Hi!

Happy Sunday.

I’m sitting outside at a little table by my orange tree, writing. So, here are some thoughts on inspiration, art, and what it means to be a human in an increasingly artificial world.

Or, something of a love letter.

HONE YOUR CRAFT

I’ve been reading Casey Gerald’s memoir, There Will Be No Miracles Here, nearly crying over the beauty and heartbreak of his prose. I’m been tabbing pages, underlining quotes, scribbling inspired thoughts into my journal. You know, same old same old. And then I started watching The Bear, this brilliantly explosive show about chefs opening up a restaurant in Chicago, and I realized something.

These chefs are completely devoted to their craft. They don’t have lives outside of the kitchen. They’re infatuated. It’s their one, big, crazy, masochistic love in life and even when it nearly kills them, even when they could walk out and breathe easy and be normal, they don’t. They come back, over and over again. One of them if this young woman who spends whole days running around the city, trying different dishes and taking notes in her journal after each bite. Then she comes home and spend all night cooking, frustrated as how it’s never perfect, but so in love with the act of trying. So unable to want to be anywhere else.

That’s how I feel. Sitting here, nearly crying over Gerald’s prose, taking mental notes on his technique and style, on how he’s telling his story, and then turning to my own blank page.

Then, out of some serendipity, one of my professors starts telling us that whenever he needs to feel inspired, he watches Taylor Swift’s The Long Pond Studio Sessions. He said that there’s something about watching an artist talk about and perform their craft that reminds him that he can do that too. I may not be able to write a song, but I can go write another chapter for my book. I thought of the chefs. I thought of Gerald’s memoir. I thought of how random it has always seemed that I love watching professional sports, yet how it actually makes so much sense. There’s something infectious and inspiring about watching people be really good at things. It reminds you that you are also a human, that you can also be extraordinary.

WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN

Which, brings me to my next point. In one of my classes, we read this quote that bought actual tears to my eyes. I think people might have thought I was crazy, but then again, they’re English majors so maybe they were kind of crying too. It read:

Art has to do with our limitations, our frailties, and our faults as human beings. It’s the distance we can travel away from our own frailties. That’s what is so awesome about art: that we deeply flawed creatures can sometimes do extraordinary things. A.I. just doesn’t have any of that stuff going on. Ultimately, it has no limitations, so therefore can’t inhabit the true transcendent artistic experience. It has nothing to transcend! It feels like such a mockery of what it is to be human. A.I. may very well save the world, but it can’t save our souls. That’s what true art is for. That’s the difference. 

–Nick Cave on the Fragility of Life

That’s what is so awesome about art: that we deeply flawed creatures can sometimes do extraordinary things. If there was a thesis statement for the human experience, I think it would be that. We’re such messy and chaotic things. We’re all traumatized and heartbroken and probably at least a little bit mentally unstable at any given moment, yet we have this capacity to create things.

I had a teacher back in high school who gave us an assignment called create something. Those were the only instructions and the projects that came out it were brilliant. They were like pieces of everyone’s soul that institutions of education rarely allow for the authentic expression of. I probably sound like your loony aunt from Portland who wears sweaters made out of recycled trash cans or whatever they’re using these days, but maybe that too is the point. Expression and creativity have become these frivolous and unworthy things. Things that hippies go on and on about.

We like to pretend it’s not this way. We like to pretend that we support the arts and that capitalism, oh god now I really sound like your loony aunt, isn’t the invisible hand that holds us, but it so is. My proof? The faces that I get when I tell people that I want to be a writer. Or the questions that ensue when I divulge that I really have devoted the past three years to studying literature at the collegiate level, instead of business or biology or whatever the hell they’re approving of these days.

So when you find yourself sitting in a classroom where that quote gets slapped up on the board, it’s a pretty chilling experience. Kind of like someone holding your hand in the dark.

ARTIFICIAL ART

It also just jarred me because of the whole AI thing, which ended up arriving at a strangely serendipitous time. One of you did a pretty cool thing. A thing that, despite what I am about to say, was fascinating and lovely. You took this post of mine and asked AI to create a poem out of it. I am not kidding when I say that this artificially generated poem chilled me to the bone. Not only is is beautifully written, but it’s somehow revealing things that were only slightly alluded to within my writing, if at all. Which is pretty freaky, as if a robot hacked into my heart. This sent me into a bit of an existential crisis, where the thought of robots creating art made me want to crawl in a hole and die because what, then, is the point of being human? And then I go to class today and this quote is waiting on the board for me. This quote about AI being a mockery.

And that, after the awe wore off, is exactly how it felt to read that poem. Like a mockery of something so human. I mean, this is the first year that my professors have had to put don’t let robots write your papers on the syllabus. Does that not sound like a line from a dystopian novel? How has that become our reality? I can’t even get started on this because it will invariably turn into a ten page argumentative essay that no one wants to read so I will just say that AI is threatening to discredit and dissolve one of the coolest things that humanity has ever had to show for itself—art.

But I agree with Nice Cave. I agree that even if AI goes on to create all of this art, it will be utterly devoid of meaning. It won’t be real. It reminds me of that ceramics teacher I told you about who never wanted me to leave any fingerprints or indentations on my projects and how morbidly antithetical to art that always felt to me. I want the fingerprints. I want the indentation of humanness.

WHAT IS ART

I used to talk about this a lot with someone I used to know. We would talk about what art is, what it means, what the bounds of it are, if there are any at all. Then one day he told me that I was art. That the way that I moved and dressed and spoke was art. At the time, I was so shocked by these words that the blood drained from my face. But they have stuck with me all of these years as the truest parameters of art that I think we will ever know. Which is to say, art is simply how we live. It’s painting and writing and architecture, yes. But it’s also how you make your breakfast and what you choose to wear and how you smile at dogs. It’s reaching your bare hand up into the blue sky and pulling a homegrown orange out of your tree. It’s how you peel that orange. A million little pieces or one long spiral? That’s yours. That’s your art. It’s all human and organic and imperfect. It’s real.

So, you know, go be art. ❤

Love, m.

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