O for a muse of fire

Here we are at Memorial Day: three days, Saturday, Sunday and Monday of liberty from the soul crushing atmosphere of work and social expectation. I exaggerate with a far flung hyperbolic turn of phrase when I say "soul crushing." Or do I? These three days are a tonic to the week spent, for me, scanning test responses and, for the last two days, assembling typed responses and irregular responses in the proper packets for distribution to scorers.
O the menial jobs I've done while maintaining my art: loading hay, making aircraft parts, telephoning for PBS, and scoring basic skills essays. The last activity has the virtue of being done with well educated people who are in a similar boat, and there's at least a smidgen of an acknowledgment that you know something. Where else have I worked with the possibility of discussing jazz, abstract expressionism and Hegel? But squeezing my brain into state required slots takes a toll. After a week of doing this my head actually feels numb. Right now there's a tingling feeling on the left top of my skull. It began yesterday around 2 pm and it continued on through dinner at Vespa, an Italian eatery in Chapel Hill, where I had spaghetti with tiny calamari in it. I tried reading Merleau Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception again and again, only to reread several passages I'd reread before (the hazard of not having a book mark), before giving up and going to bed. My head tingled numbly on through the night.
My only relief is drawing. Lately I've taken to drawing ribbons, lots of ribbony sheathes and mobius strips, winding and (in)(con)voluting. I think they symbolize for me a kind of structure that is both exo and endo skeleton. I feel keenly the need to paint. When I go into these Italianate warehouse buildings where I score tests, to the big lofts with hardwood floors and large windows, I relish the space, and I wish that I had a large canvas stretched out before me, rather than a desk with packets of tests. Lately I've begun to appreciate the work of Cy Twombly and his large caligraphic marks and swirls. There are a couple of really great Twomblys at the Chicago Art Institute. These are difficult paintings to appreciate for the noncognoscenti, but I see them as an enlarged passion for the page: the musings of thought we allow ourselves when we're in the process of working toward something. Twombly's paintings say that the process itself has merit and operates aesthetically without having a product, a Telos. Of course there must be some Telos, but it could be unknowable, or unnamable: as Jung said, a symbol tending toward an unknown goal. This is the same language Freud uses in Beyond the Pleasure Principle to describe the mechanism of drives (actually Zilboorg uses this phrase in his introduction to BTPP): that they operate at the behest of some unknown mechanism, something repressed that is trying to make its way back into the ego's consciousness.
My goal is to paint and draw, to create, with as few constraints as possible.
We both look forward to the day we can live on the beach and write and paint. Nothing unnumbs the mind more than the crash of the surf and the light of the sun off the water.
Now I'm off to shave and shower and we're going to see our friend Joey down in Smithfield where the streets are paved with ham and lined with streak-0-lean, bacon baking in the sun on lakes of pork and beans. We'll likely take in the Ava Gardener museum - my way of touching base with the chairman of the board. Ring a ding ding. And then we'll enjoy even more time off - the luxury of going into Sunday night without the feeling of work in the morning to oppress us. With that in mind I propose a Sinatra liturgy that begins with Saturday night is the loneliest night of the week and ends with 'Scuse me, while I disappear, as the benediction.