As I sit here working on an article about narrative beginnings and the theatre, I am brought to mind about the way that we think about beginnings in our own lives. the the Poetics, Aristotle calls a beginning something like "an event that nothing necessarily precedes, but after which other events must follow," and narratologist A.D. Nuttall complicates this by suggesting that nothing can really be said to have nothing that precedes it, except maybe the beginning of the universe. He allows that births and first lines of books count as beginnings for most practical purposes. Edward Said prefers the more passive term "origin" to "beginning," marked as the latter is by a more organic building toward events and identities, rather than a cataclysmic moment of generation.
What this brief primer on narrative beginnings leads me to is to wonder about when my "new life" in Appalacchia begins. Can I say that it begins when I start teaching in August? when we move there in July? when we settle on our new home on Tuesday? Or did it begin when I accepted the job? or when I first visited the campus, or when I first met the faculty at MLA or when I applied for the job last fall, or perhaps when I started graduate school, or kindergarten, for that matter?
Obviously, "origins" are complicated, because they seek to create linear causality out of the much stickier miasma of daily life. But this beginning feels like it needs to be marked because of the changes I hope to import into it. Habits of mind, mostly, but also habits of daily life, or interaction, of being in the world. When do I start them?
Of course the answer is "now." I start trying to be mindful of the small things around me, the cat at my ankles, the sounds from the road outside, the taste of dark chocolate that lingers from my illicit breakfast, the antique stopwatch ticking away to my right (Ann's mom's stuff was appraised yesterday, and I am typing at the dining room table amidst books, candles, and jewelry).
My work, too, needs a new start in certain ways, or at least a re-boot. The dissertation conversion has stalled over the last two years as many of my energies were devoted to job seeking, twin-raising, and the wrong-footedness of not knowing whether Would need to "become" a rhet/comp scholar. and yet as I return to the discourses of literature and performance, it is not a clean return either: my thinking is inflected by the specifications of my new job, which enforce a greater attention to British performance than American, by my time spent in rhet/comp (I am seriously mulling over a writing up a conference abstract for a history of rhetoric conference in Boston this fall), and by the passing time: last night at the wordherders meet-up, I spoke with Claire Macdonald about how the critical moment of theory on Gender and performance seems to have passed, and how the next draft of the dissertation needs to historicize the 80s and 90s in a way that the previous draft didn't because it was in the present.
And so I return, when do I begin? Do I begin packing boxes, sorting clothes, shopping for funiture, throwing out magazines? Do I begin writing every day, blogging confessionally, sticking to the academic prose, reading for work?
Or this simply a matter of stopping, of not doing things I used to do: living in Maryland, surfing the web too much, pushing off academic work until "sometime later." The endings and the beginnings are too closely tied, and yet never sufficiently coincidental to make anything solid, clear, or obvious.