The Fascinating I
The artist and the spawn of Narcissus
I sometimes enroll in creative writing courses. I am meticulous in choosing those because I feel like it would be pointless for me if I did not have the utmost respect for the tutor’s work, but also a connection with the way they teach. People often assume that they know how to do that without any kind of training or previous experience and hope to wow others by the sheer brilliance of their own experience when it could not be further from reality.
So this is what has been going on in my life since early January. I’m taking a writing course with one of my favourite writers (she’s amazing and not the inspiration for this post).
I often think about writing and what kind of currency it signifies in culture. Often enough, I get the impression that people like the idea of being a writer a lot more than they like the writing itself. Aesthetically pleasing photos of typewriters, fountain pens, cozy cafés, quotes from Kafka, and leafy fields. That is absolutely fine, but not usually my experience. I often write in my bed until the wee hours of the morning, without brushing my hair and occasionally while gorging on chips. Sometimes I have to write with a migraine. Sometimes I have to write with a pile of laundry to my left and one of papers to mark to my right. I’m usually hot because it’s always summer in Rio de Janeiro, even with the AC blasting. And still, I feel the pull. To write essays, to write reviews, to comb the thoughts raging inside my head into a nice French braid of coherent sentences. And I write stories. So when I ask myself what it means to be a writer, the first and obvious response is that you are someone who writes, and that’s it. Or to put it nicely, a writer is someone who makes sense of the world through writing. But how does one get there?
Since I turned thirty I often catch myself exchanging annoyance or even anger at the behaviour of others for the gratitude of inspiration. I observe their social dynamics; the words they always recur to, their little mannerisms. Whenever something absurd happens to me, I wonder how it could resurface in a story under the cloak of fictional anonymity with the full awareness that those people would never see themselves there even if they read it. I jot down ridiculous and impressive sentences in my notebook. Sometimes, if I find myself stumped in a story, it will gain life in a completely different context and, just like that, I will be completely detached from whatever inspired it. Thus, life - the good, the bad, the hurtful, the dismissive and the heartwarming - is spun into fictional threads.
If you like stories, which, of course, most people do, you probably have noticed how often writers will write about being a writer. About their writer friends, writer retreats, writer groups, writer tutorials, and writer MFAs in some place like Iowa. And because it’s America, everybody will think it sounds very professional and prestigious (which I suppose it must be) and so much serious writing must be going on there, etc. And when I go into any kind of context where a lot of writers - aspiring to celebrity or to a book deal or God knows what - are working together, I cannot help but to also place myself slightly on the outside to observe their behaviour, from sucking up and self-affirmation to the more flattering aspects of kindness and tenacity. Inevitably, someone will say something splendid about Alice Munro (everybody seems to still be a fan of Alice Munro in these kinds of settings). Some things never change. They will love Virginia Woolf, but never fess up to enjoying Dickens. They will mostly mention the same names when asked for references or inspirations. Many of them will have written memoirs, plural, and might even be working on another; their fiction is often quite obviously self-referential. Which is fine. This is not a critique, but when I put it all together, I perceive certain patterns. And then one might be led to conclude that the reason for such homogeneity takes its root in, well, the fact that the groups are quite homogeneous. And I think that’s where the trouble starts.
Earlier today, I was scrolling through TikTok and I stumbled upon a video of (mostly) white men in rock’n’roll bands naming their favourite band ever. The responses were - unsurprisingly - mostly rock’n’roll bands filled with other white men. While this is not necessarily a problem, it shed some light on for me, someone who was once a teenager quite impressed by some of the men there, the reason why they are mostly musicians but not necessarily artists. There is an inherent lack of curiosity that their replies illustrate that is made more ironic by the fact that, with the exception of those who named their own band, tongue in cheek or not, the replies were mostly quite earnestly an attempt at showing a musical taste that did not evolve from the ones they had at age 14. And that just makes up for boring, repetitive, inbred music that mostly pleases nostalgic people. And that’s why the most interesting artists associated with rock music right now are usually people who are bored by rock’n’roll nostalgia and interested in music beyond the limitations of genre. I mean, David Bowie was already bored by it in 1976.
In the same way that no woman made it to the rock’n’roll list in any way or form, you won’t find much variation within these writing groups. It is usually middle-class people, reading middle-class writers who lived in the same places they did or a variation of it. That kind of inbreeding is what dries up the imagination, limits the conversation, and produces mediocre art at best. People who only open themselves to the artistic variation of roast meat and gravy do not have the aesthetic sustenance necessary to create anything exciting.
If I close my eyes and think about any artist that I find interesting and who has found any kind of longevity doing what they do, I realise they have done so through feeding on various influences, art forms, genres, and social circles. It remains ever baffling to me how lazy people can get when they see themselves as ground zero, the standard of the human experience, the yardstick by which all others are given an exotic stamp. (i. e., Americans wondering if the rest of the universe intends to quit TikTok because they are potentially being locked out of it). This kind of narcissistic fascination is a creatively barren land. I promise you that unless you are a celebrity, which is a whole different monster, there is only one person who finds your life that compelling. Creating is as much about the world as it is about the self. Art should be generous.
Uau, disse tudo 👏👏👏