Work: it consumes vast amounts of our time, and each one of
us must come to some kind of accommodation with it early on in life. If we have
too much work we complain, if we don’t have enough, then we starve, or rot from
the inside out. It’s a tricky thing.
For a long time, I was against work. When I graduated at the
age of 22 I had successfully managed to avoid doing very much of it since my
degree was in English Literature, a subject any half-intelligent person can
succeed in with a gift for improvisation and blather. The downside was that I
was unqualified for anything profitable. Still, that wasn’t a problem as my
goal remained work avoidance.
And so I moved to Russia where I learned that there was tolerable
money to be had conversing in English with wealthy people. I did that, and
enjoyed most of the conversations. Better yet, I didn’t even need to do too
much talking to survive- I am a man of ascetic habits and can get by on very
little. I regularly turned down work if it was going to interfere with time
spent roaming the streets, sitting in cafes or writing avant-garde texts for fun.
But I suppose I had some ambition because I published a book,
accidentally acquiring a career as a writer in the process. I hadn’t really
gambled on that- my goal was just to get the book out. Meanwhile as everybody knows
it’s very difficult to make a living via the pen. But for a while I could coast
along, turning down fancy commissions if I felt like it.
Then America intervened. In Texas, everybody works all the
time. And here’s the weird thing: after resisting the call of work for many
years I suddenly found myself sucked into this vortex of labor. Sure, life in
the states is more expensive than in Russia, but it wasn’t just that. I sort
of… wanted to work. There was no space in which to be idle except at home. It
was too hot to roam the streets, and if I went to a café, even the Bohemians were
furiously working away on some project or other on their laptops.
You may have heard of the legendary Scots work ethic. We
were famous for it once, a long time ago. Now life in Scotland proceeds at a
very slow pace. One of the things I love about going home is crawling down to
my local shopping center where I drink tea in company with the aged and
long-term unemployed, all of them silently waiting for oblivion’s warm embrace.
This is very relaxing.
In Texas however it just isn’t possible. The environment
demands work. For the last couple of years I have worked more than ever before,
and certainly make more money than I used to, though I am not rich or even very
secure. But as I have became more “successful” in worldly terms I have noticed
dissatisfaction in other areas. There is no time to waste on the leisurely creative
projects that I enjoyed so much while living in Moscow.
Indeed, after a few years these all stopped migrating to the
page and remained exclusively in my head. Like the great Russian author
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky I composed fantastical texts in my imagination,
occasionally sharing details with friends. It was fun, but not quite as satisfying
as putting them on paper. I needed more time. Perhaps I thought, I’m not
doing enough work.
Then one day I read that the Japanese author Haruki Murakami
gets up at 4am every day to write his novels. Simultaneously I discovered the
work of the Manga artist Osamu Tezuka, who created over 150,000 pages of comics
in his lifetime. Takashi Miike, a very amusing film director, knocks out six or
seven movies a year.
The Japanese are famous for this, of course. They work all
the time, and create many wonderful things. Maybe
that’s what I need to do I, thought. And so I conducted an experiment,
seeking to push back the time I rose at to 4am. I had reached 5am when one day
I slept in. Project: Turn Japanese
never recovered.
Maybe you need to be born into Japanese culture to work like
that. Or, you can take amphetamines. As for me, I am back in the middle. I
definitely work a lot harder than I did in Russia, and sometimes wonder if
doing so much nothing for so long was a good idea after all. It helps that I
enjoy most of what I do today, of course. Perhaps that’s the key. My younger
self couldn’t conceive of anything he wanted to do; my older self can see lots
of things and gets frustrated when everyday nonsense gets in the way. And
that’s progress- I think.
12/12/2012