A laborer who is obliged to do menial work.
What does "work" mean, anyway? I hear it said once in a while that "they call it work for a reason," but some people’s work is laborious and inescapable while the work of others is a cat and mouse game of expending as little energy as possible. But that is just labor. Paid work. Time compensated. What of the work that is the stuff of human relationships, that laborious scrutiny and cyclothymic backpedaling, forward-pedaling, vertical rising and falling within the emotional silos of our lives. And then there is my work. Your work. Anyone’s work. A friend once commented that he liked my "work," speaking in reference to some photography I did a few years ago. I can accept that the act of taking and finding the things to photograph constitutes work, but I am not at ease with thinking that the finished product, hanging dead on a wall, is itself "work." I know that creative artists eventually catalogue their works, their complete works, but are these works different from, say, Water Works, in the Monopoly board game? Is the collected work of a painter something of a different order than a difficult situation that is made to work? How is the concept of a finished work of art different from an intangible form of work?
