Have you ever worked on something so diligently and compulsively that when you finished you didn't exactly know what to do? I was at a screening of three movies on New York City punk in the 70s last night and there was one that stuck out immensely. It was only 2 minutes. Here it is on youtube, though the quality doesn't come through nearly as well as it looks on a projector:

Soul City by The Fleshtones




The director was at the screening and he told us a bit about the process. This was 1977 and though everything in the video seems terribly mundane, at the time there was of course no digital media for quick editing. The whole editing process took the director 2 years. 2 years for 2 minutes. Some would say that it was a waste for something so small and over so quick. But it was evident just how proud the guy was, happy that his 2 minutes were returned to again over 30 years after the fact. The video was shot before greenscreens and accordingly the director had to cut every piece of film by hand. He stamped out the individual musicians and animated them himself (the film is composed of stills). The footage was shot in black and white but in the video you can see the flesh tones on the members of the fleshtones. The director hand drew every slide. That is the extent of my understanding of the process but I imagine there is a whole lot more illustrating the lengths to which this guy went to produce a 2 minute music video.

So what compelled this guy to spend so long on such a short piece? It couldn't have been a rewarding process, by his indication it sounded like a daily tedious torment. Is it for lasting effect then? I hope not, it certainly hasn't lasted the ages and will eventually fade away from this planet as resolutely as a grain of sand. But history is inked with stories like this. The loner artist working on his masterpiece. Is this something characteristic only of artists? Definitely not, what about public officials who work their entire life on a piece of legislation only to have it turned down time and time again? Is it then an attribute of mankind? Is it an existential answer to a meaningless universe? Does the project and the labor replace God?

There is a thread however that must tie every labor of love together. Every labor of love is immensely personal. How could it not be? Even if the laborer doesn't know immediately why he must see his work through to the end, he knows that he must. The closer he comes to the goal the more manically he approaches it. I think of the character in Camus' The Plague, the would be writer who eternally works on the opening sentence. In the language of Sisyphus Camus considers that writer stuck on his one sentence as happy because in the completion of that sentence he has a goal and he has meaning. It doesn't matter that he should never achieve perfection because if he did, what would he have in life but to die from the plague?

Is this a morbid reading of labors of love? Or is there any truth behind the struggling existentialist working in only one direction?