About Three Shirt Necessity
Post 1641:
Something I’ve been thinking about the last few days, which is something I’ve probably been unconsciously carrying around for a couple decades: Can you be at your creative best if you don’t need to be?
The easy answer is yes, of course you can. When the pressure is off and the mind is free and there’s no pecuniary worries or romantic worries or general enslavement to insecurities, that’s when the really good stuff gets made.
But I’m not so sure. Actually, I think desperation and wild-haired insane devotion might be the most natural breeding ground for good art.
I’ll put it like this. Why are so many debut albums the best an artist ever puts out? Why is the first novel often the most focused and poignant? How come the director’s first offering is raw and often more interesting than subsequent tries?
Well, I don’t know for sure, but it’s probably because the people that made those great things were broke and wanting nothing more than to make some kind of life doing the thing they love. Probably desperate. Living in a place they’d rather not. Driving a beater. Maybe three shirts.
It’s not a very relevant question to the twenty-year-old who spends fifteen hours a day working at his or her art. Wanting to be super awesome famous and recognized as the best ever comes pretty natural to a twenty-year-old artist. I was that person. Poverty was a given and all that mattered was the next lyric or the next show.
It might be more relevant to someone with a few more years under their belt. Some life experience and maybe a slice of comfort and stability. In this state, questions like why bother and thoughts like maybe tomorrow crop up all the time. It’s natural. I think it’s also bad for business, if you want your business to be creativity. Therefore, if you don’t need your work to be incredible, maybe manufacture the emotion.
Here’s the stupidity of the whole thing. The world needs certain things. It doesn’t need my next song or book. There are roads that can be finished because they need bridges. There are buildings that won’t go up because they need supports.
So maybe quitting or putting off creative projects is the right thing to do.
If only. For some reason that defies logic and good old-fashioned groundedness, I need to keep going. Even with this bloated shirt surplus I’ve accumulated over the years. Cheers and see you after.
