Tag: work

notes from any weekday afternoon

on arriving after the high point

Here comes a familiar question. So now what? It’s  the end of the long part of the day and the beginning of the part where I mean to redeem some of the best of me. But the glass is empty too soon, and here’s a challenge. If I don’t rush past it, a response waits. Saying, now you try to make. Something, but not today. Today I want to open the notebook, the laptop, the inbox and find it already made.

In the Mass, there was a moment after the bells and before communion that some called the High Point, where we said I am not worthy to receive, but say the word. It came after the part where my grandma would whisper, Lord, I believe. Heal my unbelief.

I return each evening in a diminished form, somehow. Determination is not the posture of prayer, but of the glossy ad. It makes demands, offers vapid encouragement, relentless goading on. Get yourself together, this part insists. How can you be finished if it isn’t even dark? How when others are just beginning, can you be done for the day?

True, this day started at four, and then came everything I will not list. I mean to get beyond all of this. Here comes Dante again, interrupting a line of thought with whispers of how the dark wood were better followed, translated. I am inclined to agree, but keep finding concrete corridors, fluorescent track lighting, deafening bells. The railings and the gates and the traffic keep me moving over leveled ground, but airless, crawling in this steady stream.  I eddy again among the bent ones, each of us shouldering the rest of the day forward until it turns on an eventual collapse, and comes back for us, again.

Study of Forms

Incandescent immersion.

Unless some energy comes to haunt, there is no movement in these words. But where does it come from? Things remembered, things observed, the contents of a collector’s shelf, or some displacement. A long drive will find it sometimes, the quick flash of wild creature crossing the road. Other times, it’s a matter of grim execution. Always the question of how much to push in the effort to grow a nascent being without killing it with overwork. We all move between the given language and the first, this waiting muscle bared and tense, all attention.

Renunciation

On the daily work of living.

There is an obscurity so obscure that it is no longer even dramatic. There is nothing unusual or heroic to celebrate in this way of being, because there is nothing to point to: no award, no arrival, no legacy. All of it is nothing, only ordinary work. And who doesn’t dream of freedom from this?

Except. If the people you love are in it, too, how will you continue to love them except by connection through this daily toil? The grind, my father calls it, and he is right. It grinds us from our husks, makes of our once-proud autonomies something else, something worth offering only because it is transformed. 

This is what makes it possible to say here, take this bread. Dearly beloved, it is the body I surrender, for you.

***

The italicized opening line is from Thomas Merton’s essay “Renunciation,” in New Seeds of Contemplation.

Present Attendants

Stillness in motion.

Weave. Unravel. Burn. Engrave. Lift. 

Horsehair, denim, parchment, wood.

Here is material, here a task. 

Each focal point becomes a counterbalance 

to the surrounding immensity.

Who are these people at these tasks?

They are attendants.

What are they doing?

They are present.

In what? I ask and no response.

In their work.

Why, though?

Because it is theirs to do,

because they are with it.

***

Inspired by some of the installations of Ann Hamilton, featuring attendants engaged in simple, repetitive tasks, which the artist sees as representative of the presence required of art.