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.