2002-07-10 - 8:57 p.m.
This Monday morning my body was still but my mind was not as I took in the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, actually two enormous steel suspension bridges, gently rotated as I drove up the angled approach, while the sun hung just above them in the sky through the haze. The time was 6:50 a.m., and I had been on the road for almost an hour, driving out to the Eastern Shore. When I arrived at 7:15, I got bitched at by the other members of the field school for my tardiness.
As I said during the discussion that day when Foucault was invoked, "If people don't accept something as legitimate, nothing you can do could be worth the effort to enforce it; if people accept something as legitimate, then they will police themselves." As horrifying as it is to me to wake up at 5:10 a.m. every day to drive over an hour -- and the ass. director didn't really care that I was late that day, or any other day -- somehow 7 a.m. got legitimized.
I'm sure weather to be saddened or relived that the end of the field school is on us. As I write this, only one day of excavations are left, as the last day we'll entertain the St. Mary's City Field School kids in Annapolis.
While some people will still be excavating for the first part of the day, my assignment will be to finalize preparations for the presentation of the converging and diverging lines in the Paca garden.
Explanation: In earlier entries, I mentioned that I had come to this field school not out of a desire to do archaeology, God help me, but because I believe in the postmodern Marxist theory espoused by the director, Dr. Leone. Early in the field school, he noticed some changes in the garden and it inspired him to come up with a project to put black plastic trapezoids on the garden surface to make converging lines. His argument is that the 18th bourgeoise elites used converging and diverging lines and terracing in the garden to naturalize their position in the stratified social order. Right.
That has about nothing to do with my thesis, which is about (among other things) the lights of the Ca d'Zan becoming across to Longboat Key like Gatsby's house to East Egg--for Ringling was not just seeking class, he was creating a new social order in Sarasota, positioning it in 1920s America, and positioning himself on top of it--with his tower, illuminated when he and Mable were in residence, beaming across to his developments at Longboat Key, reminding its residence what and who Sarasota is about. I'm not explaining it very well, I don't think.
Anyway, Leone tapped me for this project, and after deploying surveyors' equipment in the garden, consulting 18th century garden books, making calculations, and cutting large trapezoids of black plastic, we have had success. I even convinced the non-Marxist T.A. that I was onto something. This Sunday, late into the night, I wrote up the results of our project, and I believe it will be pleasing to Leone.
Part of the reason I put it off until Sunday was because I was out for a sizable part of the weekend. I would have prepared a little report on the clubs, but nothing too exciting happened and it would be mostly interior monologue. I also went to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, which was like the Medieval Fair except with more Pakistanis. But I did talk to a few people in a bar about the feasibility of living in D.C. and commuting to College Park in Maryland. Feasibility=good. I can deal with this.
The implications of my successful completion of Leone's project are too overwhelming to think about right now, since the University of Maryland Masters of Applied Anthropology (or "M.A.A.") is a two year program focusing on finding real-world applications for the postmodern (or "postprocessural") marxist theoretical approaches. With the memory of me as someone who volunteers for his pet projects and completes them successfully, combined with friendly recommendation from his pals Uzi and Maria... I have two more years at New College to complete the anthropology area of concentration. And then, it could be a lifestyle very close to what I've been experiencing for the last six weeks, leaving out my devoting ten hours a weekday to archaeology and waiting for the last train at 1:30 a.m. while drunk on a subway platform.
Of course, clubbing was not the only reason I was late with my little garden perspective project. I sat down to write it repeatedly over the weekend and it was the same old shit, the same old shit. The crushing anxiety of trying to write an assignment.
I still have two incomplete classes and an incomplete ISP, all amassed in 2002. My dorm room, which I'm supposed to be moved out of in three days, resembles the disorder of my soul. I wonder if the exhilaration I felt when I got here was the blank slate, the clean, empty room, the new people. Now the room is cluttered, the people familiar, and the strange sites and disordering sensations now comforting and strengthening.
In a reflection that just occurred to me, I have set up the same life pattern here in Maryland that I had in Sarasota. It was all in my head.
This Saturday, the morning after one last drunk funk in Annapolis, I will wake up in a hotel room and floor my little car back to Florida.
