Sublimated artistic desire?

Alan Waller
Sep 5, 2018 · 5 min read

It’s hard to know what I want to “do” artistically. The other day I started looking at tutorials for how to make videogames, simple ones. I got very excited imagining all the things I could make if I know how to program, or use the software efficiently. But the kind of games I’d like to make are not games where you score points and defeat enemies — I’d like to game games where you wander around worlds, seeing interesting things, speaking to people and listening to music. An interactive museum. So I thought to myself, does it really need to be a game? It seems like what I want to do could be achieved by just… making visual art and music, telling stories via text or cinema, etc. Ah, but that’s another one. If I started writing a novel, is a novel the format I really want? Is it perhaps a movie which I want to make, but I sacrifice that medium and decide to express it in words? Even this blog. I’m very excited about writing again, I had been making videos on YouTube for ages and now it feels great to just write. It makes me wonder: were there videos where actually what I wanted was to write, but I turned the camera on instead? It’s like a lot of artistic avenues are opening up, and with them the possibility of sublimation, of trying to find what’s the thing I “really” want to do.

Of course, this is all very silly. But it’s a trap I get into a lot. I wonder: why spend hours learning how to program videogames, if all I want to do is draw stories? Why not just draw a comic book? Is the act of learning to make videogames simply an unconscious way of “prolonging” my inactivity? I *could* just sit down and write, or draw. I have the tools and the ability to do so. But I can’t just sit down and make a game. So learning to make games somehow helps me procrastinate even more, to prolong the fatal act of creation even more, to turn it into something in the future, something that doesn’t require my attention now. How is it that making art is so stressful? It involves a great degree of existential stress for me, maybe because of, precisely, how personal it is — it’s like a ritual in which you’re invoking your Self out from the depths, your sleepy self. Well, but the question is: is it really a form of sublimation? Or is making videogames a cool and interesting thing I could learn? I don’t see why I shouldn’t learn to make games and also draw comics and write, etc. They’re not mutually exclusive. But in my mind there is like a tendency to reach for a single point in the horizon and just head towards it at full speed. An obsessive mystico-directedness: I just want to trance out and Ommm my way to nirvana. But before that, I need to decide which Omm to sing, and what direction to point in. :S

So yeah, it’s very obsessive, very obsessive. There is also an unwillingness to take things one step at a time. If today I want to learn a bit of programming, a bit of easy videogame code, why not? So what if I just learn the basics and never get TRULY INTO the world of programming. It will have been fun, and a mental exercise! Every learning experience is good imo, it all stretches the mental muscles. Great! And when I get into that mood, it all rolls on very nicely. Taking things one step at a time. Very Zen. Yes.

But of course, I do think there is a value in teleology, in seeking goals, in heading towards goals, and that requires a degree of sacrifice: of not doing some things, and instead investing all your energy into these other things. But maybe learning the “useless” things, doing the “useless” things is a way of dissolving this obsessive desire for “usefulness”. Maybe this drive for usefulness needs to be softened a little bit, and it might be precisely by following your heart step by step. Your head, your mind, works in terms of past and future, but your heart works in terms of the now, step by step. I suppose the head and its capacity for abstraction are good for what they do, and the heart for what it does, but they need to work together. That’s good. The working together. So, it’s not a sort of moral relativism, where either extreme is just as good. No, it’s like… both and. I guess. I don’t know, it’s a confusing subject. In any case, the good thing (and the trap I have set for myself!) is that, in order to explore these issues, I need to make ART. In this case, writing. So, I am wondering if writing is a sublimated desire or whether it is truly what I want to spend my time with. But in order to discuss that I need to find a form of self-expression that is at hand, in this case, writing. So art is the revelation of dilemmas, which being revealed add a new puzzle piece to the map. I’m following the map while making art, but my DOUBTS, my FEARS about the inaccuracy of the map, are PRECISELY the topics of my art, so the fears feed the art and the art transmutes them into hope via a new perspective, a road in the map that hadn’t been seen before. Expressing things, materialising them, is so different from just thinking them. The expression, the “art” somehow transmutes the emotional and intellectual content of it. One cannot see it until it has been expressed. One may have serious fears about this dead end in the road, this dead in in the map. A fear is felt, and thought, and one thinks, “there is nothing to be done, so, there is no point in expressing this fear”. Ah, but in the expression of the fear in a material medium, the fear becomes 3rd person, it becomes external, and one gains an entirely new perspective on it (a 3rd person perspective). It is truly bizarre: the same idea when thought, is different when expressed. The effects this has on the psyche are drastic. It is the mystery of art. See you! Good bye.

Alan Waller

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