Pizza Hut’s BOOK IT! club and the stickers that came with blank VHS tapes. Great big waves of nostalgia washing over me.
What to do with your feelings
A lot of the questions I get asked during Q&As have to do with the feelings and emotions around creative work. Questions about fear, imposter syndrome, jealousy, etc.
For years, I dodged, or tried to dodge these questions. “Eh, you just have to work!” “Show up!” While in the back of my mind, I’d be thinking, welcome to the club, friendo, or worse, Get over it!
Part of the trouble is that I’m not a particularly feeling person. I write to know what I think, and I make art to actually know what I feel.
I’ve been thinking lately about how many of the feelings and emotions creative people are trying to deal with are just symptoms that they’re, well, human.
In other words: I’d be more worried about you if you weren’t feeling some of these emotions.
Feelings and emotions are a form of information.
The question is what you do with information.
What’s handy, as an artist, is you can find a way to channel these feelings into the making of the work.
Fear, for example, is often just the imagination getting out of control: you can imagine every single thing that can go wrong. But on the flip side, if you can imagine the worst, you can train yourself to imagine the best.
Imposter syndrome is a sign of extreme humility: we know we’re really not that good, especially to the people we look up to and idolize! (“Some sort of self-deception is necessary simply in order to start.”) But if you turn it the right way, extreme humility is good: it means you can learn to play the fool and learn what you need to know to get to the next thing.
And jealousy, even, though it can eat you up if you let it, can be also tell you what you really want.
People often ask me how I got the courage to put my work into the world.
I’m not sure I have any courage, but I do have rage.
This may come as a surprise to readers of my books, who tell me they’re rather helpful and upbeat. (Not words my friends and family might necessarily use to describe me!)
My secret is: the books are positive because I take a negative approach: First, I see something I feel negatively about, something that aggravates me, something that pisses me off, something that infuriates me, and then I spend some time trying to articulate an alternative vision. (I’m angry, but I’m curious.)
This negative process seems to be infinitely repeatable for someone like me.
Whenever you are out of ideas, there’s someone, somewhere, with bad ideas that need to be corrected. But you don’t necessarily have to talk about the bad ideas, or take them on directly, you can just articulate the good ideas that cancel them out. (See: Identifying poison vs. seeking nourishment.)
A lot of people I know right now are angry or furious or enraged. And rightly so!
“Fatigue and outrage are appropriate emotions,” Sarah Smarsh wrote in a recent op-ed, “What to Do With Our Covid Rage. “But those feelings, if not properly channeled, can themselves take a heavy toll. What do we do with our anger?”
Anger is a contagious energy that jumps quickly from one person to the next. It will seize your mind and body as its host. If allowed to explode, it will hurt others. If allowed to implode, it will hurt you. I had to learn early how to transmute it for the sake of my own survival. I found that it can be the source of a powerful alchemy. If we are up to the task, it could help us create something good together…
I’ll give the last word to The Clash: “Let fury have the hour / anger can be power / did you know that you can use it?”
Celebrity is a mask that eats the face
From John Updike’s Self-Consciousness: Memoirs:
Celebrity, even the modest sort that comes to writers, is an unhelpful exercise in self-consciousness. Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being ‘somebody,’ to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his over animation. One can either see or be seen. Most of the best fiction is written out of early impressions, taken in before the writer became conscious of himself as a writer. The best seeing is done by the hunted and the hunter, the vulnerable and the hungry; the ‘successful’ writer acquires a film over his eyes. His eyes get fat. Self-importance is a thickened, occluding form of self-consciousness. The binge, the fling, the trip — all attempt to shake the film and get back under the dining room table, with a child’s beautifully clear eyes.
(via @claytoncubitt)
Surprise is an enabler of seeing
In Alan Jacobs’ latest newsletter, he tells a story of literally stumbling into the Pantheon and San Lorenzo in Lucina while wandering around Rome. (It’s so delicious to think about actually being able to flaneur and wander around a foreign city again one day.) Alan points out how different it felt to happen upon them by chance vs. actively seeking them out.
“Surprise is the great enabler of seeing,” Alan writes.
He points to a passage in Walker Percy’s essay, “The Loss of the Creature” (collected in The Message in the Bottle) in which Percy explores how education and classification systems blind us, essentially, to the reality of things we’re trying to see. For example, a man taking a trip to see the Grand Canyon:
Why is it almost impossible to gaze directly at the Grand Canyon under these circumstances and see it for what it is — as one picks up a strange object from one’s back yard and gazes directly at it? It is almost impossible because the Grand Canyon, the thing as it is, has been appropriated by the symbolic complex which has already been formed in the sightseer’s mind. Seeing the canyon under approved circumstances is seeing the symbolic complex head on. The thing is no longer the thing…. it is rather that which has already been formulated—by picture postcard, geography book, tourist folders, and the words Grand Canyon.
In another newsletter that hit my inbox this morning, Oliver Burkeman posted an excerpt from his forthcoming Four Thousand Weeks, about his problem of trying to “live in the moment” while trying to take in the Northern Lights.
The more Burkeman tried to take them in and be in the moment, the more he failed. In fact, he got so far away from being in the moment by trying to be in the moment that he had a thought that still makes him squirm: “Oh, I found myself thinking, they look like one of those screensavers.”
The attempt to “be here now” feels not so much relaxing as rather strenuous – and it turns out that trying to have the most intense possible present-moment experience is a surefire way to fail. […] To try to live in the moment implies that you’re somehow separate from “the moment,” and thus in a position to either succeed or fail at living in it.
Part of the problem is that the brain only really registers what it doesn’t expect to see.
When we think of seeing, we imagine the eyes sending a bunch of data to the brain and then the brain interpreting all that data.
“It turns out, however, that the brain does not work like this at all,” Carlo Rovelli writes in Helgoland. “It functions, in fact, in an opposite way. Many, if not most, of the signals do not travel from the eyes to the brain; they go the other way, from the brain to the eyes.”
What happens is that the brain expects to see something, on the basis of what it knows and has previously occurred. The brain elaborates an image of what it predicts the eyes should see. This information is conveyed from the brain to the eyes, through intermediate states. If a discrepancy is revealed between what the brain expects and the light arriving into the eyes, only then do the neural circuits send signals toward the brain. So images from around us do not travel from the eyes to the brain—only news of discrepancies regarding what the brain expects do.
This, Rovelli points out, is actually a very efficient way of functioning: no need to worry the brain with what it already knows is there.
The implications for the relationship between what we see and the world, however, are remarkable. When we look around ourselves, we are not truly “observing”: we are instead dreaming of an image of the world based on what we know (including bias and misconception) and unconsciously scrutinizing the world to reveal any discrepancies, which, if necessary, we will try to correct.
Surprising the brain, however, is almost impossible to plan or strategize! You can’t really will surprise, you can only put yourself in situations where you have a better chance of being surprised.
It’s easy to surprise your brain by looking around a foreign country, but much harder to do in your everyday environment. (In Rob Walker’s excellent The Art of Noticing, he suggests trying to be a tourist in your own town, and to “Spot Something New Every Day.”)
An artist makes the ordinary extraordinary, but if we only really register what we aren’t expecting to see, a great part of the artist’s job is to try to estrange his mind from the ordinary things he’s trying to see.
“Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.”
I am fond of drawing tricks as tools for estrangement: drawing something upside down, drawing something without looking at the paper, etc.
But seeing with fresh eyes is never a simple task.
I suppose all one can really do is keep your eyes peeled.
Absence of certainty, awareness of ignorance
The physicist Carlo Rovelli has a beautiful way of talking about science in terms of ignorance and curiosity.
In Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution, he writes:
I believe that one of the greatest mistakes made by human beings is to want certainties when trying to understand something. The search for knowledge is not nourished by certainty: it is nourished by a radical absence of certainty. Thanks to the acute awareness of our ignorance, we are open to doubt and can continue to learn and to learn better. This has always been the strength of scientific thinking—thinking born of curiosity, revolt, change.
He wrote almost the same thing almost two decades earlier, in his book The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy:
Science, I believe is a passionate search for always newer ways to conceive the world. Its strength lies not in the certainties it reaches but in a radical awareness of the vastness of our ignorance. This awareness allows us to keep questioning our own knowledge, and, thus, to continue learning. Therefore the scientific quest for knowledge is not nourished by certainty, it is nourished by a radical lack of certainty. Its way is fluid, capable of continuous evolution, and has immense strength and a subtle magic. It is able to overthrow the order of things and reconceive the world time and again.
I think he could also be talking about art.
Filed under: not knowing
- ← Newer posts
- 1
- …
- 97
- 98
- 99
- 100
- 101
- …
- 618
- Older posts→