. . . I feel like I’m disappearing
getting smaller every daybut when I open my mouth to sing
I’m bigger in every wayTunic (Song for Karen) Sonic Youth
Kim Gordon’s homage to Karen Carpenter is deliciously polysemic, given that she died of anorexia. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the level of ego it takes to believe that you have something to day to the world. This has been a huge problem for me for the last couple of years. One of the side effects of graduate education is that you really begin to doubt that you have much to contribute to the global conversation. The “artistic” fall back is to think that your thoughts and feelings are unique and worth sharing. My talents are largely observational (visual and verbal I suppose) and only occasionally critical/judgmental. I think that’s why grad school was not necessarily the best choice for me, but I went that direction anyway. It’s difficult to return to that more “artistic” root: it’s hard to open my mouth to sing.
In the process of studying writing, I nearly forgot how to write.
But there is a more basic problem. Anyone who would take up the task of trying to communicate another person’s reality has to believe that their impressions have value: they are “true” in some manner to the reality under scrutiny. Sometimes it is hard to make that case. I taught Walker Evans and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men to undergraduate writers as an example of that complexity. The more I parsed that book, nearly a sacred text to documentarians of the late twentieth century, the more I could only see it as a monument to ego. Evans’s photographs only incidentally reveal the reality of those tenant families; for him they are props in the creation of works of art. He has, as far as I can discern, no real warmth or feeling toward those people. In one sense, that makes them truer and less distorted as evidence of that reality. Evans is never deflected by sentiment. But in striving for an “egoless” photograph the work becomes a testament to his desire to disappear into the details of materiality. That denial of self becomes the ultimate egotism. Agee, on the other hand, screamed his feelings off the page at maximum volume. The combination, it might be argued, strikes a sort of balance through tension that makes this way of working a model deserving of imitation. That’s a hard sell, particularly to undergraduates. The towering ego involved in constructing such a text is hard to come by, especially for nervous young college students. No, that task is best left to the professionals, the “artists.”
I have difficulty picturing egoless writing. Some of the scholars I’ve followed seem to think of it as an idyllic possibility— wikis and collaborative enterprises where the individual writer is subsumed into a collective whole, like an army of Borg assimilating each task. I really fail to see how, except in very specific circumstances, such writing is sustainable. I mean, why bother to write if you aren’t singing your song? I can understand the choral argument, but I just don’t feel motivated to join in. That lack of motivation is what stifles me now.
I suppose, in the back of my head I always wrote out here in this public space to the people who I’ve known over the years that seemed to genuinely care about my observations. A sort of aggregate reader, composed of people from my past and present who had experience many of the same realities and personalities that I had. My shrinking motivation is due in no small part to the shrinking of that imaginary public. Almost everyone I have ever known or cared about is dead. There are a few left, but in the last few years most of the biggest characters on my life’s stage have exited with much drama, or by slowly fading away. Some are left that care, I know (don’t feel the need to comment to reassure me). It is a natural fact of entropy, though, that my world is shrinking every day. Without these characters, it’s hard to find motivation.
It dawned on me, walking away from this post, that it feels like I’ve written it several times before. Why keep repeating myself? Have I contributed anything new other than another layer of whinging? It doesn’t really feel like it. What I am concerned with (that seems a little new, at least) is the role of ego in expression/craft. I was thinking about the hunt metaphor in photography that I wrote about a while ago, and the permanent incognito that I wrote about recently. Somehow, I got derailed into a pityfest.
I’ll start again. The only take away from this digression is the question, right below the surface for any writer/photographer: what gives you the right to say/show that? Without an ego, you can’t answer.
Addendum 6/17 Re-reading Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater I was struck by this counterpoint to what I was thinking in this post:
That evening he and Sylvia went to the Metropolitan Opera for the opening of a new staging of Aida. The Rosewater Foundation had paid for the costumes. Eliot looked sleekly marvelous, tall, tailcoated, his big, friendly face pink, and his blue eyes glittering with mental hygiene.Everything was fine until the last scene of the opera, during which the hero and heroine were placed in an airtight chamber to suffocate. As the doomed pair filled their lungs, Eliot called out to them, “You will last a lot longer, if you don’t try to sing” [emphasis mine]. Eliot stood, leaned far out of his box, told the singers, “Maybe you don’t know anything about oxygen, but I do. Believe me, you must not sing.” (34)
