I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Friday Flash, I share an epiphany or aha moment from the past week.
The desire to consume is a kind of lust. We long to have the world flow through us like air or food. We are thirsty and hungry for something that can only be carried inside bodies. But consumer goods merely bait this lust, they do not satisfy it. The consumer of commodities is invited to a meal without passion, a consumption that leads to neither satiation nor fire. He is a stranger seduced into feeding on the drippings of someone else’s capital without benefit of its inner nourishment, and he is hungry at the end of the meal, depressed and weary as we all feel when lust has dragged us from the house and led us to nothing.
Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World
I find myself less and less interested in material goods — consumer goods — as I spent more time in retirement, focused on artmaking and money management and writing.
The one thing I have spent money on lately, a consumer good?, is art supplies. I’ve bought gold jewelry wire, three wood panels for a triptych, alizarin crimson hue paint, all varieties of adhesive.
But I’m thinking I may focus on using what I have instead of buying new, especially in the case of canvases. Perhaps I turn my stock of old paintings into a flow.
I started that last night, covering over one of my early large abstracts (30″ H x 40″ w) with Sherwin Williams Alabaster, to begin a new composition. I’m not sure what I will do with it, but I’ll probably use my new approach of using asemic writing to create a layered all-over composition somewhat Jackson Pollock style along the lines of this work in progress (which is the canvas that used to be Shipwrecked).
The deliveries from Amazon keep on coming
And yet I still find myself routinely buying new things — new consumer goods — from Amazon.
This morning the delivery will include hair-cutting scissors (to trim my own hair, one-in-herself style), a pet sling to hold my oldie Carlos because he loves to sit on my lap while I work, and eight ribbed hair ties.
All of these things seem to be worthwhile purchases, although maybe I could have figured out how to use a shawl or scarf I already own to sturdy Carlos onto my lap. And yes I already have hair ties but they are in some sense consumables because they don’t last forever before the stretch out or break.
I’d like to start living with more minimalism and less buying. I’d like to have less stuff in my house but I find myself unwilling to let go of all the items that represent past aspirations and hobbies: my guitar and guitar music, video lighting, high-end mirrorless camera and lenses, electronic keyboard and classical piano music, pickleball rackets and balls and court shoes.
When I think of donating them (because I don’t want to sell them, what a hassle), I feel anxious.
But perhaps I can gift them? Can I get them out into the world somehow?
I’m not ready to do that. So I’m going to put it all in my basement storage room for now. Maybe someday my kids will find it all and decide what to do with it. Or maybe at some point I’ll feel ready to let it all go.
fiction as a gift
I’ve started to write some fiction, with a vague notion of producing a novel or perhaps novella. I don’t want to do it to make money, but rather I want to do it like Iris Murdoch wrote fiction: to say something, to share something. And also because it’s a fun challenge.
Fiction can say more complex things than nonfiction can, and the things I want to say and share are complicated.
I’m reading Elaine Hsieh Chou’s novel Disorientation right now, a birthday gift from my son. But it is also a gift from Chou, something she gave to the world not just to make money but to create delight and engagement in the reader.
Fiction writing is difficult; it doesn’t come easily to me. But I’m enjoying it, for now, and the nice thing is it’s a hobby that doesn’t require any new consumer goods to come into my life.
the privilege of it all
I can focus on sharing rather than consuming because I have enough savings and income to do that.
I’ll be interested to read what Hyde has to say about this later in The Gift, because one of the main tensions he identifies in the early parts of the book is how does an artist survive financially, when art is a gift?