Temet nosce, if you dare.
On what makes writing the ballsiest medium.
With my tongue in my cheek, I google: ‘define art’.
I’m trying to work out whether or not I’m an artist, or just another boring nobody who can only draw in two-dimensions.
The top result from Oxford Languages reads:
"The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.”
Artists usually refer to the conduit they use to convey whatever it is that they’re trying to convey as their ‘medium’.
A medium, according to the computer, is an “intervening substance through which sensory impressions are conveyed or physical forces are transmitted.”
Painting and sculpture, as mentioned above, are obvious examples of mediums. Other, less obvious examples of mediums might be the playing of bagpipes and the doing of the worm. A medium is merely the conduit or vehicle an artist uses to manifest the metaphysical — an idea, a feeling, a conjecture, a need, a desire, a harm, or a question, for example.
I think it’s fair to say that writing, too, is one of these ‘intervening substances’. I also think that it’s fair to say that writers write in order to ‘convey sensory impressions’ in the hope that, among other things, our labour might be appreciated for its ‘beauty or emotional power’.
It’s important to me that writing be considered an art form and that writers consider themselves artists.
Why?
Because while writers aren’t given nearly enough credit for how much courage and self-interrogation our labour requires, we set a standard for self-honesty few visual artists have to even entertain approaching. We stand tall and naked and extra vulnerable simply by representing ourselves and our inner worlds using words.
When art involves language – be it written or spoken – it opens its penner up to a level of scrutiny reserved solely for those engaging in literalisms.
A careful, thoughtful writer owes their audience a level of precision that no painter knows. When a writer fails at communicating with the correct measures of attention to aesthetics, care for the reader, and responsibility to their own representation, readers don’t just glide past the page like they might a painting on a wall.
The writer has to be infinitely more brave than any other artist. While most artists can hide their shortcomings, ignorance, cowardice or convictions in the ambiguity inherent to language-less mediums, the writer does not have this luxury.
And worse, still: the writer’s words, in the digital age, loom irrevocably and eternally in the background, be those words weeks, years, or decades old. A writer must forever be answerable to his convictions or decisions no matter how much he grows, no matter how far his journey into the world and its infinite brambles and slides take him.
A poorly executed piece of writing — or a failure to represent oneself clearly, carefully, and handsomely — hovers like a spectre un-scrubbable from the writer’s portfolio. This spectre can be exhumed, shared, and lambasted with no more than a quick google search.
I’m a writer who has spent as much time thinking about writing as writing itself. It’s not that I’m thinking about what to write — on the contrary, I’m swamped with ideas about what to write and have no shortage of material. It’s the ‘why’ to write that consumes me, as it should anyone with a belief that they have something inside them that might be better shared with the world. Given how high the stakes are for writers, you’d want to be pretty bloody sure of your intentions when you shoot your latest work off into shared space.
As much as I wish that self-interrogation was a necessary component of all creative pursuits, it simply is not. Self-interrogation, even for those who believe themselves to be actively engaging in it, is largely non-existent in any meaningful sense among most artists and non-artists alike.
This is why most music follows a repetitive money making schema, and most dance is conducted by tweenagers behind phone screens selling either the illusion of promiscuity or a vague, white repackaging of African American self-expression. Most visual art is as un-daring, vague, derivative, and risk-averse as the pop music that these same visual artists consider themselves ‘above’ listening to.
Most artists can bathe in the luxury afforded to them by vagueness and abstraction. Painters, sculptors, and toilet-wall scrawlers may spend their entire lives living out fantasy versions of themselves. Writers, on the other hand, are brought face to face with the lies we tell ourselves from the moment we start pouring ourselves onto pages.
We see our lies in black and white from the very first times we represent and misrepresent ourselves on the page — both a discomfort and a gift not afforded to most other artists. They sit acidic in our guts as we read and re-read our own drafts, discovering the ways in which we mask, manipulate, misrepresent ourselves before closing the doc and starting again.
Self-interrogation takes balls. Honesty, directness, pain, and balls. Self-interrogation does not pop into one’s repertoire merely as the result of one’s self-help-oriented yearning to ‘temet nosce’ — to know oneself.
Self-interrogation arises only after we are forced to come face to face with our own propensity for delusion and self-deception.
Writers cannot hide in ambiguity, and as a result are subject to a level of scrutiny beyond that of any visual artist. First and foremost, from ourselves.