The extended spring of my happy discontentThe extended spring of my happy discontentThe extended spring of my happy discontent
An epiphany in honor of Jeanette Winterson
It was the spring of 2007 when the work began to dry up. I had been working as a freelance copy writer, as well as doing a bit of work grading ESL papers. Money was tight, but manageably so. Then slowly, things turned to a trickle. The workload was cut, wages were slashed in half. It was quickly becoming pointless, so I walked into the future, into a vast, welcoming sea of…
…total brokeitude.
I have been here before, many a time. Consider 1993, when I was four months behind in rent. Thanks to a landlord that was flexible enough that I’m still convinced that she was not quite of this world, I didn’t end up on the street. Things did turn around though, and before I knew it, I was waist-deep in a solid income. Lo and behold, I even had the approval of my parents, who as much as they love me, have never really got the whole artist deal. I was acceptable, almost normal, even.
I was miserable.
So when things tanked again in 2001, I walked away from moderately well-heeled despair to attempt to undo the horrendous mistake of it all, this time with a bit of severance pay to soften the blow. This in turn led to graduate school, as well as more time protesting than probably was in my best interests. As noted above, a smaller but noticeable amount of regular income came back into my life for a bit, but things soured again.
Would it shock you if this state is where I find myself still, two years in, ever-so-slowly finding my own way, eking out something well beneath what most people in the US would consider to be a stable income – and yet, even the worst days are vastly more sane, balanced and in tune with the world then the best days previously were? If you are confused by my sense of priorities here, consider this: the “best days” during my corporate years were the days where I had a glimpse of my former happy existence as a broke artist.
If this still puzzles you, let me refer you to a white paper, it may help a bit. “A liminal existence.” That’s what the white paper from AWP said about the post-graduate life of people like me. “Liminal.” See? It’s official. What was formerly the exclusive domain of visionaries and other mad people (I’ll leave it to you to decide which one I am) is now a demographic. You can rest easy in the certainty that I have my place on the spreadsheet now.
This certainty of course is preposterous. All they can offer up is what not just any post-MFA student knows, but what any serious aspiring artist knows as well – that the path of the artist is treacherous, frequently full of failure, and further, that a sizable number of the so-called successes fail epicly to a degree that only Guy Fawkes could fully appreciate, with trashed hotel rooms, fits of mania or suicidal tendencies, and various forms of train wrecked existence in lieu of gunpowder plots? Please. Apologies all around, but forget the white paper. What saved my rounded bottom somewhere between the work drying up and the work drying up yet again was Jeanette Winterson.
Listen to her for yourself:
A work of art is abundant, spills out, gets drunk, sits up with you all night and forgets to close the curtains, dries your tears, is your friend, offers you a disguise, a difference, a pose. Cut and cut it through and there is still a diamond at the core. Skim the top and it is rich. The inexhaustible energy of art is transfusion for a worn-out world.
And:
The artist imagines the forbidden because to her it is not forbidden. If she is freer than other people it is the freedom of her single allegiance to her work. Most of us have divided loyalties, most of us have sold ourselves. The artist is not divided and she is not for sale. Her clarity of purpose protects her although it is her clarity of purpose that is most likely to irritate most people. We are not happy with obsessives, visionaries, which means, in effect, we are not happy with artists. Why do we flee from feeling? Why do we celebrate those who lower us in the mire of their own making while we hound those who come to us with hands full of difficult beauty…what would happen to us if we could imagine in ourselves authentic desire?
These quotes are from a magnificent work of hers called Art Objects, and while it would be a stretch to say that it saved my life, it did save me from a very hazardous toying with a return to the death that is corporate america when the ramen ran out yet again, and the cheap rent started to look insanely expensive.
“Objects to what?”, you may ask.
Being constrained, moulded, packaged, lectured, cajoled. Put into a box for safekeeping. Shrink-wrapped. Lied to, sat upon, mistrusted, misunderstood, ignored. (The former activist in me has to find humor in how closely this resembles Proudhon’s admonishment of government – which is no accident or mere coincidence at all.) In which manner does it do so – the protest, the direct action, the takeover? No. It does so through art itself – not the “I’d like something in green to match the sofa” sort of art – which is more a form of interior decorating – but the kind that takes hold of you and refuses to let go. A tempest that devours the teapot and leaves you bare and Awake. It’s what I live for, and while I would never be so rude as to say that it’s what you should do as well, if you do find yourself in fits of despair, you may want to look at where the creativity in your life resides. If the answer to this is “under a rock,” it may be time to get into the mud a bit.
It should be noted though that none of this is meant to romanticize poverty. The rather dismal state of affairs for artists (and increasingly, for everybody who needs to work for a living) has led to a truncation of the inherent need for creativity in people’s lives by war and economic uncertainty. As Winterson points out, “Ours has not been an easy century for art…Two World Wars, the Spanish Civil War, the General Strike of 1926 and the Depression of the 1930s cut short those experiments in language and in thought that human beings perpetually make and perpetually need.” What she specifically is referring to here is Modernism, but this could be applied to present day realities as well. How much has remained unsaid because of famine, disease and the cultural wars against drug users (actual or suspected), against queers, against pretty much anybody who disobeys? Quite a bit – but consider how power always has two sides; while I think that hip-hop would have emerged with or without the drug wars, consider also how the necessary resistance to power on the part of those who were oppressed led to some of the best works of Hip Hop’s first generation. As Hardt and Negri note repeatedly throughout their work, the price that Empire pays for utilizing biopower may be Empire itself. Do be aware though that for those of you who think that “The Work” is fine and all, but that it’s not social change work, and that it’s not even close to being revolutionary? Please do not project onto artists your own failed attempts at fomenting an uprising because we have the ability to charter the chaotic with greater finesse than you. It makes you mundane, and the last thing the world needs is yet another sorry pack of trifling, artless insurrectionists.
Meanwhile, while we all wait and wonder if capitalism is finally done for good, let it be known that what saved me was not the trade organization, not work (definitely not work), and dear god, don’t even get me started about activism. No, it was art, as in The Work. And my Work objects. Frequently and loudly – but more and more as I recover from activism, from the streets, from that anything-but-liminal form of soul death that I used to call a life? Subtly as well. Art resists – but with a sense of style.
