the study garden

The joke goes; it's not a word, but a sentence. The joke is about marriage, but the word in my mind is dissertation. I've been studying, part time, for the past few years, in a work-related topic. I have one thing to do before this becomes my master's degree. Just one word. Dissertation.

It's modular, so I could have changed it back to a DipCert, but at the time I thought of doing that, it resisted, like a plant that needed pruning, but not at that time of year. This summer I'm now looking at a vast, woody monster, and thinking; well, perhaps I've actually got a tree.

So I've signed up to do it, with the sinking feeling that it will get in the way of everything else. I remember watching a film, a long time ago, about a woman doing a dissertation. The film is called The Lost Language of Cranes. You think, when the film starts, that it'll be about Cranes. But actually, it's about cranes.



She's writing a dissertation about a neglected child, who had been born and grown up in isolation, opposite a building site. We don't hear much about this in the film. The film is about some gay men, having family dramas. But anyway, back to the child. The child's only significant long-term interactions was watching the cranes (Though he must have been fed? Was it just a thought experiment? A metaphor? Is there a case at the heart of this?). When they (social services, one presumes) found him, he couldn't talk, but would imitate the mechanical swinging motions of the cranes, speaking the only language he had been exposed to.

The woman doing the dissertation is annoying and passive. Maybe she's a metaphor, too. Like I said, it was a story about gay men. But anyway, she gives up the dissertation. Why? asks the man the story is about. She answers "It was getting in the way, of life, of everything."

So, yes. I'll probably have less time to spend gardening over the next year....