08 Feb 2024 6 min read

Workshop Notes - 2/8/2024

Thanks for joining me on the workshop notes new day. With my current schedule, I was having a hard time making the turn around from writing the weekly essay, to handling childcare, and the rigors of my day job. I am gonna try out Thursdays as the new day for this essay for the future. I know that really its only me that is really that locked into the schedule, but I figured I owed y’all an explanation. I take this two times a week discipline very seriously and I carve out what little time I have to keep this practice running. Sometimes, I do have to adjust the schedule so that I can keep the energy alive to keep this practice moving. I am so grateful for your patience and continued to support.

Today, I want to poke a hole in my own aims with attaining mastery in this pursuit of handcrafts, because I don’t think I actually care much about being a master. In pretty much everything I have done, I have gone hard in the paint. Well, to a certain degree

at least. Even though I am a deep sea diver in the things that I pursue, I actually just like to take it easy. Lily always laughs at me when I say that, because I have these hard credentials that I can point to that show I am sorta an intense dude. She is probably right, honestly, But, in my own perception of myself, I see a lot of ease. Like I coulda turned any one of my passions into an “Alamo moment,” that moment where you do something or die trying, but I didn't. I do a thing until I feel like it’s good enough and then go move my body or play some video games. For the longest time I have pronounced that I want to be a master weaver, but I don’t think that’s actually true. I just want to enjoy this practice that gives me the space to feel like a living, breathing human.

Even having domination and mastery as aims in a craft is a real off late-stage capitalist flex—A real weird one. I am not saying that it doesn’t make sense. Existing within a system where you have to sell any craft you ever cared about to “earn a living” will cause you to do these real weird things like make a quiet, contemplative craft and turn it into some odd bloodsport. Again, I want to underscore that this makes sense. This is how we are conditioned from an early age, especially now in our precarious gig

and freelancer economy. If you don’t want to be absolutely pummeled by some corporation, non-profit, or government employer, you gotta become “SOMEBODY,” that can sell themselves on the “FREE MARKET.” So, my way of weaving my way through this conundrum is to drop the pretense of mastery and just stay small and humble. I don’t actually have to be anyone if I don’t want to be. I can just be that non-playable character in your reality (Ahhemm “simulation”) that provides you thoughts and encouragement at the virtual inn of the internet.

Inspired by new uniform from SCRT I will be wearing in all future virtual inn appearances.

Me? I want to drop out that bloodsport and just embrace my right to be lazy. Yes, I am talking about embracing “The Right To Be Lazy, written by Paul Lafargue in 1883. In that text, he notes that our strange, “furious passion for work” is a delusion popularized by zealous ministers, economists, and moralists:

“A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny. Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work. Blind and finite men, they have wished to be wiser than their God; weak and contemptible men, they have presumed to rehabilitate what their God had cursed. I, who do not profess to be a Christian, an economist or a moralist, I appeal from their judgement to that of their God; from the preachings of their religious, economics or free thought ethics, to the frightful consequences of work in capitalist society.” Paul LaFargue from “The Right to be Lazy”

Sound familiar? Yes, I actually think this tendency to be obsessed with work and turning all our passions into work is very old and only now finds itself in a rather hyper-developed form today with levels of bureaucratic and economic domination rising rising to levels not seen since the 1920s. Its also very similar to Tricia Hersey’s excellent work with the Nap Ministry, which demonstrates an interesting overlap between emancipatory black and socialist perspectives. I don’t want to include my weaving in that whirwind of protestant work ethic absurdity. I want to step out and just be lazy with my weaving. I no longer want to exhaust myself to meet some social norm of righteousness through back-breaking labor in quest of the socially constructed credential of “master."

In it’s place, I want to embrace an approach to craft popularized in Andy Meerfield’s excellent text, “The Amatuer.” Yes, I want to stay true to my path of weaving, but just take the stress off of it becoming anything. As Meerfield notes, I want to drop the game of trying to prove to anyone that my creations are worthy by telling stories about who I am as a weaver, which will inevitably be specific presentations of who I am that make claims that I am some weaving, dyeing, or spinning expert:

“Amateurism will be your joy, for sure, but also your eternal curse, your perpetual challenge. It will be both diabolical and divine. It'll be your mutiny in search of personal authenticity, your quest to tell the truth about yourself in a society that rewards you for telling lies, for playing its game." Andy Merrifield in The Amatuer.

No, as Meerfield counsels, I will take on the “perpetual challenge” of approaching my weaving as an amateur, as someone who will always find more questions about craft than they will offer answers. In my experience, this is one way to slip the snare of our age of the experts in last-stage capitalist society and become something incomprehensible to that system. To claim the mantle of a lazy amateur in our day and age is to invite being dismissed and ignored, and yes, this is precisely what I am hoping. Yet, those who look deeper will see the subtle depths of the lazy amateur pathway. I will not fight to dominate your attention, but I will remain at the virtual inn if you are curious what I am up to. We can clink our cups of non-alcoholic MEAD and cheers to the path. This is the way.

Secondly, to embrace the way of the amateur is to embrace approach craft as a spiritual practice. The path of the amateur is a spiritual meditation on what it means to be human. It is an incredibly nourishing and refreshing journey in letting go of being "right" and needing recognition. Weaving offers that space for me to tell the world that I am an artist. It is a practice where I can let go of providing all the answers and be an explorer of meaning and practice. Every time I approach my loom, I get to reconnect with the that basic motivation to share what my curiosity and imagination have conjured into existence. Wow is that an awe-inspiring and humbling experience to see design and subtlety emerge right before my eyes while I am working. It's one of the closest experience I have to the divine. I would much rather be engaged in that than trying to build a following.

Here’s to disappearing on a spiritual craft quest!

Artist of the week — Spectral Voice

This is a special week for me, because it’s new Spectral Voice record week. On Friday, February 9, Denver-based, funeral death-doom-metal band will release their new record “Sparagmos” on Colorado Springs-based label Dark Descent. Before their was Mournful Congregation, Skepticism, and Evoken for me, their was Spectral Voice. This band is one of the key reasons I became a death worker. Their sonic atmospheres of “lamentation and exaltation” are what made me feel more comfortable in embracing my relationship with death, facing death as a mundane reality of everyday life, and my final fate as animate meatsack. So, this new record is a big deal for me, okay? lol.

I have yet to listen to any of the sample tracks off the new record, but listened through all their previous albums, eps, and splits. To give you a taste for their style of music, I selected one song from each of their releases as a sampler. I also found a video recording of their last live show in Denver that really brings to live their newest song “Craving Final Impasse.” I was a little to the right of where this video was taken behind the sound board. What you will see is the band is entirely shrouded in smoke and the house lights are off. We have descended into the depths of the darkness where we are lost in a wash of fog. No light will find its way here. Only death is real.