I had a good reminder yesterday. The UWC network has been running a series of webinars these past few weeks from alumni, teachers, National Committee representatives, bringing the community together for discussions and presentations. It’s been incredible, seeing the community come alive in this way–I’ve never felt so connected to the larger UWC network, one of the strangely connective points of this isolating pandemic.
Yesterday evening, an alum speaking about creativity in this age of pandemic said, “You are not your art.” It struck me. I wasn’t sure whether I agreed or disagreed. I want to pick apart this question here today. I’d love to hear what you think too. Thank you for stopping by.
Are we our art?
My first reaction was protest: that yes I am my writing. I am because the things I write are part of me, are close to me, because they grow out of my intimate feelings and observations on the world. These packets of words I tinker with for months are the closest thing I have to crystallizations of my thoughts. If they aren’t me, then what?
And yet I see it. The feeling of identity with what we make can blind and limit us. It can make us take constructive criticism personally, thus hampering our growth. A rejection can send us howling to the moon. If we can have that separation, if we can say, “I made this thing, but it is not me,” then the pain is less and the productivity is higher. Perhaps this is necessary and right.
Yet what do we lose, if we say the writing is not us? For I think we must lose something, like chopping off a bit of our souls to sell. There is something of the Dr. Frankenstein about it, the doctor rejecting his creation, which thereby makes his creation violent. I fear that when we split down with the axe and sever the identity of the writing with ourselves, the writing risks becoming monstrous, because its will is too far towards the caprices of market, abandoned by and abandoning the truth of our voice.
Sometimes I think writing is a kind of exorcism. A fear or doubt inside us works its way onto the page. It inhabits us fully and so darkly. Then at the end of the story, we see it there in its independent, blazing corporality. It has become a thing apart from us. We can look at it from the outside instead of in. Its power then is less, I think. By writing the thing out of ourselves, we then perhaps can let it go. It’s like we keep these demons on their islands each apart and let them be. Are they us? How about when we change? I read the things I wrote in times past, and I am the same, and I am different, and are those things still me?
I am not my writing because I can never get every piece of myself onto the page. It is always simulacrum. It is always partway there. They are like poor photographs from flip-phone cameras and all the metadata are removed. Just something else. I’m not sure.
I’m at my limit, for the time. I’ve got a day ahead of preparations for the school week, talks with a friend and my sister this evening. Things are good, even in this awful time.
Best wishes to you. Please be in touch.
Jimmy
Words like trees 