Somewhere closer to yourself
Dedicated to sincerity, David Foster Wallace, and the predicament of birthdays
June has just broken past its first half, which means that the year has too. That things have not just a beginning and an end, but a middle too, I’ve always found hard to fathom, perhaps because the middle is always the hardest part. The middle of a story, of an event, even of a life, is often the thing that requires the most calculated effort, every moment begging for the acme of your attention, lest it slip into a kind of death. As much as I hate to disagree with Lana del Rey, we’re not just born to die: there’s some living to be done too, whatever that means. We may, as Shakespeare warns, “fat ourselves for maggots,” but we do so with purpose, naively enough. Life, like plot, happens in the distance between a beginning and an end, which is to say that living is just another word for moving. Perhaps we move from place to place in more senses than one, journey from one self to another with the same ease (or disease) with which we travel from home to work, all our eggs arranged neatly in one liminal basket, life itself a kind of threshold built on thresholds.
As the last remnants of spring turn into summer and June moves into July, I too move into a new season of mine. This is just a convoluted way of saying that it’ll be my birthday soon and, as usual, I’m not ready for it. I have listened with foreign admiration as friends discussed their plans for their “birthday weeks,” joined their parties with genuine enthusiasm, and even helped organise some of them, yet, when it comes to mine, all I want to do is go to sleep and don't wake up until it’s over, not because I’m a Cancer with Pisces rising and moon (which — if you’re into astrology you’ll understand — is excuse enough not to do many things that normal people usually do), but because I don’t want to be reminded that I’m drifting farther and farther away from myself, or at least this idea I have of a self, the current version of it, the one I know best.
It’s a weird feeling when someone sees you more clearly than you do, a little trauma if you will. One day an editor tells you that your writing reminds them of David Foster Wallace’s and your whole world is upended. At first because DFW is a writer whose name you’ve only heard in passing until now and always imagined as some kind of literary fraud (who can publish a 1000-page-long novel — excluding footnotes! — and claim not to have an ego larger than their pen?), later because you did your digging, read some of his work, watched some of his interviews, cried with a kind of despair that felt both mysterious and familiar when you learned about his tragic death, and understood the magnitude of such a comment. To think back and hear your name next to his, pronounced together in the same breath: what a strange privilege, and what a horror too. It feels both warming and terrifying to know that someone, even if that someone is your editor, can harvest so much of you from your sentences, gather all the pieces you unknowingly threw on the page like a handful of pebbles, put them together and present them to you without embellishments. It’s like looking into a mirror for the first time in too long.
But maybe that’s precisely what art is for. Not to satisfy an aesthetic need, but a more profound, even existential, one: the need to belong, to recognise ourselves as many selves, as part of something larger than the constraints of our bodies.
Keeping an art practice, I learned, is a lot like keeping a journal: the more sincere you get, the more rewarding the experience. It is often said that the artist’s job is to create something beautiful, but I disagree. I believe that the artist’s job is to create something sincere, to give themselves to others and ask for nothing in return, because there cannot be beauty without truth. It’s also true that the experience of beauty requires a kind of sincerity too, an ego stripped of its sexy parts: as the artist waves her sentences across the page, moves from one note to another, drifts from brushstroke to brushstroke, we too, as we read, listen and look, drift with her, end up somewhere we didn't know, somewhere farther than the borders of our map, usually somewhere closer to ourselves, that part of us we’re so afraid of we’d rather skip a birthday.
That is, if we’re courageous enough to take the leap.