Does Work Still Have Meaning Today? (testimony)

p. 20

An artist probably does not perceive the notion of work as everyone else does. Nor, probably, does he associate the “same deep reasons” with his actions and with his no less “deep” motivations. It therefore seems obvious to me that my testimony should feed into the peripheral, non-standard zones of the statistical curves, showing clearly that here and there marginal minds exist who may also have the right to be heard. Several attitudes are possible in approaching the question: to be frivolous, or else to probe the depths of the serious.

For several days now this question, with its double articulation, has been pursuing me. For several days, at every moment of whatever I undertake or accomplish, I have been asking myself: am I in a moment that makes sense, in my work of this precise instant, or, on the contrary, is what I am doing devoid of sense, or outside meaning itself, and can it be so, absolutely? And what, then, are or would be these deep reasons that drive me in this work… there, in the instant! In short, this two-part question has for several days made me put on a pair of glasses that I now want to take off: for they poison, first, my spontaneity, and then my innocent reading of the moment. They make me — I say it plainly — trip over my own feet. Trip up, when for me until then the moment, the instant, was that raw material — a small, unique piece of time — which every living being had, if not the mission to transcend, at least the capacity to envisage doing so. And in my perception as an “artist”, indeed, each little piece of “successful” instant contributes, as opposed to those that are not, to the great mosaic of my life, to that awareness of my existence in its design as well as in its drawing. And — my own secret — life seemed to me playable and beautiful, lovable and compelling only if, and only if, my drawings and designs of myself were respected, not to say fulfilled, and if something holding or announcing meaning and its quest was represented.

So the answer can be guessed in my marginal case: if I am working on something that makes sense and fulfils my life, I am not working but I am, I am existentially as I breathe, I am responding to something essential and inescapable. I exist, and then the extraordinary happiness of being sings within me, and these cells, the very ones that compose and make me, vibrate in return, and my heart races and I praise life for existing. But when I put on those wretched glasses, like the two lenses of the double-articulated question — several days of investigation into myself — I stumble up against the norm. For I am then completely forced to equate the moments when I stroll and dream with the moments when I work, since these two activities alike strengthen me in those designs of myself that I mentioned a moment ago, and insofar, too, as the former fortify and extend the latter.

Which no doubt means that this life will have allowed me never to toil or drudge, when elsewhere that is all too often the lot, if one considers that today more than ever meaning and thought have deserted the stage.

As for leading a quieter life? Already I lack the time to run towards what makes my life, namely my work, and to give it concrete form. I run, more than anyone perhaps, but I run there freely, as if along a line of steepest slope. Like everyone, too, I lose along the way loved ones who expected more than I could offer them in time and availability.

Moreover, as for everyone, the void, that void oozing anguish, horrifies me. So sometimes I wonder: what if, to this void oozing anguish, “my” answer lay in artistic creation, the only positive antidote known to me that secretes its own rewards. For on reflection, even if it is an antidote, it, and it alone, knows how to give me fresh strength so that, when I wake each morning that my life has granted me so far, I am full of impatience, fruitfulness and anticipation of a new day in which the whole world may fulfil itself or be revealed.