What One Really Ought To Do

     Reflection on a farm. 

    It occurs to me that every time I scribble something in my notebook, compose these very words you are reading; every brush-stroke or burned-line I make onto a picture-plane; every lunch I have with someone I love; or walk I take in the mountains; or time I paddle-out over a rocky, kelpy, living reef, hunting a wave-ride, I am, consciously or sub-consciously, answering the question that, perhaps, is at the root of human consciousness, and which has haunted me since childhood. 

"What should I do with my life?"

    As I sit watching the colors change to light over the Jerusalem Grade, I reflect on the book "Debt: The First Five-thousand Years" that I am making my way through for the third time on audiobook during this-summer's walkabouts.  (Driveabouts). In it, all sorts of fascinating, underlying, and often invisible truths about our social fabric are laid bare.  Debt, David Graeber points out, (you might also call it "the rule of exchange") is always, at root, a moral issue.  

    When you look at the structure of language (which is, itself, a type of exchange) it's clear that morality is a type of accountancy. Another way to phrase the question I answer by making paintings, designing buildings, and loving people, is "What ought I to do with my life."  And the term "ought" means "zero", so there is this sense of debt in "should" or "ought-to", which are the fundamental qualifiers of moral judgement: if you 'ought-to' do something, the metaphor follows, it is because you stand in some sort of debt, and by doing the thing, the scales will re-set to zero.

    So morality and debt, in this sense, are a type of social mathematics, or spiritual, if you prefer to call it that.  Graeber points out that these calculations tend to produce paradoxical and confusing results when they run up against a great invention, perhaps the singular invention, of the human mind, which is, of course, infinity. Or eternity, if you prefer to call it that. 

    How can you perform a zeroing out, if the grounds of the calculation are limitless?  We have Xeno's paradox in every "please" and "thank you".

    What has all this got to do with art, or, specifically, painting and mixed media art on wood panels?

    Well, I'm just getting to that...

    But first, I'm going to go do my farm chores, and prep some lime paint for a plaster mural I really ought to-do....