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<\/a>Have leisure and know that I am God. \u2014<\/em>Psalm 65:11 <\/em><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
For a long time now I have tried to argue that the maintenance of my various social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) should be considered work. After all, maintaining a social media presence\u2014a phrase that makes the bile rise in my throat\u2014is an easy and free way artists can gain a wide readership\/viewership for their work.<\/p>\n
But aside from the ill feeling I get after spending a whole morning liking, sharing, blogging, and re-blogging, I also feel a strange sense of disconnectedness from the work itself\u2014the actual art that I\u2019m making; in my case a book manuscript of a couple hundred pages.<\/p>\n
I think the way I feel is what Marx calls alienation and estrangement from labor. Because my job is to be the producer, the marketing department, and salesman of the work, my time and attention are constantly divided. I would even go so far as to say my very habitus<\/em> seems divided by the shifting of aesthetic gears it takes in order to be able to make my work sound relevant and interesting to others.<\/p>\n Josef Pieper in his important work Leisure\u2014The Basis of Culture<\/em> moves past the alienation and estrangement and worries that the laborer is increasingly \u201cfettered to one\u2019s work,\u201d which leads to a kind of \u201cinner impoverishment,\u201d a spiritual poverty.<\/p>\n \u201cHis life has shrunk inwardly, and contracted, with the result that he can no longer act significantly outside his work, and perhaps can no longer even conceive of such a thing.\u201d<\/p>\n I know this might sound melodramatic\u2014I mean it\u2019s just posting to Facebook, not working in a textile factory\u2014but anyone who makes art for a living these days finds himself at this crossroads.<\/p>\n Art is my livelihood, the business by which I earn money, but it is also where I draw much spiritual sustenance and promoting it on the same platform that specializes in cute pet photos and political tirades seems to cheapen it. I just can\u2019t help it. I grew up in the late 1980s and early \u201890s when the deep-seated fear for artists was not going hungry but selling-out.<\/p>\n And so for years I believed that becoming an artist would magically resolve any conflict between the two, but as I\u2019ve gotten older and taken on more financial responsibilities, the tension has increased. I now tell my wife on a regular basis: \u201cI\u2019m ready to sell-out.\u201d<\/p>\n To reconcile this tension I feel that I have to work harder, put in longer hours. In order to make up for the time I spend updating my Tumblr or Facebook page, I have to stay longer in the office writing. Either that, or after a long day of writing\u2014which, given the amount of administrative work I have, rarely happens\u2014I find myself standing at the kitchen counter minutes after arriving home trying to keep up the appearance (on social media, at least) that I am an interesting and productive writer.<\/p>\n This drives my wife crazy. She calls it an illness. She wonders aloud when I\u2019m going to take a break. \u201cWhen is it going to be summer?\u201d she says. My reply is always that this, too, is part of being a writer these days.<\/p>\n But is it necessary? Is it actually a productive use of my time? I keep thinking to myself that if I could drop the social media aspect of my job I would have more leisure time; time to chill, as I might have said in high school.<\/p>\n Josef Pieper theorized that it is through entering into the sphere of leisure that we can begin to see rightly. Leisure \u201cpresupposes silence, a contemplative attention to things, in which man begins to see how worthy of veneration they are.\u201d<\/p>\n In his definition, leisure is not meant as a restorative so that one has more energy for work, or so that one can perform faultlessly, but so that one has the time to contemplate and, as Pieper says:<\/p>\n Grasp the world as a whole and realize his full potentialities as an entity meant to reach wholeness\u2026. The power to know leisure is the power to overstep the boundaries of the workaday world and reach out to super-human life-giving existential forces that refresh and renew us before we turn back to our daily work. Only in genuine leisure does the \u201cgate to freedom\u201d open.<\/em><\/p>\n One can escape the anxiety-inducing binary of work and unemployment, where, he writes, \u201cwork and unemployment are the two inescapable poles of existence.\u201d<\/p>\n As I said before, in the beginning of my career, being an artist seemed to me a way out of that binary. I believed as Pieper does that the work of artists somehow \u201coverstep the boundaries of the workaday.\u201d<\/p>\n I want to believe this. I want very badly to not feel divided, to not feel that I am constantly at this crossroads, but to do that I need to find a way to treat art making more like work and less like some sort of shamanistic calling. To think of it this way is to make it precious: a rarified act that requires incense, green tea, ambient music, and meditation, rather than the sweat equity earned by putting your butt in the chair, turning off the Wi-Fi, and not getting up until you have a draft.<\/p>\n \u2014Continued on Monday<\/p>\n David Griffith<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0is the author of\u00a0A Good War is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America\u00a0<\/em>(Soft Skull). He teaches creative writing at Sweet Briar College in Virginia where he lives with his wife Jessica Mesman Griffith and children, Charlotte and Alexander. His essays and reviews have appeared in\u00a0Image, Utne Reader, The Normal School<\/em>\u00a0and online atkillingthebuddha.com<\/a>. He blogs at\u00a0Pyramid Scheme<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Have leisure and know that I am God. \u2014Psalm 65:11 \u00a0 For a long time now I have tried to argue that the maintenance of my various social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) should be considered work. After all, maintaining a social media presence\u2014a phrase that makes the bile rise in my throat\u2014is an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1048,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[188,409,375,72],"class_list":["post-686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-david-griffith","tag-creativity","tag-leisure","tag-media","tag-work"],"yoast_head":"\n