Not for nothing are the initials 'b.j.' embedded in that last fusillade of frustration. There've been blows (if not jobs) since February - beginning with the unexpected rubbishing of the Humandala website, and continuing to the evaporèsumé -- gone from all my backups.
Am I whining? Maybe, but it has never taken me more than a week or two to find work. And what I couldn't find, I could cobble together. Till now.
But soft, situated in my 6th House, this new moon says The Gig will turn up if I keep grinding: applications, combing Craigslist, Flexjobs, Indeed, Linked-in. To do otherwise, I am told, is to succumb to terminal optimism, and/or bust up my lifelong pattern of make-work to pay for creative work.§
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| 19th C Writing Ball |
I get that the 6th House story is one of service, linked with routine. That is why it is seen as the house of employment. My 6th is in Gemini, ruled by Mercury, and has Venus/Mercury (the Greek Aphrodite/Hermes) wandering through it. And that question of 'routine' will ever and forever be the bête noir of anyone wearing the writer's cape. Or should I say bête blanc, the empty page with its polar-bear-in-a-snow-storm appeal, the One True Thing of a writer's life. It's not that I don't have the tenacity to return to that blanc again and again - it is really a question of what can be said vs what needs to remain sub-rosa, whispered from one mind to another.
The subjects of my inquiry --the sensory array and its subtle iterations; creating boundaries for intensive meditative practice; what constitutes a functioning art object, to name a cryptic few-- do not amend themselves to the usual rhetorics. Writing about them is a waggle-dance through several dimensions, which rarely align with the track we mark as 'logical.' It is often possible to turn my assertions inside-out&backward and find an argument as beautiful, (disturbing), compelling as the one I thought I made.
One might say that such writing is a form of speech. Not speech as verification - truth on one side, mendacity on the other - but speech as a flow, a percolation into the spiraling corals of the mind shared by both hearers. Since capturing that interiority is so much harder than letting it spill into space, the diversions of glib Mercury are constantly tempting."Say it once. . ." he whispers
". . . but for all."
The 'for all' being the challenge.
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§And creative work always leads to play (a.k.a. 'life'), which cycles back to ...
