Greetings and Salutations, and welcome to Vesperisms: The Art of Thinking for Yourself. I’m here to help you recalibrate toward an artistic worldview. So grab your coffee, and have a seat in my studio, and let’s have a chat. This is Vesperisms Season 1, Episode 6: The Pathway from Thought to Speech.
This is the third installment in a 4-part exploration of the basic artistic process that I’m calling “The Pathway.” It’s so basic as to be laughable, but sometimes the simplest truths get us to look afresh at things we’ve taken for granted. Every art student in their senior year knows that audible groan that happens when a professor sets up that darn still life—you know the one, with the plastic fruit, the fake skull, and all. that. drapery—and everyone’s like, didn’t we finish doing still lives in Freshman Foundation? Come ON!
But then you do it, and you realize how much foundation you had lost in the in-between years. How to turn a form by blending highlight into shadow. How to really see light and shape and proportion. It’s a refresher lesson in perception and thought, and pretty soon you realize, wow, I kind of lost the trail along the way in all of my education. That’s why I’m trying to clear the weeds out of the trail as we explore how artistic process happens. I’m not reinventing the wheel. I’m not telling you anything you probably don’t already know. But even in the few minutes we get together on this podcast, we can shake off some of the dust and get back to what it means to think like an artist, to recognize and demystify how we create. Trust me, as time goes on, we’ll go into deeper dives. We’ve got all the time in the world. Now’s just the time to put our toes in the water and get reacquainted with our process.
One of the things that propelled me to start this podcast in the first place was a certain discomfort I felt when I was in grad school from 2014-2016.
When I was getting my MFA, I began very quickly to perceive that something was different this time around. Something about art school had changed in the 16 years since I had gotten my Bachelor’s in the same discipline, in the same city. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until about a year after I had graduated.
You see, art school in the 90’s had a certain value system that was very deeply rooted in anti-censorship and freedom of speech. This was the era just after the fall of the censorious Soviet Union, the era of Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe and Newt Gingrich and battles over the ethics of the NEA’s funding of what some considered “immoral” art. It was also the age of the boundary-crushing comedy of George Carlin and Andrew Dice Clay. It was the era of Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails. It was drilled into us that we should buck anyone’s efforts to control what we thought or said or did. Personal expression was king.
Fast forward to 2014, and I began to find myself holding back my opinions and not knowing why. I was the oldest person in my program; why should I have cared how people 20 years younger than me might judge me? But I found myself in confusing class discussions where my classmates—artists like me—were actively calling for curtailments on free speech and even rewriting the First Amendment—which is the provision in the US Constitution that guarantees almost total freedom of speech, among other freedoms. The heart of my classmates’ concern was that we ought to to protect vulnerable people from offense.
I’m not going to unpack that in this episode, but I’ll definitely refer to it often as we go on. I just found myself thinking, “This is art school?” I was so blindsided by this new viewpoint that I didn’t know how to answer it at the time. I just kept thinking, “If the artists are calling for censorship, we are really screwed.”
In their book The Coddling of the American Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and attorney Greg Lukianoff explored the very phenomenon I had experienced and not been able to name, and interestingly, they pinpointed its advent to the year 2014, just when I was starting my program. They note that it happened to be the first year of college for those who had been born at the advent of social media. Unlike me, this generation was used to making most of their thought process public. If you remember, in the last episode, we talked about the importance of what I called “sketch phase”, which involves keeping most of the thought process private until it’s more fully formed. What’s changed since my time as an undergrad is that we now live in this paradoxical soup of social isolation and instant publication of ourselves as essentially brands. We live mostly outwardly, and that means that our interactions have become much more sensitive and potentially inflammatory. I acknowledge that offense is real, and it matters.
But like a frog being slowly boiled in water, we don’t always recognize what’s happening to us in the moment, and in just about the last 20 years, our social norms have changed radically, and no one really knows how to handle it. But I think artists, if we can keep our wits about us and stay close to our artistic worldview first, can really help navigate others through this time. We can bring order out of this chaos, because when we’re properly oriented, artists know how to do one thing really well: communicate.
What is speech? What are words? Words, it seems to me, are manifested thoughts. When we use speech, we’re giving concrete form to our thoughts. They don’t exist any longer in the ether. But neither are they fully formed. Not every conversation is a doctoral dissertation. We need words in order to explore which ideas are valuable, worth pursuing further, and which are not—and those words have to fall on the ears of others without fear of reprisal. Even better if they’re people we trust who can give us their words in return, in the form of feedback.
I mean, who of us comes from the womb with our worldviews, our opinions, let alone our poetry or our novels, fully formed? Who of us looks at the world the same way we did when we were 9 years old, or even in high school? Of course not. Think back on the thousands of conversations you had with your parents growing up. For better or worse, those conversations formed you. And there was a lot of back and forth, am I right? If you’re a parent, you know that you have to repeat a concept approximately 12,642 times before your child can articulate it back to you, and they still might choose to go the opposite way.
But that very same child (ahem, I’ll speak for myself as a teenager) who mouthed off to her folks, eventually moderated some of her opinions given an expanding life experience. Some of the things I swore I’d never do or say with my own kids, I actually find necessary and effective, and I have a little more grace for what my folks were trying to do. People change. Their thoughts change. Their words change.
Listen to this quote from Thomas Merton about the mysterious nature of words:
“The psalms are poems, and poems have a meaning—although the poet has no obligation to make his meaning immediately clear to anyone who does not want to make an effort to discover it….The poet uses words not merely to make declarations, statements of fact. That is usually the last thing that concerns him. He seeks above all to put words together in such a way that they exercise a mysterious and vital reactivity among themselves, and so release their secret content of associations to produce in the reader an experience that enriches the depths of his spirit in a manner quite unique.”
The poem, or the essay, or the journal entry, or the novel, or the tweet, represent a moment in time: a group of words which manifest thoughts, or frame of mind. I believe that over time, with broadening life experience, the collection of words shakes down and solidifies, shedding excess and firming into a more cohesive worldview—whether that’s a positive or negative one, we’ll let that be as it may. But in order to know what we really think, we need to use words. Words bring order out of chaos. When you have a toddler, who is all emotion, you’ll often find yourself admonishing them to “use your words, honey!” Bring articulation out of the tangle of emotion.
This is why it is imperative not to restrict words. In the United States, we have, compared to the rest of the world, relatively few restrictions on speech, and any restrictions we do have tend to fall in the realm of preventing incitement of actual physical harm to others or deliberately engaging in libel or slander. And that’s for a very specific reason. Far from protecting the powerful, the freedom to speak was a reaction against the English culture we emerged from at the time of our founding, in which public execution for contrary opinion, which could change on a whim, was common. Just look at the back and forth religious intolerance between the monarchies of that bastard Henry VIII and his 3 children, Mary, Edward and Elizabeth. That was a centuries-old—in fact, humanity-old tradition: line up your allies behind you, hang your enemies. But the American founders decided to experiment with letting people think and speak for themselves without penalty. And for all its foibles—it is, still, an experiment, after all—it more or less worked.
The Czech playwright and later President Vàclav Havel was a staunch proponent of free speech, precisely because he grew up and tried to create his art under a regime which didn’t offer that latitude. He was harshly persecuted for his views, and spent time in prison for them. In his book, The Power of the Powerless, he lays out what happens when one person decides to break apart from what has been dictated. He gives the example of a greengrocer who decides to go against the grain by choosing his own words:
The manager of a fruit and vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: “Workers of the World, Unite!” Why does he do it?…I think it can be safely assumed that the overwhelming majority of shopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in their windows…That poster was delivered to the greengrocer from the enterprise headquarters along with the onions and carrots…Let us now imagine that one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans…He begins to say what he really thinks at political meetings…In this revolt the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie. He discovers once more his suppressed identity and dignity. He gives his freedom a concrete significance. His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth.
I learned within the first few weeks of grad school that if I were to speak my mind openly, the way I had always been used to as a ballsy New York artist, there would likely be a call for me to be expelled from my program. I felt it more than I was able to articulate it. I didn’t immediately feel, as I do now, that I had to call out the censorious atmosphere, because it had me in an almost instinctual state of skittishness, like a chipmunk who knows she’s caught the eye of a hawk.
So what does all of this have to do with the artist and the artistic process? This is a podcast about artistic thinking, not political thinking, right? Exactly.
One of my favorite artistic forms is satire. I love publications like The Onion and Babylon Bee. I love the mocking genius of the Greek playwrights and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. I love subversive comedy—not the raunchy kind, but the sly kind that sidles up to that greengrocer with a wink and a whisper. I love holy fools. And I adore jesters. Not clowns so much. But jesters.
What does the Jester do? He does what all artists must do: he tells the truth. In fact, he’s the only one who can tell the truth to the King’s face without getting his head chopped off.
The Artist, like the Jester, is one who sees below the surface. The Artist, like the Jester, has to be immune from the chopping block, because someone’s got to tell the truth. And you cannot predict or prescribe what an artist is going to need to say about his or her time in the world. You don’t have to agree with it. But you’ve got to let the artist say it. As Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.”
For myself as a novelist of historical fiction, I’m sensitive, even allergic—to portrayals of history which see past-events primarily through a political or critical analysis lens. We can certainly compare the norms of one time period to another, but front-loading events with modern mores is the definition of propaganda, and propaganda is, to one degree or another, a lie. As artists, we want to tell the truth, not create material for manipulation.
The movie Denial, based on the true case of Holocaust denier David Irving’s libel suit against Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt, is a must if you want to understand the danger of this. What made the case so complicated was that Irving didn’t flat out deny the events in question. Instead, he revised them. All lies contain an aspect of truth, just with a twist. Far from being the objective historian he claimed to be, Irving had a bias toward Nazi philosophy, so he read history through that lens and convinced himself and his followers that his analysis was airtight. “History” was whatever they made of it. If they already believed Jews were liars and manipulators, then the Holocaust could not have proceeded as we understand it—it had to be a construction, a conspiracy. I’m sure we could think of current examples of this kind of historic revisionism, masquerading as objective truth, in our most cherished newspapers and literature classrooms.
There’s a line of thinking among advocates for free speech, which says: ”it’s the most offensive speech which needs the most protection.” I don’t think that’s helpful. I think we can explain the need for free speech better than that.
Freedom of speech, at its core, protects the vulnerable. It gives space for the minority. And the definitions of “minority” and “vulnerable" are quite subject to change. Again, I point to 16th century England, where that definition changed from year to year in some cases. Just when you thought you could take a breath, a new Tudor monarch was in power, and it was your neck in the gallows. Since any State is loath to give up the power it acquires, and restrictive laws will only ever tighten, whatever noose we would not want for ourselves, we must not put around our neighbor's neck.
Do we really want to go back there, to be, as artists and citizens, vulnerable to the whims of any given party, faction or leader in a faraway hall of power? Haven’t we learned our lesson? Does the Tower of London not draw two million visitors every year? But in a dark irony, in the UK in 2016 alone, there were 3000 cases of political prosecution in the UK, individuals charged with incidents involving the wrong words. Word crimes are the same thing as thought crimes. And free societies do not engage in the prosecution of thought crimes.
Always, always keep in mind, not as a political creature but as an artist, that an attempt to stifle speech or to censor when your team is in power, can and will be used against you when it’s the other team calling the shots. And round and round we go.
I think it’s precisely because we gather less often in person (not to mention the social isolation resulting from our world-wide quarantine) that the call for curtailments on speech are growing. When the bulk of our social life, the forum where we speak to each other and learn from each other, is conducted online with pixelated faces or faceless text rather than flesh-and-blood people with whom we must make eye contact, upon whom we see the effect of our words, we will inevitably find ourselves only intersecting with our team. You can’t avoid it. I tried. I dumped my Twitter and drastically limited my Facebook because I didn’t want to spend my time dodging the inevitable rock-throwing from all sides.
You see, I think it really has to do with the difference between network and community.
What we’ve come to call “communities” are, in reality, single-interest network groups. True community isn’t usually chosen. A town or city or neighborhood or even a religious group is a true community—one made up of incredibly disparate people along a range of demographics—age, race, profession, political leaning—who must all figure out how to live together in peace. The misunderstanding of the word “community”—when we really mean “network”—has catastrophic consequences. Networks only conduit along a single, self-reinforcing conduit. Networks dwell in alleys, speaking to themselves about their own specific concerns, chucking garbage into an empty public square and thinking they’ve hit the other networks. I have networks, and so do you—my artist network, for example—but they’re not my communities. True communities, like families, have to hash things out in the very realm of difference. We have to get down in the dirt, reach in, and pull order out of chaos. We have to speak and listen to each other, even if we get offended. We have to take each other by the shoulders, like we do with our toddlers, and encourage each other to bring more clarity, so our tantrums can cease, and we can grow and mature, and guys? So we can make better art.
And for that, we have to use our words.
This week’s recommended read is The Power of the Powerless by Vàclav Havel. It’s a short book, but if you’re like me, you’ll take a while with it because you’ll be underlining every other sentence. Havel was an artist first, a politician a distant second. This book is one of the most important treatises on dissent, by someone who put his money where his mouth was and paid the price for it. To read The Power of the Powerless is to be inoculated against intimidation and self-censorship, and to recognize that both you and your neighbor must always fight for the right to let each other’s voices be heard—even if you’re saying opposite things.
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Work isn’t everything, but everything is The Work.
See you next time.
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