Waking up: freeing ourselves from work

We Are All Artists

Once I had a job that required me to organize and deliver ‘parenting workshops.’

It was a fraudulent exercise, a practice of deceit and hypocrisy, that justified itself in only two ways: first, by occasioning our coming together, we could offer each other a bit of comfort; and, second, pursuing the little fish ‘parenting’ to open waters where we could all be eaten together, by the Great White, at least revealed the truth that the whole notion of ‘parenting’ under conditions of servitude is a con.

Each week together we pondered the irresolvables.

How do you cope with economic stress?
What do you do with the stress of racism?
How do you not take your stress out on your children?
How do you give children the attention they need when work consumes you? When you’re a single parent? When you work two jobs? When you have no job?
How do you give love when you never got love?
Why is parenting not supported by the state?

Of course that last question we can answer just as Michael Moore answered the question “why are we so violent?” with: “because the state and its masters want us to be.”

The state refuses to support parenting because should we the people (“workers”), universally, begin to feel any degree of security about our lives and futures we might begin to question our lot in life. Because insecurity breeds passivity, compliance, acquiescence, fear – going along to get along, that sort of thing – the state wants us insecure.

One night I gave the parents a homework assignment to think about their secret passions, their dreams deferred – to name themselves, essentially – and to report back next class.

I found out they were, secretly, photographers and poets and filmmakers and chefs and actors and fashion designers and interior decorators and makeup artists.

It stirred me greatly, that experience. I never forgot it.

Afterwards it put me in the habit of asking my fellow wage-slaves, whenever I got the chance, “what’s your art? What do you do really?”

I never got a puzzled look. I never got a “Huh?”

I found this truth everywhere: the copying machine repairman / jazz pianist, the checkout clerks who are novelists and poets and singers and dancers and actors and comics; the journeymen in the trades who were simultaneously actors, singers, music producers, screenwriters…lots of musicians.

Among my neighbors there are filmmakers, visual artists, actors, poets, hip-hop producers, martial artists, singers, composers.

In a supermarket where I shop customers are ringed by bursts of colorful artwork from any point in the store. I asked about it and learned that a few of the clerks who like to draw are allowed by the company to be a “Sign Team” and design the displays.

How generous of the company to allow them.

This system is so wasteful of our talent that we start to become wasteful of our own talent. We begin to doubt we have any. A system that requires “a very small top and a very big bottom” could not function if most of us did not dismiss our power, our gifts, our art.

And because we’re wired to coalesce, and have no tribes to coalesce with, we adhere, despite ourselves, to what is unworthy of us.
We accept lives limited by the roles bestowed by the market.

Over three decades ago I took an English class called “City and Country in Literature.”

I recall only two things about the class. First, the patronizing attitude of the teacher when I challenged his dismissal of African music as “primitive,” and secondly my gut negative reaction at this observation of Thoreau’s from his Walden:

I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few wild apples only. Why, the owner does not know it for many years when a poet has put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable kind of invisible fence, has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk.

I mean, really, how would Thoreau know? How could he possibly know how much or how little that “crusty farmer” received from the earth to which he was bound? Only the most unsuccessful farmer would learn nothing from the earth that sustained him.

The most hideous part of this system (excepting the damage to the planet and its living ecosystems, planets and other animals) is its erosion of our possibilities and of our solidarity. It has caused our value to be diminished in our own eyes, boxed us into roles whose corollary is a contemptibly casual, everyday betrayal – of each other and of ourselves.

According to Mom, I was born on a cotton sack out in the fields, ‘cause she had no money to go to the hospital. When I was a child, we used to migrate from California to Arizona and back and forth. The things I saw shaped my life. I remember when we used to go out and pick carrots and onions, the whole family. We tried to scratch a livin’ out of the ground. I saw my parents cry out in despair, even though we had the whole family working. At the time, they were paying sixty-two and a half cents an hour. The average income must have been fifteen hundred dollars, maybe two thousand.
This was supplemented by child labor. During those years, the growers used to have a Pick-Your-Harvest Week. They would get all the migrant kids out of school and have ‘em out there pickin’ the crops at peak harvest time. A child was off that week and when he went back to school, he got a little gold star. They would make it seem like something civic to do.

We’d pick everything: lettuce, carrots, onions, cucumbers, cauliflower, broccoli, tomatoes – all the salads you could make out of vegetables, we picked ‘em. Citrus fruits, watermelons – you name it…We’d follow the seasons.

After my dad died, my mom would come home and she’d go into her tent and I would go into ours. We’d roughhouse and everything and then we’d go into the tent where Mom was sleeping and I’d see her crying. When I asked her why she was crying she never gave me an answer. All she said was things would get better. She retired a beaten old lady with a lot of dignity. That day she thought would be better never came for her.

…I never did want to go to town because it was a very bad thing for me. We used to go to the small stores, even though we got clipped more. If we went to the other stores, they would laugh at us. They would always point at us with a finger. We’d go to town maybe every two weeks to get what we needed. Everybody would walk in a bunch. We were afraid. (Laughs.) We sang to keep our spirits up. We joked about our poverty. This one guy would say, “When I get to be rich, I’m gonna marry an Anglo woman, so I can be accepted into society.” The other guy would say, “When I get rich I’m gonna marry a Mexican woman, so I can go to that Anglo society of yours and see them hang you for marrying an Anglo.” Our world was around the fields.

I started picking crops when I was eight. I couldn’t do much, but every little bit counts. Every time I would get behind on my chores, I would get a carrot thrown at me by my parents. I would daydream: If I were a millionaire, I would buy all these ranches and give them back to the people. I would picture my mom living in one area all the time and being admired by all the people in the community. All of a sudden I’d be rudely awaken by a broken carrot in my back. That would bust your whole dream apart and you’d work for a while and come back to daydreaming….

If people could see – in the winter, ice on the field. We’d be on our knees all day long. We’d build fires and warm up real fast and go back onto the ice. We’d be picking watermelons in 105 degrees all day long. When people have melons or cucumber or carrots or lettuce, they don’t know how they got on their table and the consequences to the people who picked it. If I had enough money, I would take busloads of people out to the fields and into the labor camps. Then they’d know how that fine salad got on their table. (Roberto Acuna in Studs Terkel’s Working)

This college boy…saw a book in my back pocket one time and he was amazed. He walked up to me and he said, “You read?” I said, “What do you mean, I read?” He said, “All these dummies read the sports pages around here. What are you doing with a book?” I got pissed off at the kid right away. I said, “What do you mean, all these dummies? Don’t knock a man who’s paying somebody else’s way through college.” He was a nineteen-year-old effete snob.
Yet you want your kid to be an effete snob? [Studs Terkel asked.]

Yes. I want my kid to look at me and say, “Dad, you’re a nice guy, but you’re a fuckin’ dummy.” Hell yes, I want my kid to tell me that he’s not gonna be like me…

…I’d like to run a combination bookstore and tavern. (Laughs.) I would like to have a place where college kids came and a steelworker could sit down and talk. Where a workingman could not be ashamed of Walt Whitman and where a college professor could not be ashamed that he painted his house over the weekend.

If a carpenter built a cabin for poets, I think the least the poets owe the carpenter is just three or four one-liners on the wall. A little plaque: Though we labor with our minds, this place we can relax in was built by someone who can work with his hands. And his work is as noble as ours. I think the poet owes something to the guy who builds the cabin for him.

I don’t think of Monday. You know what I’m thinking about on Sunday night? Next Sunday. If you work real hard, you think of a perpetual vacation. Not perpetual sleep… What do I think of on a Sunday night? Lord, I wish the fuck I could do something else for a living.

…This is gonna sound square, but my kid is my imprint. He’s my freedom… The mystics call it the brass bowl. Continuum. You know what I mean? This is why I work. Every time I see a young guy walk by with a shirt and tie and dressed up real sharp, I’m lookin’ at my kid, you know? That’s it. (Mike Lefevre in Studs Terkel’s Working)

We often believe, when we labor at the bidding of others, that these, the circumstances we were born into, the narrow fenced-in quarters where we stand, constitutes the sum of us, is all we are, despite our knowing, in our hearts, that we are more.

The only things that distinguish folks who claim their gifts from the majority of us is luck and taking oneself seriously. We can’t control the luck but we can start to take ourselves seriously (granted there’s a element of luck in that as well). And by ‘serious’ I don’t mean ‘grim’ – no, I mean “following our longing.” I’m told Michael Moore took all he had and set off to make films because he longed to. When you follow your longing, you don’t regret it.

Thoreau figured this out and shared it with these words:

I learned this, at least…that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him…In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.

All being an artist means is to have the courage, and the luck, to look beneath the lies spun to ensnare us – and what a gift, the power to cut through illusion, propaganda – and reveal truth. The shock of essential truth is food for the soul.

Once you look at truth baldly, you feel blessed, because, really, what else is there?

(And unless you do, how can we turn those ratios around?)

Though it takes courage to stand apart, when all your fellows are ensnared, when you consciously embrace the wind from below, it blows stronger.

Continue to "Culture" - Part 4

© Pamela Satterwhite for Nas2EndWork (the NEW)

Nascence to End Work

Waking up: freeing ourselves from work

Chapter IV: Culture (Part 3)

Waking Up: Freeing Ourselves From Work