[from the archives] the work you do, the person you are
from August 2020. on work and identity and where the two (/don't) meet, feat. Toni Morrison, Hilma af Klint, Zadie Smith and Liz Gilbert
**this archived issue of T H E | L I M I N A L was originally sent in August 2020. you can read other past issues here (password: theliminal2020) **
This issue features the inimitable, avant-garde work of Swedish artist and mystic, Hilma af Klint (b. 1862 - d. 1944). Her art is considered by (revisionist) art historians to be the very first work of Western abstract art, predating the so-called pioneer of abstract art Wassily Kandinsky.
Kunskapens träd nr. 1, Hilma af Klint
The work you do; the person you are. What’s the difference? What’s the same?
It’s a question Toni Morrison poses in her 2017 New Yorker article by the same name, and one I’ve been asking myself a lot lately.
Perhaps a side effect of being a student/academic for the past 21 of your 28 years is that August will always feel like back-to-school/work (despite the irony of being a PhD student who is simultaneously always-and-never “at work”). It is muscle memory. Carved into the synapses.
This August, the “back-to-” feeling is stirring but falling flat. It doesn’t know where to go; it doesn’t recognise this world despite the tempo of the lunar calendar. The idea of back-to-anything seems an off-tune joke in a world where the familiar, rote, and routine is turned on its head. I reckon I’m not the only one feeling this.
2020-isms aside—over here, in our little family, there’s been a lot of existentialism about work and careers going on. Entering the sixth (+ final!) year of my PhD, I’m facing the consequences of “hiding out” in the relative coziness and secure funding of the past five years—the question of “what next?” always (until now) out-there in the distance. August has been a month of postdoc applications and personal statements, going through the motions to enter an academic job market which is threatened at its worst to go near-extinct, and at its best to be forever changed (this is not necessarily a bad thing). Sometimes, these applications feel like a charade. The surface-question—How do you write about future plans when the world keeps reminding you it’s futile to have them?—belies a more brooding question I struggle to admit—Do I even want to go where this path is leading? Can I trust it? Can I trust me?
I watch the people I love grapple with versions of these questions. Tobias is bravely navigating a long-brewing career change in a new city, having quit his job two weeks before the pandemic hit. I’ve watched my parents, in early retirement facing long days of social distancing and quarantine ahead, crave the structure and meaning of working life. My mother has returned to practicing therapy, offering pro-bono sessions for US immigrants on Zoom; my father has returned to his first academic love, writing, penning a science-fiction novel that has been brewing on the peripheries of his imagination for the past 40 years. I’ve watched many of you claim your art and creative passions and talents as your main work (have I ever told you how much you inspire me?). I’d argue we’ve never needed your art more, even as I imagine that some days it feels impossible (please keep creating and let us know how we can support you).
In many ways, this current landscape of work is dire and foreboding. But I think there’s something to recuperate here too. We’re finally starting to question the machinery, the rhythms of our work, its sustainability, its purpose, and our internalizations of a capitalism which puts profit and productivity before human and ecological well-being (which, I might add, is nothing new, even though some of us are now seeing it for the first time).
Issue 08 of T H E | L I M I N A L explores the changing nature of work and how we bring our work into resolution with who we understand ourselves to be. I draw from the musings and words of women whose work I deeply admire — Zadie Smith, Elizabeth Gilbert, Toni Morrison, Hilma af Klint.
As is often the case, I have more ruminations and questions than solid answers. And I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the first of several newsletter issues grappling with these tensions. I acknowledge that even posing these questions about work belies a certain privilege—and that at the end of the day most of us are trying to make ends meet. I hope this is a space where you can feel safe to explore these questions with me. They are powerful and uncomfortable—if I’ve learned anything in the past few years: that’s where the magic happens.
xx
A
Kunskapens träd nr. 6, Hilma af Klint
MUSING OF THE MOMENT
On work and identity, and where the two (do/don’t) meet
Today, the mic goes to four women whose writings and musings have recently been framing, dismantling, and re-sculpting my own reflections on work, meaning, and identity:
The first is Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, whose illustrations and paintings, inspired by otherworldly séances and that which cannot be seen, are featured in this issue. You may have noticed in the first caption I said “revisionist” art history recognizes Klint as the first Western abstract artist (a title typically bestowed to Kandinsky). This is because Klint, a mystic, did not share her unprecedented work [1,200 paintings, 100 texts, 26,000 pages of notes] during her lifetime. In fact, she left special instructions for it not to be shared until at least 20 years after her death. Her reasoning? The world, as she left it, was not yet ready to receive its meaning. How is that for egoless-ness and clairvoyance? Even as her (male) contemporaries were being hailed for ushering a new era of art, Klint quietly trusted in the timing of her work. Klint’s detachment of her own ego and recognition from the work itself, at least in her own lifetime—a belief inherent in the work and its afterlife—is admirable if not also puzzling. Perhaps by relinquishing the imperative to be seen as an artist, she freed herself to create work that was daring and deeply spiritual, inward- as opposed to outward- facing. It is as if Hilma’s legacy poses these questions to us all: What is our attachment to the visibility of our work? Can we source in it a value, belief, and trust even if it is never shown? What would you do, if you relinquished the gaze of others? Would it set you free?
From the otherworldly clairvoyance and future-oriented work of Klint, we move to the deeply grounded and humanizing words of Toni Morrison in her article “The Work You Do, The Person You Are.” Morrison reminds us that our value far exceeds that which we do or produce, but from a different lens. In the article, Morrison reflects on early advice from her father on her very first employment at a young age—a housecleaning job (“what I wanted was a solution to the job, not an escape from it”). Her father’s words, and her interpretation, assert boundaries of over-identifying with one’s work and affirm the very practical realities of earning money to support one’s family. Indeed, much of Morrison’s writing career was carved in the margins and pauses from other very real demands and responsibilities—Morrison famously would wake before dawn (before her children said “Mama”) to write in the early hours. Much of her art was born from this contrast and carving of space-apart. Toni Morrison is also a beautiful reminder that it is never too late to redefine your work: she was first published at the age of 39.
According to Elizabeth Gilbert, we regularly confuse and interchange four words that are actually quite distinct: hobby, job, career and vocation (notice nowhere does the word “work” appear). Disentangling these four words’ meanings can yield a new way to frame why you do what you do, where you direct your energy, and how you envision it unfolding (it certainly has for me). I appreciate how Gilbert puts these terms in relationship to one another, and to the practical realities of making a living. For instance, guided by a commitment to her vocation (writing) Gilbert decided to forego a career in favor of several, often simultaneous, jobs that paid the bills. One arena I think deserves more attention is whether and how what we call hobbies can actually be generative and supportive of our vocation…but not that they need be (for instance, this newsletter, which is most definitely a hobby—and one which brings me great joy, at that—sometimes feels closer to what I imagine as my core vocation than the applications I’m making for my “job”). Food for thought: how do you recognize yourself with relation to these concepts? (scroll down to journal about it below).
Finally, 2020 in all its tumult (a global pandemic, the anti-racism movement, fascist uprisings, senseless killings, fires, hurricanes, social distancing…you know, I need not regale here) reveals that sometimes, the meaning we attach to most everything (especially work) falls away and leaves us raw. Beloved novelist and nonfiction writer Zadie Smith, in her flash-nonfiction book of essays Intimations just released one month ago (and book of the month for us), impressively bears witness to the pandemic and lockdown of Spring 2020, in-vivo, as-unfolding. While the thought of authoring an entire (albeit slim 100-page) book during the dawn of the pandemic might seem entirely untenable to many of us, Smith is reflexive, accessible, and writes from her pure lively necessity of doing so (“Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.”) What I enjoyed most about Intimations, and relevant to our conversation here, is Smith’s depiction of writing as vocation in the pandemic era, in her essay “Something to Do.” In it, she admits “in the first week (of lockdown) I found out how much of my old life was about hiding from life.” She recounts being “exposed” in the itinerancy and un-structure of her daily writing routines, witnessed by her family at home with her during workdays for the first time (I’ve never felt so seen, hi Tobias).
I leave you with Zadie Smith’s words, which capture more eloquently than I can the existential conundrum of doing-work in this moment:
“I can’t rid myself of the need to do ‘something,’ to make ‘something,’ to feel that this new expanse of time hasn’t been ‘wasted.’ … Watching this manic desire to make or grow or do ‘something,’ that now seems to be consuming everybody, I do feel comforted to discover I’m not the only person on this earth who has no idea what life is for, nor what is to be done with all this time aside from filling it.”
— Zadie Smith (Intimations, 2020)
WRITING PROMPT
Writing prompt priming: watch this talk by Liz Gilbert…
Right now, in this very moment, what is/are your…
…hobby(/ies)?
…job(s)?
…career?
…vocation?
How are these in alignment with who you know yourself to be? How are they not? Where is there space for soft adjustment? Realignment? (or a good old burn-it-down-and-begin-again?)