Week 08: Recovering a Sense of Strength
Jul. 14th, 2014 08:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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artistswayI learn by going where I have to go – Theodore Roethke
So, a lot of things hurt. Growth hurts. Rejection hurts. So do impatient toleration, insincere praise, and lack of interest. So does realizing that something you were trying to make just isn't working right now. So does criticism sometimes, even if it's really good criticism that will help you in the end. In weight training, you learn that injury isn't just a roadblock on the way to strength – it's in an important sense intrinsic to it. You have to break yourself down in small ways in order to build back stronger.
One of the biggest difficulties for a lot of people in dealing with artistic injuries is that we don't want to think of them as important, or we don't want to feel like we're weak or whiny. Some of us have a negative image of the “kind” of person who responds badly to artistic loss: emo kids, drama queens, egomaniacs! We're not like them. We're tough and realistic! Anyway, no one cares about your stupid dream, so neither should you. Right?
Go easier on yourself. Acknowledging the injury doesn't have to mean fighting back every time someone interrogates your text from the wrong perspective. It doesn't mean you have to spend the rest of the day on the floor listening to Morissey or waste all your time dwelling on the past. It won't change you from a strong person into a weak one to say, “That hurt.”
Ignoring injuries doesn't make us stronger. Most of the time, it makes them worse. This week, Cameron suggests spending some time with old injuries, little and big, from outside of us and from within.
Some injuries can come from teachers – bad teachers who resent their students, overworked teachers who are frustrated and tired, teachers who don't get what we're trying to do, and teachers who discourage us inadvertently in the course of trying to teach a new way of thinking or writing. Others can be self-inflicted. Sometimes they're a little of both. The relationship between other-
inflicted and self-inflicted injuries can be pretty tangled.
Of course, if you're sick of poking at your old injuries, or really didn't have that many to begin with, you should go ahead and skip this part.
I'm not thrilled with Cameron's discussion of “cerebration” and the pitfalls of academia. “Artists and intellectuals are not the same animal,” she says. “[M]ost academics know how to take something apart, but not how to assemble it.” (132)
Is this true? It doesn't feel true to me. Art isn't a vastly separate activity from science or economics or criticism. It's not a magical energy flow that ripples through spacetime to incarnate itself in beadwork and film scores; it's a thing people do with their pattern-seeking brains. It's not that different from all the other things we do. Academics and creatives aren't two different animals; they aren't even necessarily two different people. Sometimes they're the same person on the same day, in the same respect. It's not a paradox! We're just really, really complex.
But that's not the point, is it? The point is, there's no sense in analyzing or extensively criticizing a creative endeavor in embryo, any more than in signing a fetus up for T-ball. Give your creative work time to get born before you worry about its motor skills. If you find yourself picking and worrying about something new or unformed, or letting other people mess with the process in unhelpful ways, it's ok to say: Shhh. Back off. It's still growing.
In the academia section, I think the imagery of “putting together / taking apart” obscures more than it clarifies. Didn't we just enjoy the inspiring image, last week, of Michaelangelo chipping his David out of the marble? Taking things apart, whether to make something new out of them or to understand how they work, is not the opposite of creativity. It can be a tool for creativity, and it can be a creative act in itself. Good academic writing of all kinds can fill the well as much as trees and museums and the comic book store. Over-analysis and criticism at the wrong stage can mess things up, but so can any valuable tool if you jam it in sideways where it isn't needed.
As previously noted, Cameron and I are not the same person. I'm also not the same person as anyone reading this, and my flights of grumpiness should be taken with just as much salt as Cameron's flights of Cameronosity. If thinking in terms of a wall of separation between “intellectual” and “artistic” helps keep you from getting blocked by criticism, snarky professors, and snobbery, then go for it!
Gain disguised as loss is a framing issue: every new beginning, as the song says, is some other beginning's end. Cameron encourages us to see loss as opportunity, to ask, “What next?” instead of “Why me?” The discussion and examples here can slide into some privilege-tastic territory, but it's not a bad idea to keep looking for opportunities to practice your art wherever you can find them – a free life drawing class, a NaNo meetup, a fanfic exchange, a fabric giveaway – and to practice thinking of ends as beginnings whenever possible.
Take time to console your artist self when things go wrong. Take ten minutes off to meditate if that's your thing, listen to an Epic Rap Battle, make a LOLcats calendar for your relative who won't stop sending you pictures of cats, treat yourself to a free artist's date or a cup of coffee or tea – whatever cheers you up and makes you feel active, engaged, or refreshed.
There's a brief return to the idea that it's too early, or too late, to take up something new or pick up where you left off. This is shenanigans; creativity happens in the moment and the moment is whenever we say it is.
The most important thing is to keep taking small steps-- what Cameron calls filling the form. She doesn't explain this metaphor, but I guess it's like filling out the blanks on an application, one by one? The point is that a lot of people have worries about what might happen if they dedicated more of their lives to art – they'd have to move, there would be family drama, maybe they would lose friends, and then what if they wrote a whole novel and no one liked it? What if it's all for nothing? What if they become famous and then die, and Columbia University Press publishes all their second-person Jack Sparrow fanfic in a four-volume critical edition with copious footnotes and their ghost is embarrassed forever?
It's easy to worry about big-picture fears when we could be painting or sculpting or drawing or writing. “Contemplating the odds” is one way of avoiding taking small steps. Don't do it! Or at least restrict it to one evening a week, and leave the rest of the week for action.
There is (almost?) always one creative thing you can do, no matter how tiny. If you have five minutes or two minutes, you can sketch on a post-it note or a pad of paper (character-limited forms, like those on Facebook and Twitter, can be good for composing tiny stories or poems), jot down dialogue, mark down a tune that's been following you. Everything is made of something. Novels are made of words, paintings are made of brushstrokes, forests are made of trees which are made of branches and roots and leaves and bark and plant cells. Every step is a step. In fact, you should probably stop reading this and do a small creative thing right now.
Did you do your morning pages? Don't forget to schedule a date with your artist this week!
So, a lot of things hurt. Growth hurts. Rejection hurts. So do impatient toleration, insincere praise, and lack of interest. So does realizing that something you were trying to make just isn't working right now. So does criticism sometimes, even if it's really good criticism that will help you in the end. In weight training, you learn that injury isn't just a roadblock on the way to strength – it's in an important sense intrinsic to it. You have to break yourself down in small ways in order to build back stronger.
One of the biggest difficulties for a lot of people in dealing with artistic injuries is that we don't want to think of them as important, or we don't want to feel like we're weak or whiny. Some of us have a negative image of the “kind” of person who responds badly to artistic loss: emo kids, drama queens, egomaniacs! We're not like them. We're tough and realistic! Anyway, no one cares about your stupid dream, so neither should you. Right?
Go easier on yourself. Acknowledging the injury doesn't have to mean fighting back every time someone interrogates your text from the wrong perspective. It doesn't mean you have to spend the rest of the day on the floor listening to Morissey or waste all your time dwelling on the past. It won't change you from a strong person into a weak one to say, “That hurt.”
Ignoring injuries doesn't make us stronger. Most of the time, it makes them worse. This week, Cameron suggests spending some time with old injuries, little and big, from outside of us and from within.
Some injuries can come from teachers – bad teachers who resent their students, overworked teachers who are frustrated and tired, teachers who don't get what we're trying to do, and teachers who discourage us inadvertently in the course of trying to teach a new way of thinking or writing. Others can be self-inflicted. Sometimes they're a little of both. The relationship between other-
inflicted and self-inflicted injuries can be pretty tangled.
Of course, if you're sick of poking at your old injuries, or really didn't have that many to begin with, you should go ahead and skip this part.
I'm not thrilled with Cameron's discussion of “cerebration” and the pitfalls of academia. “Artists and intellectuals are not the same animal,” she says. “[M]ost academics know how to take something apart, but not how to assemble it.” (132)
Is this true? It doesn't feel true to me. Art isn't a vastly separate activity from science or economics or criticism. It's not a magical energy flow that ripples through spacetime to incarnate itself in beadwork and film scores; it's a thing people do with their pattern-seeking brains. It's not that different from all the other things we do. Academics and creatives aren't two different animals; they aren't even necessarily two different people. Sometimes they're the same person on the same day, in the same respect. It's not a paradox! We're just really, really complex.
But that's not the point, is it? The point is, there's no sense in analyzing or extensively criticizing a creative endeavor in embryo, any more than in signing a fetus up for T-ball. Give your creative work time to get born before you worry about its motor skills. If you find yourself picking and worrying about something new or unformed, or letting other people mess with the process in unhelpful ways, it's ok to say: Shhh. Back off. It's still growing.
In the academia section, I think the imagery of “putting together / taking apart” obscures more than it clarifies. Didn't we just enjoy the inspiring image, last week, of Michaelangelo chipping his David out of the marble? Taking things apart, whether to make something new out of them or to understand how they work, is not the opposite of creativity. It can be a tool for creativity, and it can be a creative act in itself. Good academic writing of all kinds can fill the well as much as trees and museums and the comic book store. Over-analysis and criticism at the wrong stage can mess things up, but so can any valuable tool if you jam it in sideways where it isn't needed.
As previously noted, Cameron and I are not the same person. I'm also not the same person as anyone reading this, and my flights of grumpiness should be taken with just as much salt as Cameron's flights of Cameronosity. If thinking in terms of a wall of separation between “intellectual” and “artistic” helps keep you from getting blocked by criticism, snarky professors, and snobbery, then go for it!
Gain disguised as loss is a framing issue: every new beginning, as the song says, is some other beginning's end. Cameron encourages us to see loss as opportunity, to ask, “What next?” instead of “Why me?” The discussion and examples here can slide into some privilege-tastic territory, but it's not a bad idea to keep looking for opportunities to practice your art wherever you can find them – a free life drawing class, a NaNo meetup, a fanfic exchange, a fabric giveaway – and to practice thinking of ends as beginnings whenever possible.
Take time to console your artist self when things go wrong. Take ten minutes off to meditate if that's your thing, listen to an Epic Rap Battle, make a LOLcats calendar for your relative who won't stop sending you pictures of cats, treat yourself to a free artist's date or a cup of coffee or tea – whatever cheers you up and makes you feel active, engaged, or refreshed.
"Do you know how old I'll be by the time I learn to play the piano?"
"The same age you will be if you don't."
There's a brief return to the idea that it's too early, or too late, to take up something new or pick up where you left off. This is shenanigans; creativity happens in the moment and the moment is whenever we say it is.
The most important thing is to keep taking small steps-- what Cameron calls filling the form. She doesn't explain this metaphor, but I guess it's like filling out the blanks on an application, one by one? The point is that a lot of people have worries about what might happen if they dedicated more of their lives to art – they'd have to move, there would be family drama, maybe they would lose friends, and then what if they wrote a whole novel and no one liked it? What if it's all for nothing? What if they become famous and then die, and Columbia University Press publishes all their second-person Jack Sparrow fanfic in a four-volume critical edition with copious footnotes and their ghost is embarrassed forever?
It's easy to worry about big-picture fears when we could be painting or sculpting or drawing or writing. “Contemplating the odds” is one way of avoiding taking small steps. Don't do it! Or at least restrict it to one evening a week, and leave the rest of the week for action.
There is (almost?) always one creative thing you can do, no matter how tiny. If you have five minutes or two minutes, you can sketch on a post-it note or a pad of paper (character-limited forms, like those on Facebook and Twitter, can be good for composing tiny stories or poems), jot down dialogue, mark down a tune that's been following you. Everything is made of something. Novels are made of words, paintings are made of brushstrokes, forests are made of trees which are made of branches and roots and leaves and bark and plant cells. Every step is a step. In fact, you should probably stop reading this and do a small creative thing right now.
Did you do your morning pages? Don't forget to schedule a date with your artist this week!
