{"id":125753,"date":"2019-01-14T12:00:19","date_gmt":"2019-01-14T12:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=125753"},"modified":"2019-01-10T14:44:36","modified_gmt":"2019-01-10T14:44:36","slug":"what-are-we-working-for-at-eternitys-gate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/01\/what-are-we-working-for-at-eternitys-gate\/","title":{"rendered":"What Are We Working for \u201cAt Eternity\u2019s Gate\u201d?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cOne also knows from his letters that nothing appeared more sacred to Van Gogh than work.\u201d<\/em>
\n\u2013 John Berger, \u201cVincent Van Gogh,\u201d Portraits<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

10 Jan 2019 – <\/em>Ever since I was a young boy, I have wondered why people do the kinds of work they do.\u00a0 I sensed early on that the economic system was a labyrinthine trap devised to imprison people in work they hated but needed for survival.\u00a0 It seemed like common sense to a child when you simply looked and listened to the adults around you.\u00a0 Karl Marx wasn\u2019t necessary for understanding the nature of alienated labor; hearing adults declaim \u201cThank God It\u2019s Friday\u201d spoke volumes.<\/p>\n

In my Bronx working class neighborhood I saw people streaming to the subway in the mornings for their rides \u201cinto the city\u201d and their forlorn trundles home in the evenings.\u00a0 It depressed me.\u00a0 Yet I knew the goal was to \u201cmake it\u201d and move away as one moved \u201cup,\u201d something that many did.\u00a0 I wondered why, when some people had options, they rarely considered the moral nature of the jobs they pursued.\u00a0 And why did they not also consider the cost in life (time) lost in their occupations?\u00a0 Were money, status, and security the deciding factors in their choices?\u00a0 Was living reserved for weekends and vacations?<\/p>\n

I gradually realized that some people, by dint of family encouragement and schooling, had opportunities that others never received.\u00a0 For the unlucky ones, work would remain a life of toil and woe in which the search for meaning in their jobs was often elusive.\u00a0 Studs Terkel, in the introduction to his wonderful book of interviews, Working: People Talk about What They Do all Day and How They Feel about What They Do<\/em>, puts it this way:<\/p>\n

This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence \u2013 to the spirit as well as to the body.\u00a0 It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around.\u00a0 It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations.\u00a0 To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Those words were confirmed for me when in the summer between high school and college I got a job through a relative\u2019s auspices as a clerk for General Motors in Manhattan.\u00a0 I dreaded taking it for the thought of being cooped up for the first time in an office building while a summer of my youth passed me by, but the money was too good to turn down (always the bait), and I wanted to save as much as possible for college spending money.\u00a0 So I bought a summer suit and joined the long line of trudgers going to and fro, down and up and out of the underground, adjusting our eyes to the darkness and light.<\/p>\n

It was a summer from hell.\u00a0 My boredom was so intense it felt like solitary confinement.\u00a0 How, I kept wondering, can people do this?\u00a0 Yet for me it was temporary; for the others it was a life sentence.\u00a0 But if this were life, I thought, it was a living death.\u00a0 All my co-workers looked forward to the mid-morning coffee wagon and lunch with a desperation so intense it was palpable.\u00a0 And then, as the minutes ticked away to 5 P.M., the agitated twitching that preceded the mad rush to the elevators seemed to synchronize with the clock\u2019s movements.\u00a0 We\u2019re out of here!<\/p>\n

On my last day, I was eating my lunch on a park bench in Central Park when a bird shit on my suit jacket.\u00a0 The stain was apt, for I felt I had spent my days defiling my true self, and so I resolved never to spend another day of my life working in an office building in a suit for a pernicious corporation, a resolution I have kept.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

\u201cAn angel is not far from someone who is sad,\u201d says Vincent Van Gogh in the new film, At Eternity\u2019s Gate. <\/em>For some reason, recently hearing these words in the darkened theater where I was almost alone, brought me back to that summer and the sadness that hung around all the people that I worked with.\u00a0 I hoped Van Gogh was right and an angel visited them from time to time.\u00a0 Most of them had no options.<\/p>\n

The painter Julian Schnabel\u2019s moving picture (moving on many levels since the film shakes and moves with its hand-held camera work and draws you into the act of drawing and painting that was Van Gogh\u2019s work) is a meditation on work.\u00a0 It asks the questions: What is work?\u00a0 What is work for?\u00a0 What is life for?\u00a0 Why paint?\u00a0 What does it mean to live?\u00a0 Why do you do what you do?\u00a0 Are you living or are you dead?\u00a0 What are you seeking through your work?<\/p>\n

For Vincent the answer was simple: reality.\u00a0 But reality is not given to us and is far from simple; we must create it in acts that penetrate the screens of clich\u00e9s that wall us off from it.\u00a0 As John Berger writes,<\/p>\n

One is taught to oppose the real to the imaginary, as though the first were always at hand and the second, distant, far away.\u00a0 This opposition is false.\u00a0 Events are always to hand.\u00a0 But the coherence of these events \u2013 which is what one means by reality \u2013 is an imaginative construction.\u00a0 Reality always lies beyond \u2013 and this is as true for materialists as for idealists.\u00a0 For Plato, for Marx.\u00a0 Reality, however one interprets it, lies beyond a screen of clich\u00e9s. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These screens serve to protect the interests of the ruling classes, who devise ways to trap regular people from seeing the reality of their condition.\u00a0 Yet while working can be a trap, it can also be a means of escape.\u00a0 For Vincent working was the way.\u00a0 For him work was not a noun but a verb. He drew and he painted as he does in this film to \u201cmake people feel what it is to feel alive.\u201d\u00a0 To be alive is to act, to paint, to write.\u00a0 He tells his friend Gauguin that there\u2019s a reason it\u2019s called the \u201cact of painting, the \u201cstroke of genius.\u201d\u00a0 For him painting is living and living is painting.<\/p>\n

The actual paintings that he made are almost beside the point, as all creative artists know too well.\u00a0 It is the doing wherein living is found.\u00a0 The completed canvas, essay, or book are what is done.\u00a0 They are nouns, still lifes, just as Van Gogh\u2019s paintings have become commodities in the years since his death, dead things to be bought and sold by the rich in a culture of death where they can be hung in mausoleums isolated from the living.\u00a0 It is appropriate that the film ends with Vincent very still in his coffin as \u201cviewers\u201d pass him by and avidly now desire his paintings that encircle the room that they once rejected.\u00a0 The man has become a has-been and the funeral parlor the museum.<\/p>\n

\u201cWithout painting I can\u2019t live,\u201d he says earlier.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t say without his paintings.<\/p>\n

\u201cGod gave me the gift for painting,\u201d he said.\u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s the only gift he gave me.\u00a0 I am a born painter.\u201d\u00a0 But his gift has begotten gifts that are still-births that do not circulate and live and breathe to encourage people to find work that will not, \u201cby its very nature, [be] about violence,\u201d as Terkel said. His works, like people, have become commodities, brands to be bought and sold in a world where the accumulation of wealth is accomplished by the infliction of pain, suffering, and death on untold numbers of victims, invisible victims that allow the wealthy to maintain their bad-faith innocence. This is often achieved in the veiled shadows of intermediaries such as stock brokers, tax consultants, and financial managers; in the liberal and conservative boardrooms of mega-corporations or law offices; and in the planning sessions of the world\u2019s great museums. Like drone killings that distance the killers from their victims, this wealth accumulation allows the wealthy to pretend they are on the side of the angels.\u00a0 It\u2019s called success, and everyone is innocent as they sing, \u201cHi Ho, Hi Ho, it\u2019s off to work we go.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is not enough to tell me you worked hard to get your gold,\u201d said Henry Thoreau, Van Gogh\u2019s soul-mate. \u201cSo does the Devil work hard.\u201d<\/p>\n

A few years ago there was a major exhibit of Van Gogh\u2019s nature paintings at the Clark Museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts \u2013 \u201cVan Gogh and Nature\u201d \u2013 that aptly symbolized Van Gogh in his coffin.\u00a0 The paintings were exhibited encased in ornate gold frames. Van Gogh in gold.\u00a0 Just perfect. \u00a0I am reminded of a scene in At Eternity\u2019s Gate<\/em> where Vincent and Gauguin are talking about the need for a creative revolution \u2013 what we sure as hell need \u2013 and the two friends stand side by side with backs to the camera and piss into the wind.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

But pseudo-innocence dies hard.\u00a0 Not long ago I was sitting in a breakfast room in a bed-and-breakfast in Houston, Texas, sipping coffee and musing myself awake.\u00a0 Two men came in and the three of us got to talking.\u00a0 As people like to say, they were nice guys.\u00a0 Very pleasant and talkative, in Houston on business.\u00a0 Normal Americans.\u00a0 Stressed. \u00a0Both were about fifty years old with wives and children.<\/p>\n

One sold drugs for one of the largest pharmaceutical companies that is known for its very popular anti-depressant drug and its aggressive sales pitches.\u00a0 He travelled a triangular route from Corpus Christi to Austin to Houston and back again, hawking his wares.\u00a0 He spoke about his work as being very lucrative and posing no ethical dilemmas.\u00a0 There were so many depressed people in need of his company\u2019s drugs, he said, as if the causes of their depression had nothing to do with inequality and the sorry state of the country as the rich rip off everyone else.\u00a0 I thought of recommending a book to him \u2013 Deadly Medicines and Organized<\/em> Crime: How big pharma has corrupted health care <\/em>by Peter Gotzsche \u2013 but held my tongue, appreciative as I was of the small but tasteful fare we were being served and not wishing to cause my companions dyspepsia.\u00a0 This guy seemed to be trying to convince me of the ethical nature of the way he panned gold, while I kept thinking of that quote attributed to Mark Twain: \u201cDenial ain\u2019t just a river in Egypt.\u201d<\/p>\n

The other guy, originally from a small town in Nebraska and now living in Baton Rouge, was a former medevac helicopter pilot who had served in the 1st<\/sup> Gulf War.\u00a0 He worked in finance for an equally large oil company.\u00a0 His attitude was a bit different, and he seemed sheepishly guilty about his work with this company as he told me how shocked he was the first time he saw so many oil, gas, and chemical plants lining the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans and all the oil and chemicals being shipped down the river. So many toxins that reminded him of the toxic black smoke rising from all the bombed oil wells in Iraq.\u00a0 Something about it all left him uneasy, but he too said he made a very good \u201cliving\u201d and that his wife also worked for the oil company back home.<\/p>\n

My childish thought recurred: when people have options, why do they not choose ethical work that makes the world more beautiful and just?\u00a0 Why is money and so-called success always the goal?<\/p>\n

Having seen At Eternity\u2019s Gate<\/em>, I now see what Van Gogh was trying to tell us and Julian Schnabel conveys through this moving picture.\u00a0 I see why these two perfectly normal guys I was breaking bread with in Houston are unable to penetrate the screen that lies between them and reality.\u00a0 They have never developed the imaginative tools to go beyond normal modes of perception and conception. Or perhaps they lack the faith to dare, to see the futility and violence in what they are working for and what their companies\u2019 products are doing to the world. \u00a0They think of themselves as hard at work, travelling hither and yon, doing their calculations, \u201cmaking their living,\u201d and collecting their pay. \u00a0It\u2019s their work that has a payoff in gold, but it\u2019s not working in the sense that painting was for Vincent, a way beyond the screen. \u00a0They are mesmerized by the spectacle, as are so many Americans. \u00a0Their jobs are perfectly logical and allow them a feeling of calm and control.<\/p>\n

But Vincent, responding to Gauguin, a former stock broker, when he urged him to paint slowly and methodically, said, \u201cI need to be out of control. I don\u2019t want to calm down.\u201d\u00a0 He knew that to be fully alive was to be vulnerable, to not hold back, to always be slipping away, and to be threatened with annihilation at any moment. When painting, he was intoxicated with a creative joy that belies the popular image of him as always depressed.\u00a0 \u201cI find joy in sorrow,\u201d he said, echoing in a paradoxical way Albert Camus, who said, \u201cI have always felt that I lived on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Both rebels, one in paint, the other in words: \u201cI rebel: therefore we exist,\u201d was how Camus put it, expressing the human solidarity that is fundamental to genuine work in our ephemeral world. Both nostalgic in the present for the future, creating freedom through vision and disclosing the way for others.<\/p>\n

And although my breakfast companions felt safe in their calmness on this side of the screen, it was an illusion.\u00a0 The only really calm ones are corpses.\u00a0 And perhaps that\u2019s why when you look around, as I did as a child, you see so many of the living dead carrying on as normal.<\/p>\n

\u201cI paint to stop thinking and feel I am a part of everything inside and outside me,\u201d says Vincent, a self-described exile and pilgrim.<\/p>\n

If we could make working a form of such painting, a path to human solidarity because a mode of rebelling, what a wonderful world it might be.<\/p>\n

That, I believe, is what working is for.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a> and teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is <\/em>http:\/\/edwardcurtin.com\/<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vincent, responding to Gauguin, a former stock broker, when he urged him to paint slowly and methodically, said, \u201cI need to be out of control. I don\u2019t want to calm down.\u201d He knew that to be fully alive was to be vulnerable, to not hold back, to always be slipping away, and to be threatened with annihilation at any moment. When painting, he was intoxicated with a creative joy that belies the popular image of him as always depressed. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":108249,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-125753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125753\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}