Since moving to Charm City, I’ve spent quite a few hours alone in a room with only my computer for company–and it was starting to drive me insane. I hadn’t realized how crazy until today when a friend came over to do her own work in the quiet of the next room. Companionate typing and coffee break conversation is all it took to realign my perspective on the world and improve my mood entirely.
Ever since NPAC, I’ve been unable to shake a comment that was made at my table during one of the group caucus session discussions: The best artists are inherently selfish people by design, only interested in their own goals, and so this whole desire to strategize some kind of collective action plan will never work.
Okay, yes, 15-year-old Molly found herself in love for the first time when Howard Roark laughed, but wasn’t this pronouncement of dedicated self-focus a bit harsh? Then Corey, my sparing partner in cultural thought, jumped in to refocus my view.
One of the things we value in an artist is his or her ability to show us how to look at things in different, unexpected ways. I think that quality is the opposite of selfish, but any time you attempt to widen someone’s perspective, you run the risk that they will feel threatened by that and react against it and call you selfish. I wonder if finessing the way you challenge accepted norms so that it doesn’t threaten people is one of the most important qualities an artist can possess.
In the quiet of our boxes, we fight fiercely to create and communicate, and it can make us unbelievably proud and scare the shit out of us all at the same time, and that’s all even before we show it to our best friend. But we are not isolated figures in that moment. We have begged, borrowed, and stolen our stories and our influences out of our enemies’ cars and our lovers’ mouths, and I think we are speaking as loud as we can, even if the sound is delayed for a little while. And claim what we will, if no one listens when it’s finally truly expressed, I think we feel we have failed, even if a person 50 years down the road hears us as clear as day. So let’s not make excuses and remove ourselves from the challenge of real life connective work. It’s difficult and heavy; and yes, many of us are cynical, which will make it even harder. But I don’t think even the most Dietrich of us seriously wants to be alone.
Wasn’t it Garbo, not Dietrich, who wanted to be alone?
Molly admits: Quite right! Quite right…thanks for the catch. I was conflating the line with Dietrich’s excellent smoking in Shanghai Express.
Solitude is absolutely necessary for making any kind of art that is worthwhile, and the habit of solitude is often perceived as selfish from the outside, but it is really not selfish from the inside. When musicians are working (practicing, writing, and listening), they are not really alone. They are in the company of their work, and, by extension, in the company of all of creative humanity, both past and present.
The big problem for a lot of creative people is when the alone time stops. Once a particular work is finished the down side of being alone starts to rear its ugly head. it is then that we all worry about who we are apart from our art, a question that none of us really wants to face. That is the state that we all aspire to avoid, because once we stop the serial act of creating music, getting back to the state of “being” as a creative person is a long climb up, and the walls are slippery.