The point of sweating what's done

Until now, most of what I've blogged started out as emails.  I had to pour out my thoughts to somebody.  They were all in my head, and they needed an outlet.  I wrote those emails to someone who cares about me, but who cares nothing about Scott or the music.  That wasn't enough.

I looked at my writing, and I thought it was pretty good.  I had created something, and it was something that I needed to share.  I felt a need to show it to a larger audience, to people who might understand what I was saying.  I have written before, but I'm not sure I've ever truly experienced this creative need before, the need for an audience.

After rewriting, and editing, and more editing, I posted each installment.  Then I mentioned them on Facebook, and looked at my pageview statistics in Blogger, and checked Facebook again to see how many likes and comments I got.

I used to want people to like me.  Now I want people to "like" me.

Being slightly dense, it actually took me until today to realize that what I felt, when I tried to drum up an audience that would appreciate my writing, was a miniature version of the same need that is felt by artists everywhere, and by Scott Miller in particular.  It's the impulse that he wrote about, again and again.  It's the impulse that gave a name and a theme to this blog.

As Scott expressed it, when he was asked directly (Ask Scott, 9/11/2000) about the desire for fame:

Fame is probably the strongest de facto experience of the sacred that most people will ever get. What constitutes the sacred is a hairy topic, but if you've had close contact with a very famous person, and were left groping for a way to express how he or she was simply more radiant than an ordinary person, that is the sacred. Not a developed experience of the sacred, but the real thing.

The same general mechanism compels people to want to accrue fame. I'm a sufferer of this disease, and I know [the] need to separate the work from the acclaim. There are times and places when working ambitiously toward fame works cleanly, but it's usually it's a pretty polluting burn. Having to fascinate people is usually a bad business for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that if you're in the process of soliciting fame, you're by definition unqualified to relate to anyone as an artist. An artist's job is to relate the truth of experience, and if in fact what you're doing is selecting for which simulated experiential truth will fly, you will acquire the habit of replacing truth with schlock when schlock flies. It's not an absolute rule, but it is a real and insidious tendency.

Wanting to be "liked".  It really does makes me feel cheapened, even polluted.  Scott was right about that.  There we were, biting nails like debutantes and waiting for a call...

And here I am, sweating what's done, obsessing over whether my carefully selected words found their targets.  Maybe they reached you through the air.  Did I sparkle and charm, just like Paris in the spring?  How many tickets to me did I sell?

Of course, wanting fame, even wanting it desperately, is one thing.  An artist's temptation to compromise his creative integrity for fame is a very different and far more corrosive thing.  The "pernicious effects of fame-whoring," to which I don't believe Scott succumbed, will be the subject of a future post (credit to Kate Evans for that description, and for locating Scott's quote above).