Showing Off

I haven’t written anything here for the past few weeks for a number of reasons, which include technical (computer) issues in Turkey, the fact that I’ve been reading more than I’ve been writing, and, perhaps most importantly, the working out of thoughts about why it is I’m writing this blog in the first place—that is, what I want it to be and what I don’t want it to be and whether I want it to be at all.

One thing you realize once you start “publishing” your thoughts on a regular basis without much editing is how half-baked most of them are, how slippery, how not-quite-what-you-meant. Disregarding factual mistakes (like the historical inaccuracy a friend pointed out in my referring to Wagner as a “Nazi”), your casual impressions of things come echoing back to you laden with attitudes and assumptions and just plain stupidity that you really hadn’t been aware you possessed—and make you wonder whether, instead of commenting blithely on everything, you hadn’t better just shut up and pay attention to somebody or something besides yourself for awhile.

What is this blog supposed to be? First of all, my intention in starting it was to share thoughts and some creative work with Everybody: to throw things out into the world to be seen, commented upon, criticized and/or enjoyed by other people.
One part of that (which is probably present to some extent in anybody who produces just about anything for public consumption, but especially in those who produce non-utilitarian, subjective things like books, music, paintings...) is the same exact impulse that prompts a kid in the swimming pool to yell: “look, mommy!” and then dive under the water. You want to be noticed and appreciated.

Another part of it is the desire to connect—that is, not only to be praised, but to enter into meaningful dialogue with people who can relate to what you’re doing but who are themselves doing and thinking things that inspire—in the original meaning of giving new spirit or life to—you. This is not entirely selfish: the pleasure of connecting with other people (creatively, intellectually, emotionally), which is the best of what we call friendship, comes not from somehow consuming another person’s spirit, but, in a sense, from the shared experience of a third spirit in the interplay of the two personalities (yours and your friend’s).

So the blog is also a kind of reaching out, in a way that is not possible in any other form, for a kind of contact that is almost impossible to establish under the normal circumstances of daily living—where you interact with people mainly on a functional basis (giving things to and getting things from them).

This reaching out implies a kind of vulnerability—that is, if it is to be meaningful at all, it must be generous, in the sense of putting something at risk. What is at risk is some piece of inner consciousness that is hidden when you walk down the street or ride the subway; you have to expose something that matters to you, and run the risk of getting negative, even hostile responses.

“Exposure” doesn’t mean “confession” here—confession, as I understand it, is a way of offering and withdrawing at the same time—that is, anticipating and outdoing any possible criticism in advance. The idea of confession includes the sense that what is being expressed is a thing that should never have existed in the first place—a fact that the confessor (the one who confesses, not the confidant) acknowledges in the form of expression—the words drip with guilt, embarrassment, remorse.

So the reaching out I want to do here is not about vulnerability for its own sake. It is about the benefits that can arise from a specific kind of vulnerability—that are worth the risk of whatever injury you might be exposing yourself to. You just put the thing out there and let its chain of unintended consequences unfold.

But obviously, you are not a disinterested party—like a parent with a child, you want the world to receive the things you put into it well. You want them to be accepted and loved more than they are rejected. It would be stupid to deny this. You are not—cannot be indifferent to the response. Otherwise, it would be enough to write in your diary and burn it all on your deathbed.

I think that the second impulse I described—the impulse toward dialogue and “friendship,” is the more satisfying and sustaining of the two. A single experience of mutual “recognition” and understanding is worth thousands of anonymous words of praise.

In fact, generalized praise without any sense of connection, it seems to me, would be a kind of Hell—like being walled up forever inside a beautiful, impregnable fortress. It would have the ironic effect of making you feel infinitely more isolated than you were when you first reached out. Generalized praise is a different kind of not-understanding, worse than being ignored because, on its own, it transforms the unique, complex, dreaming self you’ve exposed to the world into a repetitive, homogeneous, meaningless affirmation: “You are great! Everything you do is great!” No matter what you produce, the response is the same. Why bother to produce at all?

The “look at me, mommy!” impulse is basic, primitive—it appears in early childhood, when communication is in a nascent form—when you are practicing the idea of communication: I do something, the other person responds. In this situation, all that matters is whether the response happens, and whether it is positive or negative.

But somehow, the need for this kind of attention doesn’t completely vanish when the second, more complex kind of communication arises: what I’m calling “dialogue.” Let’s put it this way: If I write a book and it receives a positive, meaningful response from ten people—people with whom I can “connect” in the way described above—and is completely ignored forever by the rest of the world, that, somehow, doesn’t seem good enough.

Why not? Well—even if generalized praise is not sufficient in itself, it does, perhaps, serve a primitive need that the self has to be validated in the eyes of the world, so that the billions of people-you-don’t-know seem more positively disposed toward you than indifferent or hostile. That is, it palliates the generalized anxiety of being one insignificant person in an ocean of people. Maybe this is another way of saying “it makes you feel important.”

Is the need to “feel important” important? Should it be freely encouraged, encouraged skeptically, or despised? After all, history seems to be full of people who, convinced of their own importance, or seeking to have it confirmed, did and said and continue to do all kinds of ridiculous things. Again, the danger, it seems to me, is that the beneficiary of the world’s generalized approval can become an isolated curator of his or her own legend—jealously defending it like the mythological King of the Wood, who takes his power in the first place by slaying the previous king, and thereafter must prowl around in circles, waiting for his inevitable destroyer.

In this sense, it is a fine line between (if there is one at all) the drive to seek generalized approval and the will to power. For what is power but a solidified form of approval? Power is protection from whatever disagrees with you—it is the ability to exercise your will regardless of those who disapprove of your actions. The acquisition of power, once power has been established as the primary goal, is an insatiable drive, because anything short of absolute power leaves you potentially vulnerable to some more powerful and hostile force.

It is with good reason, then, that people feel ambivalent about the need for generalized approval: in its most potent form, it becomes an addiction, transforming the addict (as all addictions do) into a kind of slave, operating within extremely narrow and rigid boundaries—losing completely the sense of “play” that is present in the kind of “dialogue” I wrote about earlier: Dialogue and communication tending toward “life,” in the sense of new possibilities—change—hope, and generalized approval tending more towards “death” in the sense of the single-minded pursuit of one small, unchanging thing, forever.

So what I’m asking, then, is whether it is possible and necessary for these two drives—the desire for “connection” and the desire for generalized approval, to coexist peacefully—to find some kind of balance that is positive and sustainable and life-giving. I’m asking this because I think some measure of both of these needs is what’s driving me to write anything at all—in this blog or outside of it.

A friend once told me that he didn’t want to publish anything until after he turned 30, because until that time he would be motivated more by the desire to “be a writer” than by the desire to write. I’m suggesting here that both desires are present, each to a greater or lesser extent, in anybody who produces anything, and that it is only the autistic savant and maybe, possibly, the very rare mad genius who produces for no other reason than to produce.

But the fact that the “generalized approval” drive can end up, in its extreme forms, producing very ugly results, does not necessarily make it Evil. Is the child who yells “look at me, mommy!” evil? We may be embarrassed to admit that we, as sensible, sensitive, complicated adults are motivated (among other things) by the need for approval. We may respond with disgust to signs of this need in others—as something base in their nature. It makes us uncomfortable because it is selfish, because it is childish, and because we fear where it might lead. But we are motivated and driven by precisely this kind of thing—hunger, sexual desire, the need for approval. All of these drives can take ugly and destructive forms, but who would deny that we must live in some kind of harmony with them—neither denying them categorically nor obeying them blindly?

Which leaves me with the thought that there is no way of completely escaping the “look at me, mommy!” impulse, and that we should find some way of accepting it and living with it amicably—satisfying it without becoming its slave. Think about the sexual impulse: it is possible to be enslaved by it in two ways—either by trying desperately to deny it, as something “wrong” and “dirty,” or by transforming your whole existence into a desperate attempt not to be sexually repressed—either way, you’re all about sex, which is a pretty limited place to be.

Where, then, does the “connection” drive fit in—the need, not to be blindly approved of, but to respond and be responded to—to stimulate and be stimulated by interaction with others? It definitely arises at a later stage of development than the “look at me!” need, but that doesn’t necessarily make it less basic. What is special (and therfore less problematic) about “interaction” is that it distributes attention between both people: you are paying attention to the other person and being paid attention to by them. The focus is not entirely on you.

This releases you (and the other person) from the responsibility/guilt of being on stage, of being expected to perform/blamed if you fail to. Not you, not the other person, but some third force—“inspiration” for want of a better word—does the performing. It is on this third thing that your mutual attention is focused. In other words, you and the other person are able to enjoy the benefits of production without its entanglements because you are both making the thing and not making the thing at the same time. The “third force” is the paradoxical fusion of self-pride and outward-directed-focus into a single thing. You are proud of “it.”

All of this gets very tangly and metaphysical: in art, there are two ways of looking at this: Collaboration and the literary or artistic “circle” (or individual, creative friendship).

Collaboration: theatre, or film, for example, are collaborative arts in which people come together to produce something that belongs at once to each of them and to none of them. Often it is difficult to tell whether the success of a particular scene is the work of the director, the writer, the actors, or all of them together.

In the utopian ideal of theatre and film production, the team pours its collective energy into The Production, which takes on a life of its own, surprising and unexpected to its creators.

In reality, of course, it almost never works like this: usually a few personalities dominate the production, struggle with one another over creative input and credit, work independently of (and sometimes against) one another, and everybody ends up at least a little bit disappointed with the final product: it feels like a compromise—a debased alloy.

So let’s simplify the equation and think about creative partnerships, like the great music-writing teams: Gilbert and Sullivan, Lerner and Lowe, Rogers and Hammerstein, Lennon and McCartney, etc. Now I freely admit that I know next to nothing about how any of those teams actually wrote music together, but I think it’s safe to say that, working in collaboration, they produced something greater than the sum of its parts—something remarkable because of the way its elements interact: the music and the lyrics, for example, or the vocal melody and the guitar part. These relationships are unique in that they de-emphasize the contributions of the individuals to the final product and focus the artists’ attention instead upon the interaction of their separate contributions—a tricky way of freeing themselves to create.

A different, but equally illustrative example would be the idea of literary or artistic “circles”—a silly concept in the way it comes down to us, since, in reality, these “circles” were probably quite fluid and amorphous—with people coming and going, new people constantly being included and excluded, etc.—but we can accept that there have been artists who, through personal contact with other artists and the sharing of their work, have been stimulated in their own writing or painting or whatever to try things that they would not otherwise have tried—and to sustain projects that might otherwise have been dropped.

In this kind of situation, there is not a direct collaboration, but somehow the dialogue is productive—precisely, again, because it allows the producer to step, however temporarily, outside of his/her own boundaries and, by seeing things through different eyes, by focusing outward, to extend them. Because, in the end, we are never fully free of our own boundaries—the best we can hope to do is to stretch them, which happens whenever we are able to forget about them entirely for a while and focus on something outside of ourselves.

Which, interestingly, brings me back to where this post started---the feeling I sometimes (often?) have that it’s time to shut up and listen. An ironic place to end up after five pages of writing.

For the past couple of weeks, while I haven’t been writing in this blog, I’ve been doing a lot of reading. Also, writing other kinds of things—children’s stories/poems and a longer, semi-fictional thing that I love but that isn’t yet quite fictional enough for comfort. Also, some people have been commenting on my posts (many thanks, Eric, Liza, Becca…), which is a step in the right direction, because being a blog crying out in the wilderness “Repent! Repent!” is not what I’m into at all.

I also want to expand the content here—so that it’s not all this non-fictional, essay-type writing…but I’m a little reluctant, for (ugh) intellectual property reasons, to put stories and poetry up here before they’re copyrighted/published elsewhere. That is probably an incredibly arrogant/paranoid concern, since it assumes that my readership is/will be so vast that it includes literary pirates who comb blogs looking for material to steal. Aaarrgh!—avast ye Literary Pirates!! If you see stories and poems up here soon, you’ll know I’ve decided these concerns were stupid.