André Gregory's unique letter to Richard Avedon about the art form – margicinain

Half a thousand years in the recovery of our heart from the injuries of the Civilizational Descartes drawn by the body and the mind, we bleed through the clesian cleft of our practice – the destructive separation between life and work. The idea of ​​”Workaholic,” often worn as a badge in today's ego stock, looks at the person who makes the central axis of life work through food. This very question of 'work/life balance,' inherited from the industrial model, asks us to live in parts – one part of the person does the work, the other does that. But customs aren't made the way cars are made. We create – anything that is not mechanical, that is not material, that affects another person in a meaningful way – and everything that we are: All the books we've read, all the books we've ever read, all the frameworks and all the waste. The simplest poem from the poet's pen, the little wooden spoon that takes shape from the carpenter's hand, the work of a lifetime.

In the seventies, as his lifelong friend Richard Aledon died, the famous theater director André Gregory began to wonder, he despised to return the statue, and found the fear from which ancient to find something new. Times that seem unproductive, Gregory saw, feed life which is green in this work, even though we don't know if it will sprout from each seed that lives life.

Not long after Avedon's death, Gregory wrote this letter to his friend, he always intended to write but did it, “talking about their views on disagreements and disagreements and arguments” in their great friendship. (Every person who has lost a loved one knows that conversations continue, they know what Hemingway knew

There may be the strongest defense of the creative spirit since William Bloke's, Gregory writes:

Let's face it – musicians are always working, even though they may not look like it. They are like plants that grow in winter. You can't see the fruits, but they grow underground.

In the great passage of Kurt v Nonnegut's beautiful poem about the Shelter Island Billionaire and the adequate measure, Gregory holds a mirror to his removed friend – a living person who cannot know who they are except what they have to avoid their eyes:

He is the owner of this delightful house in Montauk, one of the loveliest I have seen anywhere, on the cliffs overlooking the sea. He arranged it for you. But you've probably never been there. Are you longing for another way of life? Yes, you have friends – almost all driven and professional musicians – but you've never been social. He saw each of us alone. In those dear rooms of yours, of the highest food, the talk will always be work, work, and work.

Every time you stop, you would descend into depression, believing that you have hit a wall and lost the ability to work, that you will never work.

The action Gregory Paints is a small maniatureto prevent the basic subjectivity of the self and the collective nature of art:

You have chosen a job. I chose the health. Work and Life.

At least I did 30 years ago. Will the work inform you Working? When an inch is close to us, we who were originally there, who we intend to be, do we not use the work, do we not deeply respect others? Is there no value in spreading laughter, love, and compassion to the people around us? … work changes life, and life changes work.

Couple that with Benedictine monk and philosopher David Steindl-Rast on the relationship between play and purposeful work, and rediscover Lewis Hyde's classic meditation on work vs.

HT Live letters