Work: Stephen Wisniewski
01. Writer
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Stephen Wisniewski
02. Theme
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Work
03. MUSIC INSPIRATION
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PJ Harvey:
Working For the Man
04. WRITING
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I really wanted to write something funny.
Something about the very worst job I’ve ever had, one summer when I worked in an office for a biology professor that I never actually met. He didn’t even interview me – I was hired by a graduate student who worked as his research assistant, and I never saw my “boss,” who was away doing research on diseased fish. I had no real responsibilities beyond listening to PJ Harvey in a basement office, on a campus abandoned by the semester break. Then I suddenly got word that I was being lent out by that professor to spend two weeks on the agricultural north end of campus, squatting inside an empty tank the size of a suburban above-ground swimming pool, scraping dried algae and fish waste from the lining of that tank with a razor blade. It was August, and everything around me smelled like dried algae and fish waste.
If viewed scientifically from above, the concentric circles of my environment were: a swimming pool-sized tank full of dried algae and fish waste; then an aluminum pole barn without fans or air conditioning; then a vast field of cows in various stages of scientific experimentation; then a Midwestern land-grant university campus; then the pleasant, hand-shaped peninsula of Michigan; then the blue marble of Earth; then a vast inky blackness.
I also wanted to write something poignant.
Maybe about the experience of perpetually repairing our deadly, hundred-year-old house, and the ways that it perpetually confounded my desires. Anything I wanted to change would hang on stubbornly by a thread – pieces of trim, cast brass hinges painted over with ancient shellac, stripped screws that seemed entirely made of rust. But when I climbed onto the roof to repair dozens of mortar joints in the chimney, the bricks would come apart in my hands, disintegrating into nothing and staining my gloves red. It so elegantly resisted my work, keeping and letting go exactly what it wanted to.
I wanted to write something political.
Down the street, they’re transforming the site of the Flint Sit Down Strike of 1936-37 into green space. That is to say: nothing. A sign in a field. A nice place to walk, which is fine. They're calling it “Reclaiming Chevy in the Hole.”
I was inspired by all the songs I love that told stories of work that don’t look anything like the Flint Sit Down Strike of 1936-37: Lizzo’s “Werk, Pt. II;” Clipping’s “Work Work;” Dolly’s “9 to 5.”
I also really wanted to write something fictional, that might speak to the human condition.
I’ve had a story in my head for more than twenty years, based on a real thing that still fascinates me: in 1977, two unemployed Polish mechanics decided that they were going to dig up Charlie Chaplin’s body and hold it for ransom. Chaplin had just died and been buried in Switzerland. These two men decided that it would be a brilliant thing to rob his grave, and then demand payment from his family.
And they did it! They went and dug a hole and hauled Charlie Chaplin out of the ground under cover of night, and then demanded money for his return. It turns out that they just put him into another shallower, sloppier hole in the ground, stashed in a nearby field for safe-keeping while they waited on their fortune. They failed spectacularly in their plan, but I’ve often tried to imagine what they were thinking – the sensation of the shovels in their hands; how they must have felt the interior thuds and clatter of Chaplin’s bones against the sides of the coffin as they jostled it between themselves; how desperate they must have been to conceive of such a thing. How they must have hoped to never worry about working another day in their lives.
But instead, I rolled all of these ideas around in my head to more or less the extent that I've described here: enough to consider some broad contours, but not enough to make anything real out of them. They were all pushed out of my brain as I let my mind race in bed, until I was exhausted enough to fall asleep. I kept my hands busy doing dishes or making coffee. I watched the world burn. I tried to escape myself as I was sick with migraines. I cried a bit. I maybe should have cried more? I wrestled with the knots in my stomach as I unexpectedly found myself getting my first COVID test. I checked to see how long it had been since I’d paid my electric bill, and I tried to play something new on the guitar, something that I hadn’t already played hundreds of times before. I found that the work of living was all I could bring myself to do.