discussions of "work" that disregard its fundamental nature as the extraction of value from bodies are of limited interest to me.
--J Clover
I'm not the best source to come to for perspectives on the history of work. I don't know how we have gotten to where we are now from our hunting and gathering days, though I have a vague outline of an event chain. This chain passes through some grueling times, times when the work was grueling for some but not for others, other times when there was hardly any work at all, and then some better times perhaps. Even now, we may feel the shadowy grip of medieval structure, a kind of audacity of property owner classes to keep large segments of the population bound to their cubicles and factory posts, predominantly through fear. At such a time when so much can get done with little human effort, it seems more cruel that some of us to be expected to give so much for so little, and lately the rift between the worlds inhabited by social classes is at an all-time width.
At the same time, we don't dislike work, we rather like it, if it appeals to us. But let me explain.
When I use the term, work, I don't mean the imposition that is put upon us, this state we find ourselves in brought about by the culmination of many factors, in which a huge obligatory effforts are handed off to us to perform. It's been that way since we drifted from our simple self-sustaining hamlets and had become part of larger communities that were drawn together to protect us.
What I mean by work is not the imposition, but the way we meet it. With every what we are offered, we give back a how. This is a most significant point. We don't all just work the same way, we are offered a task, and we solve it our own way. This is true even when the task requires very precise duplication of a set routine, as in certain types of factory work, or open heart surgery.
Whatever it is we do in that encounter is generally a hodgepodge of things we learned since we were very young. There are so many little pieces, so much taken for granted, that it's impossible to trace. For instance, when communicating with speech are writing -- which is a big part of most of our work -- we don't have to bother with how we understand the meaning of each word, or the syntax, just as many of us don't have to bother with how we know how to type on a keyboard, or walk, for that matter, or merely stand up. Work involves all these things, and much more, in various complex arrangements.
Processes that are not work also involve very similar arrangements. It's very hard, on this level, to tell things that are work from things that are not work, such as art. We might say that work is purely our encounter with the imposition.
But it's also arguable that leisure and even art can be thought of at times as encounters with the imposition as well. We play hard, to survive working hard. We might write poems to stand up to it, or flush it out of our systems.
There is really no definitive boundary. People play when they work, and work when they play, and it would be hard to find a moment while working when someone wasn't being creative in some way or other, at least as creative as many of the poems you'll find in most of the popular journals, either on the Internet, or on the shelves of bookstores and fancy magazine shops.
To really understand the difference between work and art, for our purposes, you will have to make an accounting of both, and we begin on a very somatic level. Let yourself take on the postures and feelings of both experiences, one after another. What does it feel like when you are working, as in a typical sense of work, and the same with doing art? Compare the physical sensations of both, the parts of the body these sensations inhabit, the way you breathe and carry yourself.
This is generally much easier with some coaching, or in a mild hypnotic state, but see what you can manage.
If you can begin to articulate the differences between these two states, your working state and your artworking state, you have not only begun to understand on a purely formal level, let's call it actual, what a work process is vs. what an art process is. You have also begun your initial steps at integrating the two.
In other words, things may soon begin to get very confusing.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Huh..?
A close friend recently suggested that what this blog is all about is an attempt to salvage or justify all the time and energy I've spent working, when I may have prefered doing something else, instead.
That may be true to some extent, but this is also about articulating the revelations one encounters once one realizes that there may be, and may have been, no other way. It's easy to dream, but many things need to come into confluence in order to create the right conditions to, let's say, publish one's novel with enough critical and commercial appeal that one might land oneself a tenure track job, or get paid handsomely enough for a screenplay to be free of working, in the typical sense.
Yes, I agree, teaching is work too, but teaching sculpture, if you are a sculpter, is very different from writing business system specifications, or answering tech support calls.
But having had to work teaches things that luck may not, and I think, at this point, after over twenty-five years of fulltime work, I'm an expert. Not only am I an expert at getting things done, but I'm also an expert at not getting things done, and being efficient, inefficient, of creating the appearance of doing a great job (sometimes actually harder than doing a great job), and numerous other operations and subterfuges one must learn in order to survive work.
The conclusion I draw more often than not is that it is best to do the best job you can possibly do, since that is really what makes things easier. The better you work, the better you get at working, and after a while it's almost like cheating. You have all these skills you're not even aware of, and you get things done in half the time, or less, than it might take someone else.
This is common sense, and not a very hard conclusion to get to. Sure, but one has to know how to work in order to accomplish this. Hard work is not enough. Very hard work is not enough. These are things some people never learn. I was actually quite stupid at it myself, and very resistant to learning as well. I didn't wanted to have to work, I wanted to be discovered. Right.
Like most work, this blog is also a fiction. Because there is no one way to work, and there is no possible way to do as I suggest. There is, in actuality, really no difference between work and anything else we do. But we don't generally live in actuality.
In order to do as I suggest, to approach your work with some of the same forces you approach "art," you have to leave all the meaning of what you are doing and why you are doing it behind, at least for periods of time, so that you can track what you are doing in purely formal terms. For instance, NLPers suggest that if you map out the linguistic, sensory-cognitive and subjective physiological processes you go through when you are either making art or doing work, you could figure out ways of supplanting parts of each into each other. There are those who even believe that if you simply pretend to believe you are making art when you are actually performing tasks at your day job, that you will make huge shifts in the way you do them.
Of course, as I said above, this is all fiction. But then, so is work, in a sense.
It would be completely up to you, if wanted to make yourself an experiment.
I'll say this, the better your refine your skills, and learn to approach your work creatively, the more subtle you will become, and the more values you will be able to satisfy at once. It is even possible to learn to reap satisfaction from activities that you shouldn't be able to reap satisfaction from. Think of it as a form of yoga, and doing -- using -- the work that is absolutely the worst suited to your disposition may actually be the most ideal work for you to do, from this perspective. That is if you wanted to take on a project of this sort, this magnitude.
I think it was Gurdjieff who said that you can learn more from a polished floor than a famous painting, if the floor was polished by someone with knowledge. Think of that knowledge, not as mystical knowledge, as he may have suggested, but an integration (and therefore, simplification) of multiple, and possibly conflicting, complexities into one's subjective arsenal.
Still, it may not make life any easier.
That may be true to some extent, but this is also about articulating the revelations one encounters once one realizes that there may be, and may have been, no other way. It's easy to dream, but many things need to come into confluence in order to create the right conditions to, let's say, publish one's novel with enough critical and commercial appeal that one might land oneself a tenure track job, or get paid handsomely enough for a screenplay to be free of working, in the typical sense.
Yes, I agree, teaching is work too, but teaching sculpture, if you are a sculpter, is very different from writing business system specifications, or answering tech support calls.
But having had to work teaches things that luck may not, and I think, at this point, after over twenty-five years of fulltime work, I'm an expert. Not only am I an expert at getting things done, but I'm also an expert at not getting things done, and being efficient, inefficient, of creating the appearance of doing a great job (sometimes actually harder than doing a great job), and numerous other operations and subterfuges one must learn in order to survive work.
The conclusion I draw more often than not is that it is best to do the best job you can possibly do, since that is really what makes things easier. The better you work, the better you get at working, and after a while it's almost like cheating. You have all these skills you're not even aware of, and you get things done in half the time, or less, than it might take someone else.
This is common sense, and not a very hard conclusion to get to. Sure, but one has to know how to work in order to accomplish this. Hard work is not enough. Very hard work is not enough. These are things some people never learn. I was actually quite stupid at it myself, and very resistant to learning as well. I didn't wanted to have to work, I wanted to be discovered. Right.
Like most work, this blog is also a fiction. Because there is no one way to work, and there is no possible way to do as I suggest. There is, in actuality, really no difference between work and anything else we do. But we don't generally live in actuality.
In order to do as I suggest, to approach your work with some of the same forces you approach "art," you have to leave all the meaning of what you are doing and why you are doing it behind, at least for periods of time, so that you can track what you are doing in purely formal terms. For instance, NLPers suggest that if you map out the linguistic, sensory-cognitive and subjective physiological processes you go through when you are either making art or doing work, you could figure out ways of supplanting parts of each into each other. There are those who even believe that if you simply pretend to believe you are making art when you are actually performing tasks at your day job, that you will make huge shifts in the way you do them.
Of course, as I said above, this is all fiction. But then, so is work, in a sense.
It would be completely up to you, if wanted to make yourself an experiment.
I'll say this, the better your refine your skills, and learn to approach your work creatively, the more subtle you will become, and the more values you will be able to satisfy at once. It is even possible to learn to reap satisfaction from activities that you shouldn't be able to reap satisfaction from. Think of it as a form of yoga, and doing -- using -- the work that is absolutely the worst suited to your disposition may actually be the most ideal work for you to do, from this perspective. That is if you wanted to take on a project of this sort, this magnitude.
I think it was Gurdjieff who said that you can learn more from a polished floor than a famous painting, if the floor was polished by someone with knowledge. Think of that knowledge, not as mystical knowledge, as he may have suggested, but an integration (and therefore, simplification) of multiple, and possibly conflicting, complexities into one's subjective arsenal.
Still, it may not make life any easier.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
From the Series "How to Work"
1.
It doesn’t follow that with the best intentions
The best results, the greatest satisfaction follows.
Not that we would deny those dreamers of dreams
Big and small, that what they hoped to achieve
May fall into the most propitious assembly.
A picture doesn’t get taken just by gazing out
Into space; nor is space made by closing one’s eyes
And imagining the world within a two hundred
Square foot apartment. Things have to be done
Not always the things one might expect, but something
Must be struck from the ground, the sky, the sea
Some action following the deft delirium that
Completes the venture from one set of futilities
To another, takes you swimming with it, if only
To feel the gliding of events, since it is probably
As important that we feel them as they feel us.
And the inevitable sacrifices dicing up our hearts
May then yield a strange kind of growth that surprises
Mildly, but well enough to feel our pores breathing.
That’s what they set out to ask us about, and all
The pictures standing next to the casket were of things
Taking effect, and lacing into the seemingly unending
Triumph of the fixity running uphill against itself.
2.
You may be pregnant with an action or idea
And for a long time that is how you’ve been
Somewhat hopeful, alarmed, discomfited
Until someone bursts into your cube asking
How many centimeters are you now ready to push.
Nothing can be done, nothing stand in your way
Though you might need to wait for it to roll
Over on you, with big nyloned legs and steel spokes
Because in some ways the completion of a thought
Is like digestion, other times the unearthing
Of an ancient weapon, while laying down
A foundation, feeling the desire to impregnate
The earth with your boundaries, rigid descriptions
Of that which cries for trampling over. And so
The mice come, and the flees and the ants and worms
Tearing apart what you thought was your piece de resistance.
And in a cubical alone a single matador
Bows to his reflection before booting up. The sequence
Has gone live and the impetus is buried in the facts
Of development. Rude impositions strike to make
One better than merely a tool, but a value
Or valued asset among innumerable flag stations
The stones vacationing along Broadway, waiting for
A peculiar kind of usage to redeem them: insertion.
3.
If you go out to hunt and gather you must engage
Your mind, though it be a soldier’s whore, a fenced in
Field of weeds, a box of rotten chocolates, evil
Design and paranoia engendered in the very tissue
Of the medulla oblongata. And all the funk
That grows out of it hence. But you have grown
To appreciate this mess and even revel in its works
From time to time, though you may be inclined to wish
You had an off switch, and so years of meditation
Practice has gotten you very far. It seems, according
To recent research to thicken the tissues of
The neo-frontal cortex, which is good news
For anyone wishing to stave off Alzheimer’s
But maybe not for those who rely on you not being
So thick-headed. Because meditators, you may have found
Tend to be the center of their universe, and that’s
Good, for the meditator. One also needs to have
A fundamental understanding of language and its
Relationship to the body, and its actions. Thoughts
And physiology travel together as their work
Is systematically entwined, according to Dr. Grinder
And Dr. Bandler, and their student, Mr. Dilts
And that whole army of thera-priests and trainers.
4.
There is really no distinction between work
And play, it is true, but who wants to play the same
Game over and over again, and who wants to
Play with those who demand that one plays with them
The game they want to play without recourse
To one’s own desires. That is why, while playing
One needs to hold silently in one’s mind another
Set of rules which make the game another game
And for which one can keep one’s own score
And change them when one wishes. After all, most
Kids who want to play, who really want
The same game played every time are lacking
In what it takes to see and need to be shown how to
Play, if only through the subtle gestures of hypnosis
Over a longish period of time until they as well
Begin to move in stranger directions
Than they have been used to. The whole world is like this
And so the world may be our target audience
Since some less than benevolent despots will tend
To play at making gruesome their games must mutate
Into another set of rules that don’t include mutilations
Of any kind, or sapping the spirits of their players
Dragging off to work unsubtly needing an off switch.
5.
When I say one must hold in ones mind another
Set of rules, what is it that I mean, since there
Is actually nothing to hold and nowhere
To hold something, but this is an act of imagining
And that is work too, perhaps one’s primary
Work, since most of us don’t even, if we’re laboring
Manually, build something to completion
And even beginning demands imaginary work
Of saying to oneself, what will these bricks look like
When they become a wall, how will the ruddy rising
Be offset by the verdigris of the garden
The azure or the boiling gray of the sky. What will it
Feel like to lean against its shady face while the sun
Remembering fleetingly in a fairer season
The intense rays of heat striking down on your defenseless
Head and torso, your dripping limbs. Recreating
Those sensations and recombining them with the world
As you have found it today, that is work as well
Though possibly not the work you credit yourself
With doing. And if you are one of those who like myself
Spends hours tapping on a keyboard and yapping
On the phone in a cubicle, imagining a world
Then there is even more work to be done. So do it.
6.
To imagine a world in which columns and rows
Of data exist in tables, and coordinates
Drape over space so that the postmaster
Can find you when it’s time to send you the bill
And even money somehow valued by the interaction
Of those columns and rows, manifestos
Of circuitry that are made manifest through observation
Through wincing and caring, so that any real information
Is actually held in your muscle tension, images
In the brain, phantom sounds and inner babble
Bundled together to create a world of value
Of the places you need to be at particular times
During the day, vs. what you’d really like
To be doing. When you multiply that by several
Billion, allowing for variation of some expanse
The inter-currency effect is that you have a world
Economy, beginning with you and your bundle
Of nervous energy accumulates over time
And maintained minute by minute by your every
Action, expectation you’ve learned and feel you need
To have, to be who you are and what is that
But all you know, having little choice in the matter
Needing to dispel as much conflict as possible.
7.
The whole body enables the brain to think—we are
The minds appropriate to upright quadripeds
Not disembodied Cartesian sailors floating
On an ethereal sea. It is the mind of two eyes
A nose, a mouth, two ears, hands that give our thoughts reach
Two feet that feel out for us a place to stand
And work is designed around an animal who thinks
He is one thing but lives as something else entirely—
Rectangular keyboards, for the hands and chairs
Which cause tension and disk compression
It is up to you to fill the gaps and this should
Be done not by some recognized distributor
Of ergonomic salvation, but by one’s own
Efforts, since it is both the body and the mind
Traveling as a unit, that is ill from too much work
And not this and that. Not pieces not fitting together
As we often find ourselves amiss and incompetent
We have designed a world in which we work
Around a metaphysics trying to disown
How lust and love of music both drive and distract
The operations we partake in, hurrying from
One state to the next as if a plasma of some sort
Was surging through electric cables in a desert.
It doesn’t follow that with the best intentions
The best results, the greatest satisfaction follows.
Not that we would deny those dreamers of dreams
Big and small, that what they hoped to achieve
May fall into the most propitious assembly.
A picture doesn’t get taken just by gazing out
Into space; nor is space made by closing one’s eyes
And imagining the world within a two hundred
Square foot apartment. Things have to be done
Not always the things one might expect, but something
Must be struck from the ground, the sky, the sea
Some action following the deft delirium that
Completes the venture from one set of futilities
To another, takes you swimming with it, if only
To feel the gliding of events, since it is probably
As important that we feel them as they feel us.
And the inevitable sacrifices dicing up our hearts
May then yield a strange kind of growth that surprises
Mildly, but well enough to feel our pores breathing.
That’s what they set out to ask us about, and all
The pictures standing next to the casket were of things
Taking effect, and lacing into the seemingly unending
Triumph of the fixity running uphill against itself.
2.
You may be pregnant with an action or idea
And for a long time that is how you’ve been
Somewhat hopeful, alarmed, discomfited
Until someone bursts into your cube asking
How many centimeters are you now ready to push.
Nothing can be done, nothing stand in your way
Though you might need to wait for it to roll
Over on you, with big nyloned legs and steel spokes
Because in some ways the completion of a thought
Is like digestion, other times the unearthing
Of an ancient weapon, while laying down
A foundation, feeling the desire to impregnate
The earth with your boundaries, rigid descriptions
Of that which cries for trampling over. And so
The mice come, and the flees and the ants and worms
Tearing apart what you thought was your piece de resistance.
And in a cubical alone a single matador
Bows to his reflection before booting up. The sequence
Has gone live and the impetus is buried in the facts
Of development. Rude impositions strike to make
One better than merely a tool, but a value
Or valued asset among innumerable flag stations
The stones vacationing along Broadway, waiting for
A peculiar kind of usage to redeem them: insertion.
3.
If you go out to hunt and gather you must engage
Your mind, though it be a soldier’s whore, a fenced in
Field of weeds, a box of rotten chocolates, evil
Design and paranoia engendered in the very tissue
Of the medulla oblongata. And all the funk
That grows out of it hence. But you have grown
To appreciate this mess and even revel in its works
From time to time, though you may be inclined to wish
You had an off switch, and so years of meditation
Practice has gotten you very far. It seems, according
To recent research to thicken the tissues of
The neo-frontal cortex, which is good news
For anyone wishing to stave off Alzheimer’s
But maybe not for those who rely on you not being
So thick-headed. Because meditators, you may have found
Tend to be the center of their universe, and that’s
Good, for the meditator. One also needs to have
A fundamental understanding of language and its
Relationship to the body, and its actions. Thoughts
And physiology travel together as their work
Is systematically entwined, according to Dr. Grinder
And Dr. Bandler, and their student, Mr. Dilts
And that whole army of thera-priests and trainers.
4.
There is really no distinction between work
And play, it is true, but who wants to play the same
Game over and over again, and who wants to
Play with those who demand that one plays with them
The game they want to play without recourse
To one’s own desires. That is why, while playing
One needs to hold silently in one’s mind another
Set of rules which make the game another game
And for which one can keep one’s own score
And change them when one wishes. After all, most
Kids who want to play, who really want
The same game played every time are lacking
In what it takes to see and need to be shown how to
Play, if only through the subtle gestures of hypnosis
Over a longish period of time until they as well
Begin to move in stranger directions
Than they have been used to. The whole world is like this
And so the world may be our target audience
Since some less than benevolent despots will tend
To play at making gruesome their games must mutate
Into another set of rules that don’t include mutilations
Of any kind, or sapping the spirits of their players
Dragging off to work unsubtly needing an off switch.
5.
When I say one must hold in ones mind another
Set of rules, what is it that I mean, since there
Is actually nothing to hold and nowhere
To hold something, but this is an act of imagining
And that is work too, perhaps one’s primary
Work, since most of us don’t even, if we’re laboring
Manually, build something to completion
And even beginning demands imaginary work
Of saying to oneself, what will these bricks look like
When they become a wall, how will the ruddy rising
Be offset by the verdigris of the garden
The azure or the boiling gray of the sky. What will it
Feel like to lean against its shady face while the sun
Remembering fleetingly in a fairer season
The intense rays of heat striking down on your defenseless
Head and torso, your dripping limbs. Recreating
Those sensations and recombining them with the world
As you have found it today, that is work as well
Though possibly not the work you credit yourself
With doing. And if you are one of those who like myself
Spends hours tapping on a keyboard and yapping
On the phone in a cubicle, imagining a world
Then there is even more work to be done. So do it.
6.
To imagine a world in which columns and rows
Of data exist in tables, and coordinates
Drape over space so that the postmaster
Can find you when it’s time to send you the bill
And even money somehow valued by the interaction
Of those columns and rows, manifestos
Of circuitry that are made manifest through observation
Through wincing and caring, so that any real information
Is actually held in your muscle tension, images
In the brain, phantom sounds and inner babble
Bundled together to create a world of value
Of the places you need to be at particular times
During the day, vs. what you’d really like
To be doing. When you multiply that by several
Billion, allowing for variation of some expanse
The inter-currency effect is that you have a world
Economy, beginning with you and your bundle
Of nervous energy accumulates over time
And maintained minute by minute by your every
Action, expectation you’ve learned and feel you need
To have, to be who you are and what is that
But all you know, having little choice in the matter
Needing to dispel as much conflict as possible.
7.
The whole body enables the brain to think—we are
The minds appropriate to upright quadripeds
Not disembodied Cartesian sailors floating
On an ethereal sea. It is the mind of two eyes
A nose, a mouth, two ears, hands that give our thoughts reach
Two feet that feel out for us a place to stand
And work is designed around an animal who thinks
He is one thing but lives as something else entirely—
Rectangular keyboards, for the hands and chairs
Which cause tension and disk compression
It is up to you to fill the gaps and this should
Be done not by some recognized distributor
Of ergonomic salvation, but by one’s own
Efforts, since it is both the body and the mind
Traveling as a unit, that is ill from too much work
And not this and that. Not pieces not fitting together
As we often find ourselves amiss and incompetent
We have designed a world in which we work
Around a metaphysics trying to disown
How lust and love of music both drive and distract
The operations we partake in, hurrying from
One state to the next as if a plasma of some sort
Was surging through electric cables in a desert.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Strategies Again & Again
For a lot of us, the time we have left after work, and the time we wish to spend with our families, is in short supply. Often we are exhausted after a day of work, and a couple of hours of eating and tossing the kids around acrobatically, or whatever it is you do. Maybe there are dishes, or recycling. Perhaps you go to the gym. There may be no time or energy even to socialize, like one used to, especially when you are responsible for others' wellbeing, and there may even be an absence of time to do art, if that is your inclination. Instead you watch TV, perhaps, or read magazines full glossy photos of pies and celebs.
I know a lot of people in this situation, even people without kids, whose daily struggles to subsist drain them so, that they haven't the impetus left to get going. There are those, either by luck, or by choice, who have never been the types able sponsor or promote themselves well enough to score that residence at Yaddo, the university job, make the right connections, in the right way, that can help set up a "situation" beneficial to the work they wish to make, though their work might well justify such special treatment. I think that goes for most of us. And most of that group's work will slowly dwindle off to practically nothing. I've sadly seen it happen to many.
In some ways this blog is about how to not let the dwindling happen, but it's also an attempt to turn the machine on its axis, so that the things in life that are generally prohibitive of art, might actually arouse its activity, not only its activity, but to perhaps even promote some of the neurological (or spiritual if you prefer) states that ideally go along with the process of making art.
Note: I am using "art" as a general term. My main focus is writing, and especially a kind of poetry that isn't quite traditional, and isn't quite the avant garde, perhaps it falls in that slot in which Ron Silliman proposes the "third way" poets live. This is the place where you are no longer upholding tradition, and supposedly not really breaking any new and significant ground either. It's kind of an insignificant position to be in, at least from an art historical angle.
Of course, time changes the way we see everything, and it's hard to know exactly how the Rorschach grid of art crit will tune its radar in coming years. Think of Emily Dickinson, Kafka, even someone like Henry Darger. So if you are in the position to judge your work, not harshly perhaps, but with tepid enthusiasm about what it might be or mean within that big ocean of works in general, think again, or rather, don't think.
Obviously a great way to manage some of this stuff (call it experience) is to engender some of our art process into other areas of our lives. This would at least keep one in practice, and keep the energies flowing in a way that would enable more productivity. It would also make some of the things we need to do, but are not so happy about needing to do, more pleasant, or at least more engaging and relevant to aspiration.
I only consider this as an option because I've seen it happen, to some degree, in a few people I've had the good fortune to have known. In most cases these have been people who have been quite oblivious to what they were doing, and have rarely been able to grasp what I was saying when I tried to point it out. I've also been around some of them enough to observe in them what seemed like better quality living during the periods they did this to a greater degree.
But the problem is, if you don't really know what you are doing, either when making art, or working your day job, that is, what you are actually doing on a detailed subjective -- for the most part unconscious -- level, i.e. your strategies, how could you possibly make choices about what to do when? That's the tricky part.
I know a lot of people in this situation, even people without kids, whose daily struggles to subsist drain them so, that they haven't the impetus left to get going. There are those, either by luck, or by choice, who have never been the types able sponsor or promote themselves well enough to score that residence at Yaddo, the university job, make the right connections, in the right way, that can help set up a "situation" beneficial to the work they wish to make, though their work might well justify such special treatment. I think that goes for most of us. And most of that group's work will slowly dwindle off to practically nothing. I've sadly seen it happen to many.
In some ways this blog is about how to not let the dwindling happen, but it's also an attempt to turn the machine on its axis, so that the things in life that are generally prohibitive of art, might actually arouse its activity, not only its activity, but to perhaps even promote some of the neurological (or spiritual if you prefer) states that ideally go along with the process of making art.
Note: I am using "art" as a general term. My main focus is writing, and especially a kind of poetry that isn't quite traditional, and isn't quite the avant garde, perhaps it falls in that slot in which Ron Silliman proposes the "third way" poets live. This is the place where you are no longer upholding tradition, and supposedly not really breaking any new and significant ground either. It's kind of an insignificant position to be in, at least from an art historical angle.
Of course, time changes the way we see everything, and it's hard to know exactly how the Rorschach grid of art crit will tune its radar in coming years. Think of Emily Dickinson, Kafka, even someone like Henry Darger. So if you are in the position to judge your work, not harshly perhaps, but with tepid enthusiasm about what it might be or mean within that big ocean of works in general, think again, or rather, don't think.
Obviously a great way to manage some of this stuff (call it experience) is to engender some of our art process into other areas of our lives. This would at least keep one in practice, and keep the energies flowing in a way that would enable more productivity. It would also make some of the things we need to do, but are not so happy about needing to do, more pleasant, or at least more engaging and relevant to aspiration.
I only consider this as an option because I've seen it happen, to some degree, in a few people I've had the good fortune to have known. In most cases these have been people who have been quite oblivious to what they were doing, and have rarely been able to grasp what I was saying when I tried to point it out. I've also been around some of them enough to observe in them what seemed like better quality living during the periods they did this to a greater degree.
But the problem is, if you don't really know what you are doing, either when making art, or working your day job, that is, what you are actually doing on a detailed subjective -- for the most part unconscious -- level, i.e. your strategies, how could you possibly make choices about what to do when? That's the tricky part.
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