VVORKING ON IT

I suggest the following excerpt from the recent writings of Isa/be//a Bur/den/ be taken into consideration as a commentary on Labor and Capital.

“When I am on my game, I even fucking work in my sleep.

Like, after I say the real and final goodnight to whoever might be next to me, before I fall asleep, I picture the project I am working on in excruciating detail.

I am not sure if this works for other people, making yourself dream about something specific, but it is how I do it.

I feel bad sometimes like, as I’m falling asleep and my heartbeat kind of accelerates, that I am not thinking about the person laying with their leg or arm or whatever on me, but this thing laying on the floor in a different room. But they don’t know that, and they are probably already asleep and I can think about whatever I want to. Right?

Oh, and it is not like a waking dream or whatever people talk about where they can control the things that happen consciously. No, I am just me in the studio in the dream … mostly feeling exasperated and just working on my project. Like in real life, Except sometimes I solve it.

When I solve it, I wake up and write it down. Then go back to sleep and have a critique or an opening, I don’t know, like to test the reception of the project.

If the reception seems good, or the dream-critic likes it, when I wake up (like am fully awake in the real world, after coffee, breakfast, and kissing goodbye), I go to the studio and try to finish the project using the solution I got from the dream.

Most nights the ideas are bad, the critics hate it, or it melts, or breaks, or I ruin it and can never remake it because I already used the entire supply of this blue-green rubber that ever existed. But sometimes I do get the right answer that way.

I have never charged for those dreams-hours on a commissioned piece or anything, except once, when my Jungian analyst bought a set of photographs of young attractive white men playing Ping-Pong.

When I say bought, what I mean is that I couldn’t pay her and traded the photographs, at an inflated dream-value, for the therapy for my dissociative disorder (which basically means that I can still move easily though the world when my brain has turned itself off… but sometimes it turns back on and I don’t know where I am or how I got there).

            So this situation changed whenever my environment changed, and I fell off my game. All the sudden I was busy solving these crazy dream-problems that had nothing to do with my work, but had to do with all these complicated intrapersonal dynamics with people (I didn’t like) who I had met in this new, changed environment. Except, I couldn’t solve the problems.”

- Isa/be//a/ Bur/den/, courtesy of Bruce LaBruce High Quality Foundation and reprinted here with the permission of Cutie Magazine (publishing house). Copyright 2014, IB, BLBHQF. 

            In this selection of less than 500 words, the narrator uses “work” 6 times for a total of 5 different meanings.  The first use vaguely introduces the concept of labor. The second use informs the first, flushing it out as existing within a boundary of time (schedule) and space (the physical world). The third use of the word acknowledges subjective opinions about what work is. The fourth use informs the reader that the narrator claims first hand experience of working. The fifth use of the word applies to and deeply re-informs the first 4 uses outlined, as it asserts that the state of ‘working’, that the narrator experiences first hand, is perpetual.

This last use makes richer many of the definitions of “work”, but discounts one previous claim: because being perpetual implies that it is without boundaries of time and space, which the author suggested as a boundary of “work” as used in the second sentence of the work. This causes in the reader a cognitive dissonance for which there are only two solutions:

1 The Narrator is unreliable and so might be, is probably, a liar.

2 The narrator is trustworthy and a vast re-contextualization and

    re-definition of the word “work” is needed in culture at large.

The other 9 uses of the word “work” are meant to sway the reader’s view of the narrator towards the second solution.