Category: Leisure and Work

My Grunt Jobs

Furniture-mover in Santa Barbara; exterminator in West Los Angeles;  grave-digger in Culver City; factory worker in Venice, California;  letter carrier and mail handler in Los Angeles; logger in Forks, Washington; tree-planter in Oregon; taxi-driver in Boston; plus assorted day jobs out of Manpower Temporary Services in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Boston. One thing's for sure: blogging beats logging any day of the week, though the pay is not as good.

Five reasons to avoid blue-collar work: (1) The working stiff gets no respect; (2) the pay is often bad; (3) the work is boring; (4) working-class types are often crude, ignorant, resentful, envious, and inimical to anyone who tries to improve himself; (5) the worker puts his body on the line, day in and day out, and often bears the marks: missing thumbs, hearing loss, etc.

Being from the working class, and having done my fair share of grunt work, I have been permanently inoculated against that fantasy of Marxist intellectuals, who tend not to be from the working class, the fantasy according to which workers, the poor, the 'downtrodden,' have some special virtue lacking in the rest of us.  That is buncombe pure and simple.  There is nothing to be expected from any class as a class: it is individuals and individuals alone who are the loci of value and the hope of humanity.

But individuation is a task, not a given.  Nicht gegeben sondern aufgegeben. 

There are no true individuals without self-individuation, something impossible to the mass man who identifies himself in terms of class, race, sex, and who is never anything more than a specimen of a species, a token of type, and no true individual.

And then these types have the chutzpah to demand to be treated as individuals.  To which I say: if you want me to treat you as an individual, don't identify yourself with a group or a class or a sex or a race.

Lower and Higher Ways of Wasting Time

A Bukowski binge appears to be in the offing, following hard on the heels of Beat October, all part of ongoing ruminations on styles of life  and modes of muddling along the via dolorosa of this vale of samsara enroute to points unknown.  Here is something that came out of my pen early in the predawn:

Barfly and gambler, flâneur and floozy fritter away their time.  And they are condemned for so doing by the solid bourgeois.  But the latter thinks, though he may not say, that the pursuits of the monastery and the ivory tower, though opposite to the low life's  dissipation, are equally time-wasting.  Prayer, meditation, study for its own sake, translation and transmission of culture, the vita contemplativa, Pieperian leisure, otium liberale, moral scrupulosity, mindfulness, the various disciplines of palate and penis, heart and memory, working out one's salvation with diligence  – all will evoke a smile from the worldly  bourgeois fellow, the man of substance solidly planted in the self-satisfied somnolence of middle-class mediocrity.   He's tolerant of course, and superficially respectful, but the respect becomes real only after the time-waster has managed to turn a buck or secure a livelihood from his time-wasting by becoming a teacher in a college, say, or a pastor of a church.

For further exfoliation, see Work, Money, Living, and Livelihood.

‘He’s Only Reading’

This just over the transom from Londiniensis:

Your last post puts me in mind of the hoary old story of the timid student hovering outside his tutor’s door not knowing whether to knock and disturb the great man.  At that moment one of the college servants walks past: “Oh, it’s all right dear, you can go in. The professor’s not doing anything, he’s only reading”.

Ambivalence towards reading and other activities in the life of the mind reflects the fact that we are embodied spirits.  As spirits, we dream and imagine, think and question, doubt and despair.  We ask what is real and what is not.  It is no surprise, then, that we question the reality and importance of reading and writing and study when these activities are not geared to what is immediate and utilitarian such as the earning of money.  Our doubts are fueled in no small measure by the lethargy and hebetude of the body with its oppressive presence and incessant demands.  The spectator of all time and existence, to borrow a beautiful phrase from Plato's Republic, should  fully expect to be deemed  one who is 'not really doing anything' by the denizens of the Cave.

The bias against the spirit is reflected in the phrase 'gainful employment.'  What is intended is pecuniary gain, as if there is no other kind.  The bias, however, is not without  its justification, as we are embodied beings subject to all the vicissitudes and debilities of material beings generally.

Companion post:  Work, Money, Living, and Livelihood

In Praise of the Useless

Morris R. Cohen, A Preface to Logic (Dover, 1977, originally published in 1944), p. 186, emphasis added:

It would certainly be absurd to suppose that the appreciation of art should justify itself by practical applications. If the vision of beauty is its own excuse for being, why should not the vision of truth be so regarded? Indeed is it not true that all useful things acquire their value because they minister to things which are not useful, but are ends in themselves? Utility is not the end of life but a means to good living, of which the exercise of our diverse energies is the substance.

Or as I like to say, the worldly hustle is for the sake of contemplative repose, it being well understood that such repose can be quite active, an "exercise of our diverse energies," but for non-utilitarian ends.

The Professional Activist

Ralph Nader, for example. Does he ever enjoy life, rest in contemplation, put aside for a time all his views and projects and schemes for improving the world? Does he consider consuming less jet fuel in his zeal to improve the unimprovable?

Chalk it up to my contemplative, quietistic bias, but activism as a way of life strikes me as ultimately meaningless. It is similar in meaninglessness to money-making as a way of life. And it doesn't matter whether one's activism points Left, Right, or sideways.

Work, Money, Living and Livelihood

Prevalent attitudes toward work and money are curious. People tend to value work in terms of money: an occupation has value if and only if it makes money, and the measure of its value is how much money it makes. If what you do makes money, then it has value regardless of what it is you do.  And if what you do does not make money, then it lacks value regardless of what it is.

A man stands on a street corner, Bible in hand, and preaches the gospel of Jesus Christ. Passersby regard him as of no account, as a loser, a bum, a fanatic. They give him a wide berth and would be embarrassed to be seen associating with him. But let the fellow clean himself up, get himself admitted to a divinity school, earn a degree and become an assistant pastor somewhere, and suddenly he has social status of sorts. For now his preaching is a livelihood, a means of attaining a comfortable living standard, and he is now a serious and productive member of society. He is now of account and is known to be such at the local bank. He amounts to something in the economic and social currency of the realm. As the Danish Socrates might have said, he has learned how to make a living from the fact that another man was crucified.  The allusion, of course, is to Kierkegaard.

Of E-Mail and Doing Nothing

I do appreciate e-mail, and I consider it rude not to respond; but lack of time and energy in synergy with congenital inefficiency conspire to make it difficult for me to answer everything. I am also temperamentally disinclined to acquiesce in mindless American hyperkineticism, in accordance with the Italian saying:

Dolce Far Niente

Sweet To Do Nothing

which saying, were it not for the inefficiency lately mentioned, would have been by now inscribed above my stoa. My paternal grandfather had it emblazoned on his pergola, and more 'nothing' transpires on my stoa than ever did beneath his pergola.

So time each day must be devoted to 'doing nothing': meditating, traipsing around in the local mountains, contemplating sunrises and moonsets, sunsets and moonrises, and taking naps, naps punctuated on one end by bed-reading and on the other by yet more coffee-drinking. Without a sizeable admixture of such 'nothing' I cannot see how a life would be worth living.