Well, this certainly isn't how things were supposed to turn out.
When I launched myself, so confidently, on this bitter journey, to catalog the various jolts and misfortunes and indignities attendant upon approaching the end of one's earthly existence, I had thought, somewhat naively, that I would be spending at least part of at least two or three days a week on the job -- retailing with appropriate ruefulness just how it was feeling, day by day, as the clock runs down.
But lo, these many weeks have trickled past, with nary a word from my fingertips -- in spite of many opportunities, and no shortage of material about which to complain in a picturesque and, I had hoped, bleakly humorous manner. Days plodded on; seasons changed; conventional festivities were celebrated with more or less sincerity; gloves were lost; one pair of reading glasses after another either disappeared or broke in half; door locks began to malfunction. No matter how vigorously I applied my store of acrid Protestant guilt and the embedded sense of obligation, my fingers remained either totally idle, or occupied with much less thematically-consistent material.
Until today, for no discernible reason.
Here I've been sitting, transfixed by the word game that fills me with a mixture of fascination, irritation and loathing, while outside, a soft snowfall marks the latest of our winter storms -- possible five more inches ahead, before the projected end of the storm, at nightfall. And for some reason, as I searched through the letters on the screen, trying to find a more satisfying word than 'ait', or 'the', some set of internal lenses were twisting into focus, and I was looking, again, at one of the more debilitating factors tied to my approaching end days: lack of futurity, and how magically that state robs me of a sense of orientation and purpose.
All through my creative life, I've realized, there was the implication of some upcoming exhibit, some opportunity for me to display my work, that made the efforts seem legitimate and reasonable investments of my time, energy and resources. Now, for some reason -- and this, in spite of a recent upwelling of inexplicable productivity -- no glimmer of future shows or competitions seems available, as the customary inducement to do something. Now, if I feel prodded to work, it's more out of a sense of housekeeping -- a tepid desire to tie up loose ends, and not to leave so many things unfinished -- even though I'm more convinced than ever, that everything I've ever done will simply be chucked into some hired dumpster, and hauled off to a landfill in upstate New York.
So I find myself operating out of a kind of unthinking, animal motivation -- some sort of motor habit, or an idle curiosity, to find out just how I did manage to create that particular mix of paints, to achieve just the right wash of neglect and despair? How ironic that, finally, I have plenty of time and plenty of material, and find that the idea of working makes me sick to my stomach, that there's no comfort in putting paint on paper, or in massing wads of stuff onto flat surfaces, to create my little wall-unit extracts of the larger suspended figures that people seem to find so fascinating -- and which objects, for all their fascination, will spend the brief remainder of their existence, hanging in an old machine shop basement in Newark.
Lack of futurity, lack of the sense that any creative endeavor can possibly represent a sensible, worthwhile investment -- that it makes no sense, really, to bother to learn anyone's name, or remember their birthday -- because I'm really just in a kind of cosmic transportation hubs, and although the schedule hasn't been posted, I'm pretty sure I've got a ticket for one of the next outbound buses. I can score 20,000,000 points on my computer word game -- it won't make a bit of difference.
© 2015 Walter Zimmerman
