constellations #22: having and being had
Hi again.
Right now I’m reading Having and Being Had by Eula Biss, on loan from the library, which an NPR review says is about “the ease of colluding in capitalism” and which a NYT review calls “a set of meditations on the twisted individual experience of class and capitalism.”
I’m enjoying it, I think. I’m interested in those themes, and I love the structure of the book (a series of mini-essays that you might also call poems) and I love a personal narrative that pokes at a group of big thematic questions, and I love a writer who jumps from Marx to Woolf to Baldwin and makes me feel like I’m getting it all.
It has a whiff of the reflexivity trap, the self-consciousness of reckoning with privilege while still centering the perspective of a white, middle-class life. It’s hard for me to get too comfortable in a book wherein the pitfalls of our current economic system are illustrated by the act of raising a kid with your spouse in a house you own in a neighborhood you’re participating in gentrifying with a stable well-paid job. Right now, I mean, when so much is falling apart around us in such a visible and visceral way. (I imagine I might still feel this way if I read the book in a different time and place, but maybe that’s me being too generous with myself.)
The NYT reviewer put it this way: “Having and Being Had is meant to be the kind of book most authors have dreamed of: one that does not sacrifice any of the writer’s egalitarian, socialist principles while nevertheless earning her a hierarchical, capitalist income, which can then let her produce more books.”
Perhaps. In any case, the thing I am enjoying the most about the book is the way Biss writes about art. Like here, concerning an essay one of her students has written about composing music:
While I open the windows to warm the overcooled room, letting in the humid air coming off the lake, I talk with the composer about his essay. I tell him that it precisely captured my moment-to-moment experience of writing — the unending interrogating, the missteps, the slowness, the frustration. He and I are talking about the agonies of our work now while another student listens.
If that’s how it makes you feel, she says, then why do you do it? Because there’s no other choice, I’m tempted to answer, if you’re compelled to make art. But I think she’s asking where the pleasure is in this work. It’s in the making, I know that much, though the process itself isn’t exactly pleasurable.
Later, she goes on to say:
We’re in service to the art, I tell my student, bent to it. There’s pleasure in this posture, in being bettered by the work. It isn’t the pleasure of mastery, but the pleasure of being mastered.
And then later, in another chapter:
Art unmakes the world made by work.
I am still figuring out my relationship to all these things — writing, art, work, labor; books like these. Maybe I always will be. (I hope not — but then again, maybe not-knowing will become a place I’m delighted to be.) But I like the way she describes writing, being bettered by it, despite (because of?) the discomfort.
I still get twisted up by questions about being compelled to make art, if only because it seems so glaringly obvious that the time and space and energy to capitulate to that compulsion isn’t equally distributed. (Something Biss writes about, too.) An indie rock artist I love used to say in interviews that she made music because she had to, that she couldn’t do anything else, and it always irked me. I knew what she meant: that she had doggedly pursued her art because she was willing to devote her life to it, that she would be unfulfilled without it. Fair enough, I think, but it takes particular circumstances to conflate fulfilling work with the only work I am capable of doing.
Ironically, until yesterday I was planning on making this week’s newsletter a semi-serious “constellations year-end holiday gift guide,” arranged by theme (for a friend you want to think about you once a week; for someone who deserves small luxuries; for the sensitive stoner in your life; etc.) But then I turned this into a newsletter about a book that critiques status-oriented consumption. I guess this book is doing work on my brain after all.
Hope you have a nice week unmaking the world made by work, whatever that means to you. Thanks for reading.
xo,
M