Beyond Academic Writing. Part 1

🅰 THE BEGINNING OF DISTORTION 🅰

The scientific world has its own stages. There is the idea — a flash of light. There is writing — a path between the lines. There is testing it out — an exchange of thoughts. All of this is alive, fluid, real. But then comes that stage. The very one where everything begins to grow cloudy. The stage called text correction. 📉

And this is where something strange begins...

This is exactly where those strange creatures are born: slightly hunched, moving in tiny steps, their eyes turned somewhere inward. They are like the congregation of a new god whose name is no longer Dionysus. Their god is Discourse.

Their speech scratches like chalk on an oxidized blackboard. Their footsteps echo through empty faculty corridors. They see only periods, commas, and properly formatted references, but they no longer see a living thought. Book dust has settled on their shoulders.

And all because the blood is gone. The blood of the text. Its spirit.

Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with their blood. Write with blood — and you will learn that blood is spirit. It is not easy to understand another person’s blood: I hate idle readers.

🅰 BEING PUT INSIDE THE TEXT 🅰

When you rework a text for the twentieth time, force it into GOST formatting, check the headings and bibliography again — what do you become?

Your muse leaves you.

And it seems that somewhere there, just around the corner of your inner voice, someone is already whispering after you:

Hey, poet, your muse seems to be some unknown beast… She is a copy of Trippie Redd, but sadly not because of the dreads. You could hardly call her “little”: her shoulders are a full fathom wide, and her eyes, like prisoners in a zindan, are set deep.

And it is not only literal — not merely eyes sunk deep in their sockets. No. They put you in. Put you inside the text. 🧑‍🏫

🜃 Your eyes, which once moved freely across the world, now drop downward, slightly inward. It is an almost imperceptible change — a reflex, a subtle adjustment. The body learns to see differently: not space, but a point. Not to survey, but to hunt for details. Not to live, but to check itself against the rules.

🅰 THE PRISON CELL OF KNOWLEDGE 🅰

This tiny change in the movement of the eyes changes everything: your freedom narrows. You no longer see the whole canvas of reality. You become chained to the letter, the comma, the empty formality.

This is how the transformation begins: a small movement of the body answers to being. And being, in return, remelts fate.

You have been locked up. For the text. You have become a prisoner in the cell of your own pages.

And then you slide into the jaws of a dead academic god. One who demands only corrected lines and flawless footnotes. One who strips the skin from thoughts until nothing remains but a cold skeleton. 🎭

But there is still a way out.

Switching from pathos to reason, I think about this: as a future teacher, I must know how to explain these things and, to some degree, follow discourse, dogmas, and standards myself.

On the other hand, as a therapist I will work with people who have become neurotic in part because self-censorship was pushed too far at different levels.

As everywhere, balance matters.

Above, I showed a deliberately polarized extreme of academic discourse.

And yet I maintain — paraphrasing Nietzsche, who once said that he would believe only in a god who knew how to dance — that I will believe only in a lecturer, and follow the ideas only of a professor who knows how to dance. I will go only to a therapist who knows how to dance.

Listen to what Abraham Maslow wrote:

They were less afraid of their own thoughts, even when those thoughts were foolish, mad, or “psychopathic”. They were less afraid that their behavior would become an object of ridicule or disapproval. They could allow emotions to overwhelm them. Average and neurotic people, by contrast, build a wall meant to protect them from fear, which for the most part lies within. They control, suppress, push things down, and build defensive lines. They disapprove of their inner self and expect the same from others.

Now, for a moment, I imagine a neurotic personality who has power — including the power of a teacher, the power to influence the minds of young students. Neuroticized personalities, when they are embedded in the education system, collectively multiply neurotic patterns through thousands of new students every year, while therapists treat those neuroses individually and, naturally, in much smaller numbers. As a therapist, I simply cannot remain silent about this, because it is part of the shared effort to serve mental health. I did not take the Hippocratic oath, but I believe in the power of psychology as both science and practice down to the foundations of my existence.

That, briefly, is why it is worth talking about the other side...

🅰 TO BE CONTINUED 🅰

In Part 2, we will talk about the pace of thought, the contrast between Machiavelli and Nietzsche, and how music and rhythm can generate strength. See you there.

Sources 📚

• Maslow A. Toward a Psychology of Being / translated from English by A. P. Khomik. Moscow: Akademicheskiy Proekt, 2022. 275 p. (Psychological Technologies: Social Psychology).