Hello, friends.
I don’t usually write to you on Fridays— or, at least, I haven’t. From now on, I’ll try to. It’ll be an experiment; I thought it might be interesting to make an effort to ship more often. I sometimes think about having ideas which back the person they inhabit up, analogous to indigestion or constipation. Their predominant effect is in stopping anything else from taking the space; with all the nutrition taken from them, they rot, and ferment, and their empty husks cause great pain despite their nonmaliciousness.
I think in most cases it is likely preferable to maintain a sort of mental agility, a constant process of reinvention which flushes out the no-longer-useful remainders of these ideas. The natural extension of this concept, I suppose, is the proposition that these words constitute but those leftovers. This newsletter, in a sense, is but a shovel with which to excavate my mind. It’s uncharitable, perhaps, to myself— and yet I don’t think that this association is necessarily so.
The idea of pressure behind great works can be mythologized, in that we have a tendency to think them Athena, driven at full formation from their creator’s minds. There is, of course, a great deal of pushback against the universalization of this model in the public consciousness, which attempts to render the Sistine Chapel’s roof achievable for the common citizen. To democratize art and scripture and thought is a worthy aim, standing opposed to that work which stands as a whole, which makes no excuses.
This is a tension between the divine-inspired, storybook-packaged sensibility of creativity, and how it works at its most granular; however, the two share this common element in our collective imagination: a drive. Or, reworded, an honest necessity to produce something. It is possible to feel inadequate for not possessing this, though it is no moral failing, because this certainty is worshipped in our culture. We glorify the “must” in place of the “can,” though we do the former as a direct result of our possibility space.
And so we circle back, because the only way to be able to work on something —to really do it— is to have the nonsense squared away. To have a house in order —as much as that aspiration’s feasibility allows— we remove the clutter, section off the detritus, process the waste. We address those inactionable items. This is my explanation for the correlation between volume and quality apparent in our favorite artists: those perfectionists put out a lot of trash, because that’s what’s required to get to the good stuff. They just don’t get famous for it.
It would seem obvious that our musical tastes, for example, are largely determined by our societal surroundings. How, then, can we assign any objective merit to Cicero’s polemics and Shakespeare’s plays? Much of their weight is attributable to their simple survival to the present moment, a product of the self-reinforcing tendency of history to confer retrospective status. The rest of it, though, which isn’t determined by the size of the market, or by the product’s fit therein, is responsible to the relative worth of the work. Their probability of remembrance, given those factors, is largely dependent on their being the best writing produced by those specific authors.
A musician will make far more finished songs, generally, than end up on the finished album. A novelist will revise, adding and paring down, an artist produces numerous refinements, and a filmmaker shoots tape knowing it’ll be reworked. Moreover, beyond those ‘finished first drafts’ or ‘minimum viable creations’ are countless iterations in the mind, only a fraction of which reach the stage of even tentative publication. So I am forced to conclude that one primary pathway both to current-day success and to maximizing potential for future recognition —in both cases, optimizing for significance— is to create as much well-intentioned junk as possible. You need ‘junk’ to get to ‘junket.’
This goes for that opening set, however; it applies to what’s done with at least a secondary intent of gathering information and feedback— it doesn’t work for established craftsmen, apparently, who aim to produce finished, ‘serious’ art: once something’s declared complete, it opens itself up to criticism regarding filler. An album with eleven perfect songs and three average cuts isn’t as good as an album which filters out the mediocre tracks, and the same applies to a misplaced word in an otherwise economical poem.
(Applying this distinction to last episode’s topic, one problem with the school system is that it fails to maximize the volume of practice, instead focusing on theory and editing, inasmuch as it aims to facilitate the production of worthwhile work at all. In its haste to create yardsticks, it oscillates between supplying busywork and harshly evaluating a finished project or assessment. It altogether fails to provide sufficient opportunities for this middling state, where growth happens; the expectations are either a specific peak of full effort, or clunky, minimal satisfaction of requirements.)
Setting that point aside, though, it’s interesting to note that not only does relative value influence the total calculus within a unified body of work, but that it changes the character of those surrounding individual components. In thinking about these deviations within an otherwise consistent body of work, I’m drawn to consider the Kuleshov effect, a film concept which articulates that a viewer gleans more significance from two frames in sequence than from either one of the two alone. It’s simple (though this isn’t always the case, read: fundamental,) but it describes much of editing, given that its goal is to provide information through these juxtapositions.
I often feel that such an effect applies thoroughly outside the arena of film. Newspaper headlines and comic panels, obviously, do this via the same method of visual stimulus, but there’s something analogous present in entirely separate domains. With syllables incepted, we garble word choice, and our past decisions inform our future ones, though they often shouldn’t. Yet this isn’t always linear, in a strict progression, as images seen in sequence might be: ideas cut both ways, affecting our understanding of past concepts and future reception of new ones.
I’m not sure how to reduce the pollution I first alluded to, only to continually repulse it, as it does me; it seems the only other way is to alter one’s diet of information, stimulus, and input which produces these unenduring mental models and sticky, no-longer-useful showerthoughts. It’d be interesting to automate this somehow; as it is, there are a lot of difficult pathways to untangle, and it’s a problem we all must continue to grapple with. It’s something for which I don’t have a perfect solution.
I could probably stand to read more books, though. I’ll work on it.
Since last time, I’ve finished up a book chapter, and The Next Episode should arrive shortly, at the usual, scheduled time. Until then, call me, Tweet me if you want to reach me— it doesn’t matter where or when there’s trouble.
Orion Lehoczky Escobar