I.
It took a week to calm down a little—to hit the edge of an ambient feeling of stress, decompressing people call it, or just working to convince your body that there’s no need to brace itself in anticipation of a crisis, or an email notification, or both. I spent all week, that first post-job week, wanting more than anything to make lists of what I had accomplished on each day. Or maybe not wanting to do this so much as feeling like my mind moved toward no other neural pathway than productivity: making and then feverishly completing these silly little lists which made me feel bad. Sometimes I did give in and make the lists, and this felt satisfying until they were finished and there was nothing left for me to do but go to, e.g., Ace Hardware to replace the broken sprinkler head. Other times I simply thought about the lists, and why I felt the need to make them, and tried to remain analytically neutral about the answers I found.
It’s difficult for a job to end when the job made you an insane person, made you need to anticipate certain things going wrong and preemptively worry about and resent them, which is not a state conducive to art-making at all. Over the first few days I did things like sweep and mop the floors, clean out the closets, drive the extra kitchen appliances to the thrift store, drive to the other thrift store to see if I could find a cabinet for the studio, hard-boil some eggs. I bought myself a coffee and then did those administrative life things that build and gunk up the blood: changing the oil and ordering compost and then getting the tomato starts in the ground, that was a close one. At the end of each day I was exhausted, and also felt like I had done nothing. I returned to the list-making, to prove to myself that I had.
In moments when I’m feeling generous with myself I can frame all of this bullshit as the necessary work I must do in order to receive my download. Receiving my download, since my job ended, is the thing I yearn for most of all, and what I spend my afternoon hours preparing for, walking my neurotic domestic loops. It is the thing that will confirm whether or not I have interesting, curious thoughts buried deep within me still, or whether my year spent fulfilling constant and wide-ranging secretarial requests has permanently impeded my ability to be cool or weird or hot. I wash the sheets and put away the dishes so that I may sit down, distraction-less, and write my little book. Days pass, lists are added to. The download does not arrive.
II.
Sometimes I feel with great conviction that art is the lens through which my soul experiences living. It is the immovable concept in a field (my life) of mostly air. In these moments I’m happy to let my life flow around it, or more accurately I understand and accept that I have no other option: my actions, my thoughts, my choices, and my opinions are all formed and fixed by my relationship to it at any given time. If I take a job I am calculating how much freedom the job will buy me to do my art, or how much money it will pay me to save for a more permanent space in which to do my art, or how much it will distract and block me from what I feel is the main reason I am here on earth, which is to share myself, or maybe actually just to practice articulating myself to others, or to me via others, or just to me.
Other times I feel like art is a nervous tic. Like someone left a window open in me, and a demon comes through the window sometimes and sits on the back of my neck and tells me that I need to be doing something that I’m not doing, gives me ideas for what I should do next, and makes me stressed about the resources and time it will take for me to complete this task, not to mention what I will do with it after, or who, if anyone, the demon wants me to try to impress. Poetry is almost never a friendly demon, meaning it never wants to just invite me over to eat fruit in its yard. It wants me to do something, or I want it to do something. We are not simply chilling together, letting each other exist, despite what the old books would have me believe.
III.
In late February I flew to Texas to see a friend and get some sun. I left my phone in the car on accident on the way to the airport, and so spent most of the days walking around East Austin with crude maps I’d made on scraps of paper. I was so happy to be phone-less, felt so free walking around without a way for anyone to get in touch with me, or anything to separate or distract me from the blooming trees and just-greening cemeteries and front yards. I still had three months of the job left, then, and felt I was arriving in Texas mostly dead, or at least unconscious. I was thinking things like my pottery is boring, and I’ll never write another book again and I’m so tired and more, and worse. I felt (and told everyone that I felt) that I’d never be interesting again.
One afternoon I followed my map to a shop I’d once sold pottery to, before this job had begun. The owner of the shop had been so kind to me over the years, paying the exorbitant shipping and calmly responding to my emails right away, and I had gone into the store to see if I could just run into her on accident, not knowing how I would feel once I got there, or whether I’d be the version of myself I’d like to introduce. Once I arrived, though, surrounded by all the glass vials and art books and organic socks, I entered into a kind of consumptive euphoric state, convinced that I could purchase a better version of me, right now, and take it home. I bought expensive local face oil and a tiny notebook and pen for my walk and two essential oil diffusers from Japan shaped like wooden flowers. Once and for all, I remember thinking, I bought The Artist’s Way.
The owner wore a mask but touched my upper arm when she spoke, saying that she was bummed to find out I was taking a break from wholesale—that she’d loved buying my work and would love to carry it again. She saw The Artist’s Way in my hand and asked if I’d ever worked through it. I said no. She told me not to beat myself up if I couldn’t commit to doing it every week. She said I could just go back whenever I was able. She said she fell off the schedule a couple of times, but just came back to it later: no big deal. She said it was a really powerful book, and that when she finished it, she knew she was going to open her store. I thanked her and hugged her, knowing only a little bit of what she was saying, but feeling genuinely excited and happy. I walked out of the shop with my paper bag of healing and felt like myself again: alone and unreachable in the sun.
The Artist’s Way is sitting on the table in the office-ish room of our house, now, un-worked-through, but sifted through, at least a bit. When I clean the room I feel the desire to put it in the bookshelf, but am too scared to remove it from my sight. So it stays: a physical to-do list of just one thing. At some point, Jay or I put a plant on top of it, so its cover is a little wavy from humidity, from wet terracotta weighing it down. When I look at it I think: I am waiting for the mental clouds to clear from the pure blue sky of my soul, and then I will be able to begin my projects. I have been waiting for this, in moments large and small, for years and for weeks, even though I know that it doesn’t really work like that.
IV.
There is a grubby little part of me that wants to know where every artist’s money comes from, and who, if anyone, is paying for their life. I am not proud of this grubby little part, not proud of the mood I’m in when these ungenerous thoughts arrive, not totally ready to confront the implication behind my suspicion that many artists do have a portion of their lives paid for by someone, or something, and still: I want to know.
I want to know how artists pay their rent, and whether it’s with their art, and how much money they have left over afterward. I want to know if they have additional corporate jobs they don’t want people to know about, or student loans or credit card debt, or rich husbands or wives or parents who support them, or if they inherited property, or if they qualify for food assistance and state-sponsored healthcare. I want to know if they fall asleep crying about money, or wake up scared about money, or falling ill, or if they worry about being unemployable, or if they are good at stashing the money away, or if they simply do not depend on their art to feed and house and clothe them, in which case I could mercifully relieve myself of the burden of trying to make my life look as effortless and luxurious and safe as theirs.
I want to know because being a working artist is very difficult. It is groping around in the dark for a light switch and finding only projected images of other people in their well-lit rooms. It’s entirely possible that supporting yourself with art alone, and on your own terms—something I’ve been aiming for since I was a kid—is no longer plausible. It’s entirely possible that the projected images of artists I see shaping their lives around their art, traveling for and with their art, thinking and talking about their art with other artists, and ostensibly being paid for it, are fake—or at least, not wholly true. I want to know about the generous patrons and gifted real estate and inherited wealth and day-trading spouses, not to determine which artists are deserving of some arbitrary label or permission from me; but so that I understand, really and truly, the resources it takes to do it, and how much longer I should continue to try.
V.
I drove to Portland recently to escape my thoughts. I drove to see Tyler for his birthday, and to check in on the city, and to see if any book-ideas would arrive during the sixteen hours I’d be in the car, air-conditioning-less and sweating in the mid-July haze. I wanted to think thoughts that were unrelated to money, or what I had and didn’t have, or whether the university would call me back, or about all the changes I needed to make to the website, or being mad at myself for not applying for health insurance: all the tiny papercuts of living. I wanted to think big grandiose and rolling-hills-like thoughts, easy and subsuming, which would only be possible if I could think of the drive as leisurely, and not utilitarian: definitely not an attempt to escape.
What I wanted more than anything was for the book to take shape in my mind: a final, definitive, interesting shape. A third of it was written, which meant that most of it wasn’t, and it was for this remaining chunk that I awaited revelation, or inspiration, or even just the will to continue working on and through. The apartment I rented was on a shady street just a block or two from East Burnside, and I spent my first day skimming along the big SE thru-ways by foot, inviting the revelation to arrive as soon as it could. I bought coffee in paper cups and took pictures of beautiful graffiti patinas. I went to the bookstore and touched the covers and got lost in the different sections: seasonal cooking, small press poetry arrivals, nonfiction staff picks. I saw The Creative Act and I saw Cooking for Artists and I saw the big new Alice Notley and I made little lists in my phone of books to order later, and left with nothing.
Back in the cool, tiled kitchen of my rented apartment, I opened all the folders containing pieces of the book—“my” book, the book I was “working on” but really only thinking about. I poured a jar of water, drank half, put the pitcher back in the fridge, returned to the screen. I checked the “last opened” dates of each piece in each folder, mentally noting the page counts and general chunk shapes, then closed the folders again. I opened a drafts document that also contained pieces of the book, in notes and outlines and streams of consciousness, then closed it. I googled the hours of the restaurants I still wanted to go to and made vague plans for dinner, and for the next day’s lunch. I opened the drafts document again, this time fixating on a single paragraph about a Talking Heads song that I’d written earlier in the spring. Seized with [something] I spent an hour working on it, or maybe two, then emailed it to Tyler. The subject of the email was “what i did today.”
VI.
Each season blooms toward its own psychosis. In the deep summer my body simply does not want to move that much, or that fast, and the dissonance between its speed and the speed of the world (traffic) first grows, then warps, then begins to throb.
Body wants to lay down in the grass or be in the water, despite the many more hours of daylight July offers, hours in which (I was raised to believe) I could or should be productive. Could or should make hay.
On the way back home I drive the length of the gorge eastward, the sun dipping in the sky just behind me: casting a kind of honey’d drama on the world ahead. The grass is more golden, more shimmeringly dead going this direction: the wind blowing the wisps and fog clean through the channel, scouring it of all but the sharp little pops of the neon wind surfers against the rough cerulean, gliding left and right.
Having used up all my phone calls on the previous leg, and feeling luxuriously bored and generous and ready to be talked to, I put on the R*** R**** audiobook.
I’d seen the R*** R**** book at the bookstore and in the airport and then in the museum gift shop and then a bunch of times on social media. Every time I saw the book I thought, I’m going to buy that book, and then just kept on walking or scrolling: a little scared, maybe, considering how much money R*** R**** has, of what his book might make me believe I should do.
The sky is blue with no smoke in sight, the heat languid and all-encompassing. The big trucks blow by me, thunder beyond me, deeper into the gold.
R*** R**** has a beautiful voice. He really does. He is calmly telling me that there comes a time when the idea phase of the art project is over, and there’s nothing left to do but climb the grand spiral staircase of the work: to do the actual writing, or recording, or painting—the labor of which the art project ultimately consists.
Fuckin R*** R****, I think, because I do not have the energy to invent a new life. Because lives and art are invented with resource, and space. How to even gather.
[Something something] the resilience of the organic being within the industrial profit-seeking grid. Wanting conscious experience of living. Plants. Finding, losing, finding, losing again (but not my fault). But is it my fault. Long swims in the river. We have fuckups to thank for our most important subcultures, our most detailed maps. And ultimately, isn’t the earth so beautiful, and we beings that come from it beautiful, too?
Purpling gliding hills roll over the sliver of gorge water, swallow it, turn to rolling grass. The shape appears. Then descends. I think, I’ll remember.
I drive as fast as I can for five more hours, eager (I guess) to do my laundry, take a bath, then sleep.