Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while
Marx, (Groucho)
The whole fucking premise is so simple it hurts: you take artists, real ones, not the kind pumping out content for the algorithm gods, and you put them somewhere beautiful and remote and you say, “Here. No deadlines. No bullshit. No one’s checking in on your productivity metrics. Just… make something. Or don’t. We don’t care.”
And that terrifies people. Because we’ve built this entire civilization on the idea that every moment must be justified, monetized, optimized for maximum extractable value. The Puritan work ethic metastasized into late-stage capitalism’s final form: the notion that a human being at rest is a human being wasting time, which is really just wasting money, which is really just wasting oxygen that could be better used by someone more productive.
But here’s the thing about whim, and this is what Groucho understood when he said we’re all just a whim of several billion cells having a good time for a while, whim is the only honest impulse we have left. Everything else is programming. Marketing. The internalized voice of every authority figure who ever told you to sit still and color inside the lines.
Whim is where the real work happens.
Take Aleta Hayes up here in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Dancer. Choreographer. Someone who’s spent years training her body to be an instrument of precise, repeatable movement. And what does she do when you give her space and time and permission? She takes that trained body out into the woods and lets the landscape tell her what to do. Site-specific work, which is just a fancy way of saying “I’m going to respond to what’s actually here instead of imposing some predetermined bullshit on the space.”
Watch her in those photographs and you see someone in conversation with dirt and light and gravity in ways that would never occur to her in a proper studio with mirrors and barres and all the infrastructure designed to make dance legible, marketable, reproducible. Out there, the mountain gets a vote. The wind gets a vote. The angle of the sun at 4 PM on a Tuesday in October gets a vote.
That’s yielding to whim. Not the abandonment of craft, she’s still every bit the trained artist, but the willingness to let craft serve discovery instead of the other way around.
You want to know what’s radical about a place like Djerassi Resident Artists Program? It’s not the mountain views or the studios or whatever amenities they’re peddling. It’s the permission structure. It’s the institutional blessing to follow the thread that makes no sense, to chase the idea that has no commercial application, to spend three weeks failing at something just to see what failure teaches you. To take your perfectly good dance vocabulary and see what happens when you put it in dialogue with redwoods and fog and the particular quality of silence that only exists in places where humans aren’t the dominant conversation.
Because art, real art, the kind that matters, doesn’t come from discipline alone. It comes from the moment when discipline breaks down and something else takes over. Call it instinct, call it the unconscious, call it whatever name makes you comfortable. But it’s whim. It’s the undefended moment. It’s what happens when Aleta stops choreographing and starts listening. When the body becomes a question instead of an answer.
And yeah, most of what comes out of those moments is garbage. That’s fine. That’s the deal. You yield to a hundred whims and ninety-nine of them lead nowhere and one of them cracks the universe open just a little bit and suddenly you remember why you started making things in the first place, before it became a career, before it became a brand, back when it was just this weird compulsion you couldn’t explain to your parents.
The rest is just survival. The hustle, the grants, the residency applications, the carefully curated social media presence that proves you’re Serious and Professional. All necessary. All soul-deadening. All part of the transaction we make to keep doing the thing we love in a world that fundamentally doesn’t give a shit about whether we do it or not.
So you take the residency. You go to the mountains. You yield to whim. You let the landscape choreograph you instead of the other way around. And maybe nothing happens. Or maybe you remember what it felt like before you learned to be afraid of your own impulses, before you calcified into someone who only moves in approved and recognized patterns.
Either way, you’ve got your answer.