Note To Self
You will die.
It will happen sooner than you expect.
You only have two questions to answer:
1. How will you spend what little time you have left on this planet?
2. What will you leave behind when you are gone?
Idling
I wish to be idle. I want to do as little as possible. I want to get up when I feel like it. Lounge on the sofa. Read classic novels and poetry. Listen to records. Drink tea. Take walks along the river. Visit galleries and museums. Go to the theatre. Sit in cafes all day and watch the world go by.
Unfortunately, I have been cursed with an unstoppable urge to make a whole lot of pointless rubbish. And there is already so much pointless rubbish in the world.
How miserable.
Branches On The Tree (from The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath, 1963)
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
My Uncle
A few years ago my uncle died, suddenly.
He left behind a home office full of papers, research, journals, clippings, records, books etc. My cousin was overwhelmed and called me to help sort it out. We spent three days going through it all. It was dusty, we sneezed a lot, our skin was itchy. We had trouble understanding what a lot of the items were, never mind if they had been important to my uncle or not.
When we finished, my cousin kept only his father’s published work, his journals and about half of his record collection. I kept one family photo. We took four boxes of research and papers to my uncle’s university, but they refused to take them. Those boxes and everything else went into the skip.
A lifetime of work, gone in a few seconds, just like that.
Two Boxes
My own work is organised in a way that I can understand it, but like my uncle, I think it would be difficult for an outsider to understand what was important to me.
I realise that I only need two boxes:
1. Pass this on when I am gone.
2. Trash this when I am dead.
The first box, pass this on, will be small, curated and annotated. It will be presentable to the public. Anybody can pick it up, navigate it, and understand what I considered valuable and why. If somebody wants to learn about my life, my work and my ideas, this will be the place to look.
The second box, or more likely collection of boxes, trash this, will be large, private and does not need to be organised properly. It will contain things that I am not finished with yet, or may want to look back on when I am older. It will be of little value to anybody else. I am sure when I am dead, this will be the first box somebody opens, so I had better get into the habit of trashing things along the way.
Going Forward
These two boxes will act as a guide for everything I create from this point onwards. I will plan exactly what it is I want to leave behind, and create an organised box of empty folders for final drafts. As each item is completed, it can be catalogued, annotated and filed immediately.
All the drafts, false starts and failed experiments can be thrown into a larger trash this box, or knowing that it will not be used, can be shredded immediately without guilt.
There are those who like to go through every draft an artist or writer has made and analyse the differences as if it will reveal some great insight, but not me. As I said, there is already enough pointless rubbish in the world and I am happy not to add to it anymore than I need to.
The Collected Sky Sandison
What do I want to spend my days working on? What will I leave behind when I am gone?
1. A novel. I want to create a world, create characters for that world, and then tell stories about those characters living in that world. It will be a collection of smaller items that add up to a single work. At first glance it will appear light and whimsical, but for those willing to scratch the surface, there will be more going on underneath.
2. A short guide on how to live, split into two parts: philosophical and practical. It won’t be perfect. It will be constantly updated. It is unlikely to ever be finished.
3. A collection of short essays and thoughts that do not directly fit into the topic of how to live, but may still be worth passing on. I will ask family and friends to give me questions and then try to answer the ones that appeal to me as best I can.
4. A list of recommendations. I will make a simple list of things that inspired me at different stages of my life. Then, going forward, I would like to keep short notes on anything I read, watch, or experience, no matter how naive my thoughts might be.
5. A memoir. This will consist of five smaller pieces: a short personal history, a collection of journal excerpts edited and tidied up, a series of a-day-in-the-life records for the various stages of my life, then two abstract pieces similar to I Remember by Joe Brainard or Autoportrait by Édouard Levé.
6. Private Press. For no better reason than it is cool, I want to start a private press to create handmade zines and prints whenever I feel like it. These could be based around a theme, gather items from the other projects listed above, or contain the best of the drafts and experiments that will otherwise be trashed. They will be hand numbered, limited edition, and passed onto friends, family and perhaps given to zine libraries or zine review sites. I may sell a few at exhibitions or book fairs to cover printing and transport costs.
7. Promotion projects. To advertise my work I will create a few specific items that can be considered part of my main work and worth passing on: a series of flyers, posters and low priced print-on-demand pieces; exhibitions and book fair displays of curated work based on a theme; a few carefully planned social media projects that are conceived as standalone works merely “on loan” to these life-draining silos.
8. Private Projects. In addition to the above, I will work on a few private projects to pass onto family: a photo collection, a family history, a folder of official documents etc.
Physical Editions
At some point in the future, I will license these works to a publisher to create physical editions that can outlive my own short life. Until then, it makes sense to curate these works on a website that I can control myself.
Website
I miss the old web. I miss the days of eccentric, personal websites that were like caves or labyrinths filled with endless, offbeat pages to explore. You never knew what each click was going to give you next. These sites were often ugly, broken and difficult to navigate. Yet, behind every poorly conceived choice of fonts, colours and animated gifs, you gained a sense of the personality behind it all.
When social media spread and we started to design for mobile rather than desktop, we began losing the idea of a website as a work of art in itself. There are still a few out there, but too many personal sites are empty, clinical portals to external work, endless sales pitches, abandoned blogs, or half-baked “content” that has been created with the sole intention of hustling something out of the visitor. I want to avoid this.
My website will be a library where each project has its own room, and each room has its own set of shelves. I will build the underlying structure then launch it empty. Little by little, as each smaller work is completed, I will upload it to the relevant place. The site will grow slowly, organically, without any fixed schedule, forced plan of action and definitely no “hustle”. I am an artist, not a salesman.
The website will be the endpoint for finding out about me and my work. Initially, I will advertise on a few select social media accounts to build an audience, but there will be nothing there that you cannot also find on my site in a fuller, more complete form. There will be no newsletter, no annoying subscription or sales pop-ups. There will be little, if any, links to work on external sites. If you are curious about me, all you have to do is type “skysandison.com” into the search bar, and with one click you will get everything you need to know. For returning visitors, there will always be something new to seek out and explore.
Ozymandias (Percy Shelly, 1819)
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Closing
I will die sooner than I think. I wish to spend my days being as idle as possible. When I am not being idle, I will be making things for the projects listed above, with the intention of passing them on when I am gone.
Sky Sandison,
Summer 2024
