• What is art?
• What is work?
• What is productivity?
• What are citations?
• Why are citations?
• Why do we feel guilt?
• Why do we feel art?
• What makes something art?
• What makes something creative practice?

As I rode my bike here this evening, I took quite a roundabout path, just because I felt like it. It did not feel like creating art. I did not exercise quite the heightened level of conscious awareness and use of conscious will to focus as I do in creating art.

On Sunday I began developing a new rope storage and deployment system as I woke up. I transitioned fluidly and continuously from mental to embodied design as I got out of bed and within reach of ropes. As I grew to like my systems, I transitioned to preparing to fly. Preparing to fly now. I used what I already had. I selected clothes suitable for flying, packed a bag, and wandered the neighborhood to find a large collection of hardpoints to hang from, ultimately deciding on a massive tree by north campus. It was lovely. It was art. I learned. I created. I left no trace.

Oh, and I almost forgot that on Saturday I took a brief intermission to participate in Liberatory Dance.

What was work, what was art, what was productivity, and why do I feel guilty about not “doing enough” for this MAP?

What is for this MAP? What counts as art, and what is just fooling around or goofing off?

When I look back a year from now, I except to remember flying. The first time I really flew. I simultaneously used every piece of rope I have; thoroughly left the ground; created; improvised; executed trained, practiced, and refined sequences; danced; preened; and embraced an art form that as been calling to me for years.

Less notably I practiced commercially viable skills, albeit not in a commercial venture, in a way that impressed those who happened to take note.

And yet, I felt/feel guilty about not “accomplishing enough”. I think that centers on leaving a record. I think that if I recorded my flying that would have changed things. Moved it from foolishness to work. What is work? If I do work, I don’t have to feel guilty? Work is something I don’t want to do? Do I want to risk turning flying into work? Work is what I get payed for? I’ve been payed for things I want to do. I’ve been payed for things I wouldn’t otherwise have wanted to do.

How do these notions of work and desire and productivity apply in the wider world? Is increased productivity possible under a holistic and artistic understanding of produce, that encompasses the whole of the fruit and its impact? I can certainly increase my work count, or increase the volume of the material trace I leave. Perhaps productivity is like nutrition: sometimes there is a deficit, that does harm which can be remedied by supplementing what is deficient. I have been deficient in sleep, but not right now. Have I been deficient in the material trace I leave? Have I been deficient in my production of completed artwork? How can I tell? I feel that I am deficient composition. I probably am. I felt that I was deficient in material trace, but feel that less now. Like nutrition\cite, however, I suspect that once major deficits are alleviated, there is still so much more going on that classical supplements will not help with. That classical accountability can’t fix. Classical accountability can ameliorate serious problems but inhibit outstanding creation. If you put me in a kitchen with every food on the planet available, would I eat well? We need constraints. We also have constraints. Do we need more constraints?

Accountability and guilt are mostly mutually exclusive for me. When someone requires me do do something with some accountability system, and I do not do the thing, I feel no guilt. I analyze the accountability system for how it impacts me and what actions I can take to mitigate adverse impacts. When someone trusts me to do something without the pretense of accountability, I feel great responsibility and when I do not accomplish what is expected, I feel guilt. (Neither system has yet come close to fully coercing my actions.) I am often faced with accountability systems that bear no teeth. The pretense of accountability which, under inspection, fails to bind my actions. In these circumstances I feel most free. I do what I please with no shame if I don’t “live up to expectations”. In these cases, I often find myself living in a state of increased holistic artistic productivity, including both direct and, often more importantly, indirect creation changes learnings teachings and marks on the world. This state sometimes results in m vastly exceeding expectations, and sometimes not at all, but regardless it is great for me and those in my ever changing bubble of empathy.

Perhaps this state of psudo-accountability stands out so much to me because of a notable lack of a state without accountability. For when no external expectations are imposed on me, I often find myself with internally imposed expectations–expectations based on the trust/responsibility/guilt model rather than on the rewards/consequences model.

Why can’t I function freely without the pretense of the rewards/consequences model? Is it how I was raised? In academia? In private school?

How does this intersect with kink, especially recognizing that I have tended to identify with positionalities that create systems of rewards/consequences rather than operate in the pretense of systems of rewards/consequences?

• Systems of accountability and pretenses thereof: Trust/Personal Responsibility/Guilt, Rewards/Consequences
• Creative health (e.g. using the nutrition analogy, and as a replacement for notions of classical productivity)
• Where do our fruits come from? (and this connects to how should we provide cite citation?

Conceptual map

• Creative Health
  • Creative can be understood as a common root of “creativity” and “creation”. This is a notion that describes the entire context that gives rise to a person’s (or generalize to entity) impact on the world. Measurable and immeasurable. Dominated by immeasurable (with current measurement techniques).
  • Constituent parts
    • productivity, work, art, play, and mental, physical, social, and intellectual health
    • Intellectual stimulations, both fully processed and prepared for presentation ideas (e.g. a class), little nutrients (i.e. a random idea that pops into your head from an external stimulus e.g. someone mentions tensors or relativity in passing and it enters our thought stream), and everything in between (e.g. academic papers).
    • others
  • A construct grounded in emotion, not measurement. Heuristics sometimes help, but the truth is only contained within you, and can be ascertained emotionally.
    • Examples of heuristics/looking at named components (tangible trace, external validation, learning, work/life balance, sleep
      • These can help identify problems, but none are universal principles.
    • Ways to feel your creative health
      • ???, but ultimately, you just know. At least I know (most of the time).
• Accountability systems
  • Two classical models reframed (intrinsic/extrinsic) trust/personal responsibility/guilt v. rewards/consequences
  • Impact of those models
  • Personal case study
  • How societal training impacts those models
  • Reimagining freedom and new models
  • Examining pretenses of accountability from the lens of kink
• Citation reimagined
  • Derive classical citation systems from first principles
  • Extend notions of productivity, value, and the web of cause and effect, responsibility, and credit with the notion of creative health (of which intellectual input is a strict subset)
  • Derive a citation system with this expanded notion
  • Perhaps a two column approach :))

I have to go now because I have “work” to do. The “work” that was assigned to me under the pretense of accountability. There is no actual accountability. I feel little guilt about not doing it, and yet here I am at 10:27pm, pried away from these interesting ideas to do something I’m not particularly interested in. (a note that I think my engagement with a topic is at a higher energy-sustainability level when I am pried away and return than when I leave of my own accord once my interest wains. This is part of what I was getting at with my axis of time thing. This should be included somewhere in this piece.)

I’ll read one paragraph or 3 pages of theory/text/whatever and then dive into a huge theory and exploration of my own. This sentence is not well formed. *paragraph