The past
The past three weeks, entrenched in ‘work’ have been at times as challenging as watching Barry Lyndon all the way through at once for the fourth time, yet as mind numbing as ABarakat’s thesis. The benefit of the 75 hour ‘work’ week is much the same as that of the 90 hour ‘school’ week. That is: stamina. Through foisting seemingly bottomless jars of Bigelow Mint Medley tea down the throat and swallowing endless baguettes, one gains the focus needed for something far greater than earning capacity or kudos, this is (as we have come to know it): ‘the work’.
Some readers of this page may have grown familiar with this nomenclature; the specificity of ‘the’ + ‘work’ drills into something that is not born from ‘work’ as (W=F*d*cos theta) or as 9 to 5… ‘The work’ is a condition of curiousity, of passion, of boundless dedication to selfishness. Selfishness is the key to true development. Selfishness is not a derogatory term, it can be equated with passion, it is absolute commitment to an investigation that you feel can touch something feebly but tenderly beyond your body.
Although this gives no clear schedule for what ‘the work’ actually is, it should insinuate that ‘the work’ is overarching. However, simply to live is not to be immersed in ‘the work’. Life must be performed with a program that is relentlessly explored yet highly flexible (flexible in the sense that one must accept that the program may fall short in certain situations, not that the program should disappear from process at these points, as the anomaly is still a matter of substance). In addition, ‘the work’ requires an application of persistent acute hindsight. This is not reminiscence but fluid reauthorial diagramming. It is both intrabeauty in ‘work’: beating your body down to produce a set of construction drawings that are so slippery that the general contractor will have to be a PhD Joycean scholar to assemble a building with their aid; ‘play’: dreaming about abandoned subways and drawing fire-escapes that penetrate the earth… (sorry, it has been a long week).