You can’t do it on your own, and that’s okay
Dreadful title, right? You’re probably thinking “This guy’s totally hotdoggin’ it.” Unfortunately, it’s the best I can come up with for whatever reason, and it’s the only way I can describe what I’ve been feeling lately about what I do, why I do it, and how I want to change it before I get old and useless and it’s way too late.
As a creative writer, musician, songwriter, music addict, and arts journalist/editor, my tastes in pretty much everything are constantly in flux. If you put my iTunes on shuffle, you’d probably jump from visionary Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu to A Tribe Called Quest’s seminal 1993 album Midnight Marauders. I have read books and watched films from all over the world, but sometimes a passing glance with a stranger can stir more inspiration in me than Tolstoy’s best short stories.
So, as you can probably imagine, it’s super difficult for me to see one thing through to the end, let alone to complete the handful of things I’d like to accomplish by the time I’m 30. Seriously, it’s become kind of a real problem in the past year.
I feel like if I don’t finish my first novel, a short story collection and poetry collections; record an album of solo guitar/vocal/experimental songs, get a really kickass band happening, finish my degree, or produce an interactive, inter-media art installation by the time I’m 30, I’ll be totally shafted for the rest of my creative career. (I am actually trying to do all these things. Ask me about them sometime! I have literally oodles of things to say about them.)
However, my views have sort of changed about that recently. It’s not like my artistic anxieties and concerns are absolved or have lost relevance to me in any way. They’ll be there for as long as I stay with the craft. But not only do I have plenty of time to do all that, I also shouldn’t even be thinkingof getting old in the first place.
A moment of clarity came from a somewhat unexpected source. I suppose it’s not that unexpected, but the way it came through my thick, scatterbrained, twenty-something skull was something sort of interesting to me.
I saw a baby the other day. Babies are so weird. They’re like little aliens or something, the way they grab their little feet and look at everything with a raw, honest-to-goodness wonderment more huge than any grown person can possibly have. For some reason, as I took the elevator up to the grad lounge for some lunch and saw that a baby was in it (like, its mother was with it; it wasn’t just out and about doing business), I realized, “I’ve been literally surroundedby people my age for the last two and a half years. I’ve only been getting one, very particular, experience of the world!”
In a more broad sense, and in more of a slow burn, hindsight realization, I’ve also encountered more mature people in my recent work with The Ontarion and in my last year of school. I’ve engaged in more varied, productive, informative dialogues with older people in the arts community and my own academic environment, and it’s been an amazingly inspiring and humbling experience, especially knowing of their contributions beforehand.
It doesn’t seem that revelatory, I know. For Christ’s sake, two good friends of mine just visited Angkor Wat a few months ago. That’s revelatory. But, still, I think it’s important to realize, after getting wrapped up so much in academics and my peers in the community, that there are so many perspectives we’re overlooking because we’re wrapped up in the world of our twenties.
And, to be honest, twenty-somethings kind of suck sometimes. And it kind of sucks being a twenty-something.
But that’s okay. We get jaded pretty quickly and pretty easily, and we’re often too reactionary for our own good. And it’s alright. University drains us and changes us. I get that. You do too. We feel transient – in between the “real world” and our education is a really awful place to be sometimes. It’s a pivotal and often frustrating moment in our lives. But we need to make room to have our minds totally blown by something – hell, even if it’s from our own enthusiasm towards something.
I think most art is inherently selfish. Regardless of the goals we have for it, or how it’s going to come to its fullest potential, we do it for ourselves. We do it because there’s something in us that won’t cease until we’ve said what we need to. And when our selfishness runs dry, where do you end up? In the wonderful world of creative frustration.
A little moment like the baby encounter sparked me to just stop, shut the fuck up about myself, marvel at things once in a while, and really re-evaluate how I experience my world as an artist. My experience, surely, isn’t the only one that counts. There are so many experiences to tap into and empathize with, and to understand and absorb in a more productive way.
All this isn’t to say I’m going to adopt a more neo-primitivist approach to my art or anything like that. If anything, the core of my work won’t change at all. But the way I want to integrate my work with the experience of the community, and others in general, seems to be going through a necessary overhaul. I’m becoming a bit less selfish, which is quite a bit for an artist.
In a city like Guelph, where so many artistic initiatives are focused on community-building and social practice, I’ve quickly come to realize that I can’t do it all by myself. No artist can. Creating anything worthwhile requires a community of people you know, people you don’t, and people that occupy, maintain, and breathe life into the spaces we use to create art that’s worth anything. So, if you’re like me and have had enough of giving up on projects or losing the motivation, perhaps it’s time to step outside of yourself and evaluate where you are, what you can do with it, and how you can make it better.