The Last Revivalist

The Promise

“The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.”
A.N. Whitehead, quoted in The Medium is the Massage.

I am either insane, or I’m just thinking way too hard about things that other creative people don’t think about — or maybe don’t worry about. That, or I’m on the brink of a crossover that Bruce Springsteen talks about in The Promise: The Making of Darkness On The Edge Of Town.

There’s a scene towards the end where Springsteen is talking about the shift that happened after Born To Run became a huge hit and he was saddled with the unenviable task of following it up.

He talks about the difference in artistic instinct and artistic intelligence. In the period leading up to and including Born To Run, he says he was relying on his artistic instinct, essentially throwing ideas at the wall, only knowing whether something “feels right” or not but not knowing why. This is the phase when the artist or writer is just coming into his or her powers, unsure of how to use them best, but sure of what the end result should be. This is the phase in which I’ve been operating the last five years or so, both in my writing and my music.

Darkness, then, for Springsteen, represents a maturity, and a shift from artistic instinct — from knowing what feels right but not knowing why — to artistic intelligence, to knowing what you as a creator want to do, knowing your own abilities well enough to know how to do them.

This is where I’m at now — between these two positions of instinct and intelligence. I’ve been flailing away on instinct for years now, knowing exactly what my best work feels like but being unable to do it on command. I feel like I’ve finally reached a point of no return, a point at which I can’t continue to operate that way.

I need to grow up, to take control of my abilities — I know what they are, sheepish and unsure though I may be sometimes — and to decide how I’m going to wield them. To create a laser-sharp focus on what I want to accomplish, and to stop at nothing to accomplish it. To use the ablities I have to do my best work, rather than to be used by my abilities and do good work.

Time is limited, and life is brief. If I want to do anything, there’s no point in not doing it to the best of my abilities.

Springsteen himself doesn’t describe how he made this transition, only that he made it, and that it took sixty-odd songs and two years worth of writing and recording. It’s only through doing the work that we can learn to do anything better. Understanding comes once the work is done.

Why This Blog Sucks

I have done a terrible job with this blog.

I have tried to be something I am not: a curator, a passer-on of interesting ideas, someone with good taste who sorts through the Internet and expects you to find me exceedingly clever on the basis of my selections. I have tried to cultivate, through my writing here, the impression that I am a member of the broader Internet community, someone who (1) people read and (2) people respond to.

Neither of those things appear to be true.

Personal Brands

I started this blog with an impassioned manifesto of sorts. I nailed what I was feeling then — and what I’m still feeling now — about all of my blogging thus far: it’s all crap. It’s all crap because, even though my opening salvo here at TLR swore against it, it’s all calculated. Each post I’ve made here is an attempt to convince you to read the next think I post. This sort of self-awareness (obviously it’s too much self-awareness) makes each post feel like another mosaic tile in an online identity, rather than a piece of writing set free onto the wires.

The cultivation of a “blogger” persona — without a sense of the razor-sharp focus necessary to build that persona over time into something coherent — is not something I’m good at. It’s something I’m good at for about three weeks, and then I lose interest. I lose interest, not in the writing itself, but in “building my personal brand,” which is something that being a blogger — one people read, anyway — seems to require more of than I’m comfortable with.

Saying I write a blog feels self-important, feels disingenuous (in my case, anyway — I feel like I’m being self-important just by mentioning it), and sets my inner Holden Caulfield screaming that I’m a phony, someone who just wants to be Internet Famous and who wants to be taken seriously. It’s only made worse by having a Twitter feed that I can then retweet from my personal account so I can “grow my readership base” or whatever that’s supposed to be.

I realize that this sensitivity is mostly self-created, and that in all likelihood I just need to relax, to not take it so seriously, but it’s my nature: I take everything too seriously. I’m a calculator at heart, an analyst, always figuring what I have to do, obsessively worrying about details, about whether or not my message is getting across, about whether I’m any good. It’s made me a better writer, this focus on perfection, but it keeps an awful lot of stuff from ever getting published. I write ten blog posts for every one that makes it through to the blog. I have folders full of textfiles you’ll never see, some of them bulleted outlines for brilliant analogies, some of them “not smart enough.”

Purposes

What’s the point of having a blog, anyways?

As Merlin Mann and John Gruber pointed out, there’s not really a substitute for their formula of obsession times voice. You have a topic, or an area of discussion, that you’re incredibly passionate about — that drives you, that you love to talk about and learn about and think about — and you develop your own distinctive voice for talking about that obsession. There’s no way to have a great blog without this.

There are all kinds of other reasons to have a blog, though. Here are some of them:

• You like being linked to by Internet Celebrities, and so every post you make is a response to something recently posted by an Internet Celebrity, baiting them into linking to you blog.
• You’ll post anything that gets people to read your blog because you show lots of ads, and all that matters to you are the pageviews because the pageviews are directly proportional to your blogging-related income.
• You are insane, and like the sound of your own voice, and like pretending that you’re on a soapbox, preaching to a throng of like-minded insane people. (Note: this is probably the category into which this blog falls more often than not.)
• You publish a collection of links to things that you find interesting, hoping for other people who are into the same things to derive enjoyment from the things to which you link.

There are other reasons and motivations for having a weblog, sure, but those are the main “non-pure” ones. The problem is this: how to keep those reasons (audience building, advertising revenue, Internet celebrity) from taking the drivers’ seat? How do you keep your blog authentic, true to the voice and the obsession that drove you to feel like you should start writing in the first place?

And, why would you start a blog at all if you didn’t think other people wanted to read it? Where is the line between organically growing a readership of cool people and becoming a link-baiting a-hole “news blog”? How do you think about an ideal reader without compromising your narrative voice, censoring yourself in order to be more popular?

Obviously, none of these questions have easy answers. None of them make it any easier to justify having a blog to begin with, but rather they tend to make me feel like a jerk any time I try to “build my readership.” People don’t want to be part of a “readership,” they just want to read good writing.

Taking Risks

In the last FreeDarko post, Kenneth Paul Drews said something that started the ball rolling on this post, on this reflection:

I am in love with the notion that failure-with-gusto is an important element of success; it seems like the primary bit of wisdom that I should pass along to my son after we get the whole “aim your pee at the bowl” thing sorted out.

When anybody on FreeDarko failed, it was never for a lack of fearlessness or imagination. They wrote strange things about strange basketball subjects and the fear of being exposed to criticism or failing to execute never seemed to throttle that strangeness.

What a glorious ideal that is — to fail with gusto. To write at such a high level, and to do anything interesting, one has to “fail with gusto” on a regular basis. There are going to be ideas that go nowhere, ideas that are half-baked, attempts that fall short, pieces that sound great to their author but to no one else, pieces that take themselves too seriously.

My fear of not being read, my nagging suspicion that my friends and family don’t even really read this thing, that I’m just posting the same old boring bullshit into the abyss to make myself feel like I’m doing something creative, all stem from a fear of failure — more specifically, a fear of being laughed at. A fear of rejection. Fear of some random person on the Internet (not you, obviously, but someone else) reading something I’ve written and saying “that guy’s a fake.”

To say I don’t care about that anymore would be to lie; I think (on some level, anyway) I’ll always be essentially the same person I am now, with the same fears and the same desires. Nobody likes being laughed at, and nobody likes feeling like all of their hard work is for naught.

That said, I’m not doing you, myself, or anyone else in the wider world any favors by not trying to write things that are brilliant, that are true, that are crazy in the best sense.

Conclusion

I don’t know where I’m going with all of this, except to say that I can do better, and I’m going to have to do better if I’m ever going to feel good about what I’m doing by having a blog.

This blog sucks. I can’t guarantee that that’ll ever change. But even if it doesn’t, I’m going to make an attempt to fail with gusto. Why the hell not?