Letter to a Derailed Creative

Remember: At least we're not fighting the Marcomannic Wars.

Dear

Clifton Duncan

,

I’m very sorry to hear that you’re having a bad time. I write to you as a longtime student of bad times. Lord knows that there have been enough opportunities for study.

This…

I make light of the circumstances by joking that typically one works as a waiter while in pursuit of their big break, while I’ve done the reverse, having broken through only to now wait tables.

…is a temporary situation. It feels eternal, because you were called by your muse to do something greater.

I’m told “at least you have your integrity!” I’m told “at least you stood up for what’s right!” “I look up to you!”

These are all well-meaning messages, from well-meaning people…but it is ice cold comfort.

I’m especially irritated by private messages of support from those still in the industry, who risk/risked nothing, lost nothing.

They lost something. In art you have nothing but your integrity. An artist I respect once said that if you get in the habit of lying to yourself, you lose access to the truth in yourself. That statement made a big impression on me. The artist who said it was you.

It is impossible to be your best self all the time. I struggle with this. My best self is capable of spelling out needed insights. My usual self is prone to grousing. I’m fond of this quote from Marcus Aurelius:

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.

I read this and think that Marcus sounds like a saint, but the Meditations indicate that he needed to remind himself of this kind of thing all the time. He spent the last years of his life fighting the miserable Marcomannic Wars as the empire succumbed to the Antonine Plague. Do I consider, when things are dark, that at least I’m not on the field of combat, with a light case of the measles, facing down a horde of pissed-off Suebians? Not as often as I should. Back to you:

I’m told that I’m a moron, a failure, a no-name loser whose career just didn’t work out, a far-right antivax conspiracy nut, that I deserve everything that is happening.

Ah well.

At the same time I have little interest in clout-chasing to earn my place among the celebrities of today, those being “Influencers” and “Content Creators”. I’m very much over the “Culture War” political nonsense.

I call this the problem of having to look at yourself in the mirror. You know what you’re supposed to do to get along, and yet you don’t. This too is the call of the muse to something greater.

As I’ve written elsewhere, the arts have the stupidest smart people of any profession. If a bunch of computer scientists say, “That guy is smart,” you can be sure that guy is smart. If a bunch of artists say it, chances are fifty-fifty. Moreover, artists in current year are the most abject conformists around. I’ve met insurance agents who are bigger bohemians. That your colleagues deride you for not accepting The Narrative is an honor.

I’ve managed to build a following… by accident. They are wonderfully bright, generous, and smart people, but I do not feel I deserve their kindness.

It was no accident. You built your audience with your courage. That audience may never be large, but it will be loyal. You will never have to wonder whether its praise is mere flattery. You will prove that you deserve their kindness by continuing to create. That is what they want from you. That is what will most readily redirect your sight to the view above the ditch.

I chastise myself: Pick yourself up, dust yourself off. Find a new profession. What’s done is done. Just move on. Stop whining.

That’s probably the right attitude…I’m just unsure why it is so difficult to move forward.

And even then, I’m unsure what I am moving toward.

To which I reply:

Actors like yourself can show up and perform a supplied script when called upon to do so. Without denigrating the enormous demands of acting, supplying the script in the first place is a different kind of activity.¹ That’s what visual artists have to do all the time: create ex nihilo in a spirit of bewilderment and incomprehension. I know you’ve done some illustration. I don’t know whether you’ve done enough to find out just how bleak things can get when you’re making a picture and there’s a forty-pound WHY on your neck. From my mentor’s Aphorisms:

Making art is like swimming underwater while wearing a blindfold.

When you are are truly making art you are out of this world, with all its safeties and certainties. By being free of real peril, art-making plunges you into a simulation of peril, where you anxiously thrash about with little to guide you but your experience, a sense of purpose, and an often uncooperative, mutating thing staring back at you.

If you think you know what you are doing, you are probably fooling yourself. And if you are a real artist you do it anyway.

And that’s when life is going well. When on top of that you’re dealing with the kind of professional setbacks you’ve experienced, it’s natural to conclude that one has to do with the other. You’re failing at art, you’re failing at life, so there must be some correlating existential failure underneath them. This is an illusion. Your integrity will prompt you to question whether you’re failing at art even if you’re succeeding at life. You’ve just forgotten this, because it’s easy to forget. It’s the curse of self-criticism, having to find the balance between the self-imposed demands on your art that will move it forward, and not being able to get out of bed. Back to you:

And thus I merely go through the motions of living, a shell of a man, semi-permanent half-scowl etched into the ever-deepening lines on my face, searching for fulfillment and meaning, haunted by what was, fighting not to numb myself with alcohol and/or cannabis that I cannot afford.

Here’s the most important point I want to make: “what was” is about to become unavailable to everyone.

I decided when I was a sophomore at RISD that I wanted to teach art at the college level. I taught full-time for several years at one of the Art Institutes. I left when cracks started to appear in the organizational edifice. The associated conglomerate subsequently went through a series of spectacular collapses and reorganizations. It no longer resembles what it was. That was the extent of my full-time teaching career. I wanted to teach at RISD. But while the Art Institutes were a markedly silly operation, it will not surprise me at all if basically the same thing happens to RISD.

Every model from history to which we might refer for our own ideas of success is about to become obsolete. I expect artificial intelligence-driven responsive animations to replace human screen actors in 24 months or fewer. Most illustrators had already become duplicates of one another even before competent image-making AI. In this moment absolutely everything is vulnerable to radical change.

It’s painful to be excluded by the art institutions and the art business. (I think it’s especially painful for an actor. Unlike painters, actors have no history of practicing their art for its own sake, alone, in unheated garrets.) But by not being a part of the old structures we’re advantageously positioned to form the new ones. I finally started my own school. It is free to take any form. Same with my art, made in a time when the seas of art history are becalmed. I am free to make it for my own pleasure, the best reason.

But in the meantime we are working toward the void. You mention being unsure of what you are moving toward. This feels awful but it is in fact excellent news. Most everyone who knows where he’s headed right now is about to run with great force into a wall. You and me, we have somewhere else to go, even though we can’t easily describe it yet. No one has ever seen that destination before. But when people finally do, we’ll be its first occupants, sitting comfortably, sipping wine, smiling the smiles of those who have suffered and prevailed.

Content at DMJ is free but paid subscriptions keep it coming. Please consider one for yourself and thank you for reading.

During the week of June 26 we will begin the Asynchonous Studio Book Club reading of Anne Truitt’s Yield. Obtain your copy soon.

1. I was a drama kid in high school, and was told that I was a decent actor. I decided that at 5’6” on a tall day and with a nose like a run-on sentence, I’d be better off in visual art.