Conversations Between Me and Myself
In which creative inertia qualifies me for godhood, apparently
Me: Man, how did therapy make me WORSE at doing art? I didn’t have much figured out about what I wanted to say, and sure, my technique wasn’t great, but at least I wasn’t sitting over a half-finished painting covered in tears of frustration and self-loathing, unable to either finish the fucking thing or walk away.
Myself: Making honest art is hard. You made a lot of things before now, but you were never consciously trying to put anything of yourself in them. As a result, you communicated more subconsciously, but felt less vulnerable while doing so. Now, you’re trying to put everything on the page, for whatever that means at the time, and that’s fucking terrifying.
It’s the biggest possible hurdle for the artist, or maybe it’s just a nice stack of hurdles, two or three of ’em piled up into a barricade to keep the zombies out. It’s the “am I good enough to put something coherent on the page” hurdle, of course, Numero Uno if you will. Which you will.
It’s also the “am I good enough to communicate something other people can parse” hurdle — the one that comes with impostor syndrome, and elitism, and “nothing new under the sun”. The one that makes you look at your work and scorn every fragment of symbolism as a cliche, as if to write anything but your own new, invented words in an order unprecedented in history is somehow unoriginal. It’s Ulysses or nothing, is it? And will we be grinding our paints from the flowers and stones, next?
Clear that one, and bang your ankles on the last one: “am I good enough to communicate something authentic about myself?” That one might take you a lifetime to clear, because honest self-examination is hard enough, but communicating anything you discover in the mirror is always going to be…
Me: Impossible.
Myself: I wouldn’t put it like that, but yes, ultimately it’s probably impossible. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. That’s the whole point, yes? Absurdism. We know this hill has no top. We know there is no possible win state. We play anyway, because we choose to, because we can choose to.
There is no possible way to communicate self-discovery to anyone else — it’s non-transferable. But that’s true in the same way that there is no way to communicate the actual experience of a journey to someone who wasn’t there. The map is not the territory, but the map sure as hell can help another person navigate similar territory, and your story might be pertinent the next time someone’s in a similar situation. They’ll take it in, through their own lens, and apply it to their own world. If you communicated anything that resonates through all of that, you’ve done a wonder.
That’s why we make things. We have one unique, utterly irreplaceable thing in this life: our perspective, the world as we experience it. The combination of time and place, chemicals and genetics, environment and chance that resulted in your gaze will never again be repeated. If you don’t tell us what you see… no one else will ever be able to see it.
Like the phasmid says:
You are a violent and irrepressible miracle. The vacuum of cosmos and the stars burning in it are afraid of you. Given enough time you would wipe us all out and replace us with nothing — just by accident.
Everything your eyes touch goes back there — behind the nerve mirror. What if you blink? Are we still here? (Please don’t blink.) What if you misplace us all one day — or just forget?
- Disco Elysium (2019)
We have this one moment, this one immortal day. This one time to speak. What if we forget? Are we still here?
(Please don’t blink.)
Me: We make things to prove that the world exists outside us. To make it so if it isn’t so. To not be alone.
Myself: Same reason God made things, they say.
Me: Every painting is a self-portrait. Every book is an autobiography. Every world is a god?
Myself: Capable of both the creation of new worlds, and their destruction? Yep, checks out.
No idea what I’m doing? Me neither. Join the club:
