RahhhhhH! Collingwood is blowing my head up!

I'm on page 291 of The principles of Art. Skimming and pulling quotations for my big essay 'Art, Zen, and Intellectual Insurgency'. He is destroying my mind. He seems to be tapped into all this stuff that all these contemporary people are articulating. Zizek, Searle, Suzuki, Cioran, Iacoboni, Foucault. Collingwood is saying things that these people should care so much about. But none of these people are citing Collingwood.

But my head can't take it. But thank god I only have about 40 pages left to skim. Then I can finally get on with my writing. I have fifteen pages of writing done straight up. Apart from those 15 written pages I have 45 pages of outline and quotations that I have pulled from Collingwood and other writers. I have no idea if I can manage this project. Every time I skim more of The Principles of Art my image of his thought grows in complexity and strangeness. He is so smart. And I can weave him in and out of so many different thinkers to talk about how all of life can become an art form. All of life can be a way to imaginatively express emotion. I know I'll get this project done. I just want to start making ground. And I am. It is just taking so much longer than any other writing project I have tried to tackle.

I need to make my outline more nuanced. I have all of these disparate ideas flowing in and out of one another. I have about 40-50 different sections that generally fit under five other sections. Part I: Defining Art Proper. Part II: The Use of Art. Part III: Becoming An Existential Aesthetician. Part IV: The Artist As Insurgent. Part V: Spreading the Insurrection.

Each part has about 8 - 12 sub-sections. The flow of the five parts makes sense. But the sections don't yet have internal coherence. I don't have a flow that I can identify within each subsection. Only Part I has a clear flow. Because it has been further partitioned into Parts I.1. I.2. and I.3! Ha! I just need to do that for the other sections. But my head doesn't know how to do it right now. I need to sleep on it.

But jesus christ I can't handle this. But that is how I'll eventually handle. Just keep grappling with it.