DoBeDoBeDo
The way to do is to be, and vice versa
Is the medium the message?
Good old Marshall McLuhan. He knew what he was taking about. Sometimes I think I should take the advice of marketing advice-givers and identify my niche or my message or my audience, so that I can shape my work in a specific way. Then I remember that I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to have a message.
I want to be a message. The price I pay for being a message is that I can’t know what that message is. I can’t get business cards that state my message. I have to have the faith of an artist, which is to be and do and not see how it adds up.
This is the real art of being human. We are the medium. Realizing that we are not in a position to see what we add up to, and accepting that, is a key to becoming.
Making art is different than making a case
I’ve had a tendency to want to hit people over the head with my brilliant (or less than brilliant) insights. Maybe I get it from the proselytizing side of my family. It’s not just an ego thing. It’s laziness, and fear, and lack of faith in myself. It’s a misunderstanding of cause and effect, because hitting people over the head does not move hearts.
As Robert Frost said,
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.
Coming up with work which might actually resonate means I have to be here now, which is not easy for me. It requires my whole self. And if I engage my whole self, who’s going to stay back to mind the paranoia store, the anxiety store, the hiding-under-the-bed store, the thought-habits-that-have-outlived-their-usefulness-but-to-which-I-cling-because-they’re-habits-forchrissakes store?
I am not saying that they are not as many ways to communicate and make art as there are people. I am also not saying that even one person, me for example, can’t communicate in a variety of ways for a variety of purposes. I can, and do.
I am saying that making art is different than making a case. It requires as much not-knowing as knowing. Making art is an interior process that calls something into being. And what makes it art is the process itself. We love the object because we can feel its expansive, struggling, striving humanity. Or its quiet thoughtful humanity. Or its wild joyous humanity. Or its sad confused humanity. We feel its humanity.
Maybe the product of the process is making a case. If so, it is a case for creative imagination transcending the weight of the human condition. And please don’t think I’m overlooking the need for dedicated craftsmanship in any art form. Dedicated craftsmanship is the doing part of the being.
When I make art it’s not exactly that I engage my whole self. My whole self engages me. It takes me for a ride. It’s a ride I want to go on. Sometimes it’s scary because I don’t know where we’re going, and other times it’s exhilarating because I don’t know where we’re going.
What I do know is that when I allow my whole self to be here now, I am protected from the folly of thinking I know something I don’t know. Because I can’t know. None of us can know the meaning of what we are doing.
We can do it though.
The way to do is to be, and vice versa.
DoBeDoBeDo
There is no need to run outside
For better seeing,
Nor to peer from a window. Rather abide
At the center of your being;
For the more you leave it, the less you learn.
Search your heart and see
If he is wise who takes each turn:
The way to do is to be.
From The Way of Life, by Lao Tzu, translated by Witter Bynner ❤️ ❤️ ❤️