In which the resident author goes back to speaking up.
“To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passion of an age that forgives nothing.”
“The greatest renown today consists in being admired or hated without having been read.”
“The question, for all those who cannot live without art and what it signifies, is merely to find out how, among the police forces of so many ideologies…the strange liberty of creation is possible.”
These are as clear-eyed a description of our time as anything I’ve read in a while.
Although I’d add one thing. It’s the trickiness of finding unfrazzled stretches of time when we’re not redlining through our task lists, when there’s enough brain-oxygen available to imagine and produce creative work. Personally, I have to switch out of hyper-mode and move from micro-focus to wide angle―what I call long-thought mode.
And then, after all the time, revisions, weighing of words and sentences, double-checking rhythm and beats, someone may read three lines (or three words) of what you’ve written, snap to an opinion, and dismiss it, all in a matter of a few seconds.
Carefully considered and constructed or not, whatever we put out there has to survive a click-bait culture where algorithms that serve advertising and the politification of everything rule. No pressure.
But that knobby little seed at the pit of all our souls still wants to reach out and make contact. We still want to share our latest story or song, that captured handful of our own aurora borealis of color and light, spits and howls.
Sometimes the response we receive feels thoroughly unrelated to what we’ve produced. Some people need to decontruct and apply labels so they can give the work a good drop-kick and move on. Some―and god willing our work finds them―say yes, I’ve felt that too, or hey, I’ve never looked at it that way, or just, thanks, that was cool.
It’s the reason we make that scary reach beyond the borders of ourselves, just to catch a glimpse of that slow dawn of recognition, of yes, of aha. So we keep on chasing the “strange liberty of creation.”
Which leads back to those quotes at the top that so accurately describe this specific moment on the planet: Albert Camus, December 1957, in a lecture delivered at the University of Uppsala. L’Artiste et son temps.*
Plus ça change, non?
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*Translated by Justin O’Brien, published in English as Create Dangerously in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death
Publiée dans les Discours de Suède sous le titre L’artiste et son temps
vesta clare 