Some songs stay with you. Maybe because you’ve listened to an album so often the riffs have taken root in your brain and can be summoned without your conscious knowledge. Sometimes a random tune draws you into another and before you know it your mind is a jukebox. Sometimes parts of a song come back to haunt you, and I like to entertain them, because in doing so, you are still listening, in a way, to the music. Recently, this little interlude in Solange’s album When I Get Home has been returning to me. I read, today, that it’s taken from a video by a YouTube spiritualist, Lula Belle. It says, ‘Do nothing without intention.’ It’s that simple. In fact, I gifted the phrase to my students at the end of the last workshop I taught. I told them that if there was one guiding principle they could adopt as part of their daily academic practice, it was this.

I find the advice so loaded, because the word intention has been consistently associated with the process of art making. You are told by the powers that be that art is about intention. An art object presumably exists because someone intended for it to come into being, or someone intended for it to assume a certain shape and form. When I argue that many housewives historically functioned as artists, I do refer to similar logic. But I am still theorising on what it means to ‘do nothing without intention’. It obviously implies that there must be a large degree of premeditation about singular acts. To do is to act or to take action. To introduce intentionality towards an action means that it must be the consequence of rigorous thinking. It is not easy to produce an intention. It is rarely automatic. If there seems at all like there is a fluidity to a series of action, it will have been the result of practice. For example, I’ve often observed my partner’s aunt Maridl in her kitchen, making a cake or a strudel. There is a way in which she minimises waste that attests to a learned frugality. If she whips cream, she will transport it into whatever requires it by using a ladle to get all of it out. If anything remains she licks it before putting it into the sink. She recycles, too, with this focussed attention on first reusing something as often as it can serve before finally giving it up. To me, her practice feels like a manifestation of an ecological consciousness. It is so inbuilt and intrinsic to the way her body moves.