“Let’s make something to represent our DIY PhDs.” David Whitaker and I were in our first month of class together, dreaming up a program to fill our cups.
We overflowed with joy and creativity, untethered to academia and following spirit. Spirit was a question mark yet perceived with a sense and direction.
When I closed my eyes and asked what to make the Mayan glyph of Caban immediately appeared; every time after when I asked what my DIY PhD was about it was the same response: Pachamama. Gaia. Mama Earth. Like “spirit,” it wasn’t about the name, but a cosmology whose origin and a destination that were the same: knowledge of being and sustaining as planet.
I’m neither a student nor descendent of Mayan glyphs. Pero the mystery suggested in caban imprinted on my psyche like the afterglow of chlorophyl. It lingered long after I’d closed the book. I painted caban as meditation, put it in a leafed cut-out holder, and brought it to class. “This is the Original Glyph, OG, it’s my guide.” Glyphs reach before limitations of words and pull primordial meaning to the forefront.
After our first Fall and Spring semesters I strung theories, images, videos, and journal entries into a Year One Paper. It was bricolage and raw, goop like chrysalises before matter morphs to butterfly. I was embarrassed to show this to my mentors who held academic jobs and professional careers in Art. It was a holding place for pulse instead of finished product for review. Still, it allowed me to stretch and leap past preconceived notions of formal writing and stay true to what pulled and pulled me in.
Now when I look at the paper I see the six-year trajectory it opened. Like caban, it illuminated that which is steady and wise. It allowed me to strengthen instinct and ecstasy of a living practice. Like this substack, I jumped before being sure of the flightpath. My heart asked me to stay a course unfamiliar to the confines of canonized knowledge and trust that it was a valid study. Here are the beginnings of the paper, which I’m sharing right before we begin our 9th DIY PhD cohort as School for the Ecocene.
I’ve been taking extra care during this round of applicant calls to emphasize how unscripted this program is. We aren’t handing out curricula but holding a steady container to practice relaxing intellectual control and deep-listening to our guts and desire. Each person becomes a channel rather than silo. In six years of practice, what starts as ephemeral has current and impact that are real. Managing expectations is the hardest part of its initiation. Consistency and connection are ingredients feeding its momentum, but rest is found.
The next few full moon archive posts will pull from this paper as an excavation into the bones of what became my Dissertation. The embarrassment I felt then had me hiding it from view. Now I see tender courageous roots that helped me ground what was to come. The codex painted at the end looked like any room portrait I’d made before. It held academic theory and the clouds spelling messages after ceremony on the same plane. Their lexicon was remaking what I thought was possible.
Knowledge as Healing: Resonance that Unfolds and Reveals Itself
An Autobiographical Annotated Bibliography
DIY PhD
Year 1 Paper
Sarita Doe
2014
My DIY PhD shifts and re-organizes itself according to what I am learning. It morphs yet holds a tone, like my body; an aesthetic vibratory identity. This identity resonates in socio-ecological places found through an integrated bloom management: a map, a cosmology to locate bliss.
Learning in the DIY PhD is alive. It’s an organism that self-regulates according to the experience unfolding in space. There is no concrete position. Rather, there are cycles of clarity, confusion, mystery, deepening, and flowing.
Western theory discovers cracks in its system and openings are created. In Methodology of the Oppressed, Chela Sandoval is seeking to reveal a rhetorical structure in which the languages of supremacy are “uttered, rationalized, and ruptured.” She authored a guide towards coalitional consciousness. LOVE feeds this consciousness with methods and materials to bypass the current order of dominant perception.
My body and my home are test-sites of colonizer and colonized. I experience the juncture Sandoval describes between being a “disoriented first world citizen-subject” and “oppositional consciousness developed by subordinated, marginalized or colonized Western citizen-subjects… forced to experience aesthetics of postmodern globalization as precondition for survival.”
From my habitat in Late August, 2014:
All of Los Angeles floats through my window. I swish the dust around and suck it up and find medicine in my home-tent. I am part of the arteries and happenings in the valley below yet I am separate. My separation is in my privilege of education, and participation in - an understanding of - white culture.
My connection is the air particles. My connection is the sunlight- fierce and drying or mottled and giving. My connection is in English, my connection is in Spanish. My separation is in a skin-tone, a height, an accent. My connection is in the soil and dust in our pores. We connect because we have to drink water and because we share body composition / water weight // We are bags of fluid and flesh.
Now I know this love/hate. Now I know this ebb/flow. As a visitor I exoticize her colors and flora. As a relative I feel her soul. As a daughter I hate her imposed values, her cold shoulder. As her lover I scorn her vastness. How can I know the corners, how can I hold her essence? Her complexity made me fall in love. Her complexity makes me want to leave her for a simpler home.
When she lets me be her mother I sing into her folds of hill and wind. I cradle and clean the dirt with prayers. I embody her pain even while knowing that it doesn’t lessen its impact.
New moon help me plant good seeds in a good way. Help me understand which path will illuminate the best situation for all concerned. GRACIAS ancestors GRACIAS teachers.
Chela states that now, transnational capitalism colonizes and subjectifies all citizens, across borders. Revolutionaries that she calls the US 3rd World Feminists have learned to both occupy and/or throw off subjectivities in a process that can reinforce or decolonize their various relations to real conditions of existence. They have “kinetic and self-conscious mobility” when identifying “oppositional subjective positions” and enact them differentially. She speaks to a topography of mapping these guerilla practices where no action is privileged over another; each is just as potentially effective as the other in its opposition.
> ENTER CODEX 1, ENTER SONG <
CODEX 1. OCTOBER’S FIRST FULL MOON “Manifest Landmarks in Theory Transfigure When the Foundational Underplate that Makes their Very Existence Possible Shifts Upward” -Chela Sandoval on Differential Consciousness Tactics
I’m enjoying sharing this work without a paywall. For those able to offer patronage, I so appreciate it! Artists getting support for their work is like paying for a show so musicians can get paid. Folks can cancel any time. I sharing full moon posts from my archive and new moon transmissions from my post-doc research.