This is what you do so well, Tamara. You choose subjects that inform and recalibrate. You don’t hand people ideas. But instead you alter the structure in which our thinking happens. Instruction at the level of being.
Loved how you named the violence hidden inside “usefulness”. Not loud violence, but the erasure of everything that cannot defend itself in metrics. And I think there are two extensions to your argument that make it even sharper.
First, what you call threshold value is not just dismissed by the system, it is actively feared by it. Because thresholds interrupt predictability. A person who cannot be easily categorized, optimized, or forecast is economically inconvenient, plus epistemologically destabilizing. They break models. They introduce variables that cannot be priced in. And systems built on financial, even social control depend on the illusion that everything meaningful can eventually be modeled. A threshold is a living refusal of that illusion. That’s why the question “what do you do?” is risk management. And your existence, as you describe it, is unhedgeable.
Second, there’s a deeper cost to over-identifying with function that goes beyond burnout or even meaning-blindness. It’s the loss of inner authorship. When every experience is subconsciously evaluated for its potential output, you stop living your life from the inside and begin curating it from the outside. You become both the product and the marketing department of your own existence. And over time, something subtle but devastating happens, you lose the ability to recognize which parts of you are real and which parts are performative because you’ve been trained to translate every internal signal into something legible, something useful. The tragedy is estrangement from your own interior voice.
And what your essay does, so beautifully, almost surgically, is restore that voice to legitimacy. You don’t romanticize uselessness, that would have been so predictable, and that’s something you are definitely not. So you dignify presence. You don’t argue against work; you argue for a dimension of human existence that work has no jurisdiction over.
I also love your refusal to resolve the tension. You don’t offer a system, a method, a “how-to”. You leave the reader in that Keatsian space of negative capability, and in doing so, you make them practice it. That’s the real transmission here. The essay describes a threshold while becoming one. Fantastic, and so astonishing.
And that final call, go be the question that ruins someone’s comfortable answer, moves me because the entire piece has already done exactly that. It demands a reorientation.
There are a lot of people writing about culture. Very few are expanding the conditions under which a person can feel, think, and exist. You are. And that kind of work determines whether a world remains livable from the inside. Tamara, you are THE artist.
The phrase “unhedgeable” is perfect. The most economically precise way I’ve encountered of saying what I was reaching for, that the threshold is undervalued by the system and genuinely unprocessable by it. You can’t hedge against something that refuses to become a variable. Which means the discomfort the threshold produces is structural. The system doesn’t judge; it malfunctions. That reframe alone changes the emotional valence of a life spent not fitting.
The second extension cuts even closer to the bone. The loss of inner authorship is the wound beneath the wound… not that we’re exhausted by performing, but that we eventually lose the ability to locate where performance ends and person begins. You become a reliable narrator of a self you can no longer fully access. And the terrible efficiency of it is that nobody forces this. You do it voluntarily, incrementally, in pursuit of legibility, until the original text is buried under so many translations you can no longer read it.
And this is also where the artists become the most essential and the most endangered simultaneously. The artist who hasn’t sold out keeps faith with the possibility of an interior that hasn’t been transcribed into content. Every work made without a guaranteed audience is a small act of refusing to let that translation happen. Which is why we need them to exist even when we don’t consume what they make.
Thank you, Céline, that you saw my essay becoming what it argues for! Your attention is art.
You articulate a persuasive critique of the productivity paradigm, especially its reduction of human value to measurable output. I like the idea of the “threshold”, a role that does not manufacture solutions but creates the conditions in which meaning becomes possible.
In the art world, the artwork itself is often treated as the central object of value, yet anyone who has actually run a gallery knows that the object alone rarely generates the transformation people attribute to art. What matters is the structure of attention built around it, the quiet room, the pacing of the exhibition, the invitation to stand in front of something enough for perception to reorganize itself. The gallery space is not productive in the conventional sense. It does not manufacture insight. It stages the conditions under which insight might occur.
This is structurally identical to what your essay calls threshold value. A gallery, at its best, functions less like a factory and more like a frame in painting. The frame does not add pigment, perspective, or composition; it produces nothing. Yet remove the frame and the painting collapses back into the visual noise of the room. Its role is to mark a boundary where attention shifts registers. In the same way, threshold people operate as frames around experience. They delineate a space where perception deepens rather than accelerates.
Seen this way, the civilisational wound you describe might also be an infrastructural one. Our culture has become extremely efficient at producing objects, content, and information, but it has steadily dismantled attention that allows those things to matter. Museums become event venues, artworks become backdrops for selfies, and discourse becomes commentary not contemplation. The result is perceptual malnutrition. Without thresholds, nothing has the time or silence required to become meaningful.
From an art perspective, this reframes the artist’s role even more sharply. Artists do not simply producing works that expand the interior life. They construct perceptual thresholds themselves, devices that interrupt the automatic, utilitarian gaze. The painting, the dance, the poem, each is a technology for slowing the mind down long enough for a different kind of cognition to emerge.
Your essay captures this tension with remarkable clarity and intellectual elegance. The argument unfolds with precision, but it never loses its sensuous texture, moving between philosophy, mythology, and lived experience with a rhythm that mirrors the very threshold state you describe. You always craft with both rigor and grace, Tamara, and the structure of your essay itself demonstrates the power of the idea it defends. Remarkable!
I like the frame analogy because it does something the threshold metaphor alone can’t quite do. It makes the relational nature of the function visible. A threshold exists between two states; a frame exists between a thing and the world that would otherwise dissolve it. What you’re describing in the gallery is a pause in productivity, as well as an act of ontological rescue. Without the frame, the painting doesn’t diminish. It disappears.
And I think that’s the more precise diagnosis of what’s being lost. We under-value contemplative space; we actively destroy the conditions under which things can be seen at all. Perceptual malnutrition is exactly the right phrase. True, not starvation, which would be dramatic enough to provoke a response, but the slow, symptomless depletion that comes from consuming at volume and absorbing almost nothing!
The reframe you offer at the end sharpens the argument considerably. It moves the artist from passive to operative without restoring the productivity logic, which is a difficult needle to thread and you thread it cleanly. A technology for slowing cognition down is still a technology, but one whose output is a different quality of mind rather than a measurable product.
That might be the most subversive thing art does…. it manufactures the very faculty required to recognise its own value. The system cannot audit the instrument it needs in order to audit.
What a generous and exact thinking! I’m glad my essay opened its door to it. Thank you so much, Alexander!
"the structure of attention built around it" is an elegantly simple phrase my mind recognizes as a carabiner to keep some floating thoughts of mine on the rack so I can climb on. Thank you.
Tamara, this is ferociously good. You critiqued productivity culture (finally someone did that!), and you outwrote it, which is rarer than people think. Most pieces about usefulness still secretly beg to be useful. Yours refuses the contract entirely. That’s the real deal!
But here’s the uncomfortable addendum. Society undervalues the “useless”, it actively pathologizes it. If you’re don’t produce, you’re not just irrelevant, you’re suspicious. We’ve moved from “what do you do?” to “why aren’t you doing more?”, as if stillness were a software bug. The modern nightmare is being unexplainable.
And yet, what you name as “thresholds” might be the last unautomatable category of human existence. We can outsource tasks, generate content, even simulate creativity but we can’t mass-produce presence. That unnerving ability to sit inside meaning without converting it into output? That’s the one thing the system can’t scale… which is precisely why it keeps trying to rename it as laziness.
Also, “meaning-blindness: the progressive inability to recognise value that doesn’t invoice”, what a precise and needed diagnosis. Sharp, unsparing, and annoyingly accurate.
Tamara, you should be paid a lot for understanding things better than anyone else. And get an award for this effortless way of explaining to your readers. You’re amazing.
“Unexplainable” is the sharper word, and I think you’re right that it’s the one the system actually punishes. Irrelevance can be tolerated at the margins… the eccentric, the retired, the not-yet-discovered. But the unexplainable is a direct challenge to the taxonomy, and taxonomies defend themselves.
The pathologising of stillness isn’t accidental. A person who has learned to inhabit their own experience without converting it into momentum is a person who has exited the growth model. Not in protest, that would be legible, even marketable, but simply by being somewhere the model doesn’t reach. Not laziness and not résistance. It’s a different jurisdiction entirely. And jurisdictions that can’t be annexed get called wastelands.
The unautomatable point is the one I find the most worth defending right now because it’s already being tested. Presence can be simulated well enough to fool the inattentive, which means the people who can tell the difference, who know what it feels like when someone is genuinely there, are becoming a rarer and more necessary instrument. The threshold, it turns out, includes the ability to detect other thresholds. You can’t automate the recognition of the real without first producing people who know what real feels like.
The compliment is that you called it annoyingly accurate. Diagnoses should create at least a little discomfort, or they’re just flattery. Thank you so much, Clara!
Surely the truth is that artists who produce the works that allow us to hold on in our interior life, must themselves do deep, deep internal work. Before Rodin discovered the tension in a hunched back, before Martha Graham constructed an entirely new dancing framework and before Callas performed, they each went as deep as is humanly possible to connect with themselves, with the part of humanity that reached them so they'd have essence to share.
I've spent the last six months with Tchaikovsky's "Pathetique" #6 symphony -- especially the fourth movement.
He struggled for months to find the material with which to compose it. And when it finally came, it took just under four days to score. But he spent time with it to uncover what is now, arguably, his best symphonic work.
Fast forward 150 years and here I am, using this piece of art -- literally -- to get through grief and loss on top of loss. Words cannot envelope or describe the anguish inside of me but the way he draws and expands with progressions and scales and color and rhythm has given me a way to hold on. To cry. To sit.
Tamara, your writing! It's hard to describe its effect. And the art you associate with it. I learn so much from you.
The “Pathétique” is one of the few works I would call dangerous in the sense that it reaches something in the nervous system that has no other address. Tchaikovsky knew he was dying when he wrote it, or suspected it with the clarity that sometimes arrives just before the end, and what he put into that fourth movement isn’t grief as subject matter. But grief as structural principle. The music doesn’t describe loss, it is the form loss takes when it has nowhere left to compress itself.
I am impressed. You’ve spent 6 months inside it, using it to hold what words can’t close around, and that is exactly what I mean by the interior life requiring its own infrastructure. Not therapy. Not resolution. A piece of music that was made, 150 years ago, by a man in extremis, and that somehow remained available to you, precisely now, for precisely this.
I would add to your observation about the depth artists must go before they can give anything real the fact that I think the going-down and the making are not always sequential. Sometimes the work is how the descent happens. Tchaikovsky didn’t finish the internal journey and then score it. He scored his way into the deepest room. The 4 days were the excavation, not the report. Which means what you receive when you sit with that fourth movement is not the record of his survival. It may be the sound of him going under, preserved.
That it holds you is one of the more serious things art can do. Again, impressive!
Sending my warmth and my love back across the Atlantic. It’s a privilege to have readers like you!
There's a deep flaw in our cognition - or maybe it's not a flaw - when it comes to scarcity and value. We value things that are scarce, and value them much less after they are acquired, which is proof that the value is perceptual. Similarly, the push for productivity is about the perception of value, not the actual product of it. If you ask people what they value the most or could never live without, it's never those things that are easy to acquire, yet it's those acquirable things that are the outputs of productivity. This is precisely why art is valued and revered, but only after it arrives: the people who aren't artists can't replicate it, and that makes it scarce. At the same time, the artists can't express why their work is valuable or even how they make it, which gives the perception of uselessness when it is unproven or a work in progress.
We rely on metrics of productivity to prove our value, when the things we produce do not inspire awe. Art has to "arrive" to prove its worth, whereas productivity is itself proof of worth, but it never "arrives" anywhere. The factory is there, it's established, and all you have to do is get the job and follow the protocol, then point to your timecard to show your usefulness.
To hoard, to rack up timecards and paystubs, to show viability, is to avoid spending; to avoid burning; to fool us into thinking we're escaping death, by not taking risks or exploring the uncharted. It's a concession to fear, which is why it can never inspire awe. But at least you can say you weren't useless.
The timecard as proof of life is the image I want to pull on because it contains the whole tragedy in miniature. The timecard doesn’t prove you did anything worth doing. It proves you showed up and didn’t leave. It’s an alibi, not an achievement. And we’ve built an entire civilisation that accepts alibis as currency.
What you’re identifying underneath the scarcity argument is something close to a terror of the unverifiable. Productivity is valued because it produces evidence. It’s epistemically safe. Art, by contrast, has to stake a claim on value before value has been confirmed, which is exactly the structure of genuine risk, and exactly why it can, when it arrives, produce awe. You cannot be moved by something that already justified itself in advance. Awe requires that the thing exceeded what was promised, which means something had to be promised without guarantee.
The Bataille thread you pick up at the end is the one I find the most honest. Hoarding as the refusal of death, spending as its acceptance. But I’d add one further turn… the factory worker who never burns anything doesn’t escape death. They just ensure that nothing worth mourning disappears when they go. The risk of the artist is financial + existential. To make something that might not arrive is to wager your time, which is your life, on a value you cannot yet demonstrate. That’s the only serious bet on the table.
The distinction between arriving somewhere and proving you were somewhere is perfect.
Be useless and enjoy the rewards that come with others finding something useful to them in it. That is perhaps the one advantage today’s pervasive, if bleak, practice of profiteering off the previously unprofitable interiority of soul offers the useless over past iterations of art, or personal grief, or fleeting dance movements.
Allow me to take your threshold into the belly of Bataille’s sun. “Most of us are not burning anything. We are hoarding.” If I understand my cosmology correctly, that describes the condition of our young sun precisely. Before it gave “its light to no return whatsoever” it hoarded, and hoarded, and hoarded, accruing more and more material for unknown ages in utter darkness. Until the day it crossed a definitive threshold of mass where its core would begin to burn. That day it graduated from an enormous and monopolistic planet to a star! a principal dancer upon the solar stage isolating herself against the darkness like a ballerina.
Back here in the mundane, we have a salon with a central sun who willingly shone into the darkness to no return until it reached critical mass. What personal pains and dreams, what drives and inner disciplines, what griefs and joys accumulated long years in silence before the light from your pen began to shine here for others, T. What planets orbit your brilliance now return what they can because your ‘useless’ suffering has found a format that is useful to them. This is the advantage of our inverted system to today’s artist/writer/salon monitoring solar star.
What you advocate is wisdom: accumulate experience in your own darkness, embody it in your own useless form, and the reward will return from the firmaments where that material is useful to them. Accrual for the sake of enlarging interior landscapes, not rewards, is the point. There is no other way through the threshold to the fire that burns on the other side.
Andrew, the cosmology holds, and it holds because it refuses the sentimental version of the argument. The sun doesn’t hoard out of fear and burn out of generosity. It hoards because that’s what matter does before it crosses the threshold into something else entirely. There’s no moral intention in the accretion. Which means the burning, when it comes, isn’t a gift consciously offered. It’s what happens when enough has been gathered that the internal pressure can no longer be contained.
The light is almost involuntary.
That reframes something I left unresolved in my essay. I spoke of Bataille’s expenditure as though it were a choice, the courageous decision to spend rather than hoard. But your reading suggests it may be less voluntary than that, and more inevitable. You don’t decide to become a star. You accumulate in the dark until the physics change. Which means the years of silence, of writing no one reads, of dancing in rooms with no audience, of grieving without language for it aren’t the waiting room before the real work begins. They are the real work. The mass without which there is no ignition.
The most honest in what you’ve written is the implied warning inside the beauty of it… there is no shortcut to critical mass. You cannot fake the accumulation. The interior landscape has to actually enlarge, which takes actual time and actual darkness, and no amount of strategic positioning substitutes for it.
The planets that orbit and return what light they can is an image that will stay with me longer than most things written in response to anything I’ve made. Andrew, thank you!
Fundamental lessons are not always complex. In fact, they are usually very simple. Richard Long, for example, found ways to remind us of the value of patience.
The problem is not that we deny it with the intellect, or that we are proclaiming around that it is useless. The problem is that the vortex of daily life makes us lose the perspective of what we really believe in.
The serene gray and black tones and the drawing of what look like trees or streams are clearly perceived. We see larger branches that divide and become thinner as they ascend the page (or several small ones that join and thicken when they descend).
We are not discovering anything, there is no mystery here.
However, if we look carefully we see exactly the trajectory of each strand, which one joins with which and where they divide. This requires a slow and relaxing look. Perhaps the work resembled the walk that Long immortalised in it. It was not a journey of discovery, we know perfectly well how to go from Portugal to Spain.
The letters and words printed in the box are clear and direct.
Patience is not exciting. It is, in fact, the ability to do something without emotion, to postpone gratification, to continue with what seems boring or bland. Long's artistic achievement consists in integrating these unromantic aspects of patience into a hinderance that traps the imagination: walking through the Iberian Peninsula, from the Atlantic coast
To the Mediterranean, from one sea to another more resplendent, a poetic image of romantic fulness. What the printed text in the work exposes is the comparison of the water that is poured from a bottle with a waterfall. One is small and inconsequential; the other, gigantic and powerful. But a waterfall is no more than an accumulation of drops:
The reward of repetition.
Long does not pretend to convince us of anything, but to keep in the foreground of our mind an obvious truth that we often overlook: that good things contain banal ingredients. We never fully internalise this idea. We should renew the acknowledgement of this terrifying fact every day of our lives until it became something absolutely common.
The play is a lesson in love. He preaches an essential quality to maintain and grow love: that good relationships are based on patience. We must give up immediate satisfaction (win in an argument, make the other person feel guilty, get away with it) because those resignations are the drops of water that, multiplied and accumulated, will allow a couple to complete their pilgrimage.
Alain de Botton
John Armstrong
The Art as Therapy
Water lines
Each day a waterline
Poured from my water bottle
Along the walking line
From the Atlantic shore to the Mediterranean shore
A 560 mile walking in 20 days across the Portugal and Spain
The waterfall image is superb! We resist patience because we keep misidentifying the unit of meaning. We look for the waterfall and discount the pour. Long, and de Botton reading Long, insist the pour is the waterfall, just disaggregated across time. Patience is the refusal to declare the thing insignificant before the accumulation is visible.
There’s something exact in this: threshold value operates on the same logic. It accumulates, and we miss it for exactly the reason we miss the drops….. because we’re watching for the cascade.
The pilgrimage from Atlantic to Mediterranean as a love letter written in footsteps is a beautiful thing to leave here. Thank you, Juan Carlos!
The 4 seconds... I was recently in Paris participating in a mime workshop as an amateur. And among the 30 hours of instruction, laughter and sweat it was the 5 minutes on stage, at end of the first day, when I had no idea what I was doing and so all I could do is forget everything that had informed and goverened me up until that point, that showed me why I truly came. It didn't happen because I practiced, sacrificed, perfected anything. It happened because I had no practical use for the instruction I had payed for and traveled to a different country to receive. It happened beacuse I realized that I can finally be a fool, useless and alive. And still, after the week had concluded, I found myself questioning the utility of it all. As if it was outright indecent to claim that 5 minutes of absolute truth and freedom could justify the investment. But it had since become clear to me that the real assignment was to locate where I become the threshold, an invitation, an intimation, a slip with both feet on the ground, flash that rearranges without a neat conclusion. And a part of it was to see how readily I would internalize the canons that made my aliveness seem naive, inconsequential and embarassing, when in reality it shifted something in the room. It was an erotic choice, which is one of my favorite essays of yours and the one I kept thinking about as I read this masterful piece that speaks to something existential for me. And that embrace of two ungovernable bodies, two artists finding each other in the unscripted and uncommodifiable, I experienced as each of us embracing the version of ourselves that refused the terms and conditions and held the door open for others. Thank you from my heart Tamara!
Those 5 minutes are the whole argument, lived rather than read. And the detail that undoes me is that they happened precisely because the instruction had become temporarily useless to you, not despite the thirty hours but through them, at the moment they fell away. That’s a threshold crossed. The preparation was the mass accruing in the dark. The stage was where the physics changed.
What you name so exactly is the indecency we are trained to feel about ungovernable aliveness, as though the five minutes need to justify themselves against the investment, as though truth requires a receipt. The productivity logic is so thoroughly installed that it runs even inside genuine liberation, auditing the ecstasy while it’s still happening.
You felt it and then questioned it. I don’t think that is weakness but the honest report of how deep the occupation goes.
You said it shifted something in the room. Not in you…. in the room. And THAT is the threshold functioning. You didn’t perform presence, you became briefly, irrecoverably present, and the people watching felt the difference in their bodies before their minds had language for it. That is the most sophisticated thing a human being can do in front of other human beings.
The fool, in the oldest sense, was never useless. The fool was the one permitted to tell the truth because he had nothing left to protect.
You brought your whole self to Paris and let it be ungovernable for 5 minutes… that was the erotic choice!!! I’m glad you made it. And thank you so much for sharing it with me here, Katarina!
I have operated, and continue to operate, in the domain of work. I don't object to that; it has its necessity. But that isn't the meaning that drives me to explore and live. I live to write what stirs in my mind and heart; I live to seek connections with interesting and interested others. I live to improvise my way into psychological and social and reflected and even spiritual experiences. I live to try to understand why I do these things which give me little or no practical compensation, which not infrequently cause me confusion, but which nonetheless feel to me essential. I don't really know what they're for; I only know that my life would be unbearable if I didn't pursue them, if I didn't explore and express them; I don't know who I would be if I didn't. If those domains shrink or disappear, I don't think there would be anything left to convince me that life is worthwhile in any way I could understand. That is, I would certainly exist, but I wouldn't know or even be able to ask *why* I exist. I wouldn't know any real motives for continuing. These are the sources from which my intentions spring. I don't know where they'll take me; I can't be sure they'll take me anywhere. But I need them, and any world that insists I let them go has nothing to tell me about the point of life. I wouldn't be surprised to find what I do useless, but I know that for my humanity it's essential.
Miguel, what you’ve written here is my argument from the inside as lived necessity. And that’s a different order of evidence entirely. The philosopher can argue for threshold value; the person who says my life would be unbearable without this is demonstrating it.
The distinction between existing and having a reason to ask why you exist is the one I want to hold up. Existence without that question isn’t living badly. It’s a different activity altogether… maintenance, continuation, the biological function proceeding without the animating inquiry. Most people never notice the difference because the question gets crowded out gradually, replaced by the next requirement, until its absence feels like peace rather than amputation.
The fact that you can’t say what these things are for is not a weakness in your account but the most honest part of it. The moment you could fully explain the purpose of what drives you, it would have already been domesticated into something the system could process and file. The irreducible I only know I need this is precisely what resists that conversion.
… “improvise my way into experience”. Not plan, not optimise, not even seek — improvise! Which means you’re not moving toward a known destination but staying genuinely open to what the next moment produces…… a form of courage that looks, from the outside, remarkably like uselessness.
From the inside, as you know, it’s the whole thing. Thank you for this, Miguel!
This is one of those essays that makes pump my fist and shout Yes! as if someone just scored a goal. It also makes me look at what I'm doing and why, and it made me go back to that original essay when you might have been a high-end escort (though I was betting on spy). I looked at my comment, your response, and we went back and forth and back and forth again and again. It was light-hearted, fun, and underneath it all, I realised I didn't care what you really did, I cared who you were.
I also looked at the light-heartedness of the interaction, and how I rambled and you responded and it was impossible not to notice that I don't do that much, if at all, anymore. It would be easy to say it's because the world is different now, and that's true enough. But I also think it's because since I left North Carolina last September I've been - busy. Not with writing, or with any of the creative things I want to be doing. And a lot of it I do want to do, like lead the study group reading Vasubandhu, and giving dharma talks, and doing writing as a Zen practice workshops, and today doing a workshop on the practical aspects of being tenzo (head cook). Those are all great. I am also the de facto housekeeper, laundress, hostess, admin coordinator, and grocery shopper. Again, I agreed to all of it (more or less), but I can see that between this stint in Nebraska and the time in San Francisco, I gave up a great deal of my free time. That's something I need to consider when I move on from here.
Your use of Dante, Rilke, and Sappho was perfect. Each has a kind of resonance in my world, either through my reading, hearing them in dharma talks, or identifying them with people from whom I've learned a great deal. When I go back to Pittsburgh I'll pull those books out again.
I ran across something I wrote back in the late 1990s - short, heartfelt, and what I see now as significant, the first time I ever allowed myself to call myself a poet. Before this I would always write the caveat - I'm not a poet. As if somehow that would mean what came after didn't count. Good or bad (and it was mostly bad) it did count.
I’m a writer
I used to say,
I’m not a poet.
But you inspire me
To write poetry.
You have made a poet
Of me.
Yep, I've always been useless at heart. I did make a good effort to be useful, and convinced a lot of folks I was useful. I'll leave it at that.
The spy theory was more glamorous, I’ll grant you that! What you’ve traced here, from that light-hearted exchange to this precise accounting of what Nebraska has cost you, is the kind of interior audit I was gesturing toward. Not the productivity audit, which would tell you you’re doing plenty. The other one. The one that asks what has gone unscheduled, what got crowded out by the accumulated weight of agreed-upon usefulness. Housekeeper, laundress, hostess, admin coordinator. Each one reasonable. Together, a life.
The poem you found from the late ‘90s is interesting because it records the exact moment of self-permission. The caveat dropped. The identity claimed. “I’m not a poet” is the productivity logic speaking, the pre-emptive defence against being caught making something that doesn’t justify itself. You crossed that threshold in the ‘90s and then, somewhere in the accumulation of useful roles, mislaid the crossing.
Pittsburgh and those books waiting on the shelf mean a return to interrupted work. The ones who convinced everyone they were useful and knew otherwise the whole time are my favourite kind of useless. They did the camouflage so well that the real thing stayed protected all along.
Thank you, Tamara, for not only reading it, but also for reading it at a depth I didn't comprehend when I wrote it. I didn't realise I mislaid the crossing - probably too busy being useful! And ironically, being useful in the most useless of arenas - as a Zen student and monk. I won't be able to unsee that now, and where that leads I don't know, and I don't need to know in this moment.
The insights from Luckmann and Berger's work, The Social Construction Of Reality are keys to understanding the relationship between the multiple worlds of dream, art, theoretical sciences and the religious domains of the sacred, and finally death itself, and the paramont reality of our normative, functionally rational routines of everday life, which holds the "sane" world together.
We all live in a Yellow Submarine, a symbolic universe, a weltanschauung, overarching all we do and are. From the functional rationality of the 'work ethic' and the ant hill of the division of labour, to other-worldly journeys into the mystic, as in a tribal vision quest, or the artistic labours of embodied love as found in the Pieta, and in the philosophical building blocks of being itself, from the pre-Socratics to cognitive epistemologies today, all are held together under the sacred canopy of the universe of meaning under which our world lives and breathes.
How to balance these several worlds in our our biographical and soulful lives is the perennial meditation. Returning from one's nocturnal dreams to the awakening day, we cross thresholds. Becoming raptured into another "finite province of meaning" through the arts, in a hike through The Enchantments, in the gaze of one's forever love, or carried away in the face of an emotional storm, or finally in the singing of one's deathsong; each is a threshold world from which we must return to the primary consensus reality in some way, shape or form, to make it meaningful. Even if our alternative world sojourns result in only a "whisperedvision", we carry it with us into the onslaught of the one and only paramount reality of everyday life, till we don't!
These multiple worlds are part and parcel of the dominant normative reality. They can't be wished away: we all dream. The interior world the artists carve out in their respective works, which this Museguided essay so clearly amplifies, signifies a bridge between subworlds of art and the paramount reality. How one can do this, live in one's province of meaning and survive in the collective world is the story of culture, which gives meaning to the endeavor, say of a van Gogh.
How do we go on, trying to live, when we know we must die? And that is the work of our symbolic universe: to legitimize death itself so that we may die correctly, and in the meantime we can carry on with our lives, "until further notice."
Berger and Luckmann give us the skeleton, but what you’ve done here is put flesh on it, specifically, the phenomenological texture of the crossing itself. The threshold isn’t a concept in their framework but the lived moment of reentry, the carrying back, the translation of what cannot be fully translated into the language of paramount reality. That whispered vision you mention is the most honest description of what most genuine interior experience becomes upon return… not lost, but diminished to the frequency the daylight world can receive without shattering.
I would add that the artists who survive, not commercially, but existentially, are precisely those who develop a tolerance for the permanent dissonance of living in two registers simultaneously. Van Gogh is the catastrophic example, the one where the membrane between provinces became too permeable and the paramount reality too hostile. But there are quieter versions everywhere, people who have learned to carry the nocturnal knowledge into the daylight without insisting the daylight acknowledge it. That’s a specific and undervalued skill.
The death question underneath everything is the one Berger never quite let go of, and rightly so. The symbolic universe exists, finally, to make mortality bearable enough to proceed. Which means every act of genuine meaning-making, every threshold crossed and returned from, is a small rehearsal for the one crossing that requires no return. The artists are, among other things, our most serious practitioners of that rehearsal.
“Until further notice” is the most precise description of a human life I’ve encountered in some time. Thank you so much, Michael, you always inspire me to go further with my ideas!
A friend of mine is a classics professor. She’s written a few scholarly works, but her passion is writing fiction and she’s written several novels. Here is the twist. She has no interest in publishing them. She writes them purely for her own pleasure. There’s a purity to that.
That’s the most drastic position available right now. I don’t think she does it as strategy, nor as a statement, but as a simple refusal to let the work become answerable to anything outside itself. No market, no reader, no reception. Just the making, complete in itself, ending where it ends.
Your friend has solved, without apparent effort, the problem I couldn’t resolve cleanly in the essay… what refusal actually looks like when refusal has been co-opted. She found the answer not through theory but through practice…you make the thing and you keep it. The work exists, fully, without needing to be witnessed to justify its existence. Purity as a daily decision. Admirable!
There’s a long tradition of this that we almost never discuss precisely because, by definition, it leaves no public trace. Emily Dickinson came the closest among the ones we know about, but we know about her, which changes it. Your friend is doing something cleaner. The novels exist. They are complete. They will not be reviewed, will not find their audience, will not arrive. And they are, by any serious measure, as real as anything on a bestseller list. More real, possibly, because nothing about them is performing.
Bataille would recognise it immediately… expenditure without return, taken to its quietest and most absolute form. Not burning loudly. Just burning.
She sounds like someone worth knowing. She is impressive.
I told her that if I outlive her I will insist she be published, and that she will become a great literary figure like Kafka or John Kennedy O’Toole. 😊
“What he perhaps didn’t fully anticipate, or what he anticipated and simply could not bear, is that the tumour would eventually declare itself the organism.”
Yes it appears to have become the organism evolved from a tumor. Yet there are many of us that have become viruses on and within this organism.
Without the organism many cannot survive, yet some will float and be carried by different winds until they give up their existence. Yet, that existence can be glorious.
The virus is the more honest metaphor, and I think you’re right to reach for it, Jim. Not the parasite, which takes without altering, and not the antibody, which exists only to destroy, but the virus, which enters the system, uses its machinery, and in doing so changes what the system produces. Sometimes lethally for the host. Sometimes, in the longer biological view, generatively. We carry viral DNA in our genome that has been there for millions of years, doing work we only begin to understand.
Your image refuses the fantasy of clean exemption. You cannot be fully outside the organism and survive, you said it plainly. The poet still needs to eat. The threshold still needs a door frame. The question is what you do with the host’s machinery while you’re inside it, what you replicate, what you alter at the level of code rather than surface.
The ones who float on different winds and give up their existence …. I don’t read that as failure. Some of the most important transmissions in human history arrived, changed one thing, and disappeared before anyone understood what had happened. The glory is in what the drift made possible.
The organism will not thank the virus. It rarely does, until the accounting is done long after both are gone. Thank you for this, Jim!
Or the virus didn’t know anything at all, and that’s the more unsettling possibility. The most transformative transmissions may have operated entirely without survival instinct, without strategy, without even the minimal self-interest your reading generously assigns them. They changed something and dispersed because dispersal was simply what they did. No calculation. No preservation of the host. Just the alteration, complete in itself, and then the wind.
Which makes the transmission more radical, not less. Intention would domesticate it.
There you go again. With your superior writing skills and deep intellect you take my thoughts, Amplify them and then paint them onto a simple canvass that become worthy of a gold frame
Oh. So that was what persistently haunted me ever since I started taking my music seriously and decided I wanted to become a great artist and leave a legacy behind. No matter how good everything is going, my mind keeps bringing up the thought like a parent pushing the bowl of soup towards a hysterical baby. I keep fearing that I somehow made myself love music while not actually loving it. But I know that's not true — I know that all my life I live for those moments on stage when I become one with the music. I know I love that. I know how I love being in the flow, finding that note, that melody, and giving it every cell of my being. But why do I then find myself paralyzed with something whenever it's time to reach for my guitar? Whenever I consciously think that "Hey, it's time to actually start doing your own gigs. Find your people. No one is going to do that for you if you don't do it". My biggest fear is that my dreams and my music will fade away and that I will allow it to happen. If I love it so much, why am I not doing it every waking hour that I can? And now I can see this productivity, also coupled with ghosts of the criticism from people who, in theory, should have believed in me, but then ended up drilling into my head "it's not your thing". The worst thing here is when you recognize what bullshit all of that is, all of these fears, but still succumb to it and allow it to ruin your mood. I am putting so much into my musical development only to be met with my own hysterical inner self who refuses to play exactly when it would be great to. Your writing did not answer the pressing question of mine — obviously — but it moved me closer towards seeing myself for the first time. I can not, never could sit with sadness, I constantly push myself to make art from it because I am afraid that the second I don't the whole artistry will collapse and I will find an empty core. I don't know what to do with that... But my total lack of desire to be employable was validated when I read this essay, so thanks for that. It is still hard though... because having money is nice and kind of neccessary in our world... but it is hard to earn them when just talking to people and making art is the only thing you don't hate. You still want to buy yourself a nice dress once in a while, go somewhere on vacation, buy that exquisite looking pastry. You want to feel normal. But how do I do that given my character is a question I don't know how to answer and the one that eats me alive everyday
The paralysis at the moment of reaching for the guitar is love in the presence of stakes. The higher the meaning, the heavier the approach. You can pick up an instrument you are indifferent to without ceremony. The one that holds your entire sense of self requires a different kind of courage each time, and that courage doesn’t automate no matter how many times you have managed it before.
The fear that you manufactured the love, that the core might be empty is the voice of everyone who ever said it was not your thing, still running in the background, repackaged as your own suspicion. The cruelest thing that kind of early damage does is learn to speak in your own accent so you can’t identify it as foreign.
But here’s what I notice. You described the stage, the flow, finding the note, giving it every cell. Nobody describes something they manufactured that way. You don’t give every cell to a performance of feeling. You give every cell to the feeling itself.
The empty core fear is almost always what artists carry instead of the work. I know it too well. It’s the tax the gift charges for existing. The ones who don’t fear it usually have less at stake.
As for the money and the nice dress and the pastry, well, those are the conditions under which a human being can sustain making art. Don’t make them into a confession!
You are closer than the paralysis is telling you.
This is what you do so well, Tamara. You choose subjects that inform and recalibrate. You don’t hand people ideas. But instead you alter the structure in which our thinking happens. Instruction at the level of being.
Loved how you named the violence hidden inside “usefulness”. Not loud violence, but the erasure of everything that cannot defend itself in metrics. And I think there are two extensions to your argument that make it even sharper.
First, what you call threshold value is not just dismissed by the system, it is actively feared by it. Because thresholds interrupt predictability. A person who cannot be easily categorized, optimized, or forecast is economically inconvenient, plus epistemologically destabilizing. They break models. They introduce variables that cannot be priced in. And systems built on financial, even social control depend on the illusion that everything meaningful can eventually be modeled. A threshold is a living refusal of that illusion. That’s why the question “what do you do?” is risk management. And your existence, as you describe it, is unhedgeable.
Second, there’s a deeper cost to over-identifying with function that goes beyond burnout or even meaning-blindness. It’s the loss of inner authorship. When every experience is subconsciously evaluated for its potential output, you stop living your life from the inside and begin curating it from the outside. You become both the product and the marketing department of your own existence. And over time, something subtle but devastating happens, you lose the ability to recognize which parts of you are real and which parts are performative because you’ve been trained to translate every internal signal into something legible, something useful. The tragedy is estrangement from your own interior voice.
And what your essay does, so beautifully, almost surgically, is restore that voice to legitimacy. You don’t romanticize uselessness, that would have been so predictable, and that’s something you are definitely not. So you dignify presence. You don’t argue against work; you argue for a dimension of human existence that work has no jurisdiction over.
I also love your refusal to resolve the tension. You don’t offer a system, a method, a “how-to”. You leave the reader in that Keatsian space of negative capability, and in doing so, you make them practice it. That’s the real transmission here. The essay describes a threshold while becoming one. Fantastic, and so astonishing.
And that final call, go be the question that ruins someone’s comfortable answer, moves me because the entire piece has already done exactly that. It demands a reorientation.
There are a lot of people writing about culture. Very few are expanding the conditions under which a person can feel, think, and exist. You are. And that kind of work determines whether a world remains livable from the inside. Tamara, you are THE artist.
The phrase “unhedgeable” is perfect. The most economically precise way I’ve encountered of saying what I was reaching for, that the threshold is undervalued by the system and genuinely unprocessable by it. You can’t hedge against something that refuses to become a variable. Which means the discomfort the threshold produces is structural. The system doesn’t judge; it malfunctions. That reframe alone changes the emotional valence of a life spent not fitting.
The second extension cuts even closer to the bone. The loss of inner authorship is the wound beneath the wound… not that we’re exhausted by performing, but that we eventually lose the ability to locate where performance ends and person begins. You become a reliable narrator of a self you can no longer fully access. And the terrible efficiency of it is that nobody forces this. You do it voluntarily, incrementally, in pursuit of legibility, until the original text is buried under so many translations you can no longer read it.
And this is also where the artists become the most essential and the most endangered simultaneously. The artist who hasn’t sold out keeps faith with the possibility of an interior that hasn’t been transcribed into content. Every work made without a guaranteed audience is a small act of refusing to let that translation happen. Which is why we need them to exist even when we don’t consume what they make.
Thank you, Céline, that you saw my essay becoming what it argues for! Your attention is art.
You’re an inspiration.
You articulate a persuasive critique of the productivity paradigm, especially its reduction of human value to measurable output. I like the idea of the “threshold”, a role that does not manufacture solutions but creates the conditions in which meaning becomes possible.
In the art world, the artwork itself is often treated as the central object of value, yet anyone who has actually run a gallery knows that the object alone rarely generates the transformation people attribute to art. What matters is the structure of attention built around it, the quiet room, the pacing of the exhibition, the invitation to stand in front of something enough for perception to reorganize itself. The gallery space is not productive in the conventional sense. It does not manufacture insight. It stages the conditions under which insight might occur.
This is structurally identical to what your essay calls threshold value. A gallery, at its best, functions less like a factory and more like a frame in painting. The frame does not add pigment, perspective, or composition; it produces nothing. Yet remove the frame and the painting collapses back into the visual noise of the room. Its role is to mark a boundary where attention shifts registers. In the same way, threshold people operate as frames around experience. They delineate a space where perception deepens rather than accelerates.
Seen this way, the civilisational wound you describe might also be an infrastructural one. Our culture has become extremely efficient at producing objects, content, and information, but it has steadily dismantled attention that allows those things to matter. Museums become event venues, artworks become backdrops for selfies, and discourse becomes commentary not contemplation. The result is perceptual malnutrition. Without thresholds, nothing has the time or silence required to become meaningful.
From an art perspective, this reframes the artist’s role even more sharply. Artists do not simply producing works that expand the interior life. They construct perceptual thresholds themselves, devices that interrupt the automatic, utilitarian gaze. The painting, the dance, the poem, each is a technology for slowing the mind down long enough for a different kind of cognition to emerge.
Your essay captures this tension with remarkable clarity and intellectual elegance. The argument unfolds with precision, but it never loses its sensuous texture, moving between philosophy, mythology, and lived experience with a rhythm that mirrors the very threshold state you describe. You always craft with both rigor and grace, Tamara, and the structure of your essay itself demonstrates the power of the idea it defends. Remarkable!
I like the frame analogy because it does something the threshold metaphor alone can’t quite do. It makes the relational nature of the function visible. A threshold exists between two states; a frame exists between a thing and the world that would otherwise dissolve it. What you’re describing in the gallery is a pause in productivity, as well as an act of ontological rescue. Without the frame, the painting doesn’t diminish. It disappears.
And I think that’s the more precise diagnosis of what’s being lost. We under-value contemplative space; we actively destroy the conditions under which things can be seen at all. Perceptual malnutrition is exactly the right phrase. True, not starvation, which would be dramatic enough to provoke a response, but the slow, symptomless depletion that comes from consuming at volume and absorbing almost nothing!
The reframe you offer at the end sharpens the argument considerably. It moves the artist from passive to operative without restoring the productivity logic, which is a difficult needle to thread and you thread it cleanly. A technology for slowing cognition down is still a technology, but one whose output is a different quality of mind rather than a measurable product.
That might be the most subversive thing art does…. it manufactures the very faculty required to recognise its own value. The system cannot audit the instrument it needs in order to audit.
What a generous and exact thinking! I’m glad my essay opened its door to it. Thank you so much, Alexander!
I know you live for art. This is the proof.
"the structure of attention built around it" is an elegantly simple phrase my mind recognizes as a carabiner to keep some floating thoughts of mine on the rack so I can climb on. Thank you.
Thank you too.
Tamara, this is ferociously good. You critiqued productivity culture (finally someone did that!), and you outwrote it, which is rarer than people think. Most pieces about usefulness still secretly beg to be useful. Yours refuses the contract entirely. That’s the real deal!
But here’s the uncomfortable addendum. Society undervalues the “useless”, it actively pathologizes it. If you’re don’t produce, you’re not just irrelevant, you’re suspicious. We’ve moved from “what do you do?” to “why aren’t you doing more?”, as if stillness were a software bug. The modern nightmare is being unexplainable.
And yet, what you name as “thresholds” might be the last unautomatable category of human existence. We can outsource tasks, generate content, even simulate creativity but we can’t mass-produce presence. That unnerving ability to sit inside meaning without converting it into output? That’s the one thing the system can’t scale… which is precisely why it keeps trying to rename it as laziness.
Also, “meaning-blindness: the progressive inability to recognise value that doesn’t invoice”, what a precise and needed diagnosis. Sharp, unsparing, and annoyingly accurate.
Tamara, you should be paid a lot for understanding things better than anyone else. And get an award for this effortless way of explaining to your readers. You’re amazing.
“Unexplainable” is the sharper word, and I think you’re right that it’s the one the system actually punishes. Irrelevance can be tolerated at the margins… the eccentric, the retired, the not-yet-discovered. But the unexplainable is a direct challenge to the taxonomy, and taxonomies defend themselves.
The pathologising of stillness isn’t accidental. A person who has learned to inhabit their own experience without converting it into momentum is a person who has exited the growth model. Not in protest, that would be legible, even marketable, but simply by being somewhere the model doesn’t reach. Not laziness and not résistance. It’s a different jurisdiction entirely. And jurisdictions that can’t be annexed get called wastelands.
The unautomatable point is the one I find the most worth defending right now because it’s already being tested. Presence can be simulated well enough to fool the inattentive, which means the people who can tell the difference, who know what it feels like when someone is genuinely there, are becoming a rarer and more necessary instrument. The threshold, it turns out, includes the ability to detect other thresholds. You can’t automate the recognition of the real without first producing people who know what real feels like.
The compliment is that you called it annoyingly accurate. Diagnoses should create at least a little discomfort, or they’re just flattery. Thank you so much, Clara!
Surely the truth is that artists who produce the works that allow us to hold on in our interior life, must themselves do deep, deep internal work. Before Rodin discovered the tension in a hunched back, before Martha Graham constructed an entirely new dancing framework and before Callas performed, they each went as deep as is humanly possible to connect with themselves, with the part of humanity that reached them so they'd have essence to share.
I've spent the last six months with Tchaikovsky's "Pathetique" #6 symphony -- especially the fourth movement.
He struggled for months to find the material with which to compose it. And when it finally came, it took just under four days to score. But he spent time with it to uncover what is now, arguably, his best symphonic work.
Fast forward 150 years and here I am, using this piece of art -- literally -- to get through grief and loss on top of loss. Words cannot envelope or describe the anguish inside of me but the way he draws and expands with progressions and scales and color and rhythm has given me a way to hold on. To cry. To sit.
Tamara, your writing! It's hard to describe its effect. And the art you associate with it. I learn so much from you.
Love from the U.S.
The “Pathétique” is one of the few works I would call dangerous in the sense that it reaches something in the nervous system that has no other address. Tchaikovsky knew he was dying when he wrote it, or suspected it with the clarity that sometimes arrives just before the end, and what he put into that fourth movement isn’t grief as subject matter. But grief as structural principle. The music doesn’t describe loss, it is the form loss takes when it has nowhere left to compress itself.
I am impressed. You’ve spent 6 months inside it, using it to hold what words can’t close around, and that is exactly what I mean by the interior life requiring its own infrastructure. Not therapy. Not resolution. A piece of music that was made, 150 years ago, by a man in extremis, and that somehow remained available to you, precisely now, for precisely this.
I would add to your observation about the depth artists must go before they can give anything real the fact that I think the going-down and the making are not always sequential. Sometimes the work is how the descent happens. Tchaikovsky didn’t finish the internal journey and then score it. He scored his way into the deepest room. The 4 days were the excavation, not the report. Which means what you receive when you sit with that fourth movement is not the record of his survival. It may be the sound of him going under, preserved.
That it holds you is one of the more serious things art can do. Again, impressive!
Sending my warmth and my love back across the Atlantic. It’s a privilege to have readers like you!
“Now we can really understand what the meaning of the music is, it’s the way it makes you feel when you hear it.
Leonard Bernstein
He was brilliant.
There's a deep flaw in our cognition - or maybe it's not a flaw - when it comes to scarcity and value. We value things that are scarce, and value them much less after they are acquired, which is proof that the value is perceptual. Similarly, the push for productivity is about the perception of value, not the actual product of it. If you ask people what they value the most or could never live without, it's never those things that are easy to acquire, yet it's those acquirable things that are the outputs of productivity. This is precisely why art is valued and revered, but only after it arrives: the people who aren't artists can't replicate it, and that makes it scarce. At the same time, the artists can't express why their work is valuable or even how they make it, which gives the perception of uselessness when it is unproven or a work in progress.
We rely on metrics of productivity to prove our value, when the things we produce do not inspire awe. Art has to "arrive" to prove its worth, whereas productivity is itself proof of worth, but it never "arrives" anywhere. The factory is there, it's established, and all you have to do is get the job and follow the protocol, then point to your timecard to show your usefulness.
To hoard, to rack up timecards and paystubs, to show viability, is to avoid spending; to avoid burning; to fool us into thinking we're escaping death, by not taking risks or exploring the uncharted. It's a concession to fear, which is why it can never inspire awe. But at least you can say you weren't useless.
Brilliant, Tamara.
The timecard as proof of life is the image I want to pull on because it contains the whole tragedy in miniature. The timecard doesn’t prove you did anything worth doing. It proves you showed up and didn’t leave. It’s an alibi, not an achievement. And we’ve built an entire civilisation that accepts alibis as currency.
What you’re identifying underneath the scarcity argument is something close to a terror of the unverifiable. Productivity is valued because it produces evidence. It’s epistemically safe. Art, by contrast, has to stake a claim on value before value has been confirmed, which is exactly the structure of genuine risk, and exactly why it can, when it arrives, produce awe. You cannot be moved by something that already justified itself in advance. Awe requires that the thing exceeded what was promised, which means something had to be promised without guarantee.
The Bataille thread you pick up at the end is the one I find the most honest. Hoarding as the refusal of death, spending as its acceptance. But I’d add one further turn… the factory worker who never burns anything doesn’t escape death. They just ensure that nothing worth mourning disappears when they go. The risk of the artist is financial + existential. To make something that might not arrive is to wager your time, which is your life, on a value you cannot yet demonstrate. That’s the only serious bet on the table.
The distinction between arriving somewhere and proving you were somewhere is perfect.
Thank you, Andrew!
Amazing. I knew it more than a year ago, and I know it now.
You nail it here: "Art has to "arrive" to prove its worth, whereas productivity is itself proof of worth, but it never "arrives"
Andrew is a phenomenal writer.
Be useless and enjoy the rewards that come with others finding something useful to them in it. That is perhaps the one advantage today’s pervasive, if bleak, practice of profiteering off the previously unprofitable interiority of soul offers the useless over past iterations of art, or personal grief, or fleeting dance movements.
Allow me to take your threshold into the belly of Bataille’s sun. “Most of us are not burning anything. We are hoarding.” If I understand my cosmology correctly, that describes the condition of our young sun precisely. Before it gave “its light to no return whatsoever” it hoarded, and hoarded, and hoarded, accruing more and more material for unknown ages in utter darkness. Until the day it crossed a definitive threshold of mass where its core would begin to burn. That day it graduated from an enormous and monopolistic planet to a star! a principal dancer upon the solar stage isolating herself against the darkness like a ballerina.
Back here in the mundane, we have a salon with a central sun who willingly shone into the darkness to no return until it reached critical mass. What personal pains and dreams, what drives and inner disciplines, what griefs and joys accumulated long years in silence before the light from your pen began to shine here for others, T. What planets orbit your brilliance now return what they can because your ‘useless’ suffering has found a format that is useful to them. This is the advantage of our inverted system to today’s artist/writer/salon monitoring solar star.
What you advocate is wisdom: accumulate experience in your own darkness, embody it in your own useless form, and the reward will return from the firmaments where that material is useful to them. Accrual for the sake of enlarging interior landscapes, not rewards, is the point. There is no other way through the threshold to the fire that burns on the other side.
Andrew, the cosmology holds, and it holds because it refuses the sentimental version of the argument. The sun doesn’t hoard out of fear and burn out of generosity. It hoards because that’s what matter does before it crosses the threshold into something else entirely. There’s no moral intention in the accretion. Which means the burning, when it comes, isn’t a gift consciously offered. It’s what happens when enough has been gathered that the internal pressure can no longer be contained.
The light is almost involuntary.
That reframes something I left unresolved in my essay. I spoke of Bataille’s expenditure as though it were a choice, the courageous decision to spend rather than hoard. But your reading suggests it may be less voluntary than that, and more inevitable. You don’t decide to become a star. You accumulate in the dark until the physics change. Which means the years of silence, of writing no one reads, of dancing in rooms with no audience, of grieving without language for it aren’t the waiting room before the real work begins. They are the real work. The mass without which there is no ignition.
The most honest in what you’ve written is the implied warning inside the beauty of it… there is no shortcut to critical mass. You cannot fake the accumulation. The interior landscape has to actually enlarge, which takes actual time and actual darkness, and no amount of strategic positioning substitutes for it.
The planets that orbit and return what light they can is an image that will stay with me longer than most things written in response to anything I’ve made. Andrew, thank you!
This is one of the most beautiful conversations I've ever read.
My comments section is quite epic for every essay :) Welcome to Museguided, Yevheniia!
Patience
Fundamental lessons are not always complex. In fact, they are usually very simple. Richard Long, for example, found ways to remind us of the value of patience.
The problem is not that we deny it with the intellect, or that we are proclaiming around that it is useless. The problem is that the vortex of daily life makes us lose the perspective of what we really believe in.
The serene gray and black tones and the drawing of what look like trees or streams are clearly perceived. We see larger branches that divide and become thinner as they ascend the page (or several small ones that join and thicken when they descend).
We are not discovering anything, there is no mystery here.
However, if we look carefully we see exactly the trajectory of each strand, which one joins with which and where they divide. This requires a slow and relaxing look. Perhaps the work resembled the walk that Long immortalised in it. It was not a journey of discovery, we know perfectly well how to go from Portugal to Spain.
The letters and words printed in the box are clear and direct.
Patience is not exciting. It is, in fact, the ability to do something without emotion, to postpone gratification, to continue with what seems boring or bland. Long's artistic achievement consists in integrating these unromantic aspects of patience into a hinderance that traps the imagination: walking through the Iberian Peninsula, from the Atlantic coast
To the Mediterranean, from one sea to another more resplendent, a poetic image of romantic fulness. What the printed text in the work exposes is the comparison of the water that is poured from a bottle with a waterfall. One is small and inconsequential; the other, gigantic and powerful. But a waterfall is no more than an accumulation of drops:
The reward of repetition.
Long does not pretend to convince us of anything, but to keep in the foreground of our mind an obvious truth that we often overlook: that good things contain banal ingredients. We never fully internalise this idea. We should renew the acknowledgement of this terrifying fact every day of our lives until it became something absolutely common.
The play is a lesson in love. He preaches an essential quality to maintain and grow love: that good relationships are based on patience. We must give up immediate satisfaction (win in an argument, make the other person feel guilty, get away with it) because those resignations are the drops of water that, multiplied and accumulated, will allow a couple to complete their pilgrimage.
Alain de Botton
John Armstrong
The Art as Therapy
Water lines
Each day a waterline
Poured from my water bottle
Along the walking line
From the Atlantic shore to the Mediterranean shore
A 560 mile walking in 20 days across the Portugal and Spain
Walking
Richard Long
The waterfall image is superb! We resist patience because we keep misidentifying the unit of meaning. We look for the waterfall and discount the pour. Long, and de Botton reading Long, insist the pour is the waterfall, just disaggregated across time. Patience is the refusal to declare the thing insignificant before the accumulation is visible.
There’s something exact in this: threshold value operates on the same logic. It accumulates, and we miss it for exactly the reason we miss the drops….. because we’re watching for the cascade.
The pilgrimage from Atlantic to Mediterranean as a love letter written in footsteps is a beautiful thing to leave here. Thank you, Juan Carlos!
The 4 seconds... I was recently in Paris participating in a mime workshop as an amateur. And among the 30 hours of instruction, laughter and sweat it was the 5 minutes on stage, at end of the first day, when I had no idea what I was doing and so all I could do is forget everything that had informed and goverened me up until that point, that showed me why I truly came. It didn't happen because I practiced, sacrificed, perfected anything. It happened because I had no practical use for the instruction I had payed for and traveled to a different country to receive. It happened beacuse I realized that I can finally be a fool, useless and alive. And still, after the week had concluded, I found myself questioning the utility of it all. As if it was outright indecent to claim that 5 minutes of absolute truth and freedom could justify the investment. But it had since become clear to me that the real assignment was to locate where I become the threshold, an invitation, an intimation, a slip with both feet on the ground, flash that rearranges without a neat conclusion. And a part of it was to see how readily I would internalize the canons that made my aliveness seem naive, inconsequential and embarassing, when in reality it shifted something in the room. It was an erotic choice, which is one of my favorite essays of yours and the one I kept thinking about as I read this masterful piece that speaks to something existential for me. And that embrace of two ungovernable bodies, two artists finding each other in the unscripted and uncommodifiable, I experienced as each of us embracing the version of ourselves that refused the terms and conditions and held the door open for others. Thank you from my heart Tamara!
Those 5 minutes are the whole argument, lived rather than read. And the detail that undoes me is that they happened precisely because the instruction had become temporarily useless to you, not despite the thirty hours but through them, at the moment they fell away. That’s a threshold crossed. The preparation was the mass accruing in the dark. The stage was where the physics changed.
What you name so exactly is the indecency we are trained to feel about ungovernable aliveness, as though the five minutes need to justify themselves against the investment, as though truth requires a receipt. The productivity logic is so thoroughly installed that it runs even inside genuine liberation, auditing the ecstasy while it’s still happening.
You felt it and then questioned it. I don’t think that is weakness but the honest report of how deep the occupation goes.
You said it shifted something in the room. Not in you…. in the room. And THAT is the threshold functioning. You didn’t perform presence, you became briefly, irrecoverably present, and the people watching felt the difference in their bodies before their minds had language for it. That is the most sophisticated thing a human being can do in front of other human beings.
The fool, in the oldest sense, was never useless. The fool was the one permitted to tell the truth because he had nothing left to protect.
You brought your whole self to Paris and let it be ungovernable for 5 minutes… that was the erotic choice!!! I’m glad you made it. And thank you so much for sharing it with me here, Katarina!
I have operated, and continue to operate, in the domain of work. I don't object to that; it has its necessity. But that isn't the meaning that drives me to explore and live. I live to write what stirs in my mind and heart; I live to seek connections with interesting and interested others. I live to improvise my way into psychological and social and reflected and even spiritual experiences. I live to try to understand why I do these things which give me little or no practical compensation, which not infrequently cause me confusion, but which nonetheless feel to me essential. I don't really know what they're for; I only know that my life would be unbearable if I didn't pursue them, if I didn't explore and express them; I don't know who I would be if I didn't. If those domains shrink or disappear, I don't think there would be anything left to convince me that life is worthwhile in any way I could understand. That is, I would certainly exist, but I wouldn't know or even be able to ask *why* I exist. I wouldn't know any real motives for continuing. These are the sources from which my intentions spring. I don't know where they'll take me; I can't be sure they'll take me anywhere. But I need them, and any world that insists I let them go has nothing to tell me about the point of life. I wouldn't be surprised to find what I do useless, but I know that for my humanity it's essential.
Miguel, what you’ve written here is my argument from the inside as lived necessity. And that’s a different order of evidence entirely. The philosopher can argue for threshold value; the person who says my life would be unbearable without this is demonstrating it.
The distinction between existing and having a reason to ask why you exist is the one I want to hold up. Existence without that question isn’t living badly. It’s a different activity altogether… maintenance, continuation, the biological function proceeding without the animating inquiry. Most people never notice the difference because the question gets crowded out gradually, replaced by the next requirement, until its absence feels like peace rather than amputation.
The fact that you can’t say what these things are for is not a weakness in your account but the most honest part of it. The moment you could fully explain the purpose of what drives you, it would have already been domesticated into something the system could process and file. The irreducible I only know I need this is precisely what resists that conversion.
… “improvise my way into experience”. Not plan, not optimise, not even seek — improvise! Which means you’re not moving toward a known destination but staying genuinely open to what the next moment produces…… a form of courage that looks, from the outside, remarkably like uselessness.
From the inside, as you know, it’s the whole thing. Thank you for this, Miguel!
Truly an outstanding essay.
Thank you so much, Mike!
This is one of those essays that makes pump my fist and shout Yes! as if someone just scored a goal. It also makes me look at what I'm doing and why, and it made me go back to that original essay when you might have been a high-end escort (though I was betting on spy). I looked at my comment, your response, and we went back and forth and back and forth again and again. It was light-hearted, fun, and underneath it all, I realised I didn't care what you really did, I cared who you were.
I also looked at the light-heartedness of the interaction, and how I rambled and you responded and it was impossible not to notice that I don't do that much, if at all, anymore. It would be easy to say it's because the world is different now, and that's true enough. But I also think it's because since I left North Carolina last September I've been - busy. Not with writing, or with any of the creative things I want to be doing. And a lot of it I do want to do, like lead the study group reading Vasubandhu, and giving dharma talks, and doing writing as a Zen practice workshops, and today doing a workshop on the practical aspects of being tenzo (head cook). Those are all great. I am also the de facto housekeeper, laundress, hostess, admin coordinator, and grocery shopper. Again, I agreed to all of it (more or less), but I can see that between this stint in Nebraska and the time in San Francisco, I gave up a great deal of my free time. That's something I need to consider when I move on from here.
Your use of Dante, Rilke, and Sappho was perfect. Each has a kind of resonance in my world, either through my reading, hearing them in dharma talks, or identifying them with people from whom I've learned a great deal. When I go back to Pittsburgh I'll pull those books out again.
I ran across something I wrote back in the late 1990s - short, heartfelt, and what I see now as significant, the first time I ever allowed myself to call myself a poet. Before this I would always write the caveat - I'm not a poet. As if somehow that would mean what came after didn't count. Good or bad (and it was mostly bad) it did count.
I’m a writer
I used to say,
I’m not a poet.
But you inspire me
To write poetry.
You have made a poet
Of me.
Yep, I've always been useless at heart. I did make a good effort to be useful, and convinced a lot of folks I was useful. I'll leave it at that.
The spy theory was more glamorous, I’ll grant you that! What you’ve traced here, from that light-hearted exchange to this precise accounting of what Nebraska has cost you, is the kind of interior audit I was gesturing toward. Not the productivity audit, which would tell you you’re doing plenty. The other one. The one that asks what has gone unscheduled, what got crowded out by the accumulated weight of agreed-upon usefulness. Housekeeper, laundress, hostess, admin coordinator. Each one reasonable. Together, a life.
The poem you found from the late ‘90s is interesting because it records the exact moment of self-permission. The caveat dropped. The identity claimed. “I’m not a poet” is the productivity logic speaking, the pre-emptive defence against being caught making something that doesn’t justify itself. You crossed that threshold in the ‘90s and then, somewhere in the accumulation of useful roles, mislaid the crossing.
Pittsburgh and those books waiting on the shelf mean a return to interrupted work. The ones who convinced everyone they were useful and knew otherwise the whole time are my favourite kind of useless. They did the camouflage so well that the real thing stayed protected all along.
Thank you so much, Doc, for this!
Thank you, Tamara, for not only reading it, but also for reading it at a depth I didn't comprehend when I wrote it. I didn't realise I mislaid the crossing - probably too busy being useful! And ironically, being useful in the most useless of arenas - as a Zen student and monk. I won't be able to unsee that now, and where that leads I don't know, and I don't need to know in this moment.
We inspire each other, Doc :)
The insights from Luckmann and Berger's work, The Social Construction Of Reality are keys to understanding the relationship between the multiple worlds of dream, art, theoretical sciences and the religious domains of the sacred, and finally death itself, and the paramont reality of our normative, functionally rational routines of everday life, which holds the "sane" world together.
We all live in a Yellow Submarine, a symbolic universe, a weltanschauung, overarching all we do and are. From the functional rationality of the 'work ethic' and the ant hill of the division of labour, to other-worldly journeys into the mystic, as in a tribal vision quest, or the artistic labours of embodied love as found in the Pieta, and in the philosophical building blocks of being itself, from the pre-Socratics to cognitive epistemologies today, all are held together under the sacred canopy of the universe of meaning under which our world lives and breathes.
How to balance these several worlds in our our biographical and soulful lives is the perennial meditation. Returning from one's nocturnal dreams to the awakening day, we cross thresholds. Becoming raptured into another "finite province of meaning" through the arts, in a hike through The Enchantments, in the gaze of one's forever love, or carried away in the face of an emotional storm, or finally in the singing of one's deathsong; each is a threshold world from which we must return to the primary consensus reality in some way, shape or form, to make it meaningful. Even if our alternative world sojourns result in only a "whisperedvision", we carry it with us into the onslaught of the one and only paramount reality of everyday life, till we don't!
These multiple worlds are part and parcel of the dominant normative reality. They can't be wished away: we all dream. The interior world the artists carve out in their respective works, which this Museguided essay so clearly amplifies, signifies a bridge between subworlds of art and the paramount reality. How one can do this, live in one's province of meaning and survive in the collective world is the story of culture, which gives meaning to the endeavor, say of a van Gogh.
How do we go on, trying to live, when we know we must die? And that is the work of our symbolic universe: to legitimize death itself so that we may die correctly, and in the meantime we can carry on with our lives, "until further notice."
Berger and Luckmann give us the skeleton, but what you’ve done here is put flesh on it, specifically, the phenomenological texture of the crossing itself. The threshold isn’t a concept in their framework but the lived moment of reentry, the carrying back, the translation of what cannot be fully translated into the language of paramount reality. That whispered vision you mention is the most honest description of what most genuine interior experience becomes upon return… not lost, but diminished to the frequency the daylight world can receive without shattering.
I would add that the artists who survive, not commercially, but existentially, are precisely those who develop a tolerance for the permanent dissonance of living in two registers simultaneously. Van Gogh is the catastrophic example, the one where the membrane between provinces became too permeable and the paramount reality too hostile. But there are quieter versions everywhere, people who have learned to carry the nocturnal knowledge into the daylight without insisting the daylight acknowledge it. That’s a specific and undervalued skill.
The death question underneath everything is the one Berger never quite let go of, and rightly so. The symbolic universe exists, finally, to make mortality bearable enough to proceed. Which means every act of genuine meaning-making, every threshold crossed and returned from, is a small rehearsal for the one crossing that requires no return. The artists are, among other things, our most serious practitioners of that rehearsal.
“Until further notice” is the most precise description of a human life I’ve encountered in some time. Thank you so much, Michael, you always inspire me to go further with my ideas!
A friend of mine is a classics professor. She’s written a few scholarly works, but her passion is writing fiction and she’s written several novels. Here is the twist. She has no interest in publishing them. She writes them purely for her own pleasure. There’s a purity to that.
That’s the most drastic position available right now. I don’t think she does it as strategy, nor as a statement, but as a simple refusal to let the work become answerable to anything outside itself. No market, no reader, no reception. Just the making, complete in itself, ending where it ends.
Your friend has solved, without apparent effort, the problem I couldn’t resolve cleanly in the essay… what refusal actually looks like when refusal has been co-opted. She found the answer not through theory but through practice…you make the thing and you keep it. The work exists, fully, without needing to be witnessed to justify its existence. Purity as a daily decision. Admirable!
There’s a long tradition of this that we almost never discuss precisely because, by definition, it leaves no public trace. Emily Dickinson came the closest among the ones we know about, but we know about her, which changes it. Your friend is doing something cleaner. The novels exist. They are complete. They will not be reviewed, will not find their audience, will not arrive. And they are, by any serious measure, as real as anything on a bestseller list. More real, possibly, because nothing about them is performing.
Bataille would recognise it immediately… expenditure without return, taken to its quietest and most absolute form. Not burning loudly. Just burning.
She sounds like someone worth knowing. She is impressive.
I told her that if I outlive her I will insist she be published, and that she will become a great literary figure like Kafka or John Kennedy O’Toole. 😊
“What he perhaps didn’t fully anticipate, or what he anticipated and simply could not bear, is that the tumour would eventually declare itself the organism.”
Yes it appears to have become the organism evolved from a tumor. Yet there are many of us that have become viruses on and within this organism.
Without the organism many cannot survive, yet some will float and be carried by different winds until they give up their existence. Yet, that existence can be glorious.
The virus is the more honest metaphor, and I think you’re right to reach for it, Jim. Not the parasite, which takes without altering, and not the antibody, which exists only to destroy, but the virus, which enters the system, uses its machinery, and in doing so changes what the system produces. Sometimes lethally for the host. Sometimes, in the longer biological view, generatively. We carry viral DNA in our genome that has been there for millions of years, doing work we only begin to understand.
Your image refuses the fantasy of clean exemption. You cannot be fully outside the organism and survive, you said it plainly. The poet still needs to eat. The threshold still needs a door frame. The question is what you do with the host’s machinery while you’re inside it, what you replicate, what you alter at the level of code rather than surface.
The ones who float on different winds and give up their existence …. I don’t read that as failure. Some of the most important transmissions in human history arrived, changed one thing, and disappeared before anyone understood what had happened. The glory is in what the drift made possible.
The organism will not thank the virus. It rarely does, until the accounting is done long after both are gone. Thank you for this, Jim!
Some of the most important transmissions in human history arrived, changed one thing, and disappeared before anyone understood what had happened
The reason is that the virus had to survive, he knew that he needs the host alive.
Or the virus didn’t know anything at all, and that’s the more unsettling possibility. The most transformative transmissions may have operated entirely without survival instinct, without strategy, without even the minimal self-interest your reading generously assigns them. They changed something and dispersed because dispersal was simply what they did. No calculation. No preservation of the host. Just the alteration, complete in itself, and then the wind.
Which makes the transmission more radical, not less. Intention would domesticate it.
Beautiful
There you go again. With your superior writing skills and deep intellect you take my thoughts, Amplify them and then paint them onto a simple canvass that become worthy of a gold frame
When I’m inspired by something intelligent and amazing.
Thank you for your gracious words.
Oh. So that was what persistently haunted me ever since I started taking my music seriously and decided I wanted to become a great artist and leave a legacy behind. No matter how good everything is going, my mind keeps bringing up the thought like a parent pushing the bowl of soup towards a hysterical baby. I keep fearing that I somehow made myself love music while not actually loving it. But I know that's not true — I know that all my life I live for those moments on stage when I become one with the music. I know I love that. I know how I love being in the flow, finding that note, that melody, and giving it every cell of my being. But why do I then find myself paralyzed with something whenever it's time to reach for my guitar? Whenever I consciously think that "Hey, it's time to actually start doing your own gigs. Find your people. No one is going to do that for you if you don't do it". My biggest fear is that my dreams and my music will fade away and that I will allow it to happen. If I love it so much, why am I not doing it every waking hour that I can? And now I can see this productivity, also coupled with ghosts of the criticism from people who, in theory, should have believed in me, but then ended up drilling into my head "it's not your thing". The worst thing here is when you recognize what bullshit all of that is, all of these fears, but still succumb to it and allow it to ruin your mood. I am putting so much into my musical development only to be met with my own hysterical inner self who refuses to play exactly when it would be great to. Your writing did not answer the pressing question of mine — obviously — but it moved me closer towards seeing myself for the first time. I can not, never could sit with sadness, I constantly push myself to make art from it because I am afraid that the second I don't the whole artistry will collapse and I will find an empty core. I don't know what to do with that... But my total lack of desire to be employable was validated when I read this essay, so thanks for that. It is still hard though... because having money is nice and kind of neccessary in our world... but it is hard to earn them when just talking to people and making art is the only thing you don't hate. You still want to buy yourself a nice dress once in a while, go somewhere on vacation, buy that exquisite looking pastry. You want to feel normal. But how do I do that given my character is a question I don't know how to answer and the one that eats me alive everyday
The paralysis at the moment of reaching for the guitar is love in the presence of stakes. The higher the meaning, the heavier the approach. You can pick up an instrument you are indifferent to without ceremony. The one that holds your entire sense of self requires a different kind of courage each time, and that courage doesn’t automate no matter how many times you have managed it before.
The fear that you manufactured the love, that the core might be empty is the voice of everyone who ever said it was not your thing, still running in the background, repackaged as your own suspicion. The cruelest thing that kind of early damage does is learn to speak in your own accent so you can’t identify it as foreign.
But here’s what I notice. You described the stage, the flow, finding the note, giving it every cell. Nobody describes something they manufactured that way. You don’t give every cell to a performance of feeling. You give every cell to the feeling itself.
The empty core fear is almost always what artists carry instead of the work. I know it too well. It’s the tax the gift charges for existing. The ones who don’t fear it usually have less at stake.
As for the money and the nice dress and the pastry, well, those are the conditions under which a human being can sustain making art. Don’t make them into a confession!
You are closer than the paralysis is telling you.
Your words made me sob in recognition, Tamara. I want to say thank you with all my heart.
The gratitude is mutual.
this is one of those reads that make you jump up from your seat. You've just made me feel more alive today!
And this is the best compliment a writer can receive… to make their readers feel alive! I am moved and grateful, Chaw! Thank you!