Skiving.

For those of you who don't know, "skiving" is the noble art of "not actually working when you're at work". In the Far East Zen masters refined and codified the practice into the highly-refined, semi-mystical form of "faff-fu". And you thought they were just meditating.

So, my boss is still on holiday (when will the madness end?), and, to make things even worse/better, my line manager-type guy has moved desks so he's no longer almost literally peering over my shoulder all the time.

Enter the sloth.

I've spent most of this week not doing any actual work at all, but wearing my (now well-practiced) "slightly consternated" face while looking up all sorts of irrelevant rubbish on Wikipedia. I also heard a crap joke that made me laugh -

Q - How do you know when the Devil's at the front of the queue in the Post Office?
A - He takes many forms.

Anyway, as I was saying - lately, the Wikipedia has been my playground during working hours, so if I'm not actually working, I am at least finding out new stuff. Been reading a lot about Outsider Art at the moment: I've always been impressed by the Watts Towers and other semi-obsessive projects like that, so I did a bit of digging and came up with some truly fascinating stories.

There's always been a bit of a correlation between art and madness, at least in the popular consciousness (if there is such a thing). Most of the people we consider as great artists were a bit unhinged, but I think that's kind of true of anyone who really throws themself into something: to be really good at something, to be singular at something, you almost by definition can't be what the bulk of society would consider "a well-balanced individual". You have to be single-minded, passionate: or, to use a less positive word that means effectively the same thing, obsessive.

What I liked about the artists I found when I did a bit of digging when no-one else was looking in my workplace was that they weren't creating for an audience. They created stuff because they had to. It almost felt a bit voyeuristic looking at the stuff they'd made, knowing that they'd never saught a public airing for it when they were alive.

I'd better give some examples. Edmund Monsiel was a Polish shopkeeper who, in 1942, hid himself away in his brother's attic fearing arrest from the Nazis. He remained there for years, scratching out innumerable iterative drawings by candlelight. All his drawings feature repeated faces drawn again and again - they do have strange kind of beauty to them, but that's probably not what Edmund intended. Even in darkness or in the folds of a piece of clothing he saw accusatory eyes and a dissaproving face. See what I mean about the voyeuristic aspect? I'm calling them beatiful, but they were probably painful to him. Not sure how I feel about looking at the signs of a mind falling apart.

I will write more about this later (it's really captured my imagination), but I must head to bed now. Do not pass Go, do not chop off your ear and send it to your loved one.