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September 6, 2004
Labor Day
20002001
2002
2003
I’ve always found something to say on Labor Day: musing on its metaphysics in 2002, and on the irony of honoring labor by not working in 2001. More personally, I worked on facing up to my father’s impending death in 2000, while last year the irony really hit home as I hovered in unemployment. But this year Labor Day is all too literal.
Yes, I’m working again.
Back with the federal government, for the sake of my pension, and because they’ll have me, even when the private sector won’t.
I can’t say I’m all that happy about it.
It was nice taking a year off, but dangerous, making it that much harder to go back to the workaday routine. I mean, working really takes a bite out of your day. Not that I got a lot done while I was off. Being unemployed I thought I’d have more time, but of course one always has the same amount of time; it’s just a matter of what you do with it. And I didn’t do much. Well, I was tired after working for my whole adult life; I deserved a rest.
Rest.
Isn’t that what Summer is all about, the languid lacuna between the gateposts of Memorial and Labor Day? But we work too hard, or work at the wrong things. Now even our leisure is being filled with “extreme” forms of play which are as taxing as work, or else we are so consumed with our jobs that we bring them on vacation with us via our phones and laptops for fear that any downtime will leave us vulnerable.
Oh, for an extremity of inactivity: the bliss of nothingness.
The Gnostic vision of creation differs from our mainstream notion of a proactive God inaugurating the workweek in a flurry of invention. Rather it would seem some instability in the fabric of emptiness occurred, some disaster of discorporate eternity, bursting forth into the labor-intensive dimension of temporal resistance. Creation is only God’s reaction; more in the nature of the filmic action-hero’s implausible last-ditch stratagem; the impossible rescue that animates our secret hope. For this cause the World of Work was born: to body forth as a means to extricate us from our obligation to the same. The achievement of the Kingdom of Heaven will be the end of all effort, and the end of all. Then let the credits roll.
But we are in the midst of the movie, and only prophets (or critics) want to spoil it by telling the end in advance. Closer at hand we see work going on all about us at an alarming pace. One cannot watch the natural world without being impressed by the incessant effort it betrays. Tiny shoots of Spring strain skyward until they tower over the Meadow by Midsummer, while a plethora of insects emerge among the stalks, feed, breed, transform, and reemerge with such profligate alacrity that we might feel not only that we inhabit a Summer action move, but an episode shot in time-lapse.
Even if we observe a turtle basking in the sun we are told that it does not indulge in the sin of sloth, but only suffers the cost of cold-bloodedness, forced to wait until its metabolism warms to an active level so that it can pursue its duties. In the meantime, it is exposed and vulnerable, like an executive at the beach without a cell phone.
So the World is a hard-working place, and we humans alone among its denizens seem subject to the temptation of not pulling our own load. At least that’s what’s taught at the confluence of business and religion that currently dominates our culture. But I see us as not so different from the rest of our co-inhabitants in this World, in the sense that we are no more inclined than a turtle to do what we do not need to do. The point being that we very much do need to lay our business aside at times; it is our very capacity to free ourselves from necessity that has made us more than the other animals, and thus the agents of possibility in the drama of Creation. From our indolence are born the dreams and visions that inspire our work, and provide the new ideas that our efforts develop into an ever changing and evolving reality, one that heads towards its own transcendence.
Or such were my thoughts when I had the time, a whole year, to think such things. Now it’s turtle-time again, pulling the head back into the dark recesses where work devours time and Holidays are less the domain of imagination than a mere pause to catch our breath, grudgingly granted by the guardians of productivity, in a worksite-world where too much of the work we do were better left undone, and much that needs doing is disdained as something less than work-worthy.
Well, I tried (not too hard) to find something worth doing, ending up at the Food and Nutrition Service, which is engaged in feeding people, one of those things that really does need to be done, though of course it’s done in the usual roundabout governmental fashion that frustrates as much as it rewards. And I’m working harder for less money, but I have to feed myself too, and I wasn’t going to work for the military/security complex that seems to be the main source of federal jobs at the moment.
In the end it’s just a job.
My real work is elsewhere, and more rewarding, if less remunerative. A few things did get done in the Arboretum over the past year. Seasons were transformed, and cycles turned; birds came and went, while flowers came to fruit, and who’s to say I didn’t have some part in all of that? I saw twelve new species of birds in Central Park, and the only effort it took was to be there. But we live in a culture that grew up thinking that seeing is a kind of work; that vision goes out from the eye to seize upon the thing that’s seen. After a year off I know better: simply open your eyes and the World pours in. The only effort is in recognition. The real work is in recognizing what’s worth working toward; the rest is the labor of love.