the concert

dispatch 31

Nov 23, 2022

hello all,

how are you doing out there in this week of grief? I was talking to a friend recently about how lately the idea of a new year doesn’t feel comforting but instead brings the fear that things will continue to get worse. How to walk through the world when things just keep coming at us from all sides?

May we give ourselves the patience to feel all that we feel without judgement and to remember that grief has no timeline, and that sometimes there are moments of joy that come amidst the grief and take your breath away. That doesn’t make any of it less real, it’s just how life is I think. This essay is about one of those moments.

This essay is also for Daniela, who always shared her joy wherever she went, three years gone and still so unbelievably missed.

A photo over water...in the foreground there are plants and in the distance there are islands covered in spruce trees darkly outlined against a gray sky — Water near Bergskäret. This has nothing to do with the essay, I just like it.

the concert

“I’m aiming at deeper pleasure, love, and progress in my work.” - Tove Jansson, 1955

I used to be painfully jealous of artists. It did not matter if they wrote like I did or made visual art, or music, or pottery. I envied the perceived ease of their creative process which I compared obsessively to my own. I was sure that if I were doing it right it would be easier. Or, maybe it would be harder…if I were truly diving deep enough. Whatever it was, I was surely doing it wrong. Comparison is a thief of joy, but it’s also a thief of actually working so that while I often thought about creating, I rarely actually did it. My brain took a sort of adversarial approach, holding to some sort of misguided untruth that other people’s creativity could be in opposition to my own.

In some ways that isn’t a surprise, given the timing. My writing got tangled up in my drinking, in that I fell for gin and the tortured artist trope in unison. I thought that if I could just write something good enough, my behavior might be excusable. Artists are reclusive. They drink too much. They create alone in the bombed-out shambles of the life they have destroyed. The ones we lose are glamorized while the ones that we don’t are ridiculed until they too are lost to us. It’s a pretty terrible and self-centered idea to opt in to.

This month I went to my first concert since pre-pandemic times and it affected me deeply. The concert itself had everything…a new-to-me beautiful venue, an amazing performer, an engaged crowd, and new artists to love among the openers. But the thing I am still thinking about all these weeks later is the joy I saw on that stage. There was no playing it cool, there was no aloofness…there was fun and silliness and adaptation. Up on that stage, decades into her career, it was obvious that the performer was having the time of her life. And shouldn’t she? Art, after all, is supposed to be fun. We know that as children but tend to lose it along the way.

This performance felt inclusive, in that as an audience member I was invited into her joy, I could look around me and see people dance and sing, and I could choose to be a part of it. It was collaborative and not oppositional, and while I have long abandoned the idea of creative competition, this is the first moment that I could really see how untrue all of those ideas had been. This person’s wholehearted pursuit of what they love actually made a little more space for the rest of us. That’s the gift.

Making things can be a solitary practice, and so it felt almost voyeuristic to see someone create in public. The effect has been lasting, and since that night I find myself reinvigorated in my writing practice. I find myself picking up my embroidery. In my downtime, I’m drawn to music over podcasts. I have been noticing the murals around my town and remembering that art I got at the street fair that I left on a chair and didn’t remember to frame. It’s not the music, though I keep listening to that too, but the act of witnessing creative joy that has widened my lens and opened me to inspiration. And isn’t that the whole point of art? That it helps us to see things differently?

When the world shrunk down due to COVID, and time became about occupying my own anxiety through binging television, reading nonfiction in an effort to make the downtime productive through learning, running to shake my nerves, and writing as a practice, it became easy to lose some of the magic that comes with creativity. And that’s okay…that’s what life is, in the losing and the finding again, over and over. That’s how you know when things are worth it. And hell if making things isn’t worth it.

A lot of my friends are sober and a lot of my friends are creatives (or that’s how I see them anyway). I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these two groups overlap in the way they do. Sobriety, at its best, is a generative force and a baring of who we really are to the world. It’s a removing of masks and that that comes out as essays or books or collage or a scarf is the best kind of transformative magic. I am so fucking grateful to get to know them in this way. I am so fucking grateful that they share what they share and that I get to receive it in my own life and how it makes me think and reflect and expands my views of what is possible.

And so this is post is a pledge. A pledge towards seeking moments to see and appreciate the vulnerability of artists of all types (and we are all artists if we choose to be) sharing their view of the world with the rest of us. I am seeking the inspiration and the visions of new futures and interpretations of the past that art can bring. I am seeking it as a reclaiming and as a testament to the generative capacity of humans. Sometimes it can feel frivolous to care about art in a world on fire, but I am not interested in a future world in which there isn’t space for our most creative expressions. We can’t strive for a utopia that no one has imagined, and so imagining feels worth it to me.

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