On the artist doing absolutely nothing.
Why lying down for a bit should not cause an identity crisis.
Last week was more than just a bad week.
Emotionally, the low hit deeper than it has in a long time. A steep spiral that pitched headfirst into an urge for total annihilation. By Friday, it seemed the spiral might be slowing ever so slightly. But there was still one more hit to take: a full bodily collapse into what must be the latest and greatest strain of Covid. I am convinced this is what I had, though I have no test to confirm it. Fever, a hacking cough, and the inability to do absolutely anything, followed. Despite wanting to get back in the zone, to figure out some way past all the emotional pain, I had no choice but to submit.
Everything ground to a halt.
The process of being an artist is cyclical: it is building and destroying, being elevated and then, reduced to nothing. This rising and falling is part of the rhythm, though sometimes we rise higher (or fall lower) than expected. The arc of the swing gets wider, then steeper, and somehow we must manage it in order to remain on the path.
What can make this so difficult to manage, however, is the fact that artists generally become synonymous with their art-making. To paraphrase from Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland, our current understanding that art = self-expression is a contemporary bias. We see art as an extension of ourselves. Separating art from craft is a post-Renaissance invention, and "more recent still is the notion that art transcends what you do, and represents what you are."
Therefore, if I halt and do nothing, who am I?
This is a spiral thought, one that leads straight into madness. It makes rest unfathomable, because rest undermines the very fabric of my being. To stop is to cease to exist.
I am more than just an artist, and so are you.
Of course this is the case. If you were ‘just’ an artist, what would you be making art about? Solitary creation in a turret does not a good artist make. This is also why struggle and sacrifice feel like such toxic concepts attached to the creative process. I will never be merely a writer - I have many other roles that I play in my life. Including as a partner, a friend, a daughter, an enthusiastic gardener and a freelance marketing strategist, amongst many other roles. Writing is a significant part of the whole. But it cannot possibly be the whole. (More on this subject in future.)
As a result of this point of view, I am not generally too precious or concerned about a day of less-than-stellar productivity; I have built enough trust in myself to know the writing is in there, somewhere, wherever I left it. But when you’re feeling low, or like the dream is slipping away, the instinctive urge is to grasp on as tightly as you can. It’s natural enough to want some kind of reassurance in a moment of insecurity.
I find some reassurance in these words from author Ann Patchett, answering this question in an interview:
This is not a popular opinion, as far as I can tell. It’s a long way away from the strict discipline and routine approaches of writers like Stephen King or, say, Haruki Murakami. According to Mason Currey’s book Daily Rituals on artists and their routines, Murakami wakes up at 4:00am every single day and works for 5-6 hours straight. In the afternoons he runs or swims (or does both), before he runs errands, reads, and listens to music. His bedtime is 9:00pm every evening. To quote:
I keep to this routine every day without variation… The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.
Okay, fair enough. But what if you did miss a day, on this routine? What happens to the mesmerism? And by extension, your art?
Here’s where trust is essential. Whatever method you take to get your work done, there must be some sense that sickness, duties, setbacks, whatever, will not cause such a problem as to prevent you accessing your art. In the same way that, in many cases, these things won’t change who you fundamentally are.
Here’s one of my favourite quotes of all time, from Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones:
One of the main aims in writing practice is to learn to trust your own mind and body; to grow patient and nonaggressive. Art lives in the Big World. One poem or story doesn’t matter one way or the other. It’s the process of writing and life that matters.
Learning balance, and by extension, rest.
For every movement, there is a counter-movement. Hustle culture, often portrayed as quintessentially Millennial, is very much on the outs. You don’t need to scroll far on Instagram to know that the anti-hustle has arrived. Slow living, slow making, slow everything. While I love this on one level, being the crafty-garden-hermit and alternative-living-seeker that I am, I don’t think aestheticising our cultural aversion to rest does much to get at the real root of the issue. After all, we have every right to get under a blanket once in a while and bid the world good day while we renew and restore ourselves. But we don’t really do proper rest a lot of the time - memes abound with portrayals of people in their ‘grandma era’, etc. But this often practically translates to watching Netflix or scrolling Instagram. And I’m not sure the buzz of the endless scroll is renewing much of anything. The idea of ‘doing nothing’ is a fallacy in the modern day; we’re always doing something. There’s always some kind of noise. And then, even if we did manage it, doing nothing for too long can leave a person empty; there is a tipping point where this kind of “rest” becomes avoidance.
I am in the midst of a great downswing. But I have started to come to think of it as a kind of purge: eliminating obstacles, like obstructive teammates, naysayers, the work that didn’t pan out, the bad influences, and more besides. But I don’t want to avoid doing what I know will help me in the long term. Just as rest can become avoidance, there is a point where avoidance becomes cowardice, and I know that courage will be required to make anything in my lifetime. I want to cultivate that courage. Finding this balance is not straightforward. I do require rest; I can’t find my upswing again when I’m crushed. But it needs to be deep rest, followed by real trust.
Here’s one more, from Natalie:
This isn’t your last chance. If you missed the mouse today, you’ll get it tomorrow. You never leave who you are. If you are a writer when writing, you also are a writer when you are cooking, sleeping, walking. And if you are a mother, a painter, a horse, a giraffe, or a carpenter, you will bring that into your writing too. It comes with you. You can’t divorce yourself from parts of yourself.
Being the other things that you are, alongside the artist, is a salve. Holding the practice lightly, and knowing it is part of me, makes this possible. I am the artist, and now I need to go lie down and do nothing.
Weekly extras and joys to share… 🌨️
Wintering by Katherine May
I recently listened to this beautiful book, and it was the perfect thing in the perfect moment. May sets out the case for the fallow period of life; the much-needed winter, where all the foundations of spring are laid. A quote:
Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider.
It’s true that we work so hard to live in an eternal spring - to show how well we are doing, put on a show for all our social media followers, etc. As a matter of course, I hid my own sadness and difficulties. This is the instinct we have learned to develop in a world where slowing down or being down aren’t appealing. But they are part of life.
We’re not raised to recognize wintering, or to acknowledge its inevitability. Instead, we tend to see it as a humiliation, something that should be hidden from view lest we shock the world too greatly.
This idea of a winter moment in our lives as a ‘humiliation’ is something I’d like to explore further. Deeming shiny legitimacy-tokens as the only source of pride and security in ourselves is not going to make a lifetime of this work very pleasant.
To get better at wintering, we need to address our very notion of time. We tend to imagine that our lives are linear, but they are in fact cyclical.
Where are you, in the cycle? I am still wintering, but there’s the first hint of spring in the air, coming over the horizon.
Until next week…
Be well,
CCx