Bodies of Work

It's late. Not hair pullingly, eye burningly, face scratchingly late, but late enough to feel I should really be asleep, or at least laying down in a dark room on something soft. As ever though, some of my best ideas come to me around this time. There's not an awful lot on my mind that can be solved before tomorrow, there's a few friends on facebook that I'm slowly bidding goodnight to and like I said, it's not so late that I feel too guilty for still being awake. Well, maybe a little bit, but that's the masochist in me.

It just struck me as I lay here, half upright, just how important a 'body of work' actually is to someone. Not just someone like me who lingers on the enthusiastic narrative of people, places and the world, but to anyone. Gandhi mentioned, probably in passing, that man is the sum of his actions, and never has that meant so much as it does today.

I am a writer and to achieve my ambitions I am actively building on my abilities; I have a pool of short films I have written, I have a series in the making which I've written, I am writing breakdowns for future projects, I have a production company to channel my work, I have a solid team I'm still recruiting, I write a fairly haphazard blog, I tweet my goings on, I update my status an average of five times a day etc. etc. Each bundle of output and every compartment of 'stuff' is a unit against which I gauge myself professionally. But what about the little things which are periphery to my obvious professional ambitions? A healthy diet? Keeping up with friends? Amount of sex I have? Quality of sex I have (I'm sensing a theme)? Are these as important as my professional bodies of work? Of course they are. I think the only difference is that they are important only to me. What I deem professional I can promote, what I deem periphery I can only build on (and reflect on) myself. I've always been a loner.

Someone said (and I'm paraphrasing here), after death all you can hope to leave behind is your art. If this is true I want to include those aspects of life you may relegate to the sidelines. Without the domestic, sexual and social arts, the overt and obvious art I, and every other artist alive, aspire to create simply wouldn't exist.

If life is where art begins, then living is how art survives. Life is a body of work in itself and everyone should appreciate that, whatever you fill it with, however you break it down. Even if your only achievement today will be to have a wank, good on you. Add it to the list. Hope it's a good one.

It's still late. Slightly closer to hair pullingly, eye burningly, face scratchingly late. For vanities sake I'll give up on this particular addition to my body of work and start on another: sleep.