Being preoccupied with our selves is a natural default position in life. As David Foster Wallace describes it in This Is Water, it’s a natural default setting because, mostly, no major event happens in our lives without us being at the center of it.
Wallace suffered from a depression all his life, which eventually killed him, but he was a great thinker and writer. And he is also responsible for promoting another great line, which is the perfect antidote for self-consciousness, and may have originated with Olin Miller, reminding us that ‘people who worry about what other people think off them should realise that they seldom do.’
Who we think we are – or more enigmatically – who we are able to let ourselves be, is a problem that radiates within the heart of creativity. This is because, like it or not, all creativity, and particularly singing and song writing, is an extension of oursense of selves.
It is probably here that the problem of wanting and striving to be perfect can build a destructive momentum. Self-consciousness can be fuel for a desire to be perfect and can result in a constricted immobility, or worse, a sneering contempt for the creative attempts of others.
To be free is to be able to play with the materials available and to turn them into something good for the pleasure of ourselves and maybe some others. To be creative is to be free to be yourself; whatever that is and whatever we make – or let – it be.
The Problem of Being Famous
If you have the inclination and a spare half an hour to read it, Jack Marx’s Walkley wonderful story about his short–lived friendship with Russell Crowe is a powerful insight into the deeply self-conscious world many public people live through.
A short way into the story, there is a moment when Russell Crowe invites Marx, who is a music journalist among other things, to his home and asks an assistant to sit Marx in a room where music from Crowe’s band Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts is playing.
The truth of the matter is not made clear in the story, but Marx is suspicious that Russell Crowe has set up a camera in the corner of the room and is watching Marx’s reactions to the music so as to, I guess, read an honest opinion of his musical talent.
It’s a story of the sad self-consciousness that comes with public acclaim and the desperation people can have for external validation of others. Something, I suppose, we all suffer from because our default settings also seem to make it difficult to accept ourselves for the mystery that we truly are. We are, also, imaginatively capable of deluding ourselves with fantasy in a world where we are never totally certain objectively of what we can actually do as we drift through time making the best of our lot.
If it’s any consolation, perhaps recognizing that popularity creative work represents nothing more than a consensus of popular opinions, and those opinions are often heavily influenced by the weakness many of us have of wanting to belong and like what everyone else does. It’s a rare thing to find people who can stand against fashion and like something unpopular just because they do.
Artistic tastes go through periods of fashion because people are convinced that what is popular is good. Our current fascination with people who are ‘influencers’ is what this is all about.
Creativity is Playing Around – a Lot
In any case, being able to play with creative work and do something that may – or may not – represent some form of your own mysterious self takes a lot of courage. It requires answering the negative and destructive thoughts that arise within yourselfcarefully and kindly so as to nurture self-acceptance and find the freedom to play around and see what works.
For a whole range of reasons associated with anxiety embedded in our times – just look at how many remakes there are of films nowadays – we are living through a period where sameness and safe works of creativity are being generated by people afraid to make a mistake on their way to creating something new because it wouldn’t be perfect.
The illusion we all often share is this problem of perfection, and it was probably best illustrated in the book Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland:
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
James Gallaway