit The Sabbe Library at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven to enrich my understanding of Catholic exegesis during the early modern period.

Ultimately, my time in Dublin will allow me to integrate my creative and critical writing skills and strengthen my relationship with Joyce, a crucial figure in modernist literature whose work I want to study further during my senior year and focus upon for my thesis. My visit could help me lay an important foundation for the research into modernist and Joycean literature, which I hope to conduct in the future here at Reed and during my time after graduation.

The ultimate goal of this project is to submit the completed article to an academic journal. Jay Dickson has as well agreed to assist me in the completion of this goal, both in the process of revising the essay and in the mechanics of finding journals where it might be published. I estimate that the entire process will take the majority of the summer; grant money, besides purchasing books, would be used to support myself as I live in Portland this summer.

Traversing the paths the six primary characters take over the course of Mrs. Dalloway, I will map each respective journey geographically, while creatively and critically responding to passages that coincide with various stages of the voyage, culminated in a final art piece. This piece will integrate various interpretations of mapping, paths, and spatiality, occupying a liminal space between cartography, concept mapping, and visual art. Interrogating space, the piece itself will formally explore spatiality. My responses, reflections, and photography will connect to my geographical map spatially and conceptually, so that layered onto the map is an additional mind map. Further layering will occur in different methods of mapping; this process will be informed by different cartographical techniques and styles. By combining literature, criticism, history, geography, and visual art, I will create a multivalent, interdisciplinary method of study that will allow me to connect my scholarly endeavors to my experiences as a traveler, thinker, and artist.

My proposed project is a series of fictional stories which will de/reconstruct the various ways we narrativize psycho-somatic experiences that are often cast as non-normative, divergent, or other. Examples of these include depressive, hallucinatory, menstrual, neurologically atypical, or synesthetic subjectivities. In considering these experiences, I will focus less on the particular psychology of an individual and more on spaces and societies that could potentially be built around these alternate presumptions of experience. The writing will interrogate and subvert current centralized notions of living and will seek to construct alternate/proximate realities, familiarizing alterities in worlds that presuppose other forms of experience as normative. In this way, the stories will also necessarily seek to understand how relationships, families, local and national institutions, art, literature, and other aspects of life might be different under alternative sets of experiential presumptions.

I first conceived of this project while flipping through a publication titled The Pill Book, an index of every pill prescribed by physicians. The book, which includes a small photograph and description of every pill, made me wonder which kinds of experiences these medications are supporting, implicitly or explicitly, and which they are 'curing.' What is the underlying message of this prescribing, and this will to be altered/fixed? I didn't ask this question about every pill, and believe in the benefits of many of them, but I did wonder about the politics and assumptions of pills like Viagra, Xanax, the abundance of female birth control pills, and many of the anti-depressive medications. Choosing to begin medication is a complex process for any individual and this complexity is only furthered by the economic incentive of pharmaceutical companies, preconceived notions of sickness, and representations or expectations tied to medication. Perhaps, for instance, there is a way in which the depressive symptoms of malaise and body aches, and the difficulty that these symptoms pose towards being a 'productive' member of society, are inherently anti-Capitalist, and that this has contributed strongly to both the stigmatization of depression and its subsequent narrativization. Or maybe the term 'disorder' to describe a mental state presumes something about our notions of organized and linear mental experiences. In pursuit of these interests, I will expand beyond mental illness categorizations into realms of other non-normative experiences, ones that aren't medicated but are nonetheless stigmatized in similar ways.

The stories will deal with some or all of the following questions, aimed at our national hegemonic reality: Why do we fear or make strange certain behaviors? What does the institutionalized nature of our health care system say about our understanding of these alternate subjectivities? What does our current experiential value system say about our relationship to death and dying? How would alternate conceptions of death affect our experience of living and vice versa? How do we conceive of or structure relationships between groups and their individual members based on the classifications we create?

In many ways I believe this project will be an investigation into, and often a resistance of, the assemblages of language we tend to use in describing these experiences. For instance, we often use the language of war to describe illness (ex: "battling cancer") or economic language for our relationships (ex: "investing in a relationship"). Further, I will take into consideration Susan Sontag's claim in her book Illness as Metaphor, that "illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness ... is one purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking." In order to avoid romanticizing and trivializing these subjectivities, the stories will seek other language that rejects the simplistic metaphors to which Sontag refers, in order to devise worlds built to support these 'atypical' psycho-somatic experiences.

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