...to quit. At least temporarily. I have quite made up my mind. I will take a complete sabbatical year from doing projects after the camp. It's not that I'm giving up what I do, it's just that for a while, I need to cleanse it out of my system and start again when I know how to do it in a healthier way.
I'm reading Stephen King's memoir titled "On Writing" at the moment, where he wrote the words which quite made my decision. It's enlightening, and it's applicable to those of you who's trying to make improvement in the lonely planet of non-popular art. Here you go:
"The last thing I want to tell you in this part is about my desk. For years I dreamed of having the sort of massive oak slab that would dominate a room--no more child's desk in a trailer laundry-closet, no more cramped kneehole in a rented house. In 1981 I got the one I wanted and placed it in the middle of a spacious, skylighted study (it's a converted stable loft at the rear of the house). For six years I sat behind that desk either drunk or wrecked out of my mind, like a ship's captain in charge of a voyage to go nowhere.
A year or two after I sobered up, I got rid of that monstrosity and put in a living room suite where it had been, picking out the pieces and a nice Turkish rug with my wife's help. In the early nineties, before they moved on to their own lives, my kids sometimes came up in the evening to watch a basketball game or a movie and eat pizza. They usually left a boxful of crusts behind when they moved on, but I didn't care. They came, they seemed to enjoy being with me, and I know I enjoyed being with them. I got another desk--it's handmade, beautiful, and half the size of the T.rex desk. I put it at the far west end of the office, in a corner under the eave. That eave is very likely the one I slept under in Durham, but there are no rats in the walls and no senile grandmother downstairs yelling to feed Dick the horse. I'm sitting under it now, a fifty-three-year-old man with bad eyes, a gimp leg, and no hangover. I'm doing what I know how to do, and as well as I know how to do it. I came through all the stuff I told you about (and plenty more that I didn't), and now I'm going to tell you as much as I can about the job. As promised, it won't take long.
It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support-system for art. It's the other way around."
At the moment in my life, my calling has seriously take over my whole life, and way too much, up to the point where I simply cannot enjoy doing it any more. The thing is, the results of what I do, of my projects, depend a lot on the audience, on the people to whom I'm dedicating all my energy, and after four years, I don't think the people where I live appreciate it. Or, they probably do, only their mind haven't been evolved, and evolution always takes years. In the meantime, there's no point of doing this unless they are working together with me. As I've said before, it's useless to educate people who are happy to stay ignorant.
Besides being tired of being broke after each camp, what finally dawned on me is that there's so much more to life than just your work, and they are just as important. Mr. King, who once was a drug addict, wrote this: "I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to work anymore if I quit drinking and drugging, but I decided again...that I would trade writing for staying married and watching the kids grow up."
Honestly, the thought of giving up was scary at first, because I know that this is my calling and that I love the job and I know I'm really good at it. For me, doing projects is like writing to Mr. King. I'd be sad to leave it, even for a while. I also know that a-while could stretch to months, even years, and if it's your calling, something inside will always crave to be out, to be fulfilled, and you sort of have a guilty feeling for not taking action about it. But I've been-there-done-that so I will know when to go back. Maybe in this place again, or maybe in another place, but I always believe that God will put me in a place where I am most useful and where I can learn the most. Here, my lesson is: when you start losing grasps on elements of life because of something, even if it's something you love, you know it's time to quit.
