On Escaping Oneself

There is in this world a wide spectrum of human circumstance, from very comfortable indeed to extremely uncomfortable. At the same time, there is a spectrum of desire-to-change ones circumstance. If one is very uncomfortable indeed, it makes sense to want to change your lot in life, perhaps even to change in some meaningful way who you are.

You might think, in fact, that the desire to change oneself might correlate more or less with the comfort of ones life, and that might even be true. True, that is, in general terms. Comfortable people, presumably, prefer to change little or nothing.

When you get down to specific people, though, you will find that many many many people who are in fairly comfortable situations nevertheless seek, sometimes desperately, to change their lives, to change themselves, to somehow escape their comfortable and yet somehow unsatisfying situation.

This manifests in a lot of ways. A lot of ways. People look to religion, they take up hobbies, and sometimes they just whine a lot on social media.

One variant is the would-be artist.

Now, I am very much in favor of art-making. Big fan. What's less appealing is the assumption, or the investment in the idea, of art-making leading to some sort of "success."

We have photographers who are struggling to become Professional Photographers, or Fine Art Photographers, and I suppose we have the same in all the other arts. Mostly, of course, I see photographers who seem to, with varying degrees of desperation, want photography to somehow save them from themselves. Maybe they want to make money, or get featured in FOAM or get a show somewhere, or maybe they just want their photography to somehow turn them into interesting people, or get them laid more, or something.

To an extent, I don't necessarily disapprove. We do grow and change, sometimes through the mechanic of "trying new things." Taking up a new hobby isn't a bad way to be human, to live your life, to expand oneself in good ways.

On the other hand, to ask too much of such a thing, to hope that it will in some meaningful way provide an escape from oneself, that can easily turn to pathology.

Perhaps there isn't, in the end, much difference between the child of poverty who bets it all on basketball, and the dweeb who buys an expensive camera. Both hope to alter their lives, maybe profoundly. Both are long shots; both enable much if the plan happens to work out. Still, one is hoping to escape from being cold and hungry, the other dreams of not being a boring dweeb. Perhaps there is a difference after all.

As someone who is essentially pretty comfortable, who is not seeking to escape cold and hunger, and at the same time as someone who's aware of what a long shot art is, I am trying to do something else artistically.

I don't want to escape myself, or my circumstances. I'm fascinating and cool, my life is really very comfortable indeed. Why on earth would I seek to escape this excellent set of circumstances?

There is a scene in a Terry Pratchett novel, Witches Abroad, in which Granny Weatherwax is trapped by her evil sister in a hall of mirrors, endlessly reflecting images of Granny back at herself. Her sister cackles from afar, something about how she must now figure out which one is real, and she never will, or whatever. Something like that. Granny instantly identifies herself as the real one and smashes the mirrors, completely unfazed.

This, while funny and somewhat silly, is a useful little parable. You are right here. There's no mystery. Perhaps you make art, and that is a wonderful and fine thing. However, there is no mythical you, no potential-you that is great artist or a professional photographer (or, for that matter, a movie star or a captain of industry.) There's just you, right here. Someday, maybe even today, you are or will be any one of those things. When that happens, you will still be, you are, right here not mythical at all but very real, very much present in all your meat-based imperfect glory.

I spend too much time online, and I see a lot of people looking for answers. They want to know how to be someone else. Ironically, many of them seem to tinker with Buddhist ideas at some time or another, which I find especially odd seeing as Buddhism seems to be as much about being yourself as you are right now, as it is about anything else. Buddhism as a way to transform yourself to someone new seems to be rather missing the point.

I don't want to make art to transform either myself or my life, but rather to be myself, and to live my life, in as fully human a way as I can manage.

Rumor has it that Bill Watterson (author of Calvin & Hobbes) paints a painting every day, and burns it that night. Kurt Vonnegut famously advised students to write a poem, as good as poem as they can, and then to tear it up. The point here is that art can simply be made, you don't have to show it to anyone. You don't have to try to "succeed" somehow. You can simply do it, and if you like, you can do it as well as you can. Or not. You can take the same photograph over and over, and if you like that photograph and you like taking it, well then why not? Larry Gagosian will not be telephoning you either way, so in the end what does it matter?

At the same time, I object to the "I neeeeeed to take photographs" (or the related "I neeeeeeed to write" or whatever) which is almost invariably a mere performance by someone who wants you to consider them interesting and fuckable. They, as a rule, have no such need, and probably don't even much like whatever art they like to imagine themselves experts at.

This is the fundamental distinction: does photography (or whatever) actually do something for you, or do you simply fancy yourself in the hat?

Because photography itself is specifically so extremely easy, it's kind of a standard landing place for those who want to appear interesting, those who hope to escape their boring selves and either get laid, get rich, or both. Learning to play the piano is hard, and learning to play it well is much harder, and anyways you can't exactly wander around with a piano trying to impress girls. The camera is more or less the one Art Accessory you can roam around with without looking like a weirdo.

Anyways, I don't think most of my readers are trying to escape themselves. I do see hints, from time to time, of someone I suspect of reading these little notes being unsatisfied with their photographs, and I urge you: don't be.