Loyal readers must, I imagine, be getting impatient with the vague reflections I offer here, and I can understand why. What, after all, have libraries, late style and the self to do with community art and co-creation? Who cares if I believe that the personal is philosophical?
These ideas are, to borrow an idea from Gary Snyder, just part of the material that, over time, mutates into compost to nourish my work. And it does take time. I have never found it easy to organise my ideas into a coherent whole. How some writers produce a book each year is beyond me. It is already seven since A Restless Art was published.
It takes time because A Selfless Art is not a continuation or a sequel. It is an interrogation, with all the brutality that word implies. More gently, it is a rebalancing, the telling of what is not in the previous book. That brimmed with projects, looking outwards to other people’s work. This is about practice, looking inwards at my own experience. I am the subject and the interrogator. It is not easy or nice.
I am writing about my practice, questioning my beliefs, prejudices and conduct, examining my methods and processes, asking how they lead to outcomes, searching for value and (self-)deceptions. I must be the subject because I have been my own blind spot, failing to see how my self (whatever that is) has defined my ideas. And I must be the subject because I have no right to interrogate anyone but me. There is, I hope, freedom on the other side, an abandonment of a self that obstructs without having either permanence or value.
The results of my work are still fragmentary and inchoate. They might never be worth sharing because I don’t know if I have the capacity, strength or time to get to the end of the inquiry. Nor do I know, if I do, that the results will mean anything to those who practice co-creation after me, and I have always written for them.
And so, unable yet to share the formless product of my work, I gather some of its sources, with shards of my own ideas, and chalk them here, as on a board. It might seem confused or uninteresting to others, but each post is another small piece of the bridge between what is and what could be.