Thoughts on agency
Gustav Klimt, Beech Grove I, 1902
The art gallery where I work is an old warehouse from 1875. We have eight large exhibition halls. For the last four weeks, I’ve been busy in five of those rooms, building walls, and painting, and putting up new exhibitions. When juggling transports and nervous artists, I find it hard to concentrate at the level I need to write properly. Carrying a vase, I overhear the artists talk about a residency in a monastery in southern Italy, where the personnel would cook for them so they could lose themselves in their art, and I feel a tinge of envy and longing.
But there is also something to be said about losing yourself in manual labor. As I climb stairs and paint, as I vacate myself to serve others, I have a sense of zooming out from the daily work of writing. I glimpse the horizon I’m moving toward.
I think it is time for me to do something more ambitious, though I’m not sure what the shape of that is yet. A long essay cycle? A book?
Maud turned seven two weeks ago. It is an interesting age. The first sparks of her grown up self have started to flare up. She has always liked to be around when Johanna and I work and talk about ideas and projects; but until recently, she did so as an anthropologist peering in from the side. Now she’s starting to express with her tone and her body language that she belongs. She is one of us. She belongs with these serious considerations—not all of the time, she still likes to play. But her adult self has begun the long process of pulling itself out. And it is important to her that she is not a kid in the same way her little sister is.
Because of this sudden growing up, one thing that I mull over as I work in the gallery is this: I should sort out my thoughts about agency and introspection, about how to unfold a life that feels true to you—so I can explain it to Maud. I wish I had a great book that I could put in her hand when she turns 14, and it helps her learn what many never learn, or learn to late, namely, that the possibilities are much bigger than you think, that you can live more deeply, and truly, and that you can solve almost any problem if you put your mind to it. A book about how to handle being sentenced to freedom, and to handle it effectively, and authentically, and responsibly. Which would it be? I can’t think of a book like that. Maybe I should write it.
If I wrote a book (or essay cycle) like that, it would sort under the label “how to be agentic.” This is a popular topic in my circles, which I find refreshing, even if I have the feeling that many people in my milieu use the word agency in a slightly different way than I do. There was, for instance, a popular blog post by Cate Hall recently. I agree with all object level advice in that post (everything is learnable, seek out rejection, embrace being low status, and so on), but the framings she used to me felt off color.