Hanged Man

I am facing a decision in my life which has an undeniable violent aspect - it will be a cut which irrevocably shall shape the life that I am sculpting - and on the surface it seems to both go against my life goals as well as being necessary. If not necessary than at least a case of, if I were to chose the path of idealism, I would shoot myself in the foot severely and seemingly post-pone the decision without guarantee that the issue would be resolved in a way beyond the binary choice presented as it stands.

The decision is to whether accept a job doing something remotely different from anything that is going on in my intermedial art endeavor, and which from the perspective of the ideals of my endeavor may even be seen as potentially ethically dubious. It deals with money, business, investment - capitalist speculation. Something, if not evil than simply amoral, and hard to take as meaningful - it risks being cynical for sure.

The immediate solution to sorting out my economic situation, as my endeavor is not sustaining me, would be to compromise : find a job where I can use my creativity and artistic bend but earn a dependable salary - this is the ‘common sense’ solution I might expect to be advised from friends and family. Isn’t this the truly cynical position though? I have feared going this route for the reason that it might deflate the artistic endeavor that I am truly passionate about, that by it’s relative proximity could come to eat of that energy and dissipate it. This type of blending is very much not the Hegelian synthesis. No - taking a job that is far away from art, that pertains to what I’ve studied but within that domain is on the farther side as compared to the side that borders to art - and in this way sharpening the conflict of my position through “accelerating the extremes“, that would be closer to synthesis. Or the synthesis emerges when this intensification of conflict leads to.. catastrophe? To something happening as the false whole of the current muddled deadlock comes apart.

Is this a way to rationalize taking an ordinary and very unromantic job, when my goal is to walk the path of the artist and counter culturalist? Maybe. But it doesn’t feel wrong, which is sort of surprising to me, intuitively it feels interesting. I have reservations though. Sure there is the contradiction on the moral plane, but I don’t take it to be that bad. It’s not a question of becoming a henchman of a fascist regime, even if it’s maybe a bit more serious than say the ethics of personal consumption (of buying organic, buying local, recycling etc.). On that level it seems acceptable. No the real question is it’s place in this fluxus gesamtkunstwerk that is my lifework.

I don’t want to argue the line that “I can just do it for a few months or years and then quit, making some money in the process” , which I get from friends quite often - because as I started with this doesn’t admit the irrevocable fact that this will be written into my life-story, will shape the sculpture that is my lifework and cascade forward. What light will it cast on my art, that which I currently produce and will come to produce? In what way will it affect what I produce through affecting the development of myself? This is the really terrifying questions. Which I can’t beforehand know the answer to. Which indeed may to asked about issues that on the surface are less controversial w.r.t. the sentiment of the endeavor. I think I will take the job, and I will work to make it into a process of intensifying the contradiction, to bring some violent refurnishing to the suspension which has been my situation for years now. May whatever God deems good come to pass.