Getting things done
in which I define the hustle, and the danger of becoming good at the hustle
Art, like any job, has many parts which are a hustle. But for the artist(*), with a profession tightly linking the output of their work to their self-worth, this hustle acquires a very special place, and this is what I want to explore in this writ: the relation of that most intimate place of inspiration and creation of art… to the hustle.
As an artist, you often have to hustle for money, to be able to live, to have freedom to create. This can easily translate into feeling pushed to perform more, or create more, or write more grants, or some such. This can lead to a feeling of a never ending day in a never ending week, in which you have never achieved enough.
You have to hustle for recognition and connections - be places, talk to people, so that you have a healthy connection network, so that you can collaborate with people you want to work with. Everyone needs to find their own way of comfort in this, but for those who are not very extroverted, or for those who don’t enjoy swapping words, this can be a downright pain.
You have to hustle to organise your work group - find a way to deal with everyone’s schedule, health issues, emotional states, different visions, work ethics, money problems, cancellations, etc, while still trying to hold onto your artistic vision.
I’m not saying here that these things cannot interesting, beautiful or inspiring. But, to be honest, they can feel like a hustle.
And in this mayhem of deadlines, project requirements, team meetings, social life and money struggles, there is a danger that the hustle becomes what you are good at. The frantic pace you maintain with varying degrees of success has something thrilling in it, something of a rush. The successful juggling of yet another project gives you a certain high, and you feel on the top of the world. A very jagged, brisk world, probably smelling faintly of caffeine. You become successful at getting things done, at cutting corners and optimising for time and resources.
And while this may be an admirable skill to have, the question becomes, is art what you are getting done?
A calm place in the countryside
in which I denounce the hustle, talk about a movie, and draw a connection between wasteland and the calm place in the countryside
I am writing this because I have noticed the workings of this type of a hustle in myself and many around me. Some are completely aware of it, and dislike it. Some are still enjoying the rush. I, for one, want to disembark this particular train. Writing this is my private and public statement of the Bartleby, the Scrivener: I would prefer not to.
The threat today is not passivity but pseudo-activity, the urge to “be active”, to “participate”, to mask the Nothingness of what goes on”. Slavoj Žižek - The Parallax View, p. 334
Slavoj has a way with words, doesn’t he? If the intellectual format does not convince you, I made it into a haiku:
The urge to be active arises, to participate, to mask the Nothingness of what goes on.
Thinking of the hustle reminded me of an Italian movie Un Tranquillo Posto di Campagna, directed by the wonderful Elio Petri (with a wonderful soundtrack by Ennio Morricone). I saw this movie before I had committed fully to the art, but thinking about it now, I feel I can understand some more subtler aspects of it. The story goes - an artist, pushed to produce by his manager-consumer-wife and art agent, faces a maddening wasteland of inspiration and goes into the countryside for some regenerative time off. But his time off in the countryside is clearly marked by an objective - to regain his creativity. There is no rest, no time off. There is no genuine option of giving up. The calm place in the countryside is intended as a cure for the disease. But the trick is that once he arrives there, it is no longer a calm place in the countryside, because he arrives as a mess of wants and needs. His mess fills the old house, and transforms it into a place of horror.
I think the intention is right, but the approach is all wrong. He would probably have an easier time if he would straight out accept that he is done with painting. Maybe then, after a while, a new inspiration would be born, a new need would arise, and painting would flow naturally.
To abstain from action is sometimes exactly what is needed. And to abstain from any action which will make possible some future action (such as wanting to regain creativity).
No desperate squeezing of the unconscious for more content.
Nothing.
A rest, a quiet rest from creating.
A rest from wanting to create.
A quiet place in the countryside.
By this, I do not want to say that we should quit when we stumble upon an obstacle. By this I mean to say that we should develop ways of noticing when we are deep in the hustle, running dry on fuel and grim about the mouth. Then we should stop.
The fuel gauge
in which I talk about how to detect that we are deep in the hustle
Now the question becomes - how do we detect that we have gone astray?
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. Hermann Melville, Moby Dick
How do we notice that the life in us growing sour?
A lot of it is that we don’t often know how good it can get. That there is a highland of the soul, so to say, and that we can live there, or at least, dwell there from time to time. It need not always be a damp, drizzly November in our soul.
But there is another type of Nothingness, and it is a creative one.
This is the “calm place in the countryside”. It is the acceptance of the staleness, of the lack of the need or desire to do anything, to achieve, to create.
I found a beautiful description of it in a book from Marie Louise von Franz:
Put into psychological language, we know that before a time of outstanding activity in the unconscious, there is a tendency toward a long period of complete passivity. It is, for instance, a normal condition in the creative personality that before some new piece of work in art or a scientific idea breaks through, people usually pass through a period of listlessness and depression and waiting; life is stale. If one analyzes them, one sees that the energy is meanwhile accumulating in the unconscious.” Marie Louise von Franz, The Feminine in Fairy Tales
Of course, what this necessitates, for those of us used to being creative, is an act of pure faith. Faith that when the necessary rest is finished, when the impressions of the last phase of our life have become integrated, the creative process will continue. Because a creative process doesn’t mean to produce artistic content, but to live fully, in which every form the life force necessitates it from us.
Pick locks - by that I mean live an intense life. The way Hemingway would live through things and then write about them, or Joseph Conrad, who has been captain of ships in southeast Asia and Congo. And he is somebody who experienced what he writes about. Werner Herzog, The Origins Podcast
The greatest freedom of thought
A lot of it seems to come from our lack of alignment to the deeper layers of ourself, to something that could be called intuition.
I think that intuition is a much deeper and wider term than is normally applied to the instinctive part of ourselves.
And we can track through time how well out intuition has guided us, and how much we should trust it, and in which fields. It is a reservoir of everything non-quantitative, or non-formulated experiences, of experiences we never digested in linguistic terms, of some type of identity and individuality we posses through no workings of our own.
Our intuition has an aesthetic, and it is our task to find out what that aesthetic is, and if we are so inclined, why it is as it is. But this second part is really not necessary.
When talking about this with my partner (Mathias Baresel), he told me that, in order to be genuine as artists, we have to allow ourselves the greatest freedom of thought, and let ourselves by judged by our actions. But if we censor ourselves already at the level of thoughts, that we will never be able to develop a genuine sense of what we want and need in our art.
I think the best advice I could give to myself is to say: stop and really listen to those little moments when something is aesthetically not working for you, when it’s nagging at you, and the nagging won’t stop. Especially if you cannot fully formulate why it’s nagging at you, it’s probably coming from a deeper level that you are not letting yourself access, or don’t know how to access.
We push these emotions away, because of friendship, because of deadlines, because it is hard to face deep faults in our own work, hard to identify something misaligned in our collaborators.
Who should fix it? (structural support for change)
Declarative vs fixing.
I personally tend to fix many things for the people I work with. I will try to compensate for the fact that they are late with something or that they have not done it to my standard of quality.
This is wrong for many reasons, but (thanks to my friend Joe Edelman), now I have a mental framework in which to frame this problem. It’s being declarative vs being fixing. Declarative would mean to say: I do not find this work good enough, we need to work more, or start over. Being declarative would mean to say: I feel offended by the fact that you are always late, and it creates in me a feeling that you don’t respect me or value my time. Being declarative means saying: fix it. It also implies that you believe that a person is capable of fixing it. The opposite, the lack of faith in others, is what is silently implied by trying to fix things for them.
Sources of inspiration - communion with the depths
I have realised that, for myself, I believe in a type of creation that is born out of a need. A need to grapple with something inside and outside me, something that is anyways there, omnipresent, and requires attention. Something that inspires me through its ugliness, or beauty, and usually both.
With this type of something, you feel called to do it. You feel like there is no choice, because the choice of what to do is perfectly clear.
And so my perfect romanticism ties back into my imperfect utilitarianism :)
I will have done mine. Nina Simone, Interview
on the lack of decisions in crucial moments
CS Lewis, Surprised by Joy
At fifteen my heart was set on learning; at thirty I stood firm; at forty I had no more doubts; at fifty I knew the mandate of heaven; at sixty my ear was obedient; at seventy I could follow my heart's desire without transgressing the norm. Confucius
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