It’s flattering to think that we are actually contributing to the pool of knowledge in our chosen fields, but are we actually learning adulthood? Finally, the opportunity to trawl unstalked through an obscure field of knowledge with little scrutiny, apart from the obscure demand to perform or to complete. It’s a responsibility we grow in, and maybe growing in the realms of unfettered and unprogrammed expertise a few neurons in the prefontal contex finally trigger.
I say that as someone who did meaningfully think he was becoming an expert in John Clare’s influence on contemporary poetry, and not just becoming a prelate in a generalised something. But it’s the imaginative exercise of it all – the desire to think it all matters, and matters uniquely – and the endless explaining to others why it might matter. This is a formation for the pointless career in adulthood – the needless retreat to the sideline, after years and years of maintaining a will towards generalisation, a keen interest in more than just John Clare.
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So, do we trade? Do we hang up all our existing knowledge on the morbid coat-rack, in exchange for this expertise? I don’t know. I wish I could still reliably pretend to be a historian, a classicist, a nuclear physicist. But we instead sprint to localised ignorances in our own field.
In our field. The word is too human. Why cannot we not have untoucbed wildernesses? But to notice them is to cultivate them, to enact our stain of expertise on the living, organic realm.
We are gardeners. We are mowing our wonderfully untapped old-growth forests of knowledge.
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But say we are growing up. We are. We are learning to distinguish, to finally ensure that what we say is mediated by authority and expertise. To not vaunt on subjects we know nothing about. To garden.
And this is by necessity a taciturnity. But must it be a retreat from activism? Can the intellectual gardener be a political visionary?
I still want to “speak up”. I don’t know what this means any more. In my saturation with expertise on one nature poet, and my awareness how little my knowledge of this one nature poet is, and the vast totality of what he wrote, from his earlier perceived days to his driftier asylum days, how can I continue to think “radically” about the plight of asylum seekers, of the growing injustices of the country I was born and have lived most of my life?
But I will. I will acknowledge that expertise must be channeled, exclusive. Equally. I will acknowledge that expertise gives us an obligation – a personal need – to develop a more integrated political voice. To speak up as this country is, in so many ways, razed to the ground. That our universities are squeezed. That our NHS is privatised.
Maybe my own PhD topic can help us understand why the expertises we funnel and inject ourselves with might be stretched to a broader vision of a society build on truth, a society rejecting the false gods of oppression:
By Langley Bush I roam but the bush hath left its hill;
On Cowper Green I stray – ’tis a desert strange and chill –
And spreading Lea Close Oak ere decay had penned its will
To the axe of the spoiler and self interest fell a prey;
And Crossberry Way and old Round Oak’s narrow lane
With its hollow trees like pulpits I shall never see again.
Enclosure like a Bonaparte let not a thing remain,
It levelled every bush and tree and levelled every hill
And hung the moles for traitors – though the brook is running still,
It runs a naked brook, cold and chill
Of particular interest is how it all contracts, how the swirl of localised Northamptonshire pronouns become a more general vision of an imperalising force, a ‘Bonaparte’.
Let’s identify the way this hangs beyond our screen-heavy dissertations: the broader context of how our research defines us.
Squidditas 
“In our field. The word is too human. Why cannot we not have untouched wildernesses? But to notice them is to cultivate them, to enact our stain of expertise on the living, organic realm.”
It always occurs to me, when I consider the language we use, that any phenomenologist worthy of their salt will tell you that all language is metaphor, because it cannot adequately describe actual experience, cannot adequately describe what it is to come into contact and react to and be swept along by the tide of moment-by-moment phenomena.
And I recall sitting, only yesterday, among a group of PhD students, how many times I said to one of them, “What’s YOUR field of research?” How lovely it might have been to have asked instead, “What’s YOUR untouched wilderness?”
But so much PhD and ECR work is precisely not done on untouched wilderness. Instead, we follow the combine harvester. We glean the overlooked ears of wheat, we pull up tares, we note the size of pebbles left behind, we marvel at a Roman coin and wonder if there are any more, we perhaps pick up the top of a lemonade bottle and wonder what labourer tossed it carelessly from the cab of his combine.
I would like to say that I work on an untouched wilderness, but what I actually work on is the ephemera of seventy years ago. Much of it might be out of the ken of the academic mainstream, but it is the stuff of lay collectors, cared about, preserved, chatted about on Facebook; more, it is part of a relatively recent world that has now gone, it is known about outside its original context, and my care has been to rediscover that context, to take things out of being mere “text” and to remind others that these were cultural objects that did not, in fact, exist in a wilderness.
As I pile metaphor upon metaphor in this reply, I begin to wonder if, in fact, a wilderness can ever exist. It is only ever a wilderness to US. Outwith us it teems with a business and a busyness of its own, full, vital…
Thank you for a fascinating post.
Paul
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