A Wasted Life

One of my favourite poems is James Wright’s ‘Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota' (Poetry Foundation). The poem is known in particular for its last line, “I have wasted my life”. Like the punchline to a joke, it hits the reader and encourages them to reevaluate everything they read leading up to it. Every time I read the poem in anticipation of that last line, in many ways reading backwards from it, like watching a film whose twist you’re already familiar with.

And every time it hits.

In what way has the narrator wasted their life? There is scant reference to their life beyond the immediate moment of pastoral repose. It's natural to assume it to be the voice of James Wright himself, a renowned ‘pickled poet’ with an “unaccountable self-loathing” (Henriques). It certainly seems self-deprecating on the surface. Regardless of who you believe the narrator is, how have they wasted their life?

My personal reading aligns with that of author David Mitchell, who sees the ultimate line in a wry and nostalgic, not necessarily negative light: “He’s been to this hammock before, and he’s had moments like this before, and it’s mostly positive” (Piepenbring). I can imagine lying in a hammock and being one with the still, summer tranquillity of the Minnesotan farm, pausing to reflect on my life. To have wasted it may mean to have missed too many moments to slow down and take stock, but it possibly refers to having evaded the rat race altogether—the poet wasting his life in literary contemplation.

We all face pressure to overwork and pursue wealth and success, succumbing to the gravitational pull of capitalist desire and hustle culture. It may be a romantic notion and an impossible dream for most, but to the poet, by instead wasting his life reflecting on the world through the medium of poetry, he has gained everything in the production of nothing.

Dan Piepenbring reads the last line as a quip on poetry itself, a recognition that “the poem is still a limited thing, composed of the ungainly materials of language”, and that the narrator, or the author, has “grown contemptuous, or at least weary, of the whole damn project [of poetry]”. If I were to subscribe to this idea, it would only be to the extent that Wright is well aware of the irony in dismissing the craft to which he committed his life (besides the craft of drinking, of course).

The production of nothing

The Aristotelian concepts of the vita activa (’active life’) and vita contemplativa (’contemplative life’) were challenged by Hannah Arendt in her work, most notably The Human Condition, in which she expanded the idea of the active life, outlining the three modalities of labour, work, and action. Whilst labour encompasses activities aimed at the satisfaction of biological needs, work refers to the creation of artefacts that endure, stabilise human cultures and societies, and construct worlds.

In the essay "Labor, Work, Action", Arendt writes “In the sphere of fabrication itself, there is only one kind of object to which the unending chain of means and ends does not apply, and this is the work of art, the most useless and, at the same time, the most durable thing human hands can produce”.

When I first read this I baulked at the sentiment that art is useless, but Arendt goes on to specify that a key characteristic of art is “its remoteness from the whole context of ordinary usage, so that in case a former object, say a piece of furniture of a bygone age, is considered by a later generation to be a 'masterpiece', it is put into a museum and thus carefully removed from any possible usage”.

What is the utility of poetry? Of any art? A thousand people will give a thousand different answers. One can’t eat a painting or seek shelter in literature (unless metaphorically, of course), and yet what would life without ‘the most useless thing human hands can produce’ consist of?

A life of contemplation and idle discourse is incompatible with the structures of contemporary capitalism, belonging to the domain of aristocratic frequenters of nineteenth-century salons and the rhetoricians of ancient Greece. The rest of us must work to survive; produce to consume. Even the most generous of arts patrons are wont to expect some form of return on their investment.

Arendt blurs the lines between the active and contemplative life, suggesting that one is not inherently superior, but that they complement each other. The abstract plane of thought is valuable only to the thinker, whilst the materialisation of thought is necessary to give it full shape. In regards to the production of artwork, this introduces an ontology of creativity:

“The thought process no more produces anything tangible than the sheer ability to use tools produces objects. It is the reification that occurs in writing something down, painting an image, composing a piece of music, etc. which actually makes the thought a reality; and in order to produce these thought-things, which we usually call artworks, the same workmanship is required that through the primordial instrument of human hands builds the other less durable and more useful things of the human artifice.”

Creativity is work. The act of writing (or painting, designing, recording and editing, sculpting, etc.) conjures for those other to the conjurer an artefact to be interpreted and reinterpreted in the absence of the original author. Indeed, the work is the work. The process is the product; the product the process. Even in virtual environments, the abstract must be reified, albeit in a simulation of physical, multi-dimensional space.

Derrida’s concept of différance introduces the idea that, due to the slippery nature of language itself, meaning is not stable but shifts ceaselessly based on context and interpretive audience. To create is to render to the world an endlessly interpretable object. This continual deferral of meaning can be seen in the multiple interpretations of James Wright’s wasted life. It can be seen in the architecture of Antoni Gaudí, the art of Louise Bourgeois, the photography of Francesca Woodman, the writing of Ali Smith, the films of Yorgos Lanthimos, and the dresses of Dries van Noten.

Across time and space, compositions exist beyond their composition—they are, to use Arendt’s words, “the most durable thing human hands can produce”. I pick out the above examples for no other reason than them being personal favourites; their work will mean something entirely different to others.

It may mean nothing at all.

Slippery meaning

When we design, we attempt to map abstract, conceptual models to tangible reality, communicating ideas of cultural expectation, utilitarian value, spiritual guidance, and desirability through the medium of architecture, fashion, advertising, furniture and industrial design, and software interfaces. As Victor Papanek wrote in Design for Real Life, “Design is the primary underlying matrix of life. Design is composing an epic poem, executing a mural, painting a masterpiece, writing a concerto”.

I don’t necessarily agree that these things all constitute design, but they do share the action of reification, the ‘making real’ of intention and thought. Designing constructs, corrals, and communicates meaning, in the hope that it is interpreted as clearly as possible. In its myriad forms, design may encompass all three modalities of Arendt’s vita activa—labour, work, and action.

Dan Piepenbring’s suggestion that “the poem is still a limited thing, composed of the ungainly materials of language” could well be applied to the work of designers striving for clarity and usability, limited by the language of shapes and symbols, constrained by the grammar of layout and colour theory. ‘Thought-things’ (to use Arendt’s term) that struggle to become more than the sum of the raw materials with which they are constructed.

Whether an architect toying with the ungainly materials of concrete and wood or a graphic designer with the ungainly materials of typography and photography, the goal is to turn thought-things into use-objects, to reify the abstract. Buildings, brochures, breast pumps, and bikes exist within the plane of a shared reality that can be interpreted, translated, used, and improved.

If Hannah Arendt considered art to be remote from the context of ordinary usage, designed objects must be present. If she considered art to be “the most durable thing human hands can produce”, designers should also strive for this sense of durability, constructing durable worlds instead of manufacturing petty desires, yearning neither to win awards that value obsolescence nor to craft masterpieces destined for museums.

Viktor Papanek famously quipped “There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a few”. It’s hard to look at the state of the world humans have designed and disagree. Those of us who contribute to the ‘underlying matrix’ of the designed world may waste our lives doing work, but our work doesn’t need to make more waste.