I'm mad at myself for not having blogged my MA from the start. Maybe i would feel less edgy if i had. I jumped into my course feet first, excited to be learning again. But out of the loop of learning i find that i was unprepared and now i feel like i'm floundering, anxious about my documentation, is my work good enough ? will i pass ?
The course is divided into two threads RIPU and ASU. The names are enough to make a mind wonder what is going on. I think RIPU is Research into Practice unit and ASU is Art Studies Unit. I imagine this was explained to us right at the beginning but right at the beginning my head was spinning with all the new, new acquaintances, new teachers, new learning, new being. 
For me my MA is my first major step back into life since Jon died. My "i am alive" affirmation, my "life goes on". And it is certainly giving me that affirmation i already feel miles away from where i was a year, two years, five years, ten years ago. I feel like i am passing through a fire ritual, coming out cleansed and beautiful. By beautiful i am not so much talking physical beauty as being beautiful, being spiritually beautiful. It's perhaps not for me to say whether this purification by fire is succeeding but it is my hope and the feeling i have right now. 
The course began slowly. We were enrolled on a Thursday and then there was a week before our first lectures. I'd wondered if one day of teaching a week would be enough but it turns out to be plenty as it leaves four days to make use of the studios and to learn from the technicians who man the studios. The generosity and patience of the technicians i've met at NUA both now on my MA and before on my BA is enriching. They give their knowledge away with such heart warming kindness and show respect for our work and desire to learn even when what we turn out is unoriginal, ugly or unsuccessful. And when we succeed, when we make something that makes us happy, that gives us a "yes", they let us know they see our happiness and it makes a difference. Being witnessed in joy is a gift. 
I am trying to catch up on a term's worth of knowledge in this blog and i know i will fail to get it all in so i may jump from moment to moment as moments pitch up in my mind while i'm writing. If i try to go carefully day by day i think it's likely i will struggle to keep my momentum. I think i will be a monkey leaping about in tree canopy rather than a more earth bound creature like a deer, an elephant or pig rootling on the forest floor. But maybe i won't. I never know how words will fall out of me when i blog so to fetter myself with an identity is perhaps unhelpful. 
After enrolling i went into the studios and wrote and drew on sheets of paper on a table in the corner that was not then my studio space but is now. I say it was not then because being the only one in the studio it wasn't really my place to give myself a specific corner without the agreement of the other students sharing the space but it came to be my space because no one minded that i kept it and i was happy to stay there. For three days i went in to the studios and saw pretty much no one. It was very odd. It was cold and as i wrote in my notebooks and scribbled on paper and tried to feel like i belonged and was meant to be there i could hear the working life of the university going on a round me. I felt separate then. Now i feel like part of the university body. In a year i will no longer be part. Now i walk through the big doors swipe my card to get into buildings that for this one year belong to me and to which i belong. It's a good feeling. It feels like coming home. It feels like i am amongst people who understand to a point, whose minds may also be filled with ideas that in other worlds seem off beat or weird. I am amongst people who get excited about a mark on paper, a line, a dot, a sound, a smell, a shadow, a body, a thing of small consequence that maybe matters an awful lot for an instant.
Being in such a world takes a little getting used to after being out of it for a while. Suddenly every sense is alert and it's easy to feel a little skinless, or whippet-skinned as opposed to great bear-skinned or pig-skinned. There's a desire to do everything, every which way there are enticements, i briefly went through a phase of feeling like a child in toyshop told she can have anything. This was somewhat closed down by a tutorial in which i was given instruction to refine and draw in my exploration. 
Tutorials are strange. I have felt sad and disheartened after both my tutorials with my tutor. He is kind and he is polite but after we've spoken i find that my confidence takes a dive, that my trust in my process is diminished and it takes me a little while to pick myself back up. I am not sure if this is a teaching technique and i wonder if maybe it's part of the course that in tutorials i will have my practice torn open and questioned, that tutorials are not where i will receive affirmation or approval and that maybe they will be easier if i accept that is not the point of them. Formal education has a form, it would be a shame if at the end of my MA i was making the same work as i was making before i started it would be a shame if i had not moved on and perhaps the pulling apart is part of the process, the journey from interview, acceptance and enrolment to, hopefully, graduation and working life after graduation.
But the MA course is designed well, i think, because before we enrolled we were asked to create a manifesto for ourselves and when i feel knocked back i refer back to mine which is a "snakes and ladders" manifesto. I let myself feel the slide down the snake but know that it's part of the game and that with a new dice roll i'll be back up and running and to remember the joy of the game is playing and that when i reach a hundred the playing will be done. 
Perhaps I'll end this blog post here to come back to later, later today or tomorrow, or the next day. I'm aware that i'm on a catch up but for a moment maybe i need to pause and draw breath and get back to tackling the first draft of my RIPU essay which is giving me a headache and making me worry that i will fall at the first hurdle.