Hi Poem People, today’s bite is thoughtful, but I did poorly in Philosophy 101 so I don’t think I can rightly claim to have philosophized.
I’m meditating on productivity, an unmistakably political subject in the same way a chair is unmistakably used for sitting, a nuance-free simplicity. Productivity is intertwined with modern life by design more than by necessity and this addition, an extra application of choice, skews life experience wherever it’s applied.
I recently spoke with an artist who warmly reflected on North America for all the opportunity, community, and incubation for creation here after returning from a long trip to Asia and Southern Europe. The boundaries we’ve drawn around ourselves cannot be expressed in true depth, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t approach the cavern with caution and wonder what’s on the other side.
Purposeful Application
Let me grind my hip, I want to stomp in the ground and look ahead. What else can be done with my hands but shape? It’s all my heart and feeling can do but start a fire. I will warm myself, these are the logs I’ve made; all I’ve done today is make this fire.
I’ve arrived, here, at the finishing point, nothing is left. I don’t pump my arms and strain. Every moment is a finishing point, ending time, ceasing in a guttural stop. My thoughts are nonsense and they are a novel that has been stamped by a publisher and pushed out for production.
We accomplish as we exist. How can we produce past instinct and need? When a question is asked, I answer. Production is sustained answers, over and over, like beckoning an echo repeatedly. And where are we at the end of all that shouting in the cavern, hearing our will back at us, faint and distorted?
I’ve arrived here, and everything is also the beginning. Each moment, I’m a different person and absorb my surroundings with awe, dyspeptic from the bulk of what is available to digest.
This is about being enough as you arrive continuously to the next moment. I’m shaping because that’s all I can do with my hands. and I’m thinking and feeling because that’s all I can do with my heart and brain, but it’s not in the way that modern productivity wants. When productivity is an answer to a command, our shapes, thoughts, and feelings are all different because they’re beckoned and orchestrated.
I’m curious how I’d exist in a world without careful orchestration and application of my faculties.
Valuing productivity has benefited Western culture in many ways, but we’re so obsessed with what we can do, we don’t stop to ask why we do it. So instead of mutual aid and bounty, we have wealth disparity, pencil-pushing, and guilt.