photo: Paul Wade
We had a little technical glitch yesterday, as a result of which I've now read this letter twice before writing this.
Further mercantile developments in this letter, mostly concerning the photography activity, which it transpires is a business.
Apparently a group of them were operating a semi-official photography studio and darkroom, developing film and so on. I didn't know Jack could develop film. I wonder if he ever had a dark room in the house on Pennsylvania Avenue?
I can imagine it would have been quite easy to do in the bomb shelter. Or did he stop doing so much photography after the war?
It strikes me that my father was born just a year and a half after these letters were written. I wonder how many of their postwar plans were disrupted by his arrival, how much they managed to do anyway.
I feel like I would have needed a period of decompression after the war. A little time to just be young and relatively unencumbered with responsibility. I cannot imagine going directly (essentially) from active deployment to parenthood, which seems to me another type of active deployment with no hope of discharge.
But perhaps that just says more about my views on parenthood than anything else.
I am in a curious mood this week. It's the slowest week I've had in quarantine, in terms of work I'm being paid to do. It's not been slow in terms of networking, creative practice and good conversation - in fact, it's been more than usually active on that front.
The fact that I still feel quite despondent makes me interrogate my own views around money, work and value.
I got really irritated with something I read on Facebook at the start of quarantine in the UK - it was a post by another theatre maker basically saying that anyone who continues to work during this period has fallen prey to the neoliberal cult of busy-ness and CONSTANT PRODUCTIVITY. That was how I read it anyway.
This irritated me on several grounds - so much so that I wrote my own post about my thoughts on how to respond on quarantine (as if any of this matters, or as if writing posts on Facebook constitutes decisive action, but hey...).
Part of my argument was that if our creative practice grinds to a halt because the instruments by which we finance it have become impossible, what does that say about us as artists? In other words, if it's only something you do because you're paid for it, that's not art, in my opinion. One still needs to get paid, of course. At least enough of the time to be sustainable. And there's the rub.
There's a part of me that envies Jack the ease with which he seems to create economic activity.
My brain endlessly generates ideas and connects concepts, but I don't think monetarily. I used to say, jokingly - but not entirely, that I am structurally incompatible with capitalism. This would be fine if I was the kind of person who was happy to take a full-time job at a university, but that kind of structure and control makes me crazy. I'm like a non-profit entrepreneur. How is one supposed to build a sustainable career in this way?
Maybe it will be possible in the brave new post-COVID world. (I'm writing that with tongue firmly in cheek, in case the sarcasm doesn't transmit via the written medium.)
I'm writing in a different room than I usually do. Here's the view out the window from where I'm sitting. It's so unseasonably cold this week. The description of the heat in the Philippines - the kind of heat that makes a cool breeze the most heavenly gift - is enough to make me quite jealous.
Perhaps its the cold that's responsible for the quiet. Perhaps things will start to grow with a warming trend.
That's a hopeful note to end on. Take care of yourself for your hubby's sake.