Lifework in the time of Crisis

It’s the 23rd of May 2020, the corona crisis enframes life and has done so for over 2 months at this point. The response to this state of affairs seems to go through cycles of finding things pointless: “what’s the point of art when society is collapsing before our eyes?” which leads to asking what can we do which matters. The answer to this question is seemingly a harrowing “nothing”, which depending on your temperament or current neurochemical composition can either be a freeing kind of nihilism: a beyond of the world of duty and responsibility, or a nihilism of despair. I myself seem to pass through all of the described stages, but with a consistent feeling that it’s difficult to really get into the deepest depths of my work: there is quite a lot of progress going on, but it seems to in large part be elaboration and continuation rather than innovation and revolution. The whole of life as enframed by Corona is thematised by waiting: we are anticipating and looking for signs of a breaking point, where thing either “go back to normal” to some degree, or a new stage of crisis erupts. The first few weeks, in the middle of March, was more intensely characterized by this, and then things did take violent turns again and again, and vectors - economic, infectious and alike - were insistently pointing in dire directions. By this point we have found a kind of normal in the state of exception, but this in no way means that a catastrophe might not occur at any moment. Now I am not interested in becoming a kind of prepper and working to secure the future of my own survival. Rather I try to find a place for that which I have dedicated my life to: the higher purpose of art and thought and culture. This devotion originates in a disillusion with the fleeting material pleasures - thus survival is only meaningful if participation in these “higher matters” can be sustained, and kept meaningful. In short the struggle now is then to siphon alarm in the face of global crisis to creative energy, to dig into this work so as to open the window for a future redemption - to labour towards a vision of how this could be possible: what possible ideas to invest in, what capacities to train, what narrative to elaborate - where to comport your attention - for what? What is redemption? In a way it can be seen as the final payment: every subtask of ones lifework “lends” from the future, and it depends on being redeemed by subsequent action to have it’s speculative meaning substantiated, and in this way the whole path is a chain of borrowings which hinge on a final redemption. On a final act of true justification which does not depend on a further redemption. Leaving aside the question if such an event is even possible, or if meaning in essence is a speculative bubble - we may ask what changes about this the thing that I am trying to describe now in life under the rubric of Corona crisis as compared to before? In essence it doesn’t change: what we are talking about here is the trite question of the meaning of life or meaning in general - and these are erected between nodes such as personal death, second death, cultural milieu, the nature of the self and it’s expression etc. and it doesn’t seem this constellation has changed, maybe rather the nodes manifest in different ways. For example this whole situation gives the idea of second death - the death of you memory, of all traces of your ever having existed - a different more palpable visage. For many personal death feel closer, overhanging. Related to the second death and the cultural milieu there’s also the prospect of the world as we know it: friends, family, cultural and socio-political institutions coming to an end or being radically transformed. This is perhaps the most alarming for many people, because as a lot of people have pointed out, this is the actuality of the portent of Apocalypse (in the common non-Biblical sense). So why does this constellation - the interstice of which being the site where the paradox of meaning wrestles with itself - when it has been tightened, when the walls are closing in or as the nodal portents become louder and more intrusive - why does it not propel us to pursue redemption with increased fervor? Maybe it does for some, maybe it will after the initial shock of the sudden seismic shift has settled a little more. I think writing this text is a step on the way for me personally. This whole thing has been a reality check: is this artistic lifework a escapist fancy? Can I remain engaged with it in earnest and sincere dedication in face of the increasingly violent real? Facing this question is a part of the striving towards redemption.