I.
There’s that first shiny week in January where I can look at the year ahead and see a field of un-punctured crystalline snow, and believe I could be as un-punctured by time and obligation and lack of sun as that field. I wake up and open the curtains and drink my large mason jar of water while writing a page or so of notes in my journal, like the internet has been screaming at me to do for years. It really does work. At night I do squats and planks and crunches in the guest room, not every night but maybe five out of seven, guided by the ponytailed fitness influencer that Instagram showed me once: a tiny version of her doing the moves on my screen. Between those two things, that first week of the year, is a stretch of calm time that I fill according to intuition or impulse: I drive to the coffee shop that has the dog treats, we park, I order, he sits and shakes and lays down, then we walk along the river trail, him sniffing and peeing on clumps of dead grass and sage, me turning over my thoughts about my book, or some other book, feeling sore in my muscles, noticing the ice or clouds or birds or deer.
Then it’s mid-January, the semester starting, the emails flitting (increasingly) in and out, and it seems harder to sit still in the morning, harder to crunch and lunge productively at night. All my ballooning luminous thoughts and dreams for me, simple and rarefied mantras that just one week ago held enough bewitching power for me to joke, and then believe with conviction, that I should make posters of them to hang on my wall—WORRY ABOUT YOURSELF or DO WHAT WORKS or PLEASURE IS THE GOAL—now wane and crease against the inescapable pressure of having, remembering that I have, a job. The un-punctured field is stabbed up, the tracks consolidated into trails, and soon the days are no longer an expanse but a simple exercise of walking the path. I keep my eyes on the ground, as it’s still winter, and this makes noticing anything else very difficult.
YOU ARE HAVING AN EXISTENTIAL CRISIS is the poster I actually want, the one I think I’ll paint and put up on my wall every January so I can look up and remember that this is what January is. Watching helplessly as the pure field of your life, of what your life could be, is slowly tramped over with common footprints: paying the exorbitant heat bill, needing a tank of gas, getting the carpets dirty again, (too much screen time), having to cook and eat, going to the store for eggs. Back and forth along the path, every day. The existential crisis exists, for me, because in the wedge of time between the final end of the holidays and before the wheel gets up and cranking again, I get a brief and too-clear vision of what it might feel like to not have to make money at all.
II.
Suzanne says WORK factors heavily in my chart. What is my WORK in this world, what are my outdated ideas about WORK, how to create and maintain a sense of purpose divorced from the American idea of WORK = IDENTITY or WORK = VALUE. Some of these things are easy to figure out, and some of them are not.
When an artists refers to a body of WORK, it’s like gesturing to a museum exhibit. Everything catalogued, photographed and dated, the WORK taking up physical space in the world, each piece of WORK in the body of WORK accumulating invisible power, and therefore representing not just labor and time but worth, increasing worth, as each piece of WORK is as solid and complete and essential as a brick in a temple, which the public can walk into, shelter under, marvel at, and appraise.
But other WORK isn’t solid at all, just an immeasurable and constant streaming of time and energy, never complete or catalogued but constant: every day a floor to sweep the crumbs from, emails that make more emails, WORK that doesn’t represent a life but takes from it, WORK that prevents a sitting-down-to more meaningful forms of WORK (WORK that might one day represent to the world who you are, instead of obscuring your soul in its stream).
I was born to two WORKaholics who became adults under the papery wingspan of Ronald Reagan, and whose ideas about WORK were irreparably hardened by his: “If you want it, WORK for it.” Something he might have said. My WORK is about class and freedom and technology and what happens to the organic being within the electrified grid of industry. I WORK at a school (a stream) and I WORK for myself (the laborious construction of a temple).
I wish I had more money, but everyone wishes that.
III.
I don’t have many friends who are writers. The writer friends I do have are the ones, like me, who struggle with writing, and groan beneath the weight of having to write things down in order to be themselves. When another writer asks me if I’m writing anything (something only writers ask) I say No! immediately and emphatically, sometimes making a funny show of it, smiling incredulously and shaking my head. It’s a reflexive reaction, but true: I am not writing anything. I am thinking about writing, sometimes, but only abstractly, and usually when my hands are busy with clay. I am definitely not sitting down to do it, unless momentarily re-possessed by a half-remembered dream of who I am, or was, which is a writer (I guess), in which case I try for a few days to string as many recent fixations together in an effort (I guess) to show myself I can still do it. In those moments I feel a dull panic about my identity, and my work, and about which version of myself (writer or potter) will take the lead going forward. Which horse I should bet on. Which horse I actually, despite the odds, would like to win.
If you are talented at something, and you show this talent to the world, and the world approves of your talent and wants more of it, don’t you begin to feel at least a bit of responsibility for not letting the world down? If you are an artist, there is always an imaginary path adjacent to the one you’re actually on, projected up into the sky, and you are watching an imagined version of yourself do imagined things on this path, things you could be doing, big and bold and successful things, if only you tried harder or had more time or were given massive institutional support. If you are an artist who lights on something that the world wants more of, and you get money or attention thrown at you for this thing, then you have to choose. Do you jump streams up onto the invisible path, and plug your soul into the production engine of your art project, where you’ve always imagined that Art Money and its social comforts exist? Or do you ask yourself the honest question: Who is running the projector up there?
IV.
Once I heard the poet Kate Greenstreet read her poems in the living room of a friend’s house in Portland, Oregon. I was twenty-six and had recently rededicated my life to the indulgence of my own whims. She was older than a parent, which forced me again to consider the history of geniuses born before me: an agonizing and pleasurable consideration. Afterward she took questions from the group of us, fifteen or twenty people sitting cross-legged on the floor. Somebody asked about her job. She’d worked in a mechanic’s office for years, or something like that, and had stayed because she liked the fact that her work had nothing to do with her writing. She went to work and did her job, kept her poem-thoughts to herself, then left her job at the end of the day, turning the lights off and locking the door, and returned home with her accumulated notes and thoughts to write.
I probably think about Kate Greenstreet once a month, if think = remember with an impactful, but diminished (overall, diminishing) echo of the force with which this admission, which she so casually offered, originally obliterated the way I thought about working, and life apart from working: the time in which real living happens. At twenty-six, the idea that someone so intelligent, so clearly gifted, could separate their income from their artistic pursuits, could intentionally do this, rang against everything I’d assumed I should strive for in life up until that point, which was to reverse-engineer a job from the amalgam of the very most unique attributes of my soul, and then to do that job for the rest of my life. For the first time, it made my scant and seasonal work patterns seem good: evidence of distinction, not indecision.
But the line does blur. I am not paid to write poems, and feel proud of this, and yet I still need money to eat, and trying to keep my need-money thoughts out of my poems takes work. Making pottery is my job, so I make the things that sell, and eventually I start to feel stuck and bored, like I am not an artist at all but merely a tube for money, because an experiment that doesn’t sell is a failure for a worker, but a triumph for an artist. I love writing my weird essays, and it makes me feel like a real writer to be hired as a Writing Teacher, but teaching college writing is nothing like the writing I want to do and think about, and by mid-semester I’m lost again, thinking maybe I don’t like writing or teaching at all. I think about Kate because I’m in awe of how she managed to remember, so consistently and for so many years, that the true value of the mechanic’s office was the clarity of this line. The conviction of knowing that if you want to be truly yourself, you’re going to have to do it for free.