Embrace the Art of Living
The best part about not being an academic is my output is slow going. I have no hurry to finish any book to ensure that I can cite it accurately. I can just slowly meander through the world created in any text, soaking it in as fast or as slow as I want. That wasn’t the case while getting a PhD where each text was just another check mark on a list. Sometimes I only read two pages a day. Others, I devour text with reckless abandon. There is no rhyme or reason that will dictate my capacity to read, save how the meter of the day might impose itself on me. Yet, even then, I have been known to have been dragged through the drudgeries of serpentine labyrinths of human excrement and bureaucratic finagling to find myself quite giddy at the prospect of reading in my cozy bed cocoon. Regardless of how much I read, I read with my whole being as if the world is ensconced right there in the margins of that page.
This embodied approach to reading is one where you are just waiting for a phrase to jump off the page and change your entire life. I know that folks will waggle their wee little finger at me, scolding me for saying that reading, of all things, could be an embodied phenomena. They might say, “What are you daft? You read with your mind! That is as disembodied as one can be.” To this I would reply, “Step off with your dualism. I will not be denied the bodily pleasures of reading.” To read for pleasure, you are reading for your own cozy, comfy (“COZCOMF”) enjoyment. You aren’t lost in the flying buttresses of your mind attempting to erect a cathedral out little whisps of ideas. You aren’t unhinging yourself from your own embeddedness in a place and time. You are just enjoying some COZCOMF, quiet time with grand ideas as a person that is embedded within a dynamic community. It just so happens that those grand ideas that you are imbibing might change the whole course of how you interact with that place and time you inhabit and thus, change the world.
I believe I am capable of this slower pace, because I have unwound the hold that academia has had on me by actively de-educating myself. When I speak of de-education, I am referencing the beat poet Gary Snyder’s use of the term. In an interview from the 80s, Snyder noted:
“(With de-education) I'm thinking in terms of a person who is going to be engaged with the Dharma, engaged with the arts and with community. You have to de-educate yourself and descend from the pinnacle of elite, centralized, Occidental education and information and its power to realize the importance of community and place and personal vulnerability and impermanence and personal practice. It leads toward a life of practice, toward a certain amount of modesty and humility, which is hard to come by if you end up in any sort of contemporary power elite.”1
I have worked enough normal jobs in my life that any brain bravado that carries over from me having a “doctorate” has been beaten out of me. I feel like doing your tour of duty in a cubicle or in customer service will allow you the ability to come off your high horse with knowledge to understand reading for as one joyful activity in an intentional, value-driven life. My oft repeated life tag line is, “I got a PhD, but I do x at my job.” X has included picking up rat droppings, making copies, billing folx, combing documents for comma splices, etc.. That sort of work isn’t the “real work” that Snyder imagined us returning to in “I Went into the Maverick Bar” to de-educate ourselves, but it still helps you approach the world with humility and modesty. That work helps you cherish theory as a luxury and not something to use for your own aggrandizement. It teaches you that theory is something you integrate into your life to constantly re-assess what your values and beliefs are.
By: Gary Snyder
I went into the Maverick Bar
In Farmington, New Mexico.
And drank double shots of bourbon
backed with beer.
My long hair was tucked up under a cap
I’d left the earring in the car.
Two cowboys did horseplay
by the pool tables,
A waitress asked us
where are you from?
a country-and-western band began to play
“We don’t smoke Marijuana in Muskokie”
And with the next song,
a couple began to dance.
They held each other like in High School dances
in the fifties;
I recalled when I worked in the woods
and the bars of Madras, Oregon.
That short-haired joy and roughness—
America—your stupidity.
I could almost love you again.
We left—onto the freeway shoulders—
under the tough old stars—
In the shadow of bluffs
I came back to myself,
To the real work, to
“What is to be done.”
No text has been more enjoyable and helpful lately as Henri Lefebvre’s “Critique of Everyday Life,” especially his thoughts on the art of living. Toward the end of Vol. 1 of that text, Lefebvre notes:
“In the future, the art of living will become a genuine art…. The art of living presupposes that the human being sees their own life—the development and intensification of their life—not as a means towards ‘another’ end, but as an end in itself. It presupposes that life as a whole —everyday life—should become a work of art….As with every genuine art, this will not be reducible to a few cheap formulas, a few gadgets to help us organize our time, our comfort, or our pleasure more efficiently….The genuine art of living implies a human reality, both individual and social, incomparably broader than this. The art of living implies an end to alienation — and will continue toward it.”2
Now positing that everyday life is an art form means moving beyond the consumer choices one makes at the local box store to achieve an aesthetic found in a magazine. That is the alienated form of an artful life that Lefebvre wants us to do away with. No, he challenges us to craft an authentic life of our own making without the aid of any cheap “how to" guides or techno gadgetry. It means ending our alienated existence and seizing back control of some of the means through which we create a life and sustain it. In short, we should be more like Bella Baxter in Poor Things, who famously told her jilted former lover who called her a whore after she created a life for herself in Paris in the sex trade, “We are our own means of production. Go away.” Like Baxter, we should tell everyone trying to fit us in a conventional labor box to go away and find our own craft where we can control our means of production.
Now, this whole seizing the means of production might confuse you, but its just about taking control of how we spend our time. The socialism I am advocating for is not the typical sort of “the great state shall provide” socialism that Bernie has often spoken of with basic universal programs. I would love those programs to exist at a much smaller scale with a decentralized socialist economy. Yet, we must achieve equity in how everyone is provided for while also directly addressing the alienation that we face today in being separated from deciding the what, the how, and the why of what we create. No, it will be just another dawn of deadening if we create equity without the soul force to make life feel vital. Yes, we must turn to the tutelage of Emma Goldman, whose work helped demarcate how one might create a equitable society marked by people pursuing their passions to their fullest. Specifically, I agree with Emma Goldman that if we want to make things of real beauty and utility we need to abandon our “clock-like, mechanical atmosphere:”
“Real wealth consists in things of utility and beauty, in things that help to create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring to live in. But if a person is doomed to wind cotton around a spool, or dig coal, or build roads for thirty years of their life, there can be no talk of wealth. What they give to the world is only gray and hideous things, reflecting a dull…existence, too weak to live, too cowardly to die. Strange to say, there are people who extol this deadening method of centralized production as the proudest achievement of our age. They fail utterly to realize that if we are to continue in machine subserviency, our slavery is more complete than was our bondage to the King. They do not want to know that centralization is not only the death knell of liberty, but also health and beauty, of art and science, all these being impossible in a clock-like, mechanical atmosphere.”3
If we want real wealth and beauty, it’s vital to get enthusiastically caught up with the everyday. Here, I mean allowing oneself to get completely caught up in the drama unfolding right outside your door and in your own workshop. Follow Lefebvre’s advice and treat your life like a work of art. Let your interactions in your community, what you notice as you move around your city, and what you create with your own two hands be the spark that kindles the flame toward a different world. This different world will be one where we take seriously the work toward being an active participant in creating our community and taking its visual culture back from parasitic corporations. This is the sort of small scale work that directly addresses the alienation we face in a technologically advanced society where everyone is hiding behind screens. Instead of getting lost in that hyper-reality, go out on a side quest and make some magic happen while plucking at the web of life that connects you to every living thing that surrounds you. Go get yo quest on, HOSSES.
Thanks for being here, friends. I am so grateful for your time and attention. Please let me know if anything here resonated with you. If you would be so inclined, think about a free or paid sub. Paid subscriptions help keep this whole thing afloat and pay the bills, come up with stickers, and buy supplies for weaving. They are $5 a month and $50 dollars for a year, and your paid tier gets you access to about 6 extra essays a month.
Until Next Time, Dear Reader,
James
Reed College Oral History Project, Interview with Gary Snyder, pg 54, on file with author
HL, Critique of Everyday Life, Verso, pg 219.
Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays, pg 55.