New Track

In case you were unawares, I have a bandcamp site where I post my musix-making. This is my latest, an ode to disco and to Satan's interval.

Thoughts on Creative Identity

 I've never not known that I would be an artist in some capacity--in fact, it seemed redundant to say "I want to be an artist," since I felt it was already true if you could say it. Only when I was very very little did there seem to be the slightest disconnect between the "I" and the artist, because I couldn't draw as well as other classmates, or especially my older sister. It drove me crazy to work very hard on something and then see clearly how crappy it was. I wanted to make pretty things, and I could only make humorous or scary things, or worse, something adults would smile condescendingly at and say, "How creative...what is that?"

It wasn't until I started copying my favorite books--Trumpet of the Swan, Dominic, and the novelization of Aladdin--that I realized I was fascinated by the rhythm and aesthetic of words and sentences. I almost became tired of constantly having to define what it was I wanted to be When I Grew Up in school. It was always, author, author, author. Picture of book and pen and typewriter, the ubiquitous icons of literary involvement. Some people suffer their whole lives to find their Calling. I was born into it, I believe. Lucky? Captive?

There's this site BrainPickings that sends me their newsletter every so often, and I loved this recent issue about the common excuses we form as adults for not creating often enough. Much of the article quotes a 1949 guide called How to Avoid Work by William J. Reilly, a career counselor. It follows along the advice I received once in the ladies' room of the Rock and Roll Hotel in DC, during the time of my greatest crisis, both personal and vocational: the woman told me, Don't do it for the money. Do what you love, and the money will come.

(from http://www.brainpickings.org/)

"Actually, there is only one way in this world to achieve true happiness, and that is to express yourself with all your skill and enthusiasm in a career that appeals to you more than any other. In such a career, you feel a sense of purpose, a sense of achievement. You feel you are making a contribution. It is not work.

  Most [people] have the ridiculous notion that anything they do which produces an income is work – and that anything they do outside 'working' hours is play. There is no logic to that. … Your life is too short and too valuable to fritter away in work. If you don't get out now, you may end up like the frog that is placed in a pot of fresh water on the stove. As the temperature is gradually increased, the frog feels restless and uncomfortable, but not uncomfortable enough to jump out. Without being aware that a chance is taking place, be is gradually lulled into unconsciousness.

Much the same thing happens when you take a person and put him in a job which he does not like. He gets irritable in his groove. His duties soon become a monotonous routine that slowly dulls his senses. As I walk into offices, through factories and stores, I often find myself looking into the expressionless faces of people going through mechanical motions. They are people whose minds are stunned and slowly dying.

To illustrate the idea that "life really begins when you have discovered that you can do anything you want," Reilly quotes Amelia Earhart, a woman of strong and refreshing liberal for their time opinions:

I flew the Atlantic because I wanted to. If that be what they call 'a woman's reason,' make the most of it. It isn't, I think, a reason to be apologized for by man or woman. … Whether you are flying the Atlantic or selling sausages or building a skyscraper or driving a truck, your greatest power comes from the fact that you want tremendously to do that very thing, and do it well.

[Reilly] admonishes against the toxic "should"-culture we live in, arguably all the more pronounced today:

[…]

To my mind, the world would be a much pleasanter and more civilized place to live in, if everyone resolved to pursue whatever is closest to his heart's desire. We would be more creative and our productivity would be vastly increased. Altogether too much emphasis, I think, is being placed on what we ought to do, rather than what we want to do.

//

Graduating from college in 2008 was a bad bit of luck, especially with my field of expertise. Print was in a grand state of suffering with the "sudden" global economic debacle, and I had been living in a hole for too long to realize that people were actually taking online printing seriously. It seemed like a  masturbatory, un-reviewed free-for-all that I preferred to shun than to hop on board. Plus, the almighty "shoulds" were taking hold. I didn't want to make my parents feel they'd invested in my education in vain, so I applied for every Big Name publishing company and newspaper joint I could think of. I was green, terribly ignorant, terribly idealistic in every way. I also had no idea how to apply for jobs, to be dogged even with scraps for confidence. I received a twenty-minute admonishment from the editor of a jazz magazine (that has since gone belly-up) who detailed everything I had said and done wrong in my application process. It was a time of grand humiliation.

It didn't stop there. After failing to get even a pity-position as a copy editor somewhere, I began to realize that an even greater disservice to the gift of my degree would be to continue to be unemployed for four months. Then it became a question of work ethic. I couldn't ask anyone to pay for me to live while I "merely" scribbled at the novel I was envisioning. I didn't EVER want to sit back on privilege while the vast majority of the world was busy developing emotional maturity through the everyman experience of gruntwork. So I joined leagues with the service industry, at the expense of my very soul.

At first it was easy to romanticize the unromantic, like my older brother figures, Kerouac and Burroughs. I imagined myself the "genius waitress" (or hostess, as was the serial case) Tom Robbins lauded in his novel, the unsung beauty who would be swept up somehow. And yes, I was swept up, as many young women are, not to be encouraged to bloom, but in order to squash what was yet blooming. I learned that people are not so much impressed by and endeared to idealistic young women as they are eager to chop down the tallest, blondest tree. There is such thing as loving humanity too much. It takes you for a fucking ride.

After surviving attacks on my personality, my brainstuff, and my life, I realized I'd gone about it all wrong, by playing safe. Now I can safely say from a distance that perhaps that early suffering did my soul some good, in my understanding of evil, of the pathological patriarchy that continues to be passed through the generations, and of different forms of violence. Not one acquaintance in those almost two years I lived in the District knew or cared that I was a writer, a musician, a philoso-freak with brimming empathy and endless curiosity. I worked and worked at the front of restaurants, getting bullied and flattered and condescended to, making pennies, and having zero energy at the end of the day to actually be creative. I began to realize that no one wanted me to succeed, to blossom. Was I one of them?

That was during the most disease-ridden era of my life. The one winter, I ignored the signs of strep throat, continuing to party obsessively, hoping just once just once I'd recognize a kindred spirit, someone who would recognize my earnest desire to live creatively, and wouldn't just want to sexually abuse me. No luck. Finally, when it was getting hard just to move, I got antibiotics (and if you're a woman, you know just how terrible the cure for that disease can be). When I'd taken the whole regiment, it came right back, with a fury. I went through three regiments of antibiotics before I could speak again. We are psycho-somatic beings, I realize now, who create our own propensities for internal chaos.

While I was taking a much-needed soulrest in beautiful Australia, I posed to myself some hard questions. Was it more important to keep making money, no matter at what, to pay honor to my parents and to the working world? Or was it more important to not squander my talents in favor of some socially-constructed obligation? Would I ever find my true literary voice while deflecting the abusive flirtation of coworkers and exploitation of my managers? Was that really what my parents wanted for me?

It's easy to say "fuck your parents, do what you want." It's harder when you're blessed with generous art-appreciators who you once criticized harshly, but who ended up very literally helping to save your life. Parents are not static overlords. I have sympathy for homosexuals whose parents disown them, or for any adult living the best way she can, making carefully considered decisions, only to be ostracized or alienated. It's a real thing. But people can and do grow, and I believe my parents grew with me. But that quote about not putting too much stock into other peoples' opinions because they know less than you do about what you are really doing and what you need to do it is true. Unless you are following in your parents' footsteps directly--or even if you are--the world of career fields has drastically changed, both through technological advancements, and just the sea tides of human history. Some things never change--there are a finite number of personality types, and only a handful of basic physical types--but art is fluid.

Once I made the decision to plop myself down in the least-expensive and still art-filled city of Baltimore, among old friends who DID know and care what I was becoming while in college, things fell into place. I just squeaked into a dream job that, while not paying handsomely, does perform some critical enhancements to my creative identity: constant stimulation, social interaction, opportunities for problem-solving and to take advantage of the resources at a nationally-acclaimed art school. Though there are times I wonder if I couldn't be making more money at a full-time job within or outside of literary work, I know it is much more important to know that I have never been more creatively prolific. I do not consider it a coincidence.

Money is a disease, a product of the lock-and-key system humanity developed around the time that physical divisions of land became a priority, around the time the role of the female and of magic became greatly diminished. To ascribe too much power to monetary influence is to move away from the mysterious power of the universe, the great vastness that grants us the curiosity, intuition, and the compassion required to create. If we deny magic, we deny an entire portion of ourselves imbued with the possibility of transcendence. And to do that is to empower the forces of evil, the products of fear.

But rather than empower those forces MORE through avoidance, I'd like to train myself to enlist fear in the creation of courage. Creating is a terrifying thing. When we make children, we become more aware of death. When we create art, we become more aware of failure. The stakes change. But all the more so, we are imbued with an exceptional recklessness we can call love, or hope. Only through this creative recklessness will we reach beyond ourselves and touch something of the divine.

Here's to recklessness: may it move us forward into the sublime unknown.

Thumbshot

Thanks to the man in the bowler hat for this depiction of the illustrated Juliana--and for getting my thumbs right.

Will Shanklin 2012

Will Shanklin 2012