Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.
A post I did a couple of weeks ago, about my view that creativity is a relationship (and thus inherently subjective, in the sense that each person will contribute something different), prompted an interesting discussion with a friend that centered around the question of whether there is actually such a thing as bad writing, art, or music.
My initial response was that the answer had to be no. The most we can say with confidence is that there is "writing, art, and music I don't happen to like." What comprises that list will differ for everyone, so there's no such thing as "objectively bad" creativity. I had an experience a few days ago of exactly this; I had picked up a copy of French composer Olivier Messiaen's opera Saint François d'Assise, considered by many to be his finest work, and I found it to be so discordant it was virtually unlistenable. I would never jump from there to saying "it's bad"; it's merely not something I enjoyed.
But my friend's question went further than that. Setting aside simple matters of taste and preference, are there works that just about everyone can agree are bad? What about considerations of execution -- skill and craftsmanship -- such that we can look at a work and say, "Okay, that's poorly done?" The problem is, even that may not be so easy. Loyal readers of Skeptophilia may recall that a few months ago, I did a piece on a fellow named Paul Jordan who decided to poke some fun at the art establishment by producing paintings that were made to be deliberately bad, and found that they were taken seriously -- and received glowing reviews from major art critics, and multiple offers for being featured in solo art exhibits.
It's wryly amusing that there's actually a Museum of Bad Art, in Dedham, Massachusetts, devoted to artistic works that are (in their words) "too bad to be ignored." I have to wonder what the artists whose works are featured there think of their inclusion. Maybe it's like a scientist winning the IgNobel Prize; perhaps, as writer Brendan Behan famously said, there's no such thing as bad publicity, and it's better to be known for doing something dramatically awful than it is simply to be ignored.
What's curious, though, is that the people running the Museum of Bad Art themselves seem to have a hard time explaining the criteria they use to determine whether a piece qualifies. Marie Jackson, the Museum's Director of Aesthetic Interpretation, said, "Nine out of ten pieces don't get in because they're not bad enough. What an artist considers to be bad doesn't always meet our low standards." Kitsch doesn't qualify, nor does anything that is judged to have been a deliberate attempt to produce bad art. (One has to wonder what they'd have done with Paul Jordan's paintings.) MOBA curator Michael Frank explained, "We collect things made in earnest, where people attempted to make art and something went wrong, either in the execution or in the original premise."
But what does it mean that "something went wrong"? Simple lack of skill isn't enough; according to honorary curator Ollie Hallowell, it has to have an "Oh my God" aspect to it. But even that suggests something curious. The fact that MOBA only accepts art that's "so bad it's good" implies there's a category below that, of art that is "simply bad."
Imagine being an artist, and having your work rejected from the Museum of Bad Art on the basis of not being good enough. It recalls Dorothy Parker's quip about a book she was reviewing: "This book was not just plain terrible. This was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it."
Bone-Juggling Dog in Hula Skirt by Mari Newman, one of the pieces that did make it into the Museum's permanent collection
So we're back to there being an inherently subjective aspect to all this. There's clearly a difference between someone who lacks skill -- someone attempting to play the piano who makes mistake after mistake, for example -- and someone who has technical competency on the instrument but who doesn't play expressively. Likewise, having basic technical writing skill (using grammar and punctuation correctly, for example) doesn't guarantee good storytelling. But beyond simple considerations of mechanics, how do you even begin to determine objectively the quality of a particular work? Could bad storytelling, for example, be couched in perfect grammar? If so, what makes it bad? I thought the Twilight books were positively dreadful, but if you thought reading them was a life-altering experience, I'm not nearly arrogant enough to tell you that you're wrong.
What's bad, apparently, is as subjective as what's good. Exactly as we should expect. So this is a further illustration that you should simply enjoy what you enjoy, and continue to create fearlessly. Marie Jackson of MOBA says that her Museum shouldn't be looked at as simple ridicule, but an impetus for us creative types to continue to put ourselves out there. "I think it's a great encouragement to people... who want to create [and] are held back by fear," Jackson said. "When they see these pieces, they realize there's nothing to be afraid of—just go for it."
Maybe. I don't know. If I were an artist, I'd have to work to wrap my brain around being included in the Museum of Bad Art. As a writer, I certainly don't enjoy feedback like I got from a "friend" a long time ago about the first three chapters of a novel I was working on: "This is somewhere between a computer crash and a train wreck." (The chapters eventually got worked into my novel The Hand of the Hunter -- if you read it, I can only hope you won't agree with her.) But I have to be realistic about the fact that my writing won't resonate with everyone.
After all, that's the nature of creativity. You win, you lose. Some things work and others don't, or (more commonly) work for some consumers and not for others.
Even if there's no real objective standard for creative quality, to that point I agree with Marie Jackson: the critical thing is not to get caught up in whether or not you're "good enough," but to keep creating.
Ernest Hemingway famously said, "There isn’t any symbolism in The Old Man and the Sea. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks, no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know."
Thus frustrating the absolute hell out of literature teachers everywhere.
To me, though, the interesting point here isn't the bit about puncturing your tenth grade English teacher's balloon, it's the last part: "What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know." Because that's true of all creative endeavors, isn't it? When creativity succeeds, it's a dialogue, not a monologue. We each bring to that dialogue our unique personalities and backgrounds and biases and individuality, and what we each take from it will be just as varied.
I ran into an interesting example of that last week when I was listening to the radio, and heard a song that was new to me -- Joywave's "Tongues." I was immediately grabbed by the mesmerizing, electro-pop riff that introduces the song (and reappears several times during its run), but the lyrics were what fascinated me most.
They seem to exist at that strange intersection between "evocative" and "fever dream." They're downright peculiar in places:
Pick me up, dust me off Give me breath and let me cough Drag me back, collect my thoughts I've come back to the land I'd lost
The palms are down, I'm welcomed back to town Sometimes I feel like they don't understand me I hear their mouths making foreign sounds Sometimes I think they're all just speaking in tongues
Despite their oddness, the lyrics immediately resonated with me. Pretty much all my life, I've been baffled by the behavior of my fellow humans. When I'm in conversations, even with people I know well and feel friendly toward, most of the time I not only never know what they're going to say next, I don't really get why they have the emotional reactions they do. I often feel like I'm witnessing something I don't really understand on any deep level, and even afterward I can't really parse what happened and why.
I've described myself as feeling like a changeling -- someone who was replaced as a child by a being from another species, and has grown up irredeemably separate from the people around him. And "Tongues" seemed to capture that sense of being a stranger in a strange land pitch-perfectly.
My emotional reaction was so powerful that I thought it'd be interesting to see what others came up with from listening to it. The first place I went was the music video, which took an entirely different tack -- this one about how society makes us hide who we actually are. [Nota bene: the video is cool but mildly NSFW, as it shows more human skin than might be appropriate in certain circumstances. Be forewarned.]
Then I did a search to see if I could find out how the songwriters themselves described it, and I found a piece lead singer Daniel Armbruster did with Medium about the origins of the song. Here's what Armbruster had to say:
There are a few things happening in the lyrics of “Tongues”, but a large chunk of it explores a disconnect with one’s peers. Back when I was DJing in Rochester, I would see the same well-meaning individuals night after night talking about how they were moving to a bigger city, writing a novel, starting a band, etc, etc. All of these things were great in theory, but no one ever did them. They never left the bar so far as I could tell. It really weighed on me after awhile and I’d just have to let it go in one ear and out the other. In a way I felt like I needed to push myself harder to compensate for my peers’ lack of effort. After the song came out, I had a person approach me one night in Rochester and tell me that the song had really resonated with them. I was thrilled until they elaborated and said that they had been traveling on another continent recently and couldn’t understand the local dialect. Hopefully that’s not what you take away from the song.
So there's yet a third and a fourth interpretation of what "Tongues" means.
As a writer, I share Armbruster's frustration that sometimes readers (or listeners) don't take away from a creative work what we intended. But that's part of the game, isn't it? Because creativity implies a relationship between producer and consumer, the producer can't (and shouldn't try to) control where it goes. Readers, listeners, and observers are one-half of the creative relationship, and their uniqueness is inevitably going to shape what they pull out of the experience. And, of course, this is why sometimes that relationship simply fails to form. I love the music of Stravinsky, while it leaves my wife completely cold -- she thinks it's pointless cacophony. A lot of people are moved to tears by Mozart, but I find much of his music inspires me to say nothing more than "it's nice, I guess." My friend Andrew Butters, who is so much like me we've been described as sharing a brain, found my favorite book (Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum) a colossal bore, and forced himself to finish it only out a sense of loyalty. Conversely, his favorite book, Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary, got no more than a tepid, "It wasn't a bad read" from me.
But that's what we should expect, you know? How monotonous would the world be if we all had the same opinions about creative works?
It's part of why I have zero patience for genre snobs and self-appointed tastemakers. If some piece of creative work inspires you, or evokes emotions in you, it's done its job, and no one has the slightest right to tell you that you're wrong for feeling that way. Honestly, I'm delighted if Mozart grabs you by the heart and swings you around; that's what music is supposed to do. Just because I'm more likely to have that experience listening to Firebird than Eine Kleine Nachtmusik doesn't mean I'm right and you're wrong; all it means is that human creativity is complex, intricate, and endlessly intriguing.
So don't take it all that seriously if someone tells you what a poem, lyric, or piece of art or music means, even if that person is a college professor. Enjoy what you enjoy, and bring your own creativity to the relationship. It may be that Ernest Hemingway didn't mean The Old Man and the Sea to be anything more than a depiction of an incident involving a fisherman, a boy, a fish, and some sharks; but that doesn't mean you can't bring more to the reading, and pull more out of it, yourself.
And isn't that what makes the creative experience magical?
Yesterday I had an interesting conversation with a dear friend of mine, the wonderful author K. D. McCrite. (Do yourself a favor and check out her books -- she's written in several different genres, and the one thing that unites them all is that they're fantastic.) It had to do with how we authors come up with characters -- and how often it feels like we're not inventing them, but discovering them, gradually getting to know some actual person we only recently met. The result is that they can sometimes seem more real than the real people we encounter every day.
"In my early days of writing, my lead male character was a handsome but rather reclusive country-boy detective," K. D. told me. "The kind who doesn't realize how good he looks in his jeans. Anyway, whilst in the middle of bringing this book to life, I saw him in the store looking at shirts. I was startled, seeing him so unexpectedly that way. So, like any good delusional person would do, I walked toward him and started to ask, 'Hey, Cody. What are you doing here?' Thank God, I came to myself, woke up, or whatever, before I reached him and embarrassed myself into the next realm."
I've never had the experience of meeting someone who was strikingly similar to one of my characters, but I've certainly had them take the keyboard right out of my hands and write themselves a completely different part. The two strangest examples of this both occurred in my Arc of the Oracles trilogy. In the first book, In the Midst of Lions, the character of Mary Hansard literally appeared out of thin air -- the main characters meet her while fleeing for their lives as law and order collapses around them, and she cheerfully tells them, "Well, hello! I've been waiting for all of you!"
I had to go back and write an entire (chronologically earlier) section of the book to explain who the hell she was and how she'd known they were going to be there, because I honestly hadn't known she was even in the story.
In the third book, The Chains of Orion, the character of Marig Kastella was initially created to be the cautious, hesitant boyfriend of the cheerful, bold, and swashbuckling main character, the astronaut Kallman Dorn. Then, halfway through, the story took a sharp left-hand turn when Marig decided to become the pivot point of the whole plot -- and ended up becoming one of my favorite characters I've ever... created? Discovered? Met? I honestly don't know what word to use.
That feeling of being the recorder of real people and events, not the designer of fictional ones, can be awfully powerful.
"Another time," K. D. told me, "we had taken a road trip to North Carolina so I could do some research for a huge historical family saga I was writing. (I was so immersed in the creation of that book that my then-husband was actually jealous of the main character -- I kid you not!) As we went through Winston-Salem, we drove past a huge cemetery. I said, 'Oh, let's stop there. Maybe that's where the Raven boys are buried and I can find their graves.' And then I remembered.. the Raven boys weren't buried there. They weren't buried anywhere. Good grief."
Turns out we're not alone in this. A 2020 study carried out by some researchers at Durham University, that was the subject of a paper in the journal Consciousness and Cognition, and received a review in The Guardian, involved surveying authors at the International Book Festival in Edinburgh in 2014 and 2018. The researchers asked a set of curious questions:
How do you experience your characters?
Do you ever hear your characters’ voices?
Do you have visual or other sensory experiences of your characters, or sense their presence?
Can you enter into a dialogue with your characters?
Do you feel that your characters always do what you tell them to do, or do they act of their own accord?
How does the way you experience your characters’ voices feed into your writing practice? Please tell us about this process.
Once a piece of writing or performance is finished, what happens to your characters’ voices?
If there are any aspects of your experience of your characters’ voices or your characters more broadly that you would like to elaborate on, please do so here.
In contexts other than writing, do you ever have the experience of hearing voices when there is no one around? If so, please describe these experiences. How do these experiences differ from the experience of hearing the voice of a character?
Question #9 was obviously thrown in there to identify test subjects who were prone to auditory hallucinations anyway. But even after you account for these folks, a remarkable percentage of authors -- 63% -- say they hear their characters' voices, with 56% having visual or other sensory experiences of their characters. 62% reported at least some experience of feeling that their characters had agency -- that they could act of their own accord independent of what the author intended.
You might be expecting me, being the perennially dubious type, to scoff at this. But all I can say is -- whatever is going on here -- this has happened to me.
Here are some examples that came out of the study, and that line up with the exactly the sort of thing both K. D. and I have experienced:
I have a very vivid, visual picture of them in my head. I see them in my imagination as if they were on film – I do not see through their eyes, but rather look at them and observe everything they do and say.
Sometimes, I just get the feeling that they are standing right behind me when I write. Of course, I turn and no one is there.
They [the characters' voices] do not belong to me. They belong to the characters. They are totally different, in the same way that talking to someone is different from being on one’s own.
I tend to celebrate the conversations as and when they happen. To my delight, my characters don’t agree with me, sometimes demand that I change things in the story arc of whatever I’m writing.
They do their own thing! I am often astonished by what takes place and it can often be as if I am watching scenes take place and hear their speech despite the fact I am creating it.
"The writers we surveyed definitely weren’t all describing the same experience," said study lead author John Foxwell, "and one way we might make sense of that is to think about how writing relates to inner speech... Whether or not we’re always aware of it, most of us are trying to anticipate what other people are going to say and do in everyday interactions. For some of these writers, it might be the case that after a while their characters start to feel independent because the writers developed the same kinds of personality ‘models’ as they’d develop for real people, and these were generating the same kinds of predictions."
Which is kind of fascinating. When I've done book signings, the single most common question revolves around where my characters and plots come from. I try to give some kind of semi-cogent response, but the truth is, the most accurate answer is "beats the hell out of me." They seem to pop into my head completely unannounced, sometimes with such vividness that I have to write the story to discover why they're important. I often joke that I keep writing because I want to find out how the story ends, and there's a sense in which this is exactly how it seems.
I'm endlessly fascinated with the origins of creativity, and how creatives of all types are driven to their chosen medium to express ideas, images, and feelings they can't explain, and which often seem to come from outside. Whatever my own experience, I'm still a skeptic, and I am about as certain as I can be that this is only a very convincing illusion, that the imagery and personalities and plots are bubbling up from some part of me that is beneath my conscious awareness.
But the sense that it isn't, that these characters have an independent existence, is really powerful. So if (as I'm nearly certain) it is an illusion, it's a remarkably intense and persistent one, and seems to be close to ubiquitous in writers of fiction.
And I swear, I didn't have any idea beforehand about Mary Hansard's backstory and what Marig Kastella would ultimately become. Wherever that information came from, I can assure you that I was as shocked as (I hope) my readers are to find it all out.
What makes a work "creative?" The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that to be creative, a the created item must be both new and valuable. The "valuable" part already skates out over thin ice, because it immediately raises the question of "valuable to whom?" I've seen works of art -- out of respect to the artists, and so as not to get Art Snobbery Bombs lobbed in my general direction, I won't provide specific examples -- that looked to me like the product of finger paints in the hands of a below-average second-grader, and yet which made it into prominent museums (and were valued in the hundreds of thousands of dollars).
The article itself touches on this problem, with a quote from philosopher Dustin Stokes:
Knowing that something is valuable or to be valued does not by itself reveal why or how that thing is. By analogy, being told that a carburetor is useful provides no explanatory insight into the nature of a carburetor: how it works and what it does.
This is a little disingenuous, though. The difference is that any sufficiently motivated person could learn the science of how an engine works and find out for themselves why a carburetor is necessary, and afterward, we'd all agree on the explanation -- while I doubt any amount of analysis would be sufficient to get me to appreciate a piece of art that I simply don't think is very good, or (worse) to get a dozen randomly-chosen people to agree on how good it is.
Margaret Boden has an additional insight into creativity; in her opinion, truly creative works are also surprising. The Stanford article has this to say about Boden's claim:
In this kind of case, the creative result is so surprising that it prompts observers to marvel, “But how could that possibly happen?” Boden calls this transformational creativity because it cannot happen within a pre-existing conceptual space; the creator has to transform the conceptual space itself, by altering its constitutive rules or constraints. Schoenberg crafted atonal music, Boden says, “by dropping the home-key constraint”, the rule that a piece of music must begin and end in the same key. Lobachevsky and other mathematicians developed non-Euclidean geometry by dropping Euclid’s fifth axiom. Kekulé discovered the ring-structure of the benzene molecule by negating the constraint that a molecule must follow an open curve. In such cases, Boden is fond of saying that the result was “downright impossible” within the previous conceptual space.
This has an immediate resonance for me, because I've had the experience as a writer of feeling like a story or character was transformed almost without any conscious volition on my part; in Boden's terms, something happened that was outside the conceptual space of the original story. The most striking example is the character of Marig Kastella from The Chains of Orion (the third book of the Arc of the Oracles trilogy). Initially, he was simply the main character's boyfriend, and there mostly to be a hesitant, insecure, questioning foil to astronaut Kallman Dorn's brash and adventurous personality. But Marig took off in an entirely different direction, and in the last third of the book kind of took over the story. As a result his character arc diverged wildly from what I had envisioned, and he remains to this day one of my very favorite characters I've written.
If I actually did write him, you know? Because it feels like Marig was already out there somewhere, and I didn't create him, I got to know him -- and in the process he revealed himself to be a far deeper, richer, and more powerful person than I'd thought at first.
[Image licensed under the Creative CommonsShareAlike 1.0, Graffiti and Mural in the Linienstreet Berlin-Mitte, photographer Jorge Correo, 2014]
The reason this topic comes up is some research out of Aalto University in Finland that appeared this week in the journal ACM Transactions on the Human-Robot Interaction. The researchers took an AI that had been programmed to produce art -- in this case, to reproduce a piece of human-created art, but the test subjects weren't told that -- and then asked the volunteers to rate how creative the product was. In all three cases, the subjects were told that the piece had been created by AI. The volunteers were placed in one of three groups:
Group 1 saw only the result -- the finished art piece;
Group 2 saw the lines appearing on the page, but not the robot creating it; and
Group 3 saw the robot itself making the drawing.
Even though the resulting art pieces were all identical -- and, as I said, the design itself had been created by a human being, and the robot was simply generating a copy -- group 1 rated the result as the least creative, and group 3 as the most.
Evidently, if we witness something's production, we're more likely to consider the act creative -- regardless of the quality of the product. If the producer appears to have agency, that's all it takes.
The problem here is that deciding whether something is "really creative" (or any of the interminable sub-arguments over whether certain music, art, or writing is "good") all inevitably involve a subjective element that -- philosophy encyclopedias notwithstanding -- cannot be expunged. The AI experiment at Aalto University highlights that it doesn't take much to change our opinion about whether something is or is not creativity.
Now, bear in mind that I'm not considering here the topic of ethics in artificial intelligence; I've already ranted at length about the problems with techbros ripping off actual human artists, musicians, and writers to train their AI models, and how this will exacerbate the fact that most of us creative types are already making three-fifths of fuck-all in the way of income from our work. But what this highlights is that we humans can't even come to consensus on whether something actually is creativity. It's a little like the Turing Test; if all we have is the output to judge by, there's never going to be agreement about what we're looking at.
So while the researchers were careful to make it obvious (well, after the fact, anyhow) that what their robot was doing was not creative, but was a replica of someone else's work, there's no reason why AI systems couldn't already be producing art, music, and writing that appears to be creative by the Stanford's criteria of being new, valuable, and surprising.
At which point we better figure out exactly what we want our culture's creative landscape to look like -- and fast.
The flood of awful, outrage-inducing, and flat-out insane news lately has made it hard to focus on anything else.
Just in the day prior to my writing this:
The U.S. Senate confirmed a wildly unqualified Christofascist woman-abusing drunkard to lead the largest and best-funded military in the world
Trump summarily fired seventeen inspectors-general at the offices of State, Veterans' Affairs, HUD, Interior, Energy, and Defense, effectively removing any capacity for oversight
ICE raids have begun in earnest, and have included churches, preschools, and schools; among those arrested/harassed have included a military officer who was born in the U.S. but happens to be the wrong color, and, in a height of irony, Native Americans
The Episcopal bishop of Washington D.C. was called "nasty" by Trump, and has received death threats from his followers (and a threat of deportation by a MAGA congressman) for... of all things... urging mercy, kindness, and empathy toward those who are suffering
By executive order, Trump removed the $35 cap on medications for people on Medicare and Medicaid, profiting pharmaceuticals companies at the expense of the elderly and poor
Elon Musk has doubled down on his Nazi salute at the Inauguration by making a series of sick puns about names of prominent Nazi officials, followed by a laugh-till-you-cry emoji
The GOP has proposed revisions to the budget that include eliminating the mortgage interest deduction, making it harder for working-class people to afford to purchase a house
And those are just the ones that come to mind immediately.
It is unsurprising if we're feeling overwhelmed by all of this. I've had to limit my time reading the news -- given my capacity for spiraling into depression even in normal times, I can't risk letting all this take a sledgehammer to my mental health. And keep in mind that this is what Trump and his cronies want; the nuclear bomb of lunacy that has marked the first two weeks of Trump 2.0 is, at least in part, intended to create a Gish gallop of horrors so demoralizing that the opposition simply gives up.
That is exactly what we cannot afford to do. Instead, let the barrage of bad news stiffen your resolve. There's a line from the song "Turning Away," by the fantastic Scottish singer/songwriter Dougie MacLean, that applies here: "Words cannot extinguish us, however hard they're thrown."
And this brings me to a documentary I watched last week that you all must make sure you see.
It's called Porcelain War, and was the winner in the documentary category at Sundance last year. It's about two brilliant Ukrainian porcelain artists, the husband-and-wife team of Slava Leontyev and Anya Stasenko, whose delicate, whimsical, and stunningly decorated animal sculptures charmed me the first time I saw them, in an online ceramics workshop Anya led that I took about four years ago. I've followed them ever since, and their work never fails to make me smile.
Then came Putin's invasion of Ukraine, and the horror show that followed.
Slava and Anya live in Kharkiv, which has been heavily attacked, but have refused to leave. Slava volunteered to train infantry, so he's away from home a lot of the time, and has often found himself in the middle of the battles. In the film, he talks about how much he hates fighting -- and, in fact, hates the guns and other weapons he is training his fellow soldiers to use. ("They're only for one purpose," he says -- "killing other human beings"). But he is unequivocal that defending his home and his fellow Ukrainians is nothing less than an absolute duty. The only other choice is to let Putin win, and that is simply not an option.
But then, when he gets leave to come home -- he and Anya go back to creating sweet, beautiful pieces of art.
The juxtaposition of the atrocities of the invasion with the staggering loveliness of Slava and Anya's delicate porcelain work is both inspiring and heartbreaking. "If the fighting makes us stop creating beautiful things," Slava says, "we've already lost."
So as counterintuitive as it sounds, we need to take inspiration from Slava and Anya, and fight hard against letting despair freeze us into inaction. That's what Trump and his cadre want. And not only do we need to push back against the flood of evil that threatens to engulf us, we need to commit ourselves to continuing to create beauty. As Slava Leontyev points out, the world can still be a beautiful place, if we work to make it so -- despite what is happening around us.
"It's easy to scare people," he says. "But it's hard to forbid them to live... Ukraine is like porcelain. Easy to break, but impossible to destroy."
May we show such resilience, dedication, and spirit in the war we will fight over the next four years.
All my life, I've been pulled by two opposing forces.
One of them is the chaos-brain I described in yesterday's post, which I seem to have been born with. The other is a ferocious attempt to counteract that tendency by controlling the absolute hell out of my surroundings. I know a lot of this came from the way I was raised; throughout my childhood, nothing I ever did was good enough, and any compliments came along with an appended list (notarized and in triplicate) of all the things I should have done differently and/or could have done better.
The result is that I do a great deal of overcompensation. I became fanatically neat, because organizing my physical space was a way of coping with the fact that my brain is like a car with bald tires and no brakes. My classroom was so organized and clean you could just about eat off the floor (and keep in mind that it was a biology lab). As a teacher, I strove to make use of every moment we had, and faulted myself whenever things didn't go well or there was an eventuality I hadn't planned for.
I didn't expect perfection from my students, but I did from myself. And, in some parts of my life, it served me well enough.
The problem is, that approach doesn't work when you apply it to the arts.
I'm not even talking about the "learning curve" issue, here. Even when I've attained some level of proficiency, I still expect nothing less than perfection, excoriating myself for every scene in a story that didn't come out the way I wanted, every slightly lopsided piece of pottery, every missed note when I play music.
In theory, I'm one hundred percent in agreement with the quote from Ludwig van Beethoven -- "To play a wrong note is insignificant; to play without passion is inexcusable." Or, more accurately, I believe that for everyone else. It's much harder to treat myself so forgivingly.
The result has been an overwhelming case of impostor syndrome, coupled with fear of criticism -- which will, in my warped way of looking at things, only confirm what I've thought about myself all along. I'm at least working on getting my writing out there under the public eye, despite the inherent risks of poor sales and/or bad reviews, but it's been harder in other aspects of my creative life. I'm still at the stage where I had to have my arm twisted (hard) to induce me to join as a flutist in a contradance band, and it's damn near impossible to get me to play the piano in front of anyone else (including my wife). But I'm harshest about my own skill when it comes to my artistic work, which is pottery. I keep very little of what I make, and most of what I do keep are the pieces that are simple and purely functional -- bowls and mugs and the like. The vast majority of the sculptures and other, more unusual, pieces I make end up given that dreadful label of "not good enough" and are smashed against the concrete wall of the back of our house.
All along, I had the attitude -- again, directly consonant with my upbringing -- that this is how you improve, that constant self-criticism should act as some kind of impetus to getting better, to ridding your work of those dreaded mistakes, to attaining that fabled ability to create something with which others could not find fault.
It's only been recently that I've realized that this approach is completely antithetical to creativity.
I got to thinking about this after watching an online pottery workshop with the wonderful New Hampshire potter Nick Sevigney, whose pieces are weird and whimsical and unexpected. A lot of his pottery has a steampunk feeling, a sense of having been put together from a random assemblage of parts. It was a revelation to watch him piece together cut slabs of clay, not caring if the result was a little uneven or had a rough edge. In fact, he embraces those seeming imperfections, turning them "from a bug into a feature."
So I decided to see if I could do a few pieces that riffed off of his approach.
I'm most comfortable on the potter's wheel, so I started out throwing three medium-sized white stoneware bowls. I've gotten pretty good at getting that smooth curve and rounded profile, with a perfectly circular rim, that is what most of us shoot for when creating a bowl.
Usually, that's where I'd stop. If it passed my critical assessment -- not lopsided, decent weight, evenly thick walls, nice smooth surface -- I'd keep it. Otherwise, into the scrap bucket it'd go. But here... that was only the first step.
One of the techniques Nick does is taking a piece, cutting chunks out of it, adding texture to the chunk, then reattaching it. You'd think that because you're putting the piece back where it had been, it'd fit perfectly; but the problem is that adding texture (usually using stamps or rollers) stretches and flattens the clay, so inevitably it ends up larger than the hole it came from. Nick just forces it to fit, warping the piece's profile -- and instead of worrying about that, he often adds some circular marks that make it look like the piece was inexpertly riveted or screwed back on.
He leans into the unevenness hard. And the result is something magical, like a relic you might find in a demolished nineteenth century mad scientist's laboratory, something stitched together and broken and reassembled upside down and backwards.
So I took my three smooth, undamaged stoneware bowls and gave it a try.
One of the results
The hardest part -- unsurprising, perhaps, given my personality -- was making the first cut. Even knowing that if I didn't like the result, I have more clay and could always make another plain, boring, but "perfect" bowl, I sat there for some time, knife in hand, as if the Pottery Gods would smite me if I touched that sleek, classic profile. Slicing and pressing and marring and deforming it felt like deliberately choosing to ruin something "nice."
But maybe "nice" isn't what we should be shooting for, as creatives.
Maybe the goal should be somewhere out there beyond "nice." The point, I realized, is not to retread the safe, secure footsteps I've always taken, but to take a deep breath and launch off into the shadowlands.
So I cut a big chunk from the side of the bowl, got out my texturing stamps and rollers, and set to work.
I was half expecting to give up after a few attempts and throw the whole thing into the scrap bucket, but I didn't. I found I actually kind of liked the result, as different as it is from what I usually make. And what surprised me even more was that once I got into it, it was...
... fun.
I've never been much good at "having fun." In general, I give new meaning to the phrase "tightly wound." Letting loose and simply being silly is way outside my wheelhouse. (I know I shortchanged my boys as a dad when they were little simply by my seeming inability to play.) But I've come to realize that the spirit of playfulness is absolutely critical to creativity. I don't mean that every creative endeavor should be funny or whimsical; but that sense of pushing the boundaries, of letting the horse have its head and seeing where you end up, is at the heart of what it means to be creative.
I was recently chatting with another author about times when inspiration in writing will surprise you, coming at you seemingly out of nowhere. When it happens, the feeling is honestly like the ideas are originating outside of my own brain. There are two examples of this that come to mind immediately, cases where characters to whom I'd never intended to give a big role basically said, "Nuh-uh, you're not sidelining me. I'm important, and here's why." (If you're curious, the two are Jennie Trahan in my novella "Convection," and most strikingly, Marig Kastella in The Chains of Orion, who kind of took over the last third of the book, and became one of my favorite characters I've ever written.) When that happens, it means I've loosened my death-grip on the story, and given my creativity space to breathe.
And it always is a hallmark of things going really right with the writing process.
So I guess the point of all this is to encourage you to stretch your boundaries in your own creative work. I won't say "lose your fears" -- that's hopeless advice -- but try something new despite them. (Either something new within your chosen creative medium, or something entirely new.) Be willing to throw your creative life out of round, to press it into new and unexpected configurations, to turn in a new direction and see where you end up. There's good stuff to be found there outside of the narrow, constricted, breathless little boundaries of what we've always been told is "the right way to do things." Take a risk. Then take another one. The goal of creativity is not to play it safe.
As French author and Nobel laureate André Gide put it, "One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore."
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My post yesterday, about how the profit motive in (and corporate control of) media has annihilated any hope of getting accurate representation of the news, was almost immediately followed up by my running into a story about how the same forces in creative media are working to strangle creativity at its source.
The article was from Publishers Weekly, and was about an interview with HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray. It centered largely on the company's whole-hearted endorsement of AI as part of its business model. He describes using AI to take the place both of human narrators for audiobooks and of translators for increasing their sales in non-English-speaking countries, which is troubling enough; but by far his most worrisome comment describes using AI, basically, to be a stand-in for the authors themselves. Lest you think I'm exaggerating, or making this up entirely, here's a direct quote from the article:
The fast-evolving AI sector could deliver new types of formats for books, Murray said, adding that HC is experimenting with a number of potential products. One idea is a “talking book,” where a book sits atop a large language model, allowing readers to converse with an AI facsimile of its author. Speculating on other possible offerings, Murray said that it is now possible for AI to help HC build an entire cooking-focused website using only content from its backlist, but the question of how to monetize such a site remains.
Later in the article, almost offhand, was a comment that while HarperCollins saw their sales go up last year by only six percent, their profits went up by sixty percent. The reason was a "restructuring" of the company -- which, of course, included plenty of layoffs.
How much of that windfall went to the authors themselves is left as an exercise for the reader.
I can vouch first-hand that in the current economic climate, it is damn near impossible to make a living as a writer, musician, or artist. The people who are actually the wellspring of creativity powering the whole enterprise of creative media get next to nothing; the profits are funneled directly into the hands of a small number of people -- the CEOs of large publishing houses, distributors, marketing and publicity firms, and social media companies.
I can use myself as an example. I have twenty-four books in print, through two small traditional publishers and some that are self-published. I have never netted more than five hundred dollars in a calendar year; most years, it's more like a hundred. I didn't go into this expecting to get rich, but I'd sure like to be able to take my wife out to a nice restaurant once a month from my royalties.
As it is, we might be able to split the lunch special at Denny's.
Okay, I can hear some of you say; maybe it's not the system, maybe it's you. Maybe your books just aren't any good, and you're blaming it on corporate greed. All right, fair enough, we can admit that as a possibility. But I have dozens of extraordinarily talented and hard-working writer friends, and they all say pretty much the same thing. Are you gonna stand there and tell us we're all so bad we don't deserve to make a living?
And now the CEO of HarperCollins is going to take the authors out of the loop even of speaking for ourselves, and just create an AI so readers can talk to a simulation of us without our getting any compensation for it?
Ooh, maybe he could ratchet those profits up into the eighty or ninety percent range if he eliminated the authors altogether, and had AI write the books themselves.
Besides the greed, it's the out-of-touchness that bothers me the most. Lately I've been seeing the following screenshot going around -- a conversation between Long Island University Economics Department Chair Panos Mourdoukoutas and an ordinary reader named Gwen:
The cockiness is absolutely staggering; that somehow it's better to put even more money in Jeff Bezos's pockets than it is to support public libraries. They've already got the entire market locked up tight, so what more do the corporate CEOs want? It's flat-out impossible as an author to avoid selling through Amazon; they've got an inescapable stranglehold on book sales. And, as I found out the hard way, they also have no problem with reducing the prices set by me or my publisher without permission, further cutting into any profit I get -- but, like HarperCollins, you can bet they make sure it doesn't hurt their bottom line by a single cent.
And don't even get me started about the Mark Zuckerberg model of social media. When Facebook first really got rolling, authors and other creators could post links to their work, and it was actually not a bad way to (at the very least) get some name recognition. Now? Anything with an external link gets deliberately drowned by the algorithm. Oh, sure, you can post stuff, but no one sees it. The idea is to force authors to purchase advertising from Facebook instead.
Basically, if it doesn't make Zuckerberg money, you can forget about it.
If I sound bitter about all this -- well, it's because I am. I've thrown my heart into my writing, and gotten very little in return. We've ceded the control of the creative spirit of humanity to an inherently parasitic system, where the ones who are actually enriching the cultural milieu are reaping only a minuscule percent of the rewards.
The worst part is that, like the situation I described yesterday regarding the news media, I see no way out of this, not for myself nor for any other creative person. Oh, we'll continue doing what we do; writing is as much a part of my life as breathing. But isn't it tragic that the writers, artists, and musicians whose creative spirits nurture all of us have to struggle against seemingly insurmountable odds even to be seen?
All because of the insatiable greed, arrogance, and short-sightedness of a handful of individuals who have somehow ended up in charge of damn near everything that makes life bearable. People who want more and more and more, and after that, more again. Millions don't satisfy; they need billions.
As psychologist Erich Fromm put it, "Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever actually reaching satisfaction."
Yesterday, I was discussing with a friend how important it is to find things that lift your spirit. The world has been replete with dismal news lately, and it's all too easy to decide that everything's hopeless -- to become either cynical or despondent. I know I have to fight that tendency myself, especially considering the topics I frequently address here at Skeptophilia.
It's essential to take a moment, every so often, to step back and recognize that however terrible current events have been, there is still great love, compassion, and wonder in the world. So I thought I'd take a day off from the continual stream of WTF that the news has become, and consider a few examples of what beauty we humans are capable of. Think of it as an anodyne against despair, a way to inoculate yourself against losing hope.
Dalai Lama Mandala I, pen/ink/watercolor, by Carol Bloomgarden [Image used with permission]
First, take a look at this video by the Dutch artist Thijme Termaat. He spent two and a half years creating a progressive set of paintings, condensed it into a three-minute video, set it to a piece from Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, and named it Timelapse. Take three minutes and be amazed.
When I was in Boston a while back, I went to the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, and I lucked out and saw some work by the incredibly creative Rachel Perry Welty. The piece that absolutely captivated me was a twelve-minute video called Karaoke Wrong Number, wherein she took four years' worth of voicemail messages she'd received by accident (i.e., the person had called her number but thought they were leaving a message to someone else entirely), and lip synced to them. I stood there and watched the entire piece three times in a row -- it's mesmerizing. The incredible thing about it is that she's able to shift her facial expression and body language to match the voice and message of the person -- it's funny, wry, and at times absolutely uncanny, and illustrates Welty's sheer creative genius. (You can watch a five-minute clip from it at the link above.)
If you don't mind crying, take a look at Kseniya Simonova's stupendous feat of drawing in sand on a light box that brought the whole audience to tears in Ukraine's Got Talent. It shows the effect of the German invasion on the people of Ukraine during World War II, and packs an emotional punch like nothing I've ever seen before -- especially considering what's happening in Ukraine right now. It's a perfect example of an artist's ability to distill pain into beauty.
If after that, you want to see something that is pure whimsy to cheer you up, you need to watch the amazing musical marble machine created by Martin Molin of the Swedish band Wintergatan. Molin created a wild Rube Goldberg machine, powered by a hand crank and 2,000 marbles, that plays a tune he wrote. It's one of those things that you watch, and you just can't quite believe it's real.
If you want to blow your mind further, have a look at this short little video showing one of the crazy three-dimensional sculptures of Japanese mathematician and artist Kokichi Sugihara. Sugihara specializes in creating optical illusions out of paper -- in this case, a structure that seems to induce marbles to roll uphill. The weird thing to me is that even when he shows you how it's done -- which he does, about halfway through -- you still can't see it any other way. It's so cleverly done that our brains simply can't handle it.
Last, for sheer exuberance -- if you're like me, it'll make you laugh and cry at the same time -- check out the short film "Where in the Hell Is Matt?", made by Matt Harding. Harding set out to film himself dancing in as many different spots on Earth as he could get to, often joined by children, adults, and dogs, all simply expressing how wonderful it is to be alive. It's set to the heart-wrenchingly gorgeous song "Praan" by Garry Schyman. The music and the spirit of Harding's project could not blend together more perfectly.
So there you are. Even when things are bad, people are still creating beautiful, funny, and whimsical things. They still care about bringing joy into the world, despite the constant barrage of pain, discouragement, and bad news we're subjected to on a daily basis. I don't know about you, but when I see things like this, it reminds me that humanity isn't as hopeless as it may seem at times. It recalls the last lines of the beautiful poem "Desiderata," by Max Ehrmann, which never fails to bring me to tears, and which seems like a good place to conclude:
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.
The question, as always, is whether this correlation is indicative of causation, and if so, which direction the causation points. Does the underlying physiological problem that causes mental illness create, as a side effect, a greater degree of creativity? (A recent study supports this conjecture, at least in some cases.) Or does mental illness cause a desire to cultivate creative outlets as a way to assuage the pain?
This latter possibility was the subject of a paper that came out this week from Ohio State University, authored by psychologist Joseph Maffly-Kipp. The research had two parts. The first was a cross-sectional study of people from ages 18 to 72, in all walks of life, that assessed their experience of depression and mood disorders, and also scored them for fantasy-proneness -- to what extent did they find themselves escaping into fantasy worlds, whether through reading, watching television or movies, creative endeavors, or daydreaming? The other was a longitudinal study took a group of college students and tracked them for six weeks to see how both of those measures changed over time.
Both groups were also assessed for their perceptions of "meaning in life" -- to what extent did they find any kind of meaning behind their daily experiences? This, like fantasy-proneness, might take many forms, from conventional religiosity, to spirituality, to connection with other human beings, to dedication to a higher purpose.
The results are fascinating. The people with higher levels of depression and high fantasy-proneness scored higher on assessments for meaning in life than the ones who were high on measures of depression but low on measures of fantasy-proneness. Apparently for depressed individuals, our ability to maintain a sense of meaningfulness in life is boosted by our capacity to escape now and again into fantasy worlds. Interesting, too, is the piece of the sample that showed negative results; individuals low for depression-proneness had no significant correlation between fantasy-proneness and meaning in life.
It seems like if you're not depressed, your capacity for finding meaning doesn't depend on your finding that sense of meaning in the imaginary.
"We found across several studies that the tendency to engage in vivid mental fantasies was related to greater perceptions that life was meaningful, but this was only true for people with high levels of depression," Maffly-Kipp said. "We speculated that, because depressed people are struggling to find meaning in more typical ways (e.g., religion, social relationships, careers, community, etc.), they might resort to finding it through the engagement with fantasies. Fantasies are less constrained by reality, more controllable, and might be free from the negativity biases seen in depression. They could help a person find a sense of belonging and purpose, even if it is imaginary."
Nøkken Som Hvit Hest by Theodor Kittelsen (1907) [Image is in the Public Domain]
Of course, it immediately made me think of my own case. I have struggled with depression and anxiety for as long as I can remember, and ever since I was a child I've not only voraciously read escapist fiction (reading Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time when I was about ten was a transcendent experience), but I've written it, too. Not that everything I read or write is cheerful, mind you -- if you pick up one of my novels, don't expect that every character is going to have a happy ending, or necessarily even survive to the end. But what my writing does consistently embody is that there is hope, that there are still selfless, brave, good people in the world, that a powerful cause is worth fighting for, and that love, loyalty, and friendship are the most important things in life.
That some of what I write is spurred by my own attempts to escape the dark, chaotic whirlwind of my own brain, I have no doubt whatsoever. Maffly-Kipp's study doesn't settle the question of whether we mentally ill people have a higher capacity for inventing fantasy worlds because of some underlying common cause, or if the mental illness came first and trying to escape from it into fantasy worlds evolved later as a coping mechanism; and of course, it could be both, or be different in different people. Mental illness, like anything having to do with our cognitive apparatus, is a complicated matter, admitting of few easy explanations.
But it does highlight that even those of us who live with depression and anxiety on a daily basis can find ways to manage it -- even if it means leaving the real world at times.
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