Wednesday, January 30, 2008
I can still learn, I must be human.
Folks are around, hanging and chatting, and the discussion turns to art. Don't recall how, but not surprising, given that Jennifer Rodgers and her booth of fantastic stuff is right there, too. So, a space happens for me to contribute to the conversation, and I offer my standard art disclaimer. "Yeah, I can't draw." and Krista does this head whipping around thing, like she's caught me beating my children and comes back with "Not true. Anyone can draw." And Jennifer is just sitting there nodding, like Krista just said "we breathe air." My standard response emerges "No, seriously. Like, my stick figures have hunchbacks."
And I can't remember if it was Krista or Jennifer who said what, but one of them was "It just takes practice." and the other one was "Yup. Lots of practice." And everyone else in the room was nodding and "Yep"ing along and that was it. Conversation over.
And I'm sitting there, and thinking, "No really, I can't draw for shit! How can you just dismiss that? I'm bad at it, damn it!" and, and, and... fuck.
See, I've been consciously struggling with this thing lately, which is acknowledging other peoples' experience and authority. When my mom used to offer cooking advice, I shut up and listen, 'cause I knew she could cook. And because I shut up and listen, now I can cook. And when my brother or my friend Jay start talking about carpentry, I shut up and listen, because they can really bend wood to their will. And again, now I know some of how to speak to wood and shape it to my desires. But there's lots and lots of places where I don't do that. Where experience and authority mean shit in the face of my own opinions. And I'm trying really hard to beat that out of myself. It's... challenging.
These are people who know art, and know how to make it, so where do I get off telling them I know better than they? I go back to my hotel room and ponder, among other things. And it comes down to two things, I think.
One of them is High School Me. HSM is the me I sometimes see in the mirror, who is a skinny little nerd with zero self-esteem that will never amount to anything and exists nowhere but in my head. Like, not even in highschool did HSM ever really exist.
The other one is Perfectionist Me. Perfectionist me is the angry guy who sits right behind my eyes and colours everything I see and hear and smell and touch and taste. He's the one that notices that the corners aren't quite square when I'm making dessert that gets me laid, and that isn't happy with anything I do. Sometimes, he's pretty useful. I'd write some pretty bad prose without him pushing me to make it better, and he's the guy who drove me to produce Blood and Bronze in the Without Peer! edition. But sometimes he's also a pain in the ass. Especially when he starts listening to HSM.
High School Me is the guy who can't draw. Perfectionist Me is the guy who tells me that what I do draw sucks. Then High School Me tells me that what I draw will always suck, so I might as well not try. Then Perfectionist Me gets angry and throws out the drawing I just made and I don't bother trying again for a long time. It begins to dawn on me: I'm being tag-teamed by those fuckers.
So I'm thinking about this (not consciously, not in so many words, but you know what I mean), and it occurs to me that I've been tag-teamed by these two before. Except that wrestling match was writing, not drawing. And for writing, I had teachers with experience and authority for whom I shut up and listened.
And so, up in my hotel room, I drew. I dragged out some paper and a pencil, and I sketched out the image for Reality Cops that's been haunting me for months - years, now. The image that is driving me to write the game. The image that I keep having to describe to people in halting, poorly expressed language that never conveys it well, because it's a picture, damn it, not words.
And Perfectionist me tells me it sucks. High School Me tries to tell me it will always suck, that I will always suck. Perfectionist me is right. It really, really does suck. But it conveys, so much better than the language I've been trying, what Reality Cops is about. And the ghost voices of Krista and Jennifer tell me "It needs practice." and I tell High School Me to fuck off and I keep the picture.
I'll scan it and post it here in the next day or so, after I finish unpacking so that you too can see the suck.
And.... I think I'll need to practice. There is a natural talent for art; an affinity which I lack. But it was foolish and short-sighted of me to ignore the voices of experience around me and think that lacking the affinity meant I lacked the capacity to learn.
James
ps: Also, I've noticed I swear more when I'm talking about myself. Bastard.
Labels: I think too much
posted by James at 4:51 PM
2 Comments:
You are awesome, and it makes me so very happy that I married you, when I read stuff like that.
(And about those deserts. Um. Yeah.)
I understand the HSM and the Perfectionist Me, and the politics between those two and the me that actually enjoys anything. I also get the 'I am really bad at art' stuck in the back of my head from long ago.
The only thing I ever did believe from the get-go was that people can do much much more than they think they can. Once my HSM got over itself and realized that she -was- one of those people, it passed that on to my PM. About the only good thing it ever passed on, frankly.
It's troublesome, I warn you, to refuse to realize the limitations of one's own talents. It leads to people wanting to sleep with you, apparently. And as a man who makes desserts like you do, you -really- do not need help with that.
But I'm very glad to be reminded that you are amongst the ranks of people who keep pushing themselves to learn new things. It keeps people spicy and interesting, and the world nicely unpredictable. *^_^*
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