when you only ever move halfway toward acceptance you never arrive there

Like both of my parents, I have a hard time keeping my living space clean. The cursed blessing of full-time work had, for brief while, led to a slight improvement simply by preventing me from being home all that much; but by mid-pandemic I had scarcely left for months and had not an iota of structure to compel remediation of the gathering storm. The return to work, welcome as it has been in most every way, has begotten equilibriation but not remediation.

A longtime friend got wind of this last week and offered to help me clean. I think this is one of the nicest, most caring things anyone not related to me has ever done for me. We didn't have a whole lot of time and hence didn't get very far, but we certainly got further than I had gotten on my own; and of course the mere fact of our appointment did compel me to get started on my own a few hours early. "Momentum" this might be called in the prevailing therapeutic argot. Except that the only momentum I am capable of torquing myself off of is the kind that lives out here, in the shadow world of ideas and discourse, and potentially (though recently not so much) in what a certain dreadlocked mandarinate has dubbed creative music. (As opposed to...the other kind?)

So, having now over the course of the prior 48 hours burned through a coupla hundred pages of moderate-to-heavy book-reading, having harvested choice nuggets from a baker's dozen emails-to-self re: a wide range of journal articles and other online blather, and having prepared and formatted almost as many future blog posts on all manner of pseudo-scholarly topics so near and dear to our ongoing project here, I do find it very, very, VERY difficult to accept the interpretation that I have been unproductive this "weekend" simply because I have let the apartment cleaning and a few other mundane errands fall by the wayside yet again, just as they always have for me and, for the most part, for my parents too. And I find it equally difficult to accept the interpretation that I am not "ambitious" just because scholarship and creative music don't pay the bills. In fact my ambitions may well kill me, same as for a good capitalist or prospector as for an artist or scholar; or if they don't quite kill me, they certainly will take their revenge in any number of mundane or quotidian ways. Which is to say, they already have.

Fromm and Maccoby on the Total Character Structure

The nonproductive forms of social relatedness in a predominantly productive person—loyalty, authority, fairness, assertiveness—turn into submission, domination, withdrawal, destructiveness in a predominantly nonproductive person. Any of the nonproductive orientations has, therefore, a positive and a negative aspect, according to the degree of productiveness in the total character structure. (78)

Erich Fromm and Michael Maccoby
Social Character
in a Mexican Village (1970)

p. 79 has a long list of "positive aspects" along with their "negative aspects," the idea being as above that the productive/nonproductive binary is the linchpin distinction which colors most other secondary traits.

These sorts of theoretical edifices are always a bit unsightly, but the general insight that the beneficence or malevolence of a given trait is actually a function of many or all of the accompanying traits is a brilliant one. In Minneapolis of course, the nonproductive version of openness is apathy. (CalArts too.)

[from a notebook, 2016 or 2017]

Millennial Ambivalence: Deadlines

I’m someone who needs deadlines, and who for that reason finds the moment itself painful and anti-climactic. I feel acutely the truism that, “You don’t finish a project, you abandon it.” This month has been tremendously fruitful in expanding the reach of this work-in-progress into areas that have become important to me since the last bout of productivity, but at the cost of the work itself being almost uniformly undercooked. This is what Blog Month has always been about: imposing deadlines as a change of pace and M.O. I would like to have done better justice to the issues, but some justice now is better than never. This is the give and take that all creative and intellectual laborers face, whoever it is that they work for and in what capacity. Here, however, there is a socially constructed notion of maturity which I am willing to accept: as we age and our portfolios grow, there is less and less need merely to announce our presence and what we’re all about, and there is an ever greater need to hit the proverbial nail on the head with whatever our next product is to be. I wonder if seeing this issue through the lens of age, and by extension of generations, does not go a ways toward explaining so many conflicts between artworks as capturing essential ideas and artworks as contingent results of a process. The process currently on display here is for me a necessary kick in the pants, but it risks becoming just that with each passing year, so much so that I have started to view blogging more as rough drafting for more formal productions which take the time needed to reach their essential form. Let’s all look forward to that, but without holding our breath.

Trick or Treat? Blog Month Post-Mortem

Today is Halloween, which has always been my favorite holiday, but this year, while most of the rest of the country is busy donning their best costumes, I am shedding mine, for this is the last day of October, the month where I attempt to be something I'm not, namely, a profligate blogger who posts regularly and always leaves his readers wanting...less.

The blog month project took a direct hit within its first week, went down in flames midway through the third, and staged an unexpected but welcome rally in the fourth. Too little, too late. Though I failed miserably to accomplish to goal I had set for myself (to post every day during the month, or at the very least, to average a post a day), it was worth attempting simply to confirm my long-held suspicion that I simply don't have the time or inclination to post on a daily basis. Nonetheless, I do enjoy occasionally dumping my misguided musico-philosophical views on the few unsuspecting readers who happen to stumble their way over here from time to time, and assuming that no self-respecting peer-reviewed publication would touch me with a ten foot double reed, I have no intention of giving it up any time soon, even if for long stretches it appears that I have.

Consider yourselves warned that beginning with our next installment, this blog is liable to start looking an awful lot like it did before (i.e. two posts a month totaling several thousand words). While I intend to make Blog Month an annual event here at My Fickle Ears Dig It, it would be quite a shock indeed if it were ever to succeed in its stated purpose (for the record, I averaged about 0.645 posts per day; we'll try to improve on that next year). With any luck, quality has not suffered too terribly in the company of increased quantity over the last few weeks, and if there is in fact anyone out there who reads this blog regularly enough in order for the frequency and length of the posts to have become monotonous, at least that routine has been broken for the time being. For new readers, feel free to enjoy the entire month at your own pace; I'll be leaving it up on the main page for a while simply so I can wallow the fleeting quasi-profligacy that was my October 2008. Don't rush yourselves; it may have to last you a while.

Hat tip to Daniel Wolf for adding the word profligate, as well as its variants, to my vocabulary. I can't stop using it, probably because I'll never be one.