Not being able to see the woods for the trees
“Midway along the journey of our life
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
for I had wandered off from the straight path.
How hard it is to tell what it was like,
this wood of wilderness, savage and stubborn
(the thought of it brings back all my old fears),
a bitter place! Death could scarce be bitterer.
But if I would show the good that came of it
I must talk about things other than the good.”
These lines open 'Inferno', the first book of Dante Alighieri's 'Divine Comedy'. They capture very well how I'm starting to feel about my PhD. The idea is clear, the path straightforward - and then I start writing. By now I feel well and truly lost, going round and round in circles, getting deeper and deeper into the undergrowth of words and ideas. There's a good reason why getting lost in minutiae is described as being unable to tell the wood from the trees. I cannot seem to finish or make progress; there's always something else to be added so that the same tiny patch gets cultivated over and over because I can't seem to find direction. And everything seems important.
Today I wrote about the dismantling of the district surgeon system because it suddenly occurred to me that its termination brought ordinary doctors into direct contact with rape patients in ways they may well have been unfamiliar with and certainly weren't prepared for. And then my intuition was borne out: von Mollendorff writes of this directly before he relates the impact a four year-old girl had on him when he treated her after she had been raped . I think it may also have influenced the Philadelphia Hospital petition.
Smith had a calling and von Mollendorff had a calling. It's my guess that many of those who opposed government's policy of the time on ARVs felt this way. And being persecuted in the way they were must surely have reinforced this. The struggle for ARVs really does come across as a battle for good and evil, tinged by more than a touch of madness. The entire period shaped subjectivity in very distinct ways. And it was enormously productive. I had forgotten the small part I played in this while at the CSVR, organising workshops and drafting information materials. Later I undertook research on behalf of the provincial department of health. I learnt a great deal from that.
So it produced a particular set of subjectivities, forged under life and death circumstances of great suffering. It organised particular responses in particular ways and generated knowledge. What else? Does the counting of lives saved work to mitigate the exposure to such extreme circumstances? Is uplift made the currency you traffic in.
Returning to Dante, then: I have wandered off the straight and narrow and gotten lost. I am learning a great deal from these wanderings. But what they mean and if I'll ever get done - show the good of it - is a moot point right now.