3/29/98.. Work rhythms.

Brent and I have been at it for three weeks now. Friday afternoon we shingled the north slope and put on the ridge cap, so the exterior is now complete except for soffets and gutters. Inside Brent has mudded the overhead sheetrock, and I have only half of the front wall left to board up. Painting, trim, finish wiring, work benches, there's a host of details to complete, but we're getting in sight of cloture. Brent wants to give it another week before he moves on to the next job, resurrecting Brinley's house, which burned two weeks ago.

And I'm completely dislocated. I've adapted to the carpenter's rhythm, and my body wants to follow that drum. It's a nice steady beat. You working stiffs know it well. Awake before daylight, logy and clenched. Feed the animal some caffeine and sustenance, then hobble out to the site. Get a sweat up in your clothes first thing, humping materials, setting up, and you forget the creaking. A few early words, then you're off and running. Compressor humming, skil saw whining, nails thumping home. Decisions to make, tasks at hand to absorb you, no time for reflection or angst. Camaraderie on the site, at the restaurant, in the yard. Beats the hell out of artisto isolato, stewing in his juices.

For a spell.

It feels like a parallel universe, however. I wake up and put on my carpenter clothes while part of me watches from afar. These unfamiliar aches prove this is the here and now, but it's more like a story told. Which has its charm. Unless you forget your meta life.

Already I find my flash attitudes shifting. I'm impatient with smoozers, and judgmental about people who don't DO things. The driving pace of construction makes a contemplative life seem especially futile and self-absorbed. Don't expect builders to appreciate conceptual art. Moody poetry. Don't bother me with sensitivities, I haven't got time.

The wind turned southwest this week, and blew Spring up our skirts. We were down to T-shirts on the site, mazed by the mildness. The young eagles are still hunting upriver, and whenever you look up there's one enspiralled above us. Saturday the whole neighborhood was outdoors running chainsaws, raking, pushing barrowloads. Like a pulled cork, everyone in Maine is fizzing outdoors and acting foolish. I had all the windows in Seven Eagles wide, and the primer dried as fast as I could roll it on. Even on a "day off" I have to put in time on the site.

You can understand the need for an enforced sabbath in a workaday world. The incessant rhythm of manual labor, the closed loop of material task and structured reward, the basic gratification of seeing buildings rise without the muddle of motives and moods (unless you are dealing with clients).. the beat.. doesn't leave any room for melody. Or the meta life.

Is the unexamined life worth living? Or is the neurotic artist who monitors and communicates his least response a freak, an unnecessary hypertext? A month pounding nails is good therapy after a winter's introspection. But now I'm severely torqued. The leisurely pace of artmaking, with it's heightened abstraction, seems absurd when I'm slamming a 16 penny, and yet, for me, there is a gaping hollowness in this workaday which begs for a sabbath.

But it's another glorious spring day out there, and I could get the painting done. Maybe finish that wall. I'll think about it all later.