creativity

It’s about time I shared my secret — the reason for this whole blog thing, the whole publishing thing, the whole writing thing.

I want to go to Antarctica.

The origin of that desire is sort of secondary, though it’s not exactly a mystery. The anime A Place Further than the Universe affected me really deeply at a time when I didn’t know what to do. It’s about a quartet of teenagers going to Anarctica to recapture their youth, to find out what happened to a character’s mother. It’s an excellent show, but it leaves only an oblique forensic impact on my larger ambitions surrounding the continent.

Antarctica is also the last true frontier on Earth, if you don’t count the ocean. But I do count the ocean, and I have no desire to go down there, let alone Mars. I would maybe go to the moon, but I vibe with the moon aesthetically.

Why do I want to go to Antarctica, then? It’s not any kind of practical goal. I could see it from a plane, or a cruise, or even a guided land tour. Maybe the latter of those would satisfy me, but it’s never how I imagined things going. My plan, if I have a plan, has to do with the Antarctic Artists & Writers Program — even though, my approach is generally more journalistic than a lot of artists you find in this program. Mary Roach is a major inspiration, and she went to Antarctica, but she’s a science writer and my interest in physical science is about as great as my knowledge of what a cell is. That is, shoddy.

So I’ve made up some kind of end goal, and I have a very specific idea of how I want to get there. (Woah, déjà vu.) I know roughly when I started wanting it, what corresponds to my wanting to go, but it’s not really a reason.

The reason is that I decided it. I made a decision that I would try. I pick up and drop a lot of things, but Antarctica has never been one of them. It stuck.

Sometimes you just have to do something difficult, you know? I suffer as much as anyone else from malaise, from frustration, from melancholy. But on the whole, life is pretty easy these days (in the parts of the world I interact with regularly). We live in a golden age of fun because most survivalistic concerns have been conquered. We’re afforded the chance to attend to more complex things.

That is: To say, “I wrote several works of nonfiction of which I am proud — I contributed to the great discussions of our time, I elevated public understanding on some range of topics, digital and analog minds replicated my name and voice across space” — these are complex. Too complex to grapple with as concepts of success.

To say, “I wrote myself to Antarctica.” That is a direction and a goal. And it isn’t just a goal in the sense of objective or target. It’s Ithaka.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

Arriving there is what you’re destined for.

But don’t hurry the journey at all.

Better if it lasts for years,

so you’re old by the time you reach the island,

wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,

not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Today I replaced not one, but two inserts into my Traveler’s Notebook. Which — very soon I might do a tour, because it is my favorite thing that I own.

I like to use the first page for quotes, but I try not to make them famous or meaningful ones. I prefer to write whatever’s going on in my language center at the moment and let the meaning emerge as the notebook gets filled.

Obviously the Shakespeare quote instantly betrays that preference, but it’s the one I kept thinking of:

Make death proud to take us.

From Antony and Cleopatra.

So to make up for it, the first quote comes from a Roadside America entry on Eddie, World’s Biggest Kid, in reference to the children that scurry around his entrails:

Are they learning to be saviors? Tormentors? Inconspicuous plasma passing through?

The whole article is really a treat.

EN: I had a really great weekend post-publishing of my piece in Tedium (linking once more for posterity), but I’m still learning to manage this writing, that writing, and the writing I make for my day job. This week I hope to return to some longer form idea mining. Maybe return to cell phone novels? Although I have some pretty long-overdue thoughts about pandemic media, since I’ve been watching a lot of Jenny Nicholson and made it through her catalog to the lockdown years. February may be the month of the Substack, so I’m looking forward to many exciting times ahead.

I lost my debit card today. UGH. Annoying. I hate losing things.

You know how you probably have one thing about yourself you really dislike? Something you say, like “literally” or “I guess” or “it’s funny,” or your posture, or how you always look at the ground when you walk instead of looking in front of you? Clumsiness is mine. There is not a glass of water I’ve drank in the last, I don’t know, five years that I haven’t spilled down the front of my shirt. It’s a miracle my computer still works, since I keep it under my desk just under where I keep a cup of coffee. There have been close calls.

It used to be these really dark circles under my eyes. Picrew saved me from that neuroticism, of all things. Not like it saved me from the circles themselves — I’ve always had them, and I think I always will despite spending a hundred dollars on retinol night cream back in college. No, it’s just that when I would make myself in the little character builder, I could usually toggle on an option for dark circles. Most Picrews are radically inclusive.

So that’s how I got over my dark circles: not by changing them, but by building an image of myself, outside of myself, that included them as a feature and not a flaw.

I don’t think I can do the same thing with clumsiness. After all, I can’t mechanically see my dark circles most of the time. They don’t affect me. And they carry this sleepless air which I’m really drawn to, on account of being a writer and also actually having insomnia. Even me saying, “I have insomnia,” feels a little like peacocking.

Clumsiness doesn’t signal anything. Today I lose my debit card, tomorrow I might blurt out the wrong pronouns or something. I mean, that’s an extreme example. But isn’t the opposite of clumsiness thoughtfulness?

(On second thought, that’s not true.)

Oh well. For what it’s worth, I don’t think I’m supposed to come to a conclusion about all of these things. I froze my card. I also made a clumsiness self-portrait in Ena’s Dreamcore Picrew. It’s a little on the nose, and I think it’s missing something, but I had a lot of fun.

I’m a WFH drone, meaning I spent a lot of time stressing about how my living space appears in 16:9. My partner tells me I’m awful at decorating — the only thing on my wall when she moved in was an apron.

So, I made two design choices. One: Anna Laura Art’s “The hero,” which has never not made me tear up.

Two: the sticky note wall. I love my sticky note wall. It’s on a door, which feels like a metaphor, but also it makes me look like a creative person. The currency of looking like a creative person is very high when you’re a writer. It’s solitary work.

My sixth or seventh blog post talked about my suspicions surrounding blogging, particularly as it pertains to specialization.

To summarize, blogs confuse me because I struggle to imagine an internet where people succeed without scissor-cutting their creative selves to fit niches in the algorithm. I worry I came across as pessimistic. (Because at that time I think I was pessimistic.)

Now, since I’m basically an expert blogger — 29 days into the year means 29 posts as of this one — I think I’ve shifted my perspective. Austin Kleon wrote,

“Don’t throw any of yourself away.”

I go back and forth all the time, should I go into writing or should I go into game design? When I picked writing, I had to decide whether I should write for audio or print? Short form or long form? Maybe a YouTube channel?

To view your creative life in those terms is pretty much begging to carry regret. If you decide to lug around the weight of everything you “could” have been working on, then of what use was the decision?

Today I feel really good about the direction of my creative life, and hopefully tomorrow I feel this way, too. I work in print, but maybe tomorrow I’ll start a big project in game design, or make a video. Even in print, I’ve learned that I love the format of the essay — something compact, 2-10k words, that makes an argument. I have ideas of the things I want to be working on.

And the best part is, I can start right now.

I was reading about why poets make bad businesspeople but great CEOs. This is something that’s always vexed me about paths through the publishing industry.

(I’m about to describe a very well-known business idea called the Peter principle, but I’m specifically talking about writing and passion, not general competence.)

I love writing. It feels like the kind of thing I want to do professionally for the rest of my life. If I do well, I get “promoted,” but promoted to what? Manager? Executive? Do these people write?

Won’t go any further into this because, again, it’s very trite and lots of people have observed this before. But it’s a good reminder not to use “upward” and “downward” ladder language when talking about jobs. A writer is not an aspiring media CEO.

Writer and game designer Matt Colville tells a story about a friend of his, an illustrator, inking a pencil drawing. Of the probability cloud of lines he’d sketched, that illustrator followed the best one with ink, and a professional drawing emerged. Matt Colville asked how he knew which line to follow. His friend replied, “Four years of art school.”

He said:

I generally think that, if you are someone who has it in you to lead a creative life […] I think the path you choose tends to be which, of all the different ways you can be an artist, did you first realize there was a person on the other side of.

Creativity is an impulse — some take it, some leave it — but it’s something that can be practiced. Maybe the path to a creative life starts by realizing that other people like you have gone before. The obsession with artists who change everything, go tortured into the bleak crags of unknown, goes down with the same flavor as the obsession with serial killers. Weird, dangerous, sort of sad. Idolize artists whose life you actually want to imitate.

Then, make like an illustrator, sketch thousands of lines of lead, and practice seeing the picture that already exists.

Corita Kent said:

I don’t think of [my work] as art — I just make things I like bigger.

Art is about liking and loving things. Criticism that relies on hate always leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Studying, adoring, eating something whole deepens your love for it. I think the only way to broaden your love for things in the world — to move more of the universe of things from your “don’t like” and “don’t care” columns into your “love” columns — is to see them through the eyes of someone else. I’ve always been afraid of bugs. The person I love most in the world loves bugs.

This is an orchid mantis. I love the orchid mantis.