Whenever somebody says something nice about the blackouts, I think, “Oh, maybe I should make some more of those.”) Marc was interested in the source material for the poem he shared, and I had to admit to him, “I don’t ‘read’ the article first when I make these — I try to think of them as a raw field of words, like a word search puzzle.” (Almost every blackout I make is from the Sunday print edition of The New York Times — the ones in this email are all from the August 28, 2022 issue.
I spent Sunday afternoon reading Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath. Published in 1951, the book explores the Jewish faith’s unique relationship to time and the meaning of the Hebrew god’s blessing of the seventh day in the book of Exodus, 20:8-11:
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
“Technical civilization is man’s conquest of space,” the rabbi starts. “We expend time to gain space.” But things go wrong, Heschel writes, when space becomes our only concern. We become so occupied with objects, with things, or nouns, that reality is a “thinghood, consisting of substances that occupy space; even God is conceived by most of us as a thing.”
The Hebrew Bible, on the other hand, is “more concerned with time than with space.”
Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time. Unlike the space-minded man to whom time is unvaried, iterative, homogeneous, to whom all hours are alike, qualitiless, empty shells, the Bible senses the diversified character of time. There are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious.
“The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals,” Heschel writes. “Jewish ritual may be characterized as the art of significant forms in time, as architecture of time.” The meaning of the Sabbath is “to celebrate time rather than space,” and to get out from “under the tyranny of things of space.” The Sabbath is a time in which you not only abstain from work, you don’t even think about work. Each Sabbath is a kind of a mini-eternity — something to look forward to.
I came to The Sabbath via artist coach Beth Pickens’ new book, Make Your Art No Matter What. Pickens uses the concept of Shabbat with all the artists she works with, regardless of their religious background: “I ask them to choose a twenty-four-hour period every week from which they abstain from any work that could lead to making money, including their art.” Many of her clients balk at this suggestion. “They want more time for their art and here I am asking them to do none of it for a whole precious day each week.”
But these artists often find that — surprise! — taking a day off from their work restores their spirit and energy. There’s a balance here, of course, as Pickens defines an artist as a person who makes art, but also someone whose life suffers when they’re away from their creative practice. A real day off is usually more than enough to have us chomping at the bit to get back to the studio. (Just a few days ago I heard cartoonist Adrian Tomine say he takes one day off and he’s ready to start a new project.)
Personally, I have started focusing on having good, old-fashioned week-ends. In the Before Times, I felt the pressure to stuff weekends full of activity, the same pressure Witold Rybczynski describes so well in his great book, Waiting for the Weekend:
We have invented the weekend, but the dark cloud of old taboos still hangs over the holiday, and the combination of the secular with the holy leaves us uneasy. This tension only compounds the guilt that many of us continue to feel about not working, and leads to the nagging feeling that our free time should be used for some purpose higher than having fun. We want leisure, but we are afraid of it, too.
Worst of all, my boss, (me), was a complete asshole, and often asked me to work at weird hours, even on Sundays. At a certain point, I started to despise weekends — I called them “Weak Ends” and joked that I was “weakened by the weekend.”
The pandemic has made me actually enjoy my weekends: I have nowhere to go, no traffic to fight, no lines to wait in for brunch, no crowds at museums. My kids are always home, so the school week provides no relief in the form of daycare. The week-end, however, means that nobody outside the house really expects anything from me. I don’t have to answer my email. Everything can wait until Monday.
Best of all, and perhaps the most crucial point: I’ve started abstaining from Twitter and social media on Saturday and Sunday. (As Pickens writes: “This wasn’t in the Talmud, but most certainly would have been: Put down your fucking phone.”)
It helps that my week sort of climaxes with the Friday morning newsletter. Once that’s out, I spend Friday clearing the decks, cleaning my office, answering letters and email, and winding down. The weekend begins with Friday night pizza and a movie with the boys.
Saturday morning, I still got up pretty early, and I still wrote in my diary, but afterwards, I just puttered around, read books, played piano, went for a walk, messed around in the yard, etc. My eight-year-old and I finally watched Star Wars and chased it with some Donkey Kong. Sunday, I read the paper and called my mom and laid in a hammock and read while the boys got their screen time.
It’s a strange feeling… I am no longer weakened by the weekend!
Is it weird to start a post about blogging with a video of my paper diaries? All I want to do is make the point that I have made over and over and over again, on this blog and in my books:
One little blog post is nothing on its own, but publish a thousand blog posts over a decade, and it turns into your life’s work. This blog has been my sketchbook, my studio, my gallery, my storefront, and my salon. Absolutely everything good that has happened in my career can be traced back in some way to this blog. My books, my art shows, my speaking gigs, some of my best friendships—they all exist because I have my own little piece of turf on the Internet.
I started this blog when I was 22 years old. I’m 37 now. Good grief.
Why keep blogging? For me, there are at least 3 good reasons:
1. To leave a trace.
Here’s what William Kentridge says in Six Drawing Lessonsabout why he thinks he makes art:
An insufficiency in the self, the need to be a snail, leaving a trail of yourself as you move through the world. Hansel, leaving a trail of crumbs to lead you home.
On a single post of this blog you’ll find a form of navigation known as “bread crumbs” and if you click here the hyperlink will take you to the blog’s “home” page.
This is my home online. It’s where you can find me. If you want to know me, knock on the door, and I’ll let you in.
2. To figure out what I have to say.
I made this point in Show Your Work! and elsewhere: I didn’t start a blog because I had something to say, I started a blog to find something to say.
Every time I start a new post, I never know for sure where it’s going to go. This is what writing and making art is all about: not having something to say, but finding out what you have to say. It’s thinking on the page or the screen or in whatever materials you manipulate. Blogging has taught me to embrace this kind of not-knowing in my other art and my writing.
Here’s how Marc Weidenbaum put it in his celebration of blogging on the twentieth anniversary of his blog, Disquiet.com:
Don’t leave writing to writers. Don’t delegate your area of interest and knowledge to people with stronger rhetorical resources. You’ll find your voice as you make your way. There is, however, one thing to learn from writers that non-writers don’t always understand. Most writers don’t write to express what they think. They write to figure out what they think. Writing is a process of discovery. Blogging is an essential tool toward meditating over an extended period of time on a subject you consider to be important.
That last line is worth repeating: “Blogging is an essential tool toward meditating over an extended period of time on a subject you consider to be important.”
In my case, a single post becomes two posts, and two posts birth a blog tag, and a blog tag often births a book chapter. (Or a whole book.)
3. Because I like it.
This doesn’t get said enough in this culture: You should do things because you like them, because they’re satisfying.
It is very easy to be disciplined when you like what you’re doing.
Blogging is very satisfying to me — even more satisfying, in many ways, than having a book in a bookstore or a page in a newspaper. If I have an idea or an image I want to riff on, I sit down for half an hour or an hour, and then I publish it where anyone can see it. Instant self-publishing. Instant gratification.
Yes, I think I’ll keep blogging, because I like it, and also because, as Van Morrison put it, “It’s too late to stop now!”
Here is a photograph of the chalkboard at the end of one of Marc Weidenbaum’s classes. He says a lengthy classroom discussion of “what sound looks like” led to “this mid-period Basquiat.”
I just love looking at thesemarkings. Weidenbaum has posted a few whiteboards on his site, but they just don’t have the same magic.
What is it about chalk?
Photographer Jessica Wynne has posed exactly that question with her series of photos Do Not Erase, which capture the chalkboards of mathematicians across the world.
“I am attracted to the timeless beauty and physicality of the mathematicians’ chalkboard, and to their higher aspiration to uncover the truth and solve a problem,” Ms. Wynne said in an email. “Their imagination guides them and they see images first, not words. They see pictures before meaning.”
She added: “I am also fascinated by the process of working on the chalkboard. Despite technological advances, and the creation of computers, this is how the masters choose to work.”
In their love of blackboards and chalk, mathematicians are among the last holdouts. In many fields of science and investigation, blackboards have been replaced with whiteboards or slide show presentations. But chalk is cheaper and biodegradable. It smells better than whiteboard markers and is easier to clean up, mathematicians say. It is also more fun to write with.
Wynne says she deliberately shunned whiteboards, or digital boards. “I like the timelessness about blackboards,” she says, adding that they are also intriguing for their capacity to show layer upon layer of working.
There’s something about having the space to think:
The sheer size of blackboards, ranging from single wall affairs to extensive, multi-panel boards, is important. “It is this giant canvas,” says Wynne. “Seeing everything in one large piece, you can jump around on the board and connect pieces and take things away and add things… I haven’t seen any other tool or any other device that matches that experience.”
Here is one of the collages from Serrah Russell’s book tears tears.It’s made with what I call “the simplest cut,” but I especially like the title, which I’ve stolen for this blog post: “I’ve been trying to hold onto last night’s dream.”
I did not sleep well last night, which is funny, because I started a book called Why We Sleep before falling asleep. (For me, it’s the season of going to bed at 9AM and loving it.)
I’ve noticed this bizarre thing about my brain: After a bad night’s sleep or a hangover I feel like I’m actually better at making art. It’s unhealthy and unsustainable, of course, but as bad as I feel, I enjoy the results: I’m slower and dreamier and a lot of ideas come to visit. All I have to do is keep the notebook handy.
When I was trying to fall back asleep last night, I put on Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works, Volume II. It’s an album I’ve listened to over and over this year, mostly on plane rides during book tour. Richard D. James claims he made 70 percent of the album while experimenting with sleep deprivation and lucid dreaming. (A lucid dream is a dream in which the dreamer is aware she is awake and can control some of what happens in the dream.)
That’s what James told David Toop, anyways, who notes that James speaks “in a way which indicates either a serious person who has never been taken seriously or a practical joker who has been taken too seriously for too long.”
“About a year and a half ago… I badly wanted to make dream tracks. Like imagine I’m in the in the studio and write a track in my sleep, wake up and then write it in the real world with real instruments. I couldn’t do it at first. The main problem was just remembering it. Melodies were easy to remember. I’d go to sleep in my studio. I’d go to sleep for ten minutes and write three tracks — only small segments, not 100 percent finished tracks. I’d wake up and I’d only been asleep for ten minutes. That’s quite mental. I vary the way I do it, dreaming either I’m in my studio, entirely the way it is, or all kinds of variations. The hardest thing is getting the sounds the same. It’s never the same. It doesn’t really come close to it.
In his book on the album, Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works, Volume II, Marc Weidenbaum recalled an interview in which James told him why it’s so important that he work in his bedroom:
To me, it’s essential… I mean, I didn’t realize it when I was growing up, until I moved my studio like out of my bedroom into another room—when I came to London I thought that was a really good idea: you know, studio in one room and bedroom in another—got really excited. And I just, for ages, I just wasn’t as happy and I couldn’t work it out, just ’cause I wasn’t sleeping in the same room as my stuff. There’s something magical about having all your equipment in the same room as your bed, and you just get out of bed and like do a track and go back to sleep and then get up and do some more and do tracks in your pants and stuff.
In Keep Going, I wrote about that dream-like state and how much I love napping, and quoted William Gibson: “Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking.”
An artist could use it as a mission statement: “I’ve been trying to hold onto last night’s dream…”
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