If I had an opportunity to give Kellie advice, I would tell her that she cannot know herself, particularly as an artist, until she makes art. Art is not expansive and freeing, it is pure limitation. 'The line will go from here to there and its shape will be like this.' 'The tone which I choose for this section calls for the word ascertain. Determine simply will not do.' The writer must buy erasers in bulk or perhaps always stinks of whiteout.(Dated but I need the image. Which is the point.) The painter has enough rejected canvasses to build a shed out of. Art is the willful choice to reject everything that is not the art, which means the main thing to be rejected is...the Artist.
Art is all about the artist. But it is not about his presence but his absence. Even in writing an autobiography you must erase the writer. Even in a self-portrait of you painting a self-portrait you can never paint yourself as you are in the moment, but must paint the artist that is retained in your mind, and reject any intrusion from the still-existing self. The artist is the mold in which the art is formed. Introspection is the solvent that dissolves the artist. That is the introspection that is needed. Kellie wants to know herself before she paints, but the artist knows himself by what things he removes from the painting. Art is the sacrifice of self to obtain the boon of communicating with the outside world. If you want to know if you are an artist, 'Make some art.'
There is a phrase in a Deleuze essay about Francis Bacon that I often return to: the painting before the painting. Standing before a white canvas the artist has to empty it of the painting before the painting before they can paint the real painting. What you are saying is a similar point as I read it; we're always continually removing the painting that hides the real painting.
Jun 27, 2023·edited Jun 27, 2023Liked by Henrik Karlsson
I really understand where Kellie is coming from. With my own writing I try to separate my desire for a grand, overarching sense of Truth™️ from my capacity to convey what feels true in the moment when I’m writing. The latter feels infinitely more accessible and - paradoxically - more honest.
I also think about this quotation that I came across in Akwaeke Emezi’s book ‘Dear Senthuran’: “Did you ever watch the Alexander McQueen documentary? There’s a quote that Jahra pulled from it and shared: I didn’t care about what people thought of me and I didn’t care what I thought of myself. Okay, we’ve heard the first part before, but fuck, that second part? To not care what you think of yourself?… McQueen was here talking about removing not just the collar other people put on him, but, more important, the collar he put on himself! It blows my mind—to free yourself from yourself, to hear the voice in your head saying all the things it’s been conditioned to say, and then to ignore it and make the work anyway? I love this idea so much—especially because it doesn’t demand that you not think things of yourself. You can think whatever you want, just don’t care about it. That’s wild. That’s some next-level magic.”
The dam metaphor is a highlight for me too, and it reminds me of Hannah Arendt's dichotomy of the active life and contemplative life.
For me, it often works the other way too. Silence and stillness help me accumulate potential energy that I release in a directed action — like spending time thinking about a big decision before committing to one of the options.
The contemplative and active phases of life feed each other, like inhaling and exhaling.
A realization that has been working its way to the surface for me is that the only way to have a consistent and stable "self" identity is to expand it to include all of the changing spectrum of your experience over time. Like the old metaphor of a boat being replaced plank by plank...is it still the same boat when all of its planks have been replaced? We are like that too, but with experience, and if we grasp for some single defining "who am i" we suffer deeply because there is no such thing. In redefining "self" identity to be a result OF our decisions, rather than a constraint ON our decisions then we are liberated in the moment...our identity is stabilized in the process of living, and it flexes with the context of our existence. Our identity becomes, basically, the way in which we handle change.
Excellent insight. The distinction between passive and active introspection is brilliant Thank you, Henrik.
Regarding the value of holding off on the passive type, I highly recommend Lewis Thomas's essay "The Attic of the Brain," which makes essentially the same point by arguing that there's creative danger in psychoanalysis and other such means by which we seek to become too acutely aware of the contents of our own subconscious minds.
I often have a feeling which call "accumulating rules", it is as if I in learning things and thinking accumulate barriers to what I can and cannot do, and from time to time I just need to rid myself of that.
Interesting idea: "accumulating rules," accumulating barriers. And purging oneself of them periodically. Nice.
"The Attic of the Brain" can be found in Thomas's classic essay collection LATE NIGHT THOUGHTS ON LISTENING TO MAHLER'S NINTH SYMPHONY. Quite seriously -- and I say this as a lifelong fan of great essays -- this is among the two or three best (most lucid, cogent, and moving) books of essays that I've ever read.
Rick Rubin also talks about a similar concept to Nick Cave's ide of the "muse." Rubin calls it "the Source." As much as I enjoyed Rubin's book, I am not very comfortable with the idea that there is a "Source" or "Muses" out there and that we are just vessels for them. I think practicing introspection through "doing" works for me best if I am working on something.
The best view of the muse, or source, or daemon, is not that we are passive vessels or conduits for it, but that our creative work represents an active collaboration with it.
I find the collaboration metaphor of inspired creativity better than the vessel one because it corrects the possible error of thinking the muse/daemon/genius implies total passivity on our part. It confronts the mistaken idea that relying on, or evening championing (as I do), the idea of higher inspiration means you just sit around waiting to feel inspired. As we all know, that approach is a guaranteed way to get nothing done and die with your creative calling unexpressed and unfilfilled (in other words, to fail to “bring forth what is within you,” in the famous line of the Thomas Gospel). Understanding that working with the daemon muse is a collaboration between you and a separate intelligence, and getting the respective roles right—knowing that your job is to wait actively by honing your craft and putting in seat time to make space for your inner partner to make its appearance when it wants, while your muse’s job is to provide the ideas, the focus, the fire, the the overall direction and content of your creative gift and your unique perspective on life—is, in my experience, a recipe for creative fulfillment.
It also doesn’t matter if you take this model as a psychological metaphor or something metaphysically real. In fact, I personally find that leaving it ontologically indeterminate and liminal imparts a numinous power.
FWIW, I wrote a book on this, in case you might find it interesting. (Forgive the self-plug; I only mention it because we’re talking about this topic.) The title is A Course in Demonic Creativity: A Writer’s Guide to the Inner Genius. You can find it freely downloadable online as a PDF. Currently a print edition is in the works, many years after I first published the electronic version.
Hey Henrik, great article. I agree that asking yourself ‘what am I supposed to be doing’ is an upward spiral of never-ending anxiety.
However, I’m curious more about your position on therapy. I find that working out who I am through therapy, talking things out, or uncovering traumatic experiences that have crafted me, has only ever helped me.
Who knows though? Maybe I could’ve been a greater artist if I didn’t uncover these things in therapy or inner work an just ran to my art with a machete.
I would say the type of therapeutic work that interest me and I have found useful is where you increase the space of dialogue in a group or within yourself. Sometimes you can make small narratives about your past as a ritual, but that doesn't interest me as much.
As I mention in a caveat in the end I have benefited from therapeutic work! Though a lot of people who is more interested than I in making great art would say to avoid that. As with all things: know what you are trying to achieve, use all tools were they help etc.
Interesting. I'm definitely trying to make great art.. but I feel that there are things 'in the way' that I need to still work on. And I really don't want to end up like some of the 'great artists', the ones who off themselves or live a life in terrible conditions. I don't think that's for our time anymore IMO.
Not of our time: who would you count as great contemporary artists/writers/etc who do not live dysfunctional lives?
The one clear example I have is Tomas Tranströmer -- well he's been dead 8 years -- who seemed perfectly wholesome. All other contemporary that spring to mind seem dysfunctional.
The first that comes to mind is Paul Thomas Anderson and Stephen King if that says anything of my current taste lol. I don’t know much of PTA and his struggles but King for sure went through a bloody battle with drugs and alcohol. Are you saying all is lost for a functional artist lol?
That’s the quote from ‘On Writing’ right? Great pull.
I hear ya. So I’ll only do therapy until we are about to uncover the real down and dirty and then apply that darkness to the page. I love this discussion.
Do you feel this is where you are getting your inspiration from?
"If you spend too much time with a therapist, for instance, building up a complex model of who you are, that model is going to limit what you allow yourself to do."
It feels like a balancing act between defining your identity, having it empower you, and letting go all together to discover something new.
It's like to find yourself you must lose yourself.
You must get out of your mind and actively experiment with your environment and the things you feel driven to do. Then get back into yourself and make meaning of the insights from your experience.
Before now, I had thoughts of this active and passive forms of introspection, but your articulation has given wings to my thoughts. Thank you Henrik.
I've been thinking about this alot lately, especially in the sense of therapy that continually seems to throw me deeper into looking and not listening. I've been contemplating once a month sessions, or, ad hoc, because in a sense I feel like those sessions are decreasing my personal understanding of me. Albeit when I started I desperately needed some help and guidance, but there is a point where I keep asking "why do I keep showing up here?" Listening to my writing, my photography, nature, the streets, my dog, and my daily rhythms sometimes help me feel more like myself than a 50 minute long dive into larger, complex, knotty questions. Glad I'm not the only one like this. Really grateful for this piece.
If I had an opportunity to give Kellie advice, I would tell her that she cannot know herself, particularly as an artist, until she makes art. Art is not expansive and freeing, it is pure limitation. 'The line will go from here to there and its shape will be like this.' 'The tone which I choose for this section calls for the word ascertain. Determine simply will not do.' The writer must buy erasers in bulk or perhaps always stinks of whiteout.(Dated but I need the image. Which is the point.) The painter has enough rejected canvasses to build a shed out of. Art is the willful choice to reject everything that is not the art, which means the main thing to be rejected is...the Artist.
Art is all about the artist. But it is not about his presence but his absence. Even in writing an autobiography you must erase the writer. Even in a self-portrait of you painting a self-portrait you can never paint yourself as you are in the moment, but must paint the artist that is retained in your mind, and reject any intrusion from the still-existing self. The artist is the mold in which the art is formed. Introspection is the solvent that dissolves the artist. That is the introspection that is needed. Kellie wants to know herself before she paints, but the artist knows himself by what things he removes from the painting. Art is the sacrifice of self to obtain the boon of communicating with the outside world. If you want to know if you are an artist, 'Make some art.'
There is a phrase in a Deleuze essay about Francis Bacon that I often return to: the painting before the painting. Standing before a white canvas the artist has to empty it of the painting before the painting before they can paint the real painting. What you are saying is a similar point as I read it; we're always continually removing the painting that hides the real painting.
I really understand where Kellie is coming from. With my own writing I try to separate my desire for a grand, overarching sense of Truth™️ from my capacity to convey what feels true in the moment when I’m writing. The latter feels infinitely more accessible and - paradoxically - more honest.
I also think about this quotation that I came across in Akwaeke Emezi’s book ‘Dear Senthuran’: “Did you ever watch the Alexander McQueen documentary? There’s a quote that Jahra pulled from it and shared: I didn’t care about what people thought of me and I didn’t care what I thought of myself. Okay, we’ve heard the first part before, but fuck, that second part? To not care what you think of yourself?… McQueen was here talking about removing not just the collar other people put on him, but, more important, the collar he put on himself! It blows my mind—to free yourself from yourself, to hear the voice in your head saying all the things it’s been conditioned to say, and then to ignore it and make the work anyway? I love this idea so much—especially because it doesn’t demand that you not think things of yourself. You can think whatever you want, just don’t care about it. That’s wild. That’s some next-level magic.”
That's neat. I will have to think about that for awhile.
The dam metaphor really lands. Crucial to have both action and reflection. Great piece
I imagine you must have a lot to process from time to time, Will, with everything you fling yourself into.
Appreciate you saying that, Henrik. Looking forward to some wide-open reflection time next month!
The dam metaphor is a highlight for me too, and it reminds me of Hannah Arendt's dichotomy of the active life and contemplative life.
For me, it often works the other way too. Silence and stillness help me accumulate potential energy that I release in a directed action — like spending time thinking about a big decision before committing to one of the options.
The contemplative and active phases of life feed each other, like inhaling and exhaling.
Love the pic of Cy’s studio!
The idea of action as a myriad of experiments on who we are, with no underlying eternal essence, is amazing.
Yes! It is a strange set of experiments naturally, since they change the subject under study.
A realization that has been working its way to the surface for me is that the only way to have a consistent and stable "self" identity is to expand it to include all of the changing spectrum of your experience over time. Like the old metaphor of a boat being replaced plank by plank...is it still the same boat when all of its planks have been replaced? We are like that too, but with experience, and if we grasp for some single defining "who am i" we suffer deeply because there is no such thing. In redefining "self" identity to be a result OF our decisions, rather than a constraint ON our decisions then we are liberated in the moment...our identity is stabilized in the process of living, and it flexes with the context of our existence. Our identity becomes, basically, the way in which we handle change.
Excellent insight. The distinction between passive and active introspection is brilliant Thank you, Henrik.
Regarding the value of holding off on the passive type, I highly recommend Lewis Thomas's essay "The Attic of the Brain," which makes essentially the same point by arguing that there's creative danger in psychoanalysis and other such means by which we seek to become too acutely aware of the contents of our own subconscious minds.
That sounds interesting!
I often have a feeling which call "accumulating rules", it is as if I in learning things and thinking accumulate barriers to what I can and cannot do, and from time to time I just need to rid myself of that.
Interesting idea: "accumulating rules," accumulating barriers. And purging oneself of them periodically. Nice.
"The Attic of the Brain" can be found in Thomas's classic essay collection LATE NIGHT THOUGHTS ON LISTENING TO MAHLER'S NINTH SYMPHONY. Quite seriously -- and I say this as a lifelong fan of great essays -- this is among the two or three best (most lucid, cogent, and moving) books of essays that I've ever read.
Rick Rubin also talks about a similar concept to Nick Cave's ide of the "muse." Rubin calls it "the Source." As much as I enjoyed Rubin's book, I am not very comfortable with the idea that there is a "Source" or "Muses" out there and that we are just vessels for them. I think practicing introspection through "doing" works for me best if I am working on something.
Thank you for your insights!
The best view of the muse, or source, or daemon, is not that we are passive vessels or conduits for it, but that our creative work represents an active collaboration with it.
What makes you say that? What makes "collaboration" better as a metaphor than "vessel"?
I find the collaboration metaphor of inspired creativity better than the vessel one because it corrects the possible error of thinking the muse/daemon/genius implies total passivity on our part. It confronts the mistaken idea that relying on, or evening championing (as I do), the idea of higher inspiration means you just sit around waiting to feel inspired. As we all know, that approach is a guaranteed way to get nothing done and die with your creative calling unexpressed and unfilfilled (in other words, to fail to “bring forth what is within you,” in the famous line of the Thomas Gospel). Understanding that working with the daemon muse is a collaboration between you and a separate intelligence, and getting the respective roles right—knowing that your job is to wait actively by honing your craft and putting in seat time to make space for your inner partner to make its appearance when it wants, while your muse’s job is to provide the ideas, the focus, the fire, the the overall direction and content of your creative gift and your unique perspective on life—is, in my experience, a recipe for creative fulfillment.
It also doesn’t matter if you take this model as a psychological metaphor or something metaphysically real. In fact, I personally find that leaving it ontologically indeterminate and liminal imparts a numinous power.
FWIW, I wrote a book on this, in case you might find it interesting. (Forgive the self-plug; I only mention it because we’re talking about this topic.) The title is A Course in Demonic Creativity: A Writer’s Guide to the Inner Genius. You can find it freely downloadable online as a PDF. Currently a print edition is in the works, many years after I first published the electronic version.
Hey Henrik, great article. I agree that asking yourself ‘what am I supposed to be doing’ is an upward spiral of never-ending anxiety.
However, I’m curious more about your position on therapy. I find that working out who I am through therapy, talking things out, or uncovering traumatic experiences that have crafted me, has only ever helped me.
Who knows though? Maybe I could’ve been a greater artist if I didn’t uncover these things in therapy or inner work an just ran to my art with a machete.
Am I misinterpreting the idea of therapy here?
I would say the type of therapeutic work that interest me and I have found useful is where you increase the space of dialogue in a group or within yourself. Sometimes you can make small narratives about your past as a ritual, but that doesn't interest me as much.
As I mention in a caveat in the end I have benefited from therapeutic work! Though a lot of people who is more interested than I in making great art would say to avoid that. As with all things: know what you are trying to achieve, use all tools were they help etc.
Interesting. I'm definitely trying to make great art.. but I feel that there are things 'in the way' that I need to still work on. And I really don't want to end up like some of the 'great artists', the ones who off themselves or live a life in terrible conditions. I don't think that's for our time anymore IMO.
Not of our time: who would you count as great contemporary artists/writers/etc who do not live dysfunctional lives?
The one clear example I have is Tomas Tranströmer -- well he's been dead 8 years -- who seemed perfectly wholesome. All other contemporary that spring to mind seem dysfunctional.
The first that comes to mind is Paul Thomas Anderson and Stephen King if that says anything of my current taste lol. I don’t know much of PTA and his struggles but King for sure went through a bloody battle with drugs and alcohol. Are you saying all is lost for a functional artist lol?
King did so much coke and was so drunk in the 80s he can't even remember writing Cujo, lol.
Nah. But there are some stuff you need to be really fucked up to push into and that stuff will always be electric.
That’s the quote from ‘On Writing’ right? Great pull.
I hear ya. So I’ll only do therapy until we are about to uncover the real down and dirty and then apply that darkness to the page. I love this discussion.
Do you feel this is where you are getting your inspiration from?
"If you spend too much time with a therapist, for instance, building up a complex model of who you are, that model is going to limit what you allow yourself to do."
It feels like a balancing act between defining your identity, having it empower you, and letting go all together to discover something new.
It's like to find yourself you must lose yourself.
You must get out of your mind and actively experiment with your environment and the things you feel driven to do. Then get back into yourself and make meaning of the insights from your experience.
Before now, I had thoughts of this active and passive forms of introspection, but your articulation has given wings to my thoughts. Thank you Henrik.
I've been thinking about this alot lately, especially in the sense of therapy that continually seems to throw me deeper into looking and not listening. I've been contemplating once a month sessions, or, ad hoc, because in a sense I feel like those sessions are decreasing my personal understanding of me. Albeit when I started I desperately needed some help and guidance, but there is a point where I keep asking "why do I keep showing up here?" Listening to my writing, my photography, nature, the streets, my dog, and my daily rhythms sometimes help me feel more like myself than a 50 minute long dive into larger, complex, knotty questions. Glad I'm not the only one like this. Really grateful for this piece.