Everything becomes work. First off, there is work-work, the cash-producing activity that resembles being at a cocktail party that your spouse’s ex invited her to, what the fuck was his name? You got dragged along. Yes, a non-zero possibility of having an interesting conversation on occasion, but then there are the unavoidable and stultifying and dysfunctional interactions more commonly encountered. There are surely better things to do in what has now become extremely limited life-time.
Then there is art-work, something that has generated minuscule quantities of cash over the years, though the peripheral effect of getting teaching jobs ostensibly because creative output can’t be ignored. But there’s no time to engage in the deep immersion that is required to produce, for example, sonic compositions. So art-work simply dries up. Archive gets occasional additions, but the process of mining the archive for material to feed the creative has ceased.
But all this is retrospect: what of the moment, this moment, where words are of no consequence, where words are empty, sightless, glazed eyes peering out from the memory of what once was on the page: what is now faded, erased. Yet, there is only the now, anymore, ever. The when of the past is only a weight to carry; the when of the future is someone else’s. Present conditions shrivel to the minimum: work-work to keep medical insurance and mortgage payments going while the mass of art-work falls to the floor, a gravitational insult to earth-bound body. No Lightness left in the creative endeavor.
Reminds me of old acquaintance Tom Sherman’s A Finished Work of Art is a Thing of the Past … or not.
Wind blowing gusts of snow on the far southern horizon: the San Juan Mountains. To the west the hulking mass of the Uncompaghre Uplift creates a false horizon, bending gravitational waves and forcing a second look, always.