Worn Out Welcomes

I told myself I was going to stop writing about work, stop working to write and giving fake consolation to my dead-end days. It’s foolish to make art out of life, as I risk prettifying an ugly situation, capping my hopes at low grade expression and debased recognition, wearing withered laurels as I bust my ass for nothing. For subsistence, the right to sandwiches from a vending machine, a short squat on a lord’s land, a subscription coffin. Not that hope can be invested in a radical new earthly order, in which exploitation and suffering will be abolished, and all people will enjoy themselves noneverlastingly, but at least for their time between birth and death, and frolic in a world without hunger and toil and hurt feelings, with precious art projects for all, plenty of supplies, ample training, and encouragement to gild their entrails, in a global community of free loving hobbyists, semi-gods, law-benders drafting licenses to do anything anytime. Not a city of man or God but a city of authenticity, of self-creating nothings with fashionable ideas for what might suit their blank slates. 

Hope will have to be directed elsewhere, to the other side of the sky, to that which can’t be made by the grubby hand or willed by the corrupted heart. Not to a God within but a God beyond who will intervene at the right moment, after the ultimate devastation, at the height of despair. Better to think I’m not here to build heaven but to endure the trials of life until true power nails me to the wall and then lifts me up, renews my undying essence.  

Even the darkest art lures us into a dangerous complacency. The most shocking expressions become habitual vanities, the most lurid exposé declines into beige wallpaper. What a soul needs lies not within itself, and can’t be produced out of its own resources, its grandest designs. I can work a degrading job but I need to stop thematizing it, representing it, turning it into a toy for my own and other’s amusement, all in a damned blasted effort to forget the sorriness of my lot. Each of ours. I should drop the inclination to thematize falsely redemptive art. (Everyone should consider this.) 

It’s not so much that I must change my life in a practical sense and start acting like a rational economic agent or a towering paternal presence. I can accept low status and poverty and menial work and even a spoiled profligate character, but art can no longer serve as their justification or derive its impetus from such banal sources. Like saving grace, art will have to come from somewhere else, not only from the carebattered days, the lines of dust drawn on overlooked panes. 

But then a neighborhood committee, some shadowy organization of bobble headed grandmas, petitioned for a new fountain outside my apartment. For weeks men worked on the fountain and I could hear the sawing of stone throughout the day, sharp and flinty, at a pitch that tickled the insides of my teeth and scratched at the backs of my eyeballs, for weeks each day off at home accompanied by the soundtrack to an overhanded stabbing. When the fountain was done and the noise quieted down and night fell, the lights blazed on; four posts of blinding white beams, joining the row of burning balls strung along the esplanades, already irradiating the night, adding a lunatic glow to bedrooms and a cold and unsettled air to dreams. (The figures of my sleeping self appear as the monstrous stitchwork of an undead unconscious.) 

A weapons grade lighting system and smooth cut stone and four benches, a melodious trickle of water siphoned from some dwindling reserve, cottage industry extravagance. A convenient place for people to gather just outside my apartment, to bring their children and dogs and why not, whip out the acoustic guitars and harmonicas, send in the cartwheeling clowns.  

And I’m still working in yet another doomed cafe, a third place sliding into last, a galaxy brain truck stop electric watering hole and pissing trough, where clouded interests collide, where coconut heads hang around for hours and carry out their virtually useful business, annoyingly silent and glassy before opaque interfaces or annoyingly loud and strutty, taking calls, the weekend leisure destination as well, the Saturday morning stroller fest, the last families, the whole portion of the reproducing public jostling for bagels and sweet milk substitutes. All these places should burn to a pile of hissing bricks. Throw me and the public on while we’re at it.  

Luxury products and services deployed as assaults on the senses, as martial campaigns against the body in need of sleep, darkness, space and quiet. Even a measured working life, working to serve stable and reasonable goals, is sucked into the tread of the progress, ground under a marching army of improvident improvers. The old gifts of the gods we must now swipe from windowsills, put inverted Promethean effort into stealing a place without technical fires scorching our retinas.  

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Human will in the grip of a twisted imperative, summarized by a logical formula: if you can, then you must. All options tend to obligations. But it gets worse. Even if you can’t, then you must: run a small business, satisfy an amorphous public, take care of yourself and others, find faith, attain mastery of a craft. No one can resist ruining themselves trying to erect spanking new cathedrals. I wrote a book about work and quotidian aches; that should be enough. But the days keep coming after it’s all been said, giving more time to wreck good impressions.