Confessions of a "constipated academic"

I am borrowing the phrase “constipated academic” from historian Ambeth Ocampo. I think the phrase suits me right now. In fact, to add a little more drama, the “thing” in the noun phrase should be “academic wannabe” which would then make me a “constipated academic wannabe.” That perfectly describes me at this point and I am not complaining. No, I actually am complaining pala because academic constipation is a painful experience – very painful.


On Friday, October 24 – United Nations’ Day and my father’s 62nd birthday, Ambeth Ocampo’s third in a series of articles on names appeared in print and online in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. He concluded his article with this line: “If one is curious one can find delight in simple things like names. If you are a constipated academic, you squeeze the life from learning by focusing on theoretical frameworks and other boring stuff.” Upon reading those lines, I felt Professor Ambeth was talking directly to me. I felt as if Ateneo’s nationally renowned professor of history was insinuating that PhD students like me are cold, socially detached (human) beings trying so hard to draw or construct contrived theoretical explanations for our pet subjects. And strange as it may seem, I couldn’t agree more.


I just ended the process of writing my research proposal early this afternoon, and right now, I just feel so dreadful about the sleepless nights, headaches, muscle pain, occasional nausea, cough and cold, and social and personal animosity the writing process has caused me. It goes without saying that intellectually masticating heaps of reading materials and mentally digesting dense texts to produce what else (?) but a (self-) convincing “theoretical framework” of what I intend to do to make modest tremors in my field of study are, well, formidable tasks. Of course, there’s the frequent intellectual indigestion – so brain wracking that I had to more frequently than ever seek Divine Guidance at the nearest religious parish or spiritual sanctuary. Thankfully for me, the Great Thinker is also the Great Healer and has provided me the greatest care.


When intellectual digestion becomes successful, the process of squeezing the (mental) manure so to speak (my “byproduct” is supposed to fertilize academic fields for more harvests!) becomes another formidable task. It troubled me for weeks – no, months – and I needed all the energy, all the support, and all the features of the university’s educational infrastructure I could benefit from and rely on: I had to do library work, library work, and more library work with movies on the side, fantastic rumor-mongering among friends, nitpicking of our pet peeves (with disconcerting karmic effects!), a little dose of social networking, long distance calls to my family, and some leisure reading. Of course, there were (and still are) the quite regular visits to the Church of Saint Mary of the Angels at Bukit Batok which boasts of quite eloquent and quite viscerally interesting Franciscan friars. Hmmm…. (it is not what you think it is!)


More often than not, to be able to hit the ground running, I would induce myself to vomit words. I chanced upon the expression “word vomit” through NUS Filipino graduate students steeped in writing end-of-term papers with the minimum of 6000 to 7000 words. My proposal is actually as much a product of word vomit as it is of my modest capacity to synthesize things. I am quite amazed and at the same time apprehensive that I have exceeded by more than a page the 50-page maximum (this aside from the bibliography, appendices and other attachments) set by the department for thesis proposals (It reminds me of the scene in “Antonia’s Line” where a university professor finds Antonia’s grand daughter Therese wanting for submitting a paper beyond the required number of pages. To follow instructions strictly is a sign of discipline, you know.).


The explanation for the number of pages is not really because I have a lot of things to say (well, actually, I have a lot of glittering generalities to prove). It is because I was initially so afraid of the possibility of not reaching the minimum 30 pages of double spaced text that I began to liberally lift from my previous papers in the university, make some modifications of them (meaning creating lengthy paraphrases), and deliberately vomit words as it were.When I began to notice that I had already exceeded the minimum number of pages and was already on the verge of reaching the maximum, I also realized that I still had a lot of arguments to prove and develop. I was then faced with the difficult task of cleaning up the mess and it’s not always easy when your vital points are actually built around the mess!


Naturally, getting over the constipation and being able to justify one’s mess are such a relief; but while that is the case, I still feel the pangs of the excruciating squeeze to beat deadlines (and to create the impression that my postgraduate education so much deserves to be subsidized!).


On the side, there are the proverbial nagging questions: Who will read/appreciate my work? Will people even borrow my dissertation from the library? Will it have an impact in the field? Will it have influence on other people’s lives (such an ambitious question!)? Will my future studies using my semi-original framework attract research funding? In one of my early meetings with my supervisor, I was warned that undertaking doctoral research is a lonely journey. Most of the time, people you like to talk to don’t actually care about your research interests; they have their own research and other interests too. I guess even after the dissertation, the lonely journey continues.


The experience has so far taught me that higher learning is… (I want to use the term “formidable” again but I have used it twice at least so let me check the thesaurus…)…aha, redoubtable (that doesn’t seem to fit and merely personifies the noun but what the heck!). Come to think of it. The conceptual metaphors STUDYING IS EATING (re: intellectual or mental mastication) and LEARNING IS DIGESTION (re: intellectual digestion, academic constipation) have underlain my PhD experience so far. And for a guy (ching!) like me who is not really crazy about eating and not so very much adventurous with food, those conceptualizations can…yes, be formidable (I guess this is becoming part of my idiolect!). If we think about them further, we can derive such entailments or even larger conceptual metaphors as LEARNING IS (PHYSICAL) SURVIVAL or the erudite sounding LEARNING IS LIFE, which makes a lot of sense and which makes the line “Education is a right” more resonant.


And at my age, when all about me is tentative and when the prospect of navigating the great unknown is still exciting, I definitely still don’t want to die. So I don’t want to stop learning.