reading dangerously, part one of many
You must try the ground in many directions in order to come at the deep places…
- The Intellectual Life, A.G. Sertillanges, O.P
As a writer explores ideas, fields, and geniuses through their initially wide cast of the net, they discover certain fundamental truths about the place they find themselves on an artistic spectrum or stylistic range. They may have entered into a field to emulate precisely the work of a previously famous or currently influential author. They might seek to write in a style that’s deeply analytical and impervious to the scrutiny of a scientific instrument. They may earnestly wish to write with the reading public’s linguistic deficits in mind to create accessible on-ramps for understanding and engaging with their work.
Or he may have to give all those hopes and lessons away for something else…
These earliest impressions of direction are vital to our development. They push us out of the nest to explore, test, and ship new (to us) work while swiping, parroting, and ingesting art that helps us find our own place to roost.
They also can almost never be where we land.
All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer.
~ Ira Glass
I really believed I would be a writer in the vein of Cal Newport of Deep Work fame or Malcolm Gladwell. I thought my analyses would be as rigorous as the Center for Humane Technology and my encapsulation of an idea would be as tight, relatable, and parabolically-dense as Seth Godin. Each of these names, and others, had enough connective tissue I thought would be enough to create in my voice an alloy of their’s.
And it would’ve been okay if it did end up that way.
I still read these giants, love most of the work they do, and am informed in my own journey by their style, tone, and process.
They left indelible marks on my artist brain and will continue to come out in my work in ways big and small.
But the purpose of casting a wide net and reading dangerously is to encounter ideas, voices, and stories that resonate with you in ways you can’t know about at a conscious level. To bump up against things that you would never actively perceive to suck you into their orbit but passively do. To be affected, wrecked by, put into a place of such existential questioning, doubting, wondering. and, ultimately, hope that something new shakes out of you.
There is a part of each of us, call it the soul or the imago dei or the divine ground of all being from and to which we flow, that can’t be touched. This deeper part is vital to protect and nurture. We have to feed it, give it grace to become whatever thing it’s meant to be, and watch for signs of its creative needs.
You can’t cultivate it by staying in a rigid box.
You can’t cultivate it by giving yourself a label, genre, or myopic focus in your learning or working.
You can only cultivate it by kicking the doors down to let it cast about for whatever sunlight it can find to index itself in the direction it’s meant to go.
rock + roll, EDEN (see especially the outro sampling Scarlett Johansson & Bill Murray in “Lost in Translation”)
