Begin Again
There is this overarching project I have been failing to imagine for years now which, here and in my notebooks I keep repeating that it’s time to start, it’s time to do the ‘Real work’, but I don’t, it fails. Maybe out of necessity? It is as if I have been waiting for an idea as to what it is, and thus never truly pick up the yoke, but maybe the thing to do is simply attempt to describe what I imagine it to be in this current vague absence in which I sense it?
It would be a Gesamtkunstwerk - lifework which tied together my various endeavors, organising them towards a common telos and thus giving each context and straighten them out a their own particular telos as well. The Overarch (as I think I called it in 2017 - 18) would thus inform say my music in so that it would be more purposefully composed, and the same with my painting, etc. One stumbling block, which at the same time is undeniably a strong inspiration, is Hunter’s Arkwork / OlOlOn as a fluxus style embodied Opera, which in it’s dramatic arc plops out Wagnerian operas as way stations. Apotheosis of art-work and artist into a Mother-Child couple of pure art.
With this staggering vision it has been unbelievably hard for me to find myself, to match up to that vision without simply copying. Especially since a trace of a similar idea was present as early as 2015 in myself, and I had a sense of being bereft as I started to read Hunter’s writing I have withdrawn again and again from this insurmountable task because it is unbearable, and I am cucked by her long shadow.
But today I read again from Hunter's blog Reignarray.tumblr.com from 2013, when she was just starting on this project herself, and her situation there is similar to my own. It’s a matter of starting before knowing what it is one is really starting, and indeed to realise that one begun long before, in the old forgotten fits and starts.
A name is needed. And an event. Neither has to be new. I don’t have a name yet, Emanancea has never been all that convincing for myself. I for a long time tried to find other names. Svavel as well. It’s easier to take a word which has some significance in itself already, to just whip up phonemes and then try to charge them after the fact is harder than having a deep vein to draw from.
Materials for an ontology and ethics is needed as well. I have some things I am drawing out there in another text.
Most of all a sustained effort is required, now when I have less time than before to work on art it is easy to be a bit dissuaded. Weekends will have to be transformed into consistent work. I feel a degree of confidence in how to “fail better” at this than I have done. There is a compulsion in me pushing me back towards this despite my budding maturity and material comfort.