09-14-2016, 12:47 PM
"I don't care about drawing and painting for its own sake. It's just something I want to use to support my storytelling." That's what I've been telling myself since I started keeping a sketchbook two years ago, but at this point art has once again completely taken over my life.
When I made this thread, it was for the sake of using accountability ( i.e. the pressure of the expectations you believe others have of you) as a source of consistency. In retrospect I should have known better than to do that. After all, I already worry too much about that kind of thing to begin with.
Fear plays a bigger role in how we think about the world and interact with eachother than we'd care to admit, and I think I'm a prime example of someone who tries their hardest to pretend that that should apply to everyone else but them. The fight against your own ego (an ego being nothing more than a desire for control and safety, which is to say a desire to be in position free of fear) is the kind of battle you can never hope to win completely, but I somehow still expect it to be gone a lot of times.
Admitting to and working on the shortcomings of my art is easy for me, as long as I can see them. When it comes to writing however, I have huge trouble disassociating myself from anything I work on. Amit said in a different thread that our own ego is what makes a lot of things impossible for us. He's pretty spot on as far as that is concerned. A persons ego is their desire to be in a position where they are safe from fear, so it naturally pushes them into a place where they feel comfortable. I've listened to a lecture by a screenwriter today that also dealt with similar fears, and how they impact that persons work. https://soundcloud.com/bafta/charlie-kau...ng-lecture
Now, time to get to the core of my argument:
Failure is scary enough when the only one who is affected by it is you alone, but we're social beings, so we extend our fears to the people around us as well.
Doctors have every reason to feel afraid of failure. The decisions they are making are important because they affect other peoples livelihood. The same goes for politicians, police officers, farmers, plumbers, parents, really, anyone who is given responsibility for an aspect of other peoples lives, to a certain extent. Depending on how big the impact they have is, they have a very real reason to feel scared of failure. However, if you do something enough it'll become routine, and a lot of things that should be scary lose their terror after a while. I have responsibilities as a driver, and I don't worry about those at all at this point. So why make such a big deal out of writing? I have a thesis on what a writers responsibility is. I'm not sure about it, and it could be it's just my own justification for not doing something I should be doing, but here it is:
People rely on the images and storytelling presented to them as a basis to create a story for their own lives.
Forget about the idea of an enlightened, rational human being. We're not intelligent enough to process the world in that way. At the core of our self-understanding we think about life in stories, which is why we often make strange decisions without even realizing it.
Let me give you some examples: If you meet someone while hiking in the mountains, travel along with them for half a day and give them your number, they're far more likely to keep in contact with you than if you met them somewhere in their everyday environment, even if you spend a good long time together and then gave them your number - because you've become part of their 'story of a journey', and in that context you are unique, unlike in their everyday life where they have tons of people they interact with on a day-to-day basis.
Martyrs believe they're sacrificing themselves for something greater than themselves, and that image gives them the will to do things that look mad to anyone who doesn't share their beliefs, and I'm not just talking about religious beliefs here. In the same way, someone who believes in the survival of the fittest and acts upon that belief, and then loses it at a later point will be tormented by their own actions, simply because the story of their life has fallen apart.
So, if people depend on storytelling to continuously reconstruct their own understanding of the world and themselves, and to pick up the pieces when their life falls apart, can it really be said that a writer has less responsibility than anyone else in their work?
Now, that doesn't mean that storytelling is inherently a form of manipulation, though it certainly has the potential to be used that way. Of course a construction is always just an approximation, but it's a necessary compromise for our limited intelligence to be able to process a very complicated world. It's the same thing with language itself. Michael Ende described his understanding of art as 'the act of turning images of the outside world into images of our inner world, which makes us capable of dealing with them'. I believe what he meant by that is that in order for us to be able to construct a story about our lives that reflects the reality we experience, we need to have a counterpart to the things we are confronted with in the 'outside world' in our inner construction of it. That's why creating a story is something that requires honesty and precision of thought... and at this point I'm not sure I'm either honest or precise enough to do a decent job of it. Some part of me might already have given up on writing entirely.
If you've read up to this point it'll be clear to you that I'm not entirely sure what I'm trying to say, except that I'm not doing what I want to be doing, and it's really messing with me. This is the biggest dump of 'stuff not meant for university' that I have written in a good long while, which is to say I haven't written much of anything recently. In fact, my thoughts have been occupied with composition and values to a scary degree.
I thought I'd find it in myself to get over my existencial angst and past the prologue of the story I've been meaning to work on for half a year now, or at least write a shorstory or two over the summer holidays. Here we are in mid-September, and my head is so full of art things that I can't come up with anything worthwhile, or that's just another excuse.
The reason I'm writing this is to get someone elses opinion. So, yeah, no matter what your position on whatever you believe the topic of this textlump is might be, post it up!
When I made this thread, it was for the sake of using accountability ( i.e. the pressure of the expectations you believe others have of you) as a source of consistency. In retrospect I should have known better than to do that. After all, I already worry too much about that kind of thing to begin with.
Fear plays a bigger role in how we think about the world and interact with eachother than we'd care to admit, and I think I'm a prime example of someone who tries their hardest to pretend that that should apply to everyone else but them. The fight against your own ego (an ego being nothing more than a desire for control and safety, which is to say a desire to be in position free of fear) is the kind of battle you can never hope to win completely, but I somehow still expect it to be gone a lot of times.
Admitting to and working on the shortcomings of my art is easy for me, as long as I can see them. When it comes to writing however, I have huge trouble disassociating myself from anything I work on. Amit said in a different thread that our own ego is what makes a lot of things impossible for us. He's pretty spot on as far as that is concerned. A persons ego is their desire to be in a position where they are safe from fear, so it naturally pushes them into a place where they feel comfortable. I've listened to a lecture by a screenwriter today that also dealt with similar fears, and how they impact that persons work. https://soundcloud.com/bafta/charlie-kau...ng-lecture
Now, time to get to the core of my argument:
Failure is scary enough when the only one who is affected by it is you alone, but we're social beings, so we extend our fears to the people around us as well.
Doctors have every reason to feel afraid of failure. The decisions they are making are important because they affect other peoples livelihood. The same goes for politicians, police officers, farmers, plumbers, parents, really, anyone who is given responsibility for an aspect of other peoples lives, to a certain extent. Depending on how big the impact they have is, they have a very real reason to feel scared of failure. However, if you do something enough it'll become routine, and a lot of things that should be scary lose their terror after a while. I have responsibilities as a driver, and I don't worry about those at all at this point. So why make such a big deal out of writing? I have a thesis on what a writers responsibility is. I'm not sure about it, and it could be it's just my own justification for not doing something I should be doing, but here it is:
People rely on the images and storytelling presented to them as a basis to create a story for their own lives.
Forget about the idea of an enlightened, rational human being. We're not intelligent enough to process the world in that way. At the core of our self-understanding we think about life in stories, which is why we often make strange decisions without even realizing it.
Let me give you some examples: If you meet someone while hiking in the mountains, travel along with them for half a day and give them your number, they're far more likely to keep in contact with you than if you met them somewhere in their everyday environment, even if you spend a good long time together and then gave them your number - because you've become part of their 'story of a journey', and in that context you are unique, unlike in their everyday life where they have tons of people they interact with on a day-to-day basis.
Martyrs believe they're sacrificing themselves for something greater than themselves, and that image gives them the will to do things that look mad to anyone who doesn't share their beliefs, and I'm not just talking about religious beliefs here. In the same way, someone who believes in the survival of the fittest and acts upon that belief, and then loses it at a later point will be tormented by their own actions, simply because the story of their life has fallen apart.
So, if people depend on storytelling to continuously reconstruct their own understanding of the world and themselves, and to pick up the pieces when their life falls apart, can it really be said that a writer has less responsibility than anyone else in their work?
Now, that doesn't mean that storytelling is inherently a form of manipulation, though it certainly has the potential to be used that way. Of course a construction is always just an approximation, but it's a necessary compromise for our limited intelligence to be able to process a very complicated world. It's the same thing with language itself. Michael Ende described his understanding of art as 'the act of turning images of the outside world into images of our inner world, which makes us capable of dealing with them'. I believe what he meant by that is that in order for us to be able to construct a story about our lives that reflects the reality we experience, we need to have a counterpart to the things we are confronted with in the 'outside world' in our inner construction of it. That's why creating a story is something that requires honesty and precision of thought... and at this point I'm not sure I'm either honest or precise enough to do a decent job of it. Some part of me might already have given up on writing entirely.
If you've read up to this point it'll be clear to you that I'm not entirely sure what I'm trying to say, except that I'm not doing what I want to be doing, and it's really messing with me. This is the biggest dump of 'stuff not meant for university' that I have written in a good long while, which is to say I haven't written much of anything recently. In fact, my thoughts have been occupied with composition and values to a scary degree.
I thought I'd find it in myself to get over my existencial angst and past the prologue of the story I've been meaning to work on for half a year now, or at least write a shorstory or two over the summer holidays. Here we are in mid-September, and my head is so full of art things that I can't come up with anything worthwhile, or that's just another excuse.
The reason I'm writing this is to get someone elses opinion. So, yeah, no matter what your position on whatever you believe the topic of this textlump is might be, post it up!