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Turning to a blank page
Aug. 25th, 2023 11:32 amA formerly local friend pinged me this morning about having seen an artist around online, someone who was a friend of mine in college.
I have suddenly gained free time like no time since then, and my next steps feel about as blank-slate-and-yawning-void as they did then, and I find myself verklempt over how different it feels, the grief in place of uncertainty.
Then was the first real flowering of collaborative art that high speed internet allowed for, and we were all in this community built online, doing amazing work, dreaming together, doing what humans do - making beautiful things and sharing them openly for the sake of shared joy, practicing our highest competencies as any animal plays. And then the recession hit and most of us had to get day jobs and give up a lot of that dreaming, myself included. I’ve barely done any art since 2008, but I can still feel the phantom limb of a pencil or a knife in hand after that amputation. Now, looking ahead, trying to figure out what sort of future there is left, how much more fragile all the world seems, and it really hammers home how diminished our collective hopes feel to know that so many of them signed off around when I did. Such genius consigned to digging trenches and filling them back in again - participants in an economy that does little more in the end than pulling useful materials from the earth, transforming them, and sending it all back as unwanted junk to landfill. A couple trillion tons of paperclips maximized.
And now that I find myself with a window of time, long enough to start to feel anything, to uncoil from tool-shape into animal-shape I feel overwhelmed, obligated to so much more than the human scale aims of wellbeing and communal joy we so excelled at bringing to life back then because human scale building is what we are meant to do. Looking on what we can build from what we have now, and what can be saved, and what can’t, and grieving because none of us were supposed to have to be heroic or sacrificial to make good on life. I do believe we still need vocational dreamers, and a few of us, my friend included, “made it,” but gods, we need so much hard work done if we’re going to make it out of this alive let alone save what we cherish, and it takes dreamers’ hands to do it, when no one else believes.
But the doing takes us away again from what we were born for, and lesser or greater talents, we were all of us born for dreaming.
I have suddenly gained free time like no time since then, and my next steps feel about as blank-slate-and-yawning-void as they did then, and I find myself verklempt over how different it feels, the grief in place of uncertainty.
Then was the first real flowering of collaborative art that high speed internet allowed for, and we were all in this community built online, doing amazing work, dreaming together, doing what humans do - making beautiful things and sharing them openly for the sake of shared joy, practicing our highest competencies as any animal plays. And then the recession hit and most of us had to get day jobs and give up a lot of that dreaming, myself included. I’ve barely done any art since 2008, but I can still feel the phantom limb of a pencil or a knife in hand after that amputation. Now, looking ahead, trying to figure out what sort of future there is left, how much more fragile all the world seems, and it really hammers home how diminished our collective hopes feel to know that so many of them signed off around when I did. Such genius consigned to digging trenches and filling them back in again - participants in an economy that does little more in the end than pulling useful materials from the earth, transforming them, and sending it all back as unwanted junk to landfill. A couple trillion tons of paperclips maximized.
And now that I find myself with a window of time, long enough to start to feel anything, to uncoil from tool-shape into animal-shape I feel overwhelmed, obligated to so much more than the human scale aims of wellbeing and communal joy we so excelled at bringing to life back then because human scale building is what we are meant to do. Looking on what we can build from what we have now, and what can be saved, and what can’t, and grieving because none of us were supposed to have to be heroic or sacrificial to make good on life. I do believe we still need vocational dreamers, and a few of us, my friend included, “made it,” but gods, we need so much hard work done if we’re going to make it out of this alive let alone save what we cherish, and it takes dreamers’ hands to do it, when no one else believes.
But the doing takes us away again from what we were born for, and lesser or greater talents, we were all of us born for dreaming.