Response to An Artist

De Singelbrug bij de Paleisstraat in Amsterdam or The Singel Bridge at the Paleisstraat in Amsterdam by George Hendrik Breitner

do you have any advice for someone similarly grappling with which direction to go artistically? i’m probably going to write in some capacity no matter what, but i feel burdened by the confused notions about writing i had prior to starting the various fiction projects i have going. i also wonder if i would be better suited to making some other kind of art, esp since my faith that people are interested in ambitious literary projects like long novels waxes and wanes perpetually
– Cody Frank

*

I see in your worries two questions:

1. How do I become otherwise?

2. Is my work worthwhile?

I can’t give you answers, but I’ll try to help you think clearly about your questions. Since we don’t know each other intimately, I’ll use my life as an artist only as an analogy. I’ll also explain the premises and promises which have guided me of late.

Please forgive me if none of this precise and please disregard whatever isn’t useful.

Let me start by saying plainly that our culture is suicidal. So whenever you suspect a pressure is from without, please treat it with the care you’d take with hazardous materials. The more I see and feel, the more I know that much of what culture deems acceptable is empirically and spiritually poisonous.

I mean: if what you once believed about writing and art feels alien to you, it’d be good to know precisely why those beliefs estrange you from your capacity to write. What did you once believe about writing? What did you think it was for? How did you think you had to write in order to write well, or acceptably, or properly? If you can answer those questions and relate those answers directly to our long history of self-destruction, you’ll likely intuit the features of a different way of living.

Practicing this different way is difficult. Practicing this different way is quietly and persistently joyful. Of course this practice is the work of a lifetime.

*

Our modes of attention are changing. This is obvious to anyone willing to admit how tightly they’ve been yoked to their phone for the last few years. I won’t say our attention span is getting worse, or that we’re incapable of focusing like we used to, because our act of attending to reality (a word I use here in its broadest possible sense) is changing to help us survive. I suspect the easy, instant presence of intense pain anywhere on Earth is cause enough for us to not look so long at whatever’s in front of us. We can conjure agony, problematizing every relation as we go. This work papers over simple pains with technical speech. (The more we can theorize our suffering the less we believe it can harm us.) All of which is to say that we’re desperate to not want to face the fact of how arbitrary most suffering is—to not admit how thoroughly we can hate ourselves.

I say all that shit to show you my assumptions. Those assumptions are marked on me in various scars. I can’t say anything about convincing yourself of your worth without starting with the simple admission that I have only very recently begun, in a serious and unconditional way, to want to exist. I am learning to live with a doubt, like yours, that the verbs I’m best at are actually worthless.

Luckily that doubt is full of shit.

A novel is miraculous. A long novel is miraculous; a short novel is miraculous. Fiction is conjuring for another an invitation to understand that reality isn’t only what we can touch and that love isn’t only cleaning up someone else’s mess. Art, more generally, keeps artists alive—and if we’re to escape this hell, we need our artists. In our mostly-secular, mostly-materialist, mostly-sociological English-speaking cultural milieu, we’re backed up against the wall of history. By which I mean we often feel we have no recourse to anything else other than ourselves and our friends; if we fail to improve conditions on Earth, we have only ourselves to blame. This attitude—and it is simply an attitude—is certainly brand new and most likely wrong. Reality isn’t only iterations within politics. There’s something else, something inarticulably immense and inescapably important, something mysteriously plural, and that something else is exactly what artists enter when they make their work. Reading a long novel is a wonderful opportunity to welcome back into our lives the fact of mystery—and the conviction that love composes that mystery.

In other words, even though you might have fewer readers for your long novels, the opportunity those books will provide people are immeasurable.

Fuck quantity. Do what you know you can do to help people—thus helping yourself. I believe completely that I’d be dead if in a few definite periods of time I hadn’t decided *to write* and to write in the shape provided me. Because that work got me away from much of culture, which is death, and into reality, which is love. If you’re anything like me, writing what you want—and not thinking too far past the immediate and delightful demands of the next sentence—will do the same for you.