been feeling particularly caged in by the Black Iron Prison lately (the world is a vampire, history is a nightmare, etc. etc….) in no small part due to the terms of agreement I didn’t read before signing up for this particular lifestyle I have: not particularly luxurious, but comfortable, a job not particularly soul crushing, but soul sapping. each day becomes more like the next as I swaddle myself in restraints that cushion me from the untamed majority of reality.
I’ve resolved to give up. giving up is easy, that much I’ve proven to myself every time I don’t sit down to write, every time I say there’s always tomorrow. but it’s best if I apply this talent for giving up to different ends. if I don’t get the librarian job here that I’ve applied for, then I’m giving up on the idea of having a librarian career. certainly giving up on the idea that this is a system worth working for. the trajectory of my life the past decade suggests that my priority has been to have a career in libraries. a noble cause, if I may say so. but emotionally, psychically, the depression and dissatisfaction I’ve felt suggests that my priorities lie elsewhere, and it’s long past time that I take that seriously.
I’m not interested in rehashing this problem. just dusting out the cage so I can get some real thinking done while incarcerated.
because the guards aren’t my coworkers here at the library; my boss isn’t the warden. the System extends far beyond the little grievances I have with wage labor. everything is working against the possibility of living life freely; and the only possibility of living life freely is to be a creator of realities that compete with, rail against, and try to subvert the structures holding us back. ie to be an artist. and here, in the US of A, artists who don’t serve as mouthpieces for the Empire place themselves near the very bottom of the pyramid, among women the poor nonwhites and queers. but it is in this willingness to cast themselves out of the Empire’s good graces that artists gain the power of true perception, and the potential for self-mastery.
there’s one passage in Great Expectations by Kathy Acker I think often about, where she lays out the problem of being an artist in the United States. if she thought the problem was bad in 1982, no telling the depths of despair she’d feel seeing the state of the arts today. the broader point she makes is that in a country where money is the Logos dictating the conditions of existence, and this society selects very few of its artists as being worthy of attention (ie care and support), then to persist in being an artist requires either financial support from family or sexual partners, critical compromise with commercial forces, or else a pathological and self-destructive commitment to the work. that aside, a minor point she mentions is that, because so few artists are selected as worthy of attention, the vast majority of us never get the recognition, distribution, or feedback necessary to progress artistically past the personal preoccupation stage of an artist’s development. the inclusion of “feedback” in this list really hits the mark for me. the past 6 months to a year has been a steady decrease in my concern for not only sharing work, but for making work at all, because I tried for a few years to keep at the avenue most available to me for sharing work, and never got anything that felt like actionable feedback. if creating art is a cybernetic process with the world, and there’s no response to incorporate back into the original force that brought the work into being, then by the law of entropy the will to create, unless exceptionally strong and self-sufficient, will dissipate.
this was supposed to be a kind of working out of ideas I’m going to package differently on my newsletter soon (remember I have a newsletter? link in bio). not sure I did that exactly but whatever–I’m learning to be okay with making a mess I don’t know what to do with. I think I’ve come up with a System (my old boss was all about creating Systems, and something I’ve learned is that it’s not enough to have a goal, or even a plan, but you need to have a System for attaining that goal, for implementing that plan). I’m going to start writing newsletters again, and hopefully get them out more consistently, because why else have a newsletter if I’m not sharing something consistently.
despite a feeling of having my creative energies exhausted, I remain dissatisfied with a life not shaped by a commitment to art. so I’m fueling my tank up with vitriol, resentment and a hunger to prove myself.