Unheimlichkeit

I have been trying to take some time this weekend to reflect on projects that I am working on at work and also next steps for research articles that I am working on. I have many resources that I want and need to create for work but it has been difficult to find the time to create them with other work responsibilities. I am also working on edits on an article with a friend which requires a rather quick turn around of next week. Both of these are exciting projects but they are also projects that require distance in order to approach them with a comprehensive frame of reference.

I have done a bit of work on the article today and will return to it soon, but as I was editing today I realized that I actually needed more time away from it to see more clearly where the path of the edits and the article was going. Time is a privilege that not everyone has. I know I was very lucky yesterday to be able to sit in a hammock and read a memoir, but it was also very necessary time that I spent contemplating my social location in relation to the world and words that keep popping up in my mind as I take time to reflect.

One of those words is actually one of my favourite German words: unheimlichkeit. Keit in German is used to make an adjective into a noun, like ness in English. Unheimlich has many meanings in English but the most common is uncanny. If you have read any Freud you probably remember this word. Why this word? Well I feel like I am going through a phase, and I guess I can argue so is the world, that everything feels uncanny,and that all things are draped in uncanniness. Things feel strangely unsettled and yet there are many reasons why I should actually feel more settled at the moment (more on that in the next few weeks- because processing takes time). 

Yesterday an article that originally started as a guest lecture I gave in the States in 2009, was published. Eleven years. I know we say that academe moves slowly but this article is really a sort of academic bookend for me and when I saw the website live yesterday all there was was an overwhelming feeling of at once happiness and at the same time intense unsettling; an end and maybe a new beginning. 

I am slowly making my way through my weekend writing to do projects and will be starting new ones on academic integrity and inclusive pedagogy in the next month or so that I am very excited about. I am checking off boxes and doing what one does in academe, moving forward, advocating, researching, thinking. But it all is so unheimlich in a time where I have only left my house once in 14 weeks. We are all lacking the physical markers of time, the tangible markers of place, that make things less like Groundhog Day and more like you are moving towards something. 

I guess it is important for me to remember that it feels uncanny because it is. None of this is anything we could have predicted and I have to remind myself that it is very much okay to take time to think it all through and to prioritize that processing. I have a short week at work this week before having a few days off which is also going to allow me more time to process. Therefore, there will be no new blog next Sunday, as I will be taking time away from a keyboard, at least physically; the keyboard in my mind rarely stops. 

So my question to you is: Is there a word that you keep coming to in these quarantimes? How is this word being represented in your world?