I think my policy of “rounding things off so that I can post them” has been destructive to my creative process/progress. The idea of the blog was to get used to the feeling that the world might be able to see what I’m doing here in my room, since it shouldn’t actually make a difference to me. The reason for the exercise being that it actually made a paralyzingly big difference to me. As it seemed impossible for me not to apply some kind of self-censorship, I tried to compromise by making a point of appeasing the fear with an absolutely minimal effort. I.e. when I heard myself think “I don’t think this music is worth letting people hear!” I’d answer it with “Well you’re wrong, it’s fine, and the proof will be in facing your fear, so why don’t you just put a bow on it and then you can lay it out there for them to see.”
But this turns out to be problematic because it still means that I end up stopping any actual creative process at the point that my first anxiety arises. It stops with a positive spin rather than a negative one, but it still stops. The anxiety is like a timer going off: okay, pencils down, the moment has arrived to prove to yourself that everything is actually fine! This is pretty restrictive.
I think the actual path to artistic fulfillment is to take one’s own idiosyncrasies so very seriously and devote such time and love to them that they are strengthened and deepened and made whole enough to be compelling to others. You’ll never get there if you keep changing the goal to merely convincing yourself that your impulses are not embarrassing. That’s like a rating system that goes from negative 10 to 0. And, this was my point, it’s a very short game. Too short to get much done before the bell.
I’m writing this after posting this particular tiny fragment of music because for once I really didn’t put a bow on it or try to shape it or anything. It’s just sketchbook stuff as is. When the bell rang I wrote this instead.
Maybe soon I will realize that I am not afraid to post things that I don’t consider “presentable,” because I am finally genuinely immune to evaluation — I think I’m at least narrowing on it — and then will no longer want to. The only point of all this, after all, has been to exercise myself. The moment of presentation should just be a choice of its own, equally unburdened. I have my own ideas about when that should be.
Of course for years I neither showed much to anyone nor did anything particularly whole or ambitious in private. I certainly don’t want to revert to that. But I think the anxiety of being evaluated was still subconsciously informing both aspects. Privacy can be used far better when it doesn’t feel like hiding.
Though maybe being disinterested in whether I’m being seen is a muscle that will always need exercise for upkeep.
Of course I debated about whether commenting at all would be meta/counter-to-the-spirit-of-the-piece. Realized that it not mattering one way or another is the spirit-of-the-piece.
What you wrote makes a lot of sense to me. What I’m expressing here is thanks for presenting it so I could think about it.