Alone, toil does not achieve;
Their nose-to-tail practices.
The following is my present response the above about fifteen years later:
I gained the maturity that you predicted so now, I hardly catch myself procrastinating at all but I'm working on much fewer projects than you were. That's probably mostly because your large artistic community demanded a lot from you while your were a single parent with one child. I moved to a new place with a larger family and have been slow to integrate with the local artistic community. Thank you for the many ideas and the many projects you began. I am still following through with many of them and you have given me a wealth of material that has made up much of this piece. Don't worry about how you did in school. I more than made up for it. I never made less than an A until I continued on in nontraditional graduate programs. I learned how to get the most out of my classes and as I got older and there became much less separation between authority figures and myself. In fact, when I first went back to school my former colleagues were my teachers who I respected as friends. I also used my classes to help me with the very problems you addressed concerning being articulate about some very complex feelings about the art. I haven't gained so much in expertise as I have in confidence because I know that the subjects we are concerned with have not really been thoroughly dealt with. When you were teaching at UTD you were not inadequate intellectually. It was your idealism that made you seem to have less depth than your more cynical peers. You just came off as the happy "idiot savant" but your productivity and quality of your work could have only been envied by others especially by those whose medium is writing about others' art. You took their cynicism much too seriously. Often one's cynical criticism of others is only a screen for one's own short-comings. An artist is almost by definition an intellectual whose medium may not be words and when one advances art to new levels one should be respected for it by other intellectuals. Whether that really happens or not doesn't really matter. You have done well and I, who may know you best, do appreciate you. Thanks. I know it hasn't been easy.
719-720
Their diligence, their diligence,
Enfolds the carriage,
Enters the abyss,
Turns back on the boat,
Ascends the mountain.
All of the me's past, present, and future, archetypes/gods, family and ancestors keep plodding forward despite political and/or economic trends.