In his volume of essays, Life Work, Donald Hall draws distinctions among jobs, chores, and work. The first is done for the pay, the second because it must, while the third arises as a passion, a calling, often an avocation – and is ultimately energizing and life-affirming. Lucky, he says, is the person whose work is also a paying job. So for income, where do we turn? Retreat into farming? Farmers aren’t surviving.
Wendell Berry speaks of two Muses. In Standing by Words, North Point Press, San Francisco, 1983, highly recommended, he writes: “There are, it seems, two Muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say, ‘It is yet more difficult than you thought.’ This is the muse of form.
“The first muse is the one mainly listened to in a cheap energy civilization, in which `economic health’ depends on the assumption that everything desirable lies within easy reach of anyone. It is the willingness to hear the second muse that keeps us cheerful in our work. To hear only the first is to live in the bitterness of disappointment.”
Here, then, is yet another slant on work from an unabashedly Christian poet and essayist.
Robert Bly once said that to write a line of poetry requires two hours. Not so much for the actual writing. Not even for the inspiration. Certainly for the revision.
And revision. And revision. His estimate, it seems, is quite optimistic.
In the practice, I keep asking: Are my facts right? Is this the most appropriate detail? How will the piece open and what structure will it assume? What is unique and most meaningful here? For whom? Does it boogie?
All of this to guard against shoddy workmanship; anything lazy, even deceitful; the artiste and the counterfeit.
Jnana's Red Barn 