Marsden Hartley, Robin Hood Cove, Georgetown, Maine, 1938
This post is dedicated to those suffering acute hardship, with accompanying agitation of mind.
All the student workers at my dining hall are studying to be engineers—civil, mechanical, software, something to do with polymers that keep barnacles off ships. I can’t think of any explanation that isn’t dystopian; nevertheless, they are brilliant and kind. Tatenda tells me Biomedical Engineering is too competitive—he wanted to return to Zimbabwe and repair medical equipment, but will instead study Operations Analytics and use algorithms to solve problems in investment banking. “You don’t think investment banking is evil?” I ask, passing him a handful of tongs. “I will become rich and take the money back to my people,” he explains.
Aniruddha sits beside me at House Dinner with an entire plate of doughnut holes. He is a doctoral candidate in engineering, and I ask with characteristic American rudeness if his education is free. “Yes, but I have to teach Calculus,” he says. When he works as door checker, he draws beguiling diagrams and tries to answer my questions about his thesis on combustion. “You will dedicate your life to machines?” I ask. “Wouldn’t you rather be an artist?” He smiles with a tolerance that is balm to my aggrieved soul and says, “art and engineering are the same, except the public understands the end result and intention of engineering. People do not know if they need art, or what qualifies as such, but everyone recognizes the utility of a bridge.” I want to hug him. Imagine being so smart that Cornell University gives you a terminal degree for free.
Susan is finishing her Masters in Electrical Engineering; she specializes in the design of computer chips. I foolishly think she’s got it made, but she reveals she’s applied for six hundred jobs in three months. The companies don’t want to pay $5,000 for her work visa, but she would do anything not to be deported to India. As we’re talking, she shreds a paper napkin into a fine dust that coats her chin and neck. “Have you considered PhD programs?” I ask her. “Do you know how many rupees make a dollar?” she replies. “What about marrying an American?” I ask. “I want to be a free bird,” she says. I love her.
It’s Spring Break, so I’m Sunday driving my shiny little dish cart, contemplative and marveling over Susan and her six hundred applications. I’ve applied for one job in the past month, though I’ll be deported to a couch in the Southern United States if I don’t get my act together with all radical speed. I u-turn and head toward the grill line where Susan is ladling nacho cheese onto chips. “Susan, I’m going to do a performance in honor of you. But I only have two months, so I’ll apply for four hundred jobs. How many is that per day?” “Six point six six,” she says without hesitation, smiling, a sunny human calculator. “Seven a day, and remember the rigor of your studies, so only ten minutes per application.”
Yes, the rigor of my studies. Servility, asceticism, endurance.
The inner sanctum of the dishroom, the dish machine its beating heart.
Around this time I receive the following email from an old friend:
I go outside to walk and think, walking around and around my fake Swedish village in the blue-black hills.
I would happily live in solidarity with this friend—a kind and patient creative genius—or many others, but we are separated by geography, lack of funds, the stipulations of custody arrangements, and perhaps the bourgeois fear of living with other people. I want to help her, but I don’t even know how to help myself.
I believe, and have argued in several posts, that we need something akin to the bizarre, the surreal, as well as struggle and friction, to provide material for our creative work, as well as erect a scaffolding of narrative tension.
In the simplest terms: freak events and absurdities provide rich material in the domains of storytelling, photography, filmmaking, theater, music, painting. Of course there is pure abstraction, conceptual experimentation, pastoral landscape. But even a struggle within the craft itself counts: I think of my friend who is a potter, where anomalies of glaze, firing, cracks, and kiln explosions make the potential outcome of a simple mug a captivating mystery.
This is not to minimize or gamify all problems. Many are tragedies of the highest order. But we live in a culture that aims to iron out the discomfort of the unknown—through buying stuff, life-hacking, the promulgation of false hope bolstering the status quo, the use of technology to control the proliferating chaos of organic lifeforms.
And so I’m walking with a heavy heart for my friend who deserves better. I’m thinking that certain collections or sequences of problems make us stronger, more curious and determined, while others cause mental and physical collapse.
Perhaps David Sedaris’s comic observations will never eclipse those he made as a Macy’s elf, but can we transition from material based on hardships of everyday life to material based on voluntary adventure and imagination? Don’t roll your eyes—I’m not done. We’re traveling to the old-school multiverse. Some of the good things in your life you bought from a catalog. You may be the rare person who found love on a dating app. But most good things are accidents, happenstances, meetings of chance, flights of fancy. (They may be predetermined according to a chain of cause and effect far too elaborate for us to see in full, but that’s irrelevant to the present argument.) We cannot know the affective outcome of any action. The factor of chance far outstrips our powers of prognostication, not to mention the combined factors of chance and time.
Wait, wait, I can already hear your objections. Yes, jumping off the George Washington Bridge will always result in death. Drinking Milwaukee’s Best will always result in misery.
We cannot know the affective outcome of any action aimed at the good.
I think this has particular importance for the jobseeker and others confronting a seeming infinity of treacherous choices. Shall I apply for this job or that one? Go to this school or that? Move to this city or the other? Marry a cook or an engineer? It’s not that it doesn’t matter, but that we can’t know how the decision matters until we’ve made it. And while this is an insurmountable existential condition, it’s also a great relief. You needn’t make the safe choice because there isn’t any safe choice.
My suggestion this week is that we take risks aimed at the good, honoring the almost completely enigmatic nature of outcomes. Making decisions quickly because the results by definition can only be known in hindsight. Choosing the unknown over the known as an act of faith, mysticism, curiousity, whimsy. Via negativa. Chance operations.
I’ll publish this before the power goes out again—it’s a murky one! You can follow my 400 applications here, also accessible on the navigation bar at the top of the homepage.
Keep in touch! Solidarity!
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