Kafka's Meaning of Life

Originally Posted Saturday, March 15, 2014

Change is inevitable.  Some of it is maddening.  Capitalism keeps taking away the things I use.  Film is the one I'm thinking of at present.  Fuji has announced that it is discontinuing another of the films that I use, films I have bought cameras for at very dear prices.  Elsewhere others are trying to invent replacements, but that, too, is a matter of money.  The Impossible Project can't get me the film I spent thousands of dollars around so that I could shoot it.  Oh. . . it is coming, they say, but it will be expensive and I don't know when.  The New 55 has begun trying to raise money on Kickstarter so that they can make an instant 4x5 film that I would surely like to have, but it also will be expensive, and I may be dead before they ever go into production.

I spent this past week going through the prints I have in my studio.  It has become a mess, but it has been a wonderful trip through the creative processes I have used.  If you could see the prints rather than these digital images, you would know.  I've done so many things that I look at a print and wonder exactly how I made it.  I go through them and know I must do more of that again.  And I will, starting today. 

All that I am going to be left with is digital.  Film is definitely becoming extinct.  I need to give it up completely.  It is the way back.  I need the way ahead.  I must put what creative energies I have now into figuring out how to fuck up the digital image outside of software.  Anyone can fuck it up using software, but in the end, when it is no longer digital, it looks like it was fucked up in software.  I need to fuck it up otherwise. 

But maybe I should quit thinking that way, too.  Why do I need to degrade the image to make it appealing?  My friend who is an encaustic artist of some repute and I laugh sometimes about the process.  "Scrapbooking," we'll say in self-denegration.  Mixed media is sort of that, though, isn't it?  You begin the same way, find elements, add them to the mix.  How is it different?  You can tell yourself lots of things, but it is just saying.  I've seen some pretty good scrapbookers.  I have a friend whose artwork is in museums around the country, and in the end, she is something of that.  She has a workshop this weekend teaching people the techniques.  The people who come to her workshops are already very, very good. 

But this way lies madness.  Or at least doubt and depression, and those are the last two things I need today for I am one step away from destroying my set so that I am not tempted to continue doing what I've done.  It is almost Spring, and I feel the need for something new.  I will spend the day thinking of what this "newness" will be.  It must be scary.  It must be do-able. 

These are the thoughts that have been filling my head this past week.  Now I have spat them out.  Maybe they will find soil and grow.  Maybe not.  I read an interview with Philip Roth this morning.  He quoted Kafka on the meaning of life.  "The meaning of life," he said, "is that it ends."  I need to get busy.