Having and Being Had

by Eula Biss

Her crimes are many, Didion. She’s thin, she’s cool, she’s rich. She doesn’t interrogate her privilege, though neither do the men of her moment—Norman Mailer, John McPhee, and Tom Wolfe in his white suit. I was primed for that argument with my mother, I was angry already, because I’d read a book review that suggested Didion neglected her child for her work. I was just back to work after having a child and the crazy bitch, I was sure, was me.

She works for her money, writing essays and articles and screenplays, but she also married into money and was born into economic security.

“New York: Sentimental Journeys,” in which she concludes that the reason the rape of one white investment banker in Central Park captured more attention than any of the other 3,254 rapes reported in New York City in 1989 was that it seemed to be the story the city wanted to tell itself. That story, an upper-class fantasy, “was of a city systematically ruined, violated, raped by its underclass.” It was a story, she observes, that reversed reality. The rich of the city wanted to believe that the poor made them unsafe, not the other way around.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live” was printed triumphantly across a banner at a writing conference I once attended. Had they read the rest of that paragraph, I wondered. Because what she means is not that stories are the stuff of life, but that we lie to ourselves. Self-deception has always been her subject.

She tells me about the exhibit she just saw at the Museum of Arts and Design, where gold kudzu with two thousand leaves wound around the entire gallery.

I say that I just find it exhausting, the calculus of wringing profit out of other people’s work.

He says I’m using the language of Marx to talk about real lives. I’m using the only language I know, and there are real lives behind the term labor costs, too.

But I don’t see much evidence that what anyone gets for their work has anything to do with what they deserve.

The question of the past is bottomless,

why do you do it? Because there’s no other choice, I’m tempted to answer, if you’re compelled to make art. But I think she’s asking where the pleasure is in this work. It’s in the making, I know that much, though the process itself isn’t exactly pleasurable. It is, as the composer chronicled, a series of difficult questions. Attending to those questions demands both work and labor.

We’re in service to the art, I tell my student, bent to it. There’s pleasure in this posture, in being bettered by the work. It isn’t the pleasure of mastery, but the pleasure of being mastered.

Bullshit jobs aren’t shit jobs, the distinction being that shit jobs involve essential work that needs to be done—what makes them shit is that the workers who do these jobs are badly treated, undervalued, and poorly paid. “Shit jobs tend to be blue collar and pay by the hour,” Graeber observes, “whereas bullshit jobs tend to be white collar and salaried.” Bullshit jobs are not usually dangerous or physically demanding. And they pay well. But they don’t offer any of the rewards of service or the satisfaction of having done something worthwhile. Many of them involve doing nothing at all. Where shit jobs often expose a worker’s body to harm, bullshit jobs cause psychological harm.

“Daily meaning as well as daily bread,” Terkel writes, is what people are looking for in work, “a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”

Part of what makes a job good, they understood, is the sense that what you do matters.

“For children play is serious learning. Play is the real work of childhood.”

Norwegian early-childhood education expert who maintains that fire is an essential component of productive play, along with heights, sharp tools, fighting, and solitude. There are dissertations devoted to why children need this kind of play, and psychologists warning us to save play from safety.

You have to be appointed before you can be disappointed,

Robyn doesn’t garden, she ungardens, as she puts it.

I feel a rising euphoria. I recognize this as the aura that precedes the work of writing, like the aura that precedes a seizure or a migraine. An idea is hovering before me, spectral and electric. The idea is just slightly out of reach and I will spend hours at my desk before I can grasp it, before I can work it on the page. But it is here now in the weeds, ungardened.

Listening to him reminds me of driving across the Midwest—all those changeless hours in which you sense the momentum of the car but still feel like you aren’t going anywhere, just through more corn.

didn’t seem to be trying to accomplish anything except resistance.

Like the past living in the present, the blithe racism of wealthy women still not erased from the feminism of our time.

Middle age is really all about maintenance, my mother once said.

You spend your life accumulating things, she said, and then you have to maintain them. Your house, your car, your body. You have to maintain your children, too, and your parents.

Maintenance is the tax I pay on this life, I think. And that is why I want to do it by hand, with heavy shears.

I ask him if he can imagine this system of investment coming to an end. No, he says, your money is safe. But that’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking if there’s any way out of this.

That’s how I feel, I tell David, I feel like a spy faking this life. Me too, John says. But why, I wonder? And who do we think we’re spying on—we’re just like everyone else who lives around here. No, John says, we’re nothing like them, I’m nothing like them.

At work the other day, one of our colleagues told me that he’d seen John riding his bike without a helmet. Yes, I told him, John doesn’t always wear a helmet. He doesn’t wear sunscreen either, and sometimes he doesn’t wear his seat belt. It’s an aesthetic, I explained.

I could also have said that it’s a critique, an embodied critique of the middle-class cult of personal safety. It’s a rejection of the belief that every vulnerability should be protected, and that the central project of our lives is to undo our own precarity. It’s a refusal of a way of life devoted to insurance. I won’t buy our son out of an uncertain future, John says when we discuss life insurance. That’s what life is, he says. I don’t want to argue with that. Instead, I quietly submit a blood sample and sign the paperwork that will insure my life for $250,000.

The British import of line cutting, Junod notes, is “perfectly in keeping with the two-tiering of America.”

Junod takes his daughter to a waterpark every year for the lines. There, people wait wet and undressed, in camaraderie, with their scars and their tattoos exposed. “They’re a vision not just of democracy in action but democracy unveiled,” Junod writes of the lines, “a glimpse of what the last line is going to look like, when all is revealed, and we’re waiting for our interview with Saint Peter.” Buying a ticket that allows cutting, he observes, amounts to paying to degrade other people’s experience. If some people don’t stand in line at all, then other people have to stand in line longer. Which, as any child can see, is unfair.

Watching it now, I realize with surprise that Scooby-Doo is all about capitalism. Every ghost, every mummy, every vampire turns out, in the end, to be someone trying to get rich.

Only someone who is going through something, my cousin observed, plays songs on repeat.

know now that this is funny, but I had no sense of humor then.

David comes over, bringing a painting for us from his office wall. The painting is based on one of his poems, which was based on a movie. Last year John made a video based on David’s latest book, which was based on a television series, which was based on a novel. This is how art eats, I think—it feeds itself with art.

Capitalism, Lewis Hyde writes, is “the ideology that asks that we remove surplus wealth from circulation and lay it aside to produce more wealth.” The defining feature of capitalism, he suggests, is not the breeding of money, but the hoarding of money for that purpose.

Private investment provides security for the privileged class—covering the expenses of education and illness and old age—in a country that lacks public investment in security. But our political structure is not the only one given to hoarding.

The service I’m doing for my students, I tell him, is teaching them how to find value in something that isn’t widely valued. And I think it’s a gift to give another person permission to do something worthless.

I don’t believe my work to be worth more than his, nor do I believe it to be worth less than the work of the professors who make over twice what I make. There is no system of accounting here that I want to internalize.

In the final tabulation, what I value—the practice of art, the cultivation of care—doesn’t even appear on the ledger, inside or outside the university. Art is freeing in this sense, in that it’s unaccountable.

What I want to report is that I’ve done absolutely nothing of value and that is my accomplishment.

Art has value for people who aren’t artists, she insists, you should explain that value. Is it too scary? she asks again. I think it’s inherently scary, I say, being inside the pit of a peach, rolling along, not knowing where you’re going, getting carried across the ocean by birds. It’s a life marked by uncertainty and absurdity, the life of an artist. Maybe the value of art, to artists and everyone else, is that it upends other value systems. Art unmakes the world made by work.

after a life measured out in coffee spoons, and after having already asked, Do I dare / Disturb the universe?

Income’s Outcome is a project that began when the artist Danica Phelps made drawings of everything she did with the money in her bank account until that balance was spent down to zero. She drew her son putting a coin into a parking meter, her hands opening bills, boots on her feet, a scooter, her son pushing a grocery cart. When she sold each one of those drawings, she recorded the income and drew everything she did with that money. The drawings are full of bodies, rendered in long liquid lines, overlapping in embrace, and hands holding things, cookies and eggs and apples. “Each time a batch of drawings is sold,” she says of the project, “it creates a window into my life where I draw what I spend money on until that money is gone and then the window closes.”

Her art is an accounting. When a drawing sells, she records the income by painting a green stripe, a tally mark, for every dollar. Money spent is painted in red stripes. Credit is gray, as it occupies the gray area between earnings and expenses.

“In my first exhibition, there were pieces ranging from $7 to $1,600, based on how much I liked the drawing.” The determination of the price, as one gallery noted, was her “final aesthetic decision.”

“We are all communists with our closest friends,” David Graeber writes, “and feudal lords when dealing with small children.” We move between different systems of moral accounting, he writes, but all social systems, including capitalism, rest on a bedrock of everyday communism. By everyday communism he means the principle: “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.” An entire economy couldn’t be organized this way, Graeber argues, but many of our daily interactions already are. This is how we exchange information, for instance, in conversation.

The spies are artists, I think, or anyone who lives inside a value system that isn’t their own.

Miłosz didn’t want to leave the place where the language of his poetry was spoken. “Language,” he wrote, “is the only homeland.”

create private sanctuaries of the mind,