I was struck by the aesthetics of the language you use to describe the wall covered by vines and then the snowy, white, pristine space that stretches between the iron gate and the brick wall. I like this poetic description you give, since I am very interested in poetry and in ethnographers as people who manipulate language in very surprising–maybe delightful but often unpoetic–ways.

I was thrown off by the paragraph in which you introduce the language of your advisor. Here, I felt myself getting mystified and impatient. I felt uncomfortable. Why do I feel uncomfortable?

There is something contradictory about the comfort and safety of a university campus, the bounded off space that is tamed by too much knowledge–seemingly so, anyways–and the discomfort of the language used by academics, a stiff and unbending kind of language, cold and unfriendly but that eagerly passes itself off as sensual.

Lability. Rolls off the tongue. Invites me in. But I’m not supposed to know what it means. I’m not supposed to completely enjoy it, to “know” it fully.

Maybe what I am feeling is something like “the relationship between affect and meaning, the sensible and the intelligible” and the way that “lability for the harnessing of desire” is toying with but never fulfilling my own desires. 🙂