Math.

I’m on the train from Saratoga Springs headed home after a month at Yaddo where I was working on my book.

I had set an arbitrary goal for myself — to end the month with a draft. I say arbitrary because I’ve never known how long this book would take to write. I’ve never written a book before, and the scope and structure of it keeps changing as I go. I started it in earnest four years ago at the beginning of the pandemic, but I don’t know how to measure how much time or energy I’ve spent on it because that formulation changes day to day depending on whatever else demands my attention: family, cooking and cleaning, LIZZIE, therapy, the gym when I do that, a million other tiny things that need done when they need done.

I didn’t end the month with a draft per se as much as a picture coming into focus, but I fulfilled the real underlying goal which was to work as hard as I could, to keep my head in it every waking minute (and some of the sleeping ones), and I got more done in the previous month than I did the whole year before it.

I’ve never experienced anything like Yaddo. I won’t even try to describe it. I’m only a hour away and it feels like a dream. People talk about the magic, the spell, of Yaddo. The magic is real, though I think the largest portion of Yaddo’s effect is maybe not magic at all, but just the answer to a material question at the heart of what it means to live an artist’s life: The work has its demands, and they are the same whether I am at Yaddo or at home. And home has its demands, and they are the same whether I am at Yaddo or at home. Both home and work are all-consuming, and I fail at either if I don’t devote my whole self to it. When I am at Yaddo, I can ignore the demands of home and just do the work and I am an artist. When I am at home, if I ignore the demands of home and just do the work, I am a psychopath.

The various indie creative communities, non-profit institutions that produce, present, develop, support artists’ work—visual art, music, theater, etc.—have been focused the last several years on creating models where they can pay artists a living wage. (Historically artists who made work in those institutions worked for little or nothing because they wanted to do the work and would take whatever they could get.) But I always feel at odds with this “artist as employee” conversation. Yes, artists need a living wage but that is the wrong frame. Artists need the material circumstances within which they can work, and that includes a living, but they also need the space their work requires, they need their beds made and towels and sheets laundered, their meals prepared, morning walks and evening conversation, to share their work with other artists working in the same and other media who love and revere the process, and still seemingly endless hours for daydreaming and scribbling, hard thinking, and typing into the late hours, in a community of people who know hard it all is and what silence means. Artists need the circumstances that make art-making possible. This project I’ve been at for the last 4 years, or the last 15 years depending on where I mark the beginning, has required reflecting on a lifetime of correspondence and journals and notes, reminding me that I’ve contemplated and fretted about this tension, this dilemma over and over and over since I was 20 years old, and 40 years later I’m pretty certain that these circumstances are incompatible with life. That — not depression — is the cause of my lifelong sadness and anxiety. Depression is irrational, whereas this insight is as reasonable as a mathematical fact.