(I may be updating this & the next post in between calls today... they're a bit sketchy still... in this one, for instance, there was a real clash with "the muse" that I could imagine as a "scene" of some sort, we'll see.)
What made the pale suite washed out, drained, anemic? Was it the eloquent executive furniture, the large walnut veneer desks, strategic abstract paintings of desert yellow with some red drips, couches and dried flower arrangements all color-coded in muted tones, a whole suite of executive offices abandoned, places of corporate battles where victories were savoured or wounds sustained, and where profits increased yearly, ever-plundering the populace, until the merger and the redundancy and the emptiness? A commercial insurance company that banked on the stability of the world, drew profits from potential disaster, disasters that could be counted on not to happen but which could be insured against none-the-less. A wealthy world, this --- swish of fine, worsted wool suits, stout bellies and fat expense accounts, of the supremacy of numbers, the tallies of the underwriter who tabulates worth and value and what staving against the inevitability of decline will cost you, enabling an elite business corps to maintain itself, a world of infinitely regressive cliches. One that now lies empty, recently vacated, pale in the cool morning light, surveyed over a styrofoam cup of weak coffee.
What I want to say is that my muse doesn't understand that money needs to be made in order to live.
Afterwards at a cafe, the green tomato on the vine in the window box that ran around the empty outdoor patio next to the red flowering geranium. So sour that looking at it through a closed window made it break open on your tongue, green and puckering, coupled with frilly, vibrant, sensuous red petals.
Sheath of feeling. Words groping to touch air.
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Do you wake up - just once in a while - and curse the gods that made you creative, interesting, different? That life would be far easier if our days didn't need time for both the creation and the wide open eyes we need to make our creations come alive? Where is the safety of 'just enough cash' to go with the inspirations?
ReplyDeleteWish I knew...
Haha, Narrator, no, don't believe I ever have, but I've cursed the fat gods of "Capitalism" lots! Unfortunately, it's a system that seems most adept at subsuming its detractors into its folds, buying them out... and I suppose, were we to be offered fat publishing contracts, we'd leap at them, surely, and bless our muses all the way to the bank. :-)
ReplyDeleteAs I was reading this, I could envision a camera going down the hallways and byways of office structures empty at the end of the day, almost, but for a single woman cleaning in a room where the lights of the city rise as the sun begins to set on her nightly routines. I could hear the narration of the voice speaking the words you have written. I could see it on the Arts Channel, Sundance, perhaps, and it was quite profound.
ReplyDeleteThen, at the end of the little film, the Artist who, through circumstance forced, to work in the structures, sits in the cafe at the end of the day and there touches the simplicity of spirit~wow
Blessings~
Laurieglynn, yes, that must be somewhat like what cleaners see every night and into the dawn... only the places they clean are being used, there's paper, envelopes, coffee cups with yesterday's rings, full garbage cans with food that's recently been discarded, perhaps a coat here, a pair of shoes there, a living office just sleeping. This place was literally like a real estate model suite, perfectly furnished, but devoid of lived-in 'life' - only perhaps a memory of what went on in there when you found out it had been a commercial insurance company.
ReplyDeleteI was actually there with two other women for 'mock interviews' - training session for HR Managers, 3 interviews of 45 minutes each, and exhausting. I only do temp office work to get by, not being a business person at all, and having to pull out of my riddled experience answers to their questions about 'team work,' 'difficulties with a co-worker,' a 'time when you made a change that helped you perform your job better,' these questions left me grasping at straws of impossibility. I work one-on-one with students; temp work is not 'team' work but replacement for a sick worker, etc. The times when I've instituted little systems to facilitate filing, for instance, I've done myself out of the temp job... how could they deal with this 'other' side of their business?
The publications, and conferences, and writing and artwork left them dumbfounded, as did the teaching... and even my attempts to connect their interview questions with concepts of 'organiztion' in general were met with incomprehension. At the end, though, while they recommended I redo my resume (so it would 'fit' a hypothetical 'customer service' job, ooh la), they did say I was a very warm person and a delight to interview. :chuckle: :-)