The Creator Mindset
The Concept of Time in the Life of the Artist
Rare is the creator who dares to be happy.
Creators don’t tend to consider their happiness worth working on. Think of the creative archetype: moodiness, unpredictability, aloofness. Happiness by comparison seems too… stable.
The gifted artist tends to stay apart from society, and becomes tormented. She feels isolated, but not willing to give up the vision of life which keeps her separate. She probably equates happiness to being adjusted to the society which is hostile to her nature.
Torment and creativity look like a package deal, so the creator stays attached to her unhappiness.
Happiness is Inefficient
The investor and philosopher Naval Ravikant offered a subtly radical idea on his podcast: being unhappy is extremely inefficient.
When I got happier in my own life, I became much more effective — even though I don’t work as hard as I used to. I’m able to form relationships with people who I would have kept at a distance earlier in my life, for whatever preconceived notions I held.
I make decisions much more clearly now, because I can see the long-term outcomes. I cut straight to the chase and don’t try and negotiate an extra 20% here or there — because I know that’s going to make me unhappy in the long-term, make the other person unhappy, and make the deal less stable.
I’ve become more productive even though I don’t work as hard, because I make better decisions.
The resolution for this apparent conflict between happiness, creativity and society is this: there is no external circumstance, there is nothing “out there,” no person or achievement which can bring you a long lasting improvement in happiness.
Leadership and Indifference
Historians tell us that Cato the Younger used to deliberately invite ridicule by wearing unfashionable clothing in the Roman Senate. His idea was to immunize himself against concern for the opinion of others, so he could make decisions with a clearer mind.
Then there is ‘The Anxiety of Influence’, a theory by the literary scholar Harold Bloom which asserts that in order to attain true originality the artist must perform a symbolic “murder” of his creative predecessor. There will be a past artist, a figure of inspiration in the young creator’s mind, whose work casts a shadow and weighs him down with the authority of its aesthetic values.
To achieve originality is to depart from these values which have shepherded the artist in his life so far. It is to reject the validation of similarity to someone else.
At first it is terrifying to see beyond where others have seen.
Indifference
Do not chase indifference to the opinion of others. Where is that coming from, except from the desire to be free of the weight of their judgement which is a product of your non-indifference?
Indifference must arise as a side effect.
They say sunlight is the best disinfectant. The indifference to others’ opinions will come when you fix your gaze on whatever is there to receive the judgement, and find that there is nothing.
Immersion
The writer and performance coach Kapil Gupta has a popular saying, which is that stoicism is the product of wisdom, not its cause.
You cannot force, lead or cajole your mind into a state of equanimity when it would rather kick up a storm. Under such conditions, stoicism is just another tactic your mind turns to in order to feel better.
If on the other hand you have found complete immersion, the idea of nervousness would never arise. There would be no space in awareness for it to do so. In the above 11 minute video, the veteran actress Lila Garrett explains how when she spoke on a subject she felt passionate about, or acted a script that gripped her, stage fright simply didn’t arise.
The Concept of Time in the Life of the Artist
Just as in a failed marriage you can rarely point to one day as the day where it all went wrong, the idea of a particular moment when an artist’s performance collapsed under nerves is an illusion.
This collapse can be attributed to any and all moments when the artist failed to see the truth about her craft.
Since this statement is probably not a familiar one, I will pick it up, turn it over and present it from a few different angles.
The truth is the complex, intricate and subtle tendency of reality to kick back when you kick it. That is, to let you know it exists. Within a human it is ultimately non-intellectual. Footballers do not waste their time studying the physics of a spherical object in motion. Birds have never been successfully lectured on how to fly. Writers’ style manuals are beloved of students and alien to masters.
There is that famous saying, “keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” I interpret ‘enemy’ not as a chess piece in some Machiavellian schema, but as something completely internal. It is your demon, your obstacle to creative freedom, keeping your conscious mind in gainful employment. Its power is in remaining out of sight.
The solution is never separate from the problem. It lies within the problem. There are not two things; there is only one thing.
To see the truth about one’s craft as an artist is to be in communion with it, to arrive at a oneness which extends the scientific principle of parsimonious reasoning (Occam’s Razor) beyond where science itself has been able to take it.
This communion is literally a loss of the mind. The internal narrator, problem-solver, worrier, prospector, reputation guardian… has gone. Direct interface with the unnamable truth about the art itself.
Time
There is no such thing as tomorrow. There is only ever today.
I was thinking recently about the billions of people who have hoped. It occurred to me that this moment right now is what occupied the glowing frame of that hopeful future.
In Volume 2 of Marcel Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’, the young narrator reflects on the beginning of his ambition to become a novelist.
If I had not been so determined to set to work, I might have made an effort to start at once. But given that my resolve was unbreakable, given that within twenty-four hours, inside the empty frame of tomorrow where everything was perfect because it was not today, my best intentions would begin to take material shape, it was really preferable not to think of beginning things on an evening when I was not quite ready - and of course the following days were to be no better suited to beginning things.
The concept of time is the skeleton of anxiety. Whenever you lose yourself in an activity, Time disappears.
It is not a question of whether time has an objective existence from the point of view of physics. If you have found communion with your craft as an artist, you have left behind that state of searching for concepts.
The remaining question is what is left behind after concepts have departed. Art is the understanding that there is no answer; there is only the question.
