Over the years since starting Wasteland & Sky I've learned a few things. I must admit that they aren't things I expected to learn, but that's how life goes. They are takeaways, regardless. Times change, and so do thoughts and opinions. No one stays the same.
The world is what it is, whether you take it or leave it.
I'm certain you've heard much of the doom and gloom bathing everything, especially recently. For the last four years or so there appears to be a new crisis every few months. Aside from that hysteria, which is bad enough on its own, we can't even have any escapism to get away from it for even a few seconds. You see all sorts of comments from people with "power" and "prestige" the correct ways to create, despite they themselves not being able to create much at all. Even worse is some of the defeatism that comes out of even those who should know better to excuse the current state of things. These are people who will do anything to avoid moving on.
As I've covered more than a few times here, there are plenty of people today who believe they are writing some grand narrative in their head that will refashion and alter reality to be the way they want it. Writers today are trained to do this. Whether it is by hating the audience and aiming for a fictitious replacement for them that exists only in their head, or by creating new "genres" out of their personal pet philosophies in order to conquer public discourse and warp minds, this isn't a new happening. It's just gotten far too accepted over the course of the 20th century. Keep the artist and the audience completely separate and don't be surprised when they have radically ideas of the definition of such simple terms such as "good" or even "reality." We're living in the ruins of such thought processes today in the post postmodern world.
Regardless, there was a time when art was created for the audience first and then everything flowed from there. Over time, however, as we've seen, slowly we've twisted definitions of words and group definitions to now make the customer the enemy, the original sources aberrations of the now "accepted" new canon, and the traditional morals and people that allowed all these things to be made to begin with as objectively evil and wrong groups who should be destroyed and spat on whenever the chance arises. In other words, everything is now backwards and we are just supposed to accept this new state of normality. All while depression, drug usage, and suicide, is constantly on the rise. It's a mad world, after all.
This is one of the reasons the 20th century is not going to be looked back well on at all in the future. When you look at all of this from a bird's eye view you can't see what is going on today as anything other than Clown World, where everything is stupid and falling apart at the seems. The main reason to not despair over this is the truth that Clown World can not continue on indefinitely. Despite how it might feel, and how long this inane modernity might be dragging on, the way things are will not last forever.
The times do seem to be getting worse just about every day in the modern age. You see it every day if you bother to watch the sensationalistic news or go near any of the corporate owned media franchises. It all consists of weaponry against normality and sanity, bent on making you a zealot for the here and now cause they decided at their whim. Hard to deny this if you've been paying attention for the last half decade or so. The people in charge hate and wish to control you, and will do just about anything to cause division with you and your neighbor and family in order to gain the authority position in your life. Things are getting nasty out there, and they are going to get nastier.
You've probably heard some of the following things said. No one reads anymore, so we shouldn't write. Everyone watches television movies in theatres streaming, so we should meet the audience where they are and pander to that. Video games are the future, but only certain types. Don't color outside the lines and do what is currently successful. Invest in something--as long as it's visual and Hollywood-like or on the internet, even though Hollywood is currently dying and the internet is being locked down as we speak. Whatever you do, you must keep up with the ever-changing modern world and meet the present where it is. Think about tomorrow by doing what is popular today.
But, that was yesterday.
The nonsense that has piled up over the last few years should prove one thing for most of us, and that is that the current way of things is already passing on. In an era defined by rushing to the newest thing at faster and faster rates throughout the past century, we've long since hit the wall. Nothing lasts for long, and everything is a flash in the pan. Everything.
Think of the last really popular new thing you know, by which I mean a phenomenon extremely popular among large swaths of people, and you won't find much, and what you do find is nothing that stuck around very long before the next new thing came around. We are always hunting for the next trend at faster and faster rates. We refuse to be satiated for even a moment.
This is not a sustainable way of creating art. It's just trend chasing for novelty and the next buzz. Nothing sticks for long because everyone is just looking for their next hit, the newest drug. If that is all art is going to be treated as, which is what it has been for some time now, then why bother making it at all? There is no point participating in a grinding conveyor belt machine of product meant for little more than another buzz before cranking out the next one.
I'm not talking about creating things quickly: the pulp era was a century ago and they worked fast. I'm talking about consuming it like it were alcohol then tossing it aside before instantly moving on to the next mug. Creating work meant to be disposed of and forgotten instantly after usage is not really creating: it's supplying. Art isn't a fix.
That isn't creating--that's supplying soma. There is no reason to be part of a system like that, especially when megacorps are already falling over themselves doing that for their personal streaming services and failing big bookstores. The big dogs are already pandering to the lowest common denominator as you read this. What is the point of independent and smaller works being created if they're just going to match this failing model that has no future?
We should think higher. Not in terms of high and low art, but in terms of what the art is meant to invoke in the first place. Consuming and disposing is not a purpose.
I know there are many artists of all mediums worried about relevance and success in the modern day, but they also appear to be missing the point of creating art to begin with. Much has to do with today's expectations, most of which are tied to the most popular pieces of their childhood from the 1970s through the 1990s. None of that takes into account that those years were an aberration on how art has worked throughout all of history, and that the era of your childhood is long over and currently a haunting specter over how everything works now. It appears a new perspective on this subject needs to be given: a perspective much older than any of us.
The first is a realization most probably don't want to hear. There is a very real possibility that you will never make much of anything off of your art in your lifetime, or that no one will read it as long as you breathe. It could very well happen.
This wasn't even that uncommon in the much imitated 20th century. H.P. Lovecraft died in poverty. Robert E. Howard's success mainly arrived decades after he had died. There are countless bands from the Velvet Underground to The Replacements that had no real success when they were around but became influential and known after they had already broken up. The JoJo's Bizarre Adventure series took multiple decades for it to crack success worldwide, mostly from a new anime adaption. Blade Runner was infamously a bomb in its original release before going on to become one of the most influential movies of the century. These are just a handful of examples.
In other words, obsessing over the here and now is missing the point, especially when one doesn't know what tomorrow will bring. Plenty of things do not take off how or when you wish they would. We work on God's schedule, not our own. You don't know what tomorrow will bring.
One of my favorite pieces on this subject is author John C. Wright's essay entitled "Your Book of Gold." It was one he had written years back that still sticks in my mind today.
The article states, in part:
"If you only write one book in your whole life, and only sell 600 copies or less, nonetheless, I assure you, I solemnly assure you, that this book will be someone’s absolutely favorite book of all time, and it will come to him on some dark day and give him sunlight, and open his eyes and fill his heart and make him see things in life even you never suspected, and will be his most precious tale, and it will live in his heart like the Book of Gold."
If even one person reads your book, or indulges in your art, for even a second, and they get something out of it: then it is a success. Do not concern yourself with numbers as you have limited control over those. Concern yourself for making your art all it can be. That is your job.
Art can do wonders to the soul, especially if it connects. Should you do your best to connect, then it is hard to imagine not being able to do so at least on some level.
This is, after all, the main point. Monetary reward is secondary. Yes, even with pulp writing. That doesn't mean it isn't important at all, but it is not first.
As an example, Weird Tales was a middling success when it was around. It did decently but had little in the way of budget and had to use tasteful nude covers to attract buyers. The market back then was tough, after all. Many authors left Weird Tales for higher paying markets like the splatter and shudder pulps to make more money. That was their prerogative--who knows how much they needed the money, after all.
However, Weird Tales is now looked back on as one of the most influential and important magazines of its time. Any author who ran in its pages is given automatic prestige today for being in it. Those higher paying magazines? All gone and forgotten: most never reprinted. But the work many thought would never get seen? It's highly sought after now. The magazine has such prestige that modern grifters think buying the name and slapping it against their modern stories gives them instant credibility. This wouldn't have happened without the passage of time.
You simply do not know the future. That is the point.
But Mr. Wright goes on:
"I write for that one reader I will never see, the one who needs just such a tale as I can pen, in just such a time and place, some rainy afternoon or dark hour, when providence will bring my book into his hands. And he will open it, and it will not be a book, but a casement, from which he will glimpse the needed vision his soul requires of a world larger than our own, or a star in a heaven wider and higher than ours, a star aflame with magic more majestic than any star mortal astronomers can name.
"I humbly but strongly suggest you write for that unknown reader also, and not for worldly praise, or influence, or self, or applause. The world flatters popular authors, and the clamor of the multitude of brazen tongues is vanity. It is dust on the wind. The unknown reader will greet your work with love. It is a crown of adamant, solid and enduring.
"You will never meet that one reader, not in this life. In heaven he will come to you and fall on his face and anoint your feet with tears of gratitude, and you will stand astonished and humbled, having never suspected."
The future is unknown, but one thing is for certain: what you do matters, even if you do not see the results tangibly in your lifetime, and even if it isn't much from your point of view. This all goes on after you are gone, after all. Everything you do effects someone else somehow in someway you will never see or experience in this world. This is what our art should reflect. That's just how the world is and always was.
And I take that seriously.
I had a dream not too long ago. In fact, this was being added to the post when I woke from it. This was not the sort of dream I tend to have, so I found it best to write it down here. It is very relevant to the changing world around us.
What I remember was bizarre because it came oddly clear to me. I was in the mall of my youth, most of the stores were now gone and replaced with either empty rooms or far inferior establishments with little to be seen in them aside from old paint jobs and sparse décor like a handful of white curtains on the walls (there were no windows). There were few to no people in any of the shops, it was so empty you could hear the footsteps echoing down the halls. The parking lot outside was also almost barren with around two cars to be seen. There remained an odd feeling of smallness as I looked over it all where it once seemed so big when I was a child.
Speaking of the outside, it was even more odd than the mall. Half the stores across the street were also closed, either being rebuilt or constructed, or simply taken down. The road itself hadn't been repaved recently, crumbling quite badly after decades of neglect. The people nearby were confused at the world around them, the one they knew so well and so long, appeared to be going away. And sure enough, in real life, it was and is.
The entire experience reminded me of the song "Sunstroke" by the band Less Than Jake. The subject is one I think is more relevant today than ever.
When did I become
A tourist in the city I got my name from?
How did construction sites
Rise up on streets with shoes tied to old power lines?
And I'll never question why
Or where I draw the line
I'm too stubborn to decide
It's like living on a fault line
And I'm too stubborn to decide
The old saying goes
You're only missed when you start to like being alone
I'm left here in a pose
With steel beams and the fact that I'm just flesh and bone
And I'll never question why
Or where I draw the line
I'm too stubborn to decide
It's like living on a fault line
And I'm too stubborn to decide
That song was about Gen X getting older and realizing the world they grew up in was physically gone, and only really exists now in their memory. It was more metaphorical when it was written nearly a decade ago. The difference today is that these things are vanishing a lot more quickly and are more noticeable in scope and frequency.
The thing is, the real life area of the above dream is not too far from actually looking like this. Most of the places near where I grew up are long gone and paved over. It's now a patchwork of badly-aged brutalist buildings both empty and barely functional, mid-20th century megacorp franchises that just won't die, and rusted steel and badly paved roads that haven't been touched up since I was a grade schooler. It's fairly dead, and it isn't ever coming back.
It's all part of yesterday. There is no tomorrow coming for them.
Outside of that dream, I had been thinking about several other areas just like it for some time now. I remember what these places were like when they were full of people, of actual life, decades ago, where now walks almost no one, empty lots of torn up pavement with grass growing through the cracks, and barred windows under old, unclean signs. The dream might not have been the exact reality, but it definitely represented what had happened to it quite well. At the rate we're going, the place I grew up in will be a ghost town within a decade.
This is the bigger point here. All the things that were prosperous so long ago are dying now. That era is over.
You never know what the future is going to hold. This is why the current obsession with trying to be big today, in the here and now, when things are at their bleakest and rot covers everything like a disease-infested blanket, is a losing game. Being king of the junkpile might feel good for a few minutes before you are dethroned by the next flash in the pan constantly being rotated in by our fast moving ADD culture. You are missing the forest for the trees trying to fit work of vitality and life into a climate that is on its death bed and falling apart at an astonishing speed. Aim higher than modernity's mediocrity. You're going to have to, at this point.
If your work is truly relevant in a culture of destruction then no one will pay it any mind today regardless. Most modernists are too busy consuming the things that are killing them to even notice. A smaller, more discerning group will be looking for what you offer--and they might not even find you in your lifetime. There is no way to know. But they will never find you if they're trying to get away from the dross that chased them away from your genre or medium to begin with, while you stay behind reveling in it hoping for kudos instead. This is backwards.
You're going to have to aim higher than this; there is no choice but to do it. Get better, go big, and do what you've got to do. Floating with the stream isn't going to get you ahead; you're going to have to risking sinking by swimming hard.
This is the way it's going to be in the roaring '20s. We no longer have much in the way of safety nets of reliable plans going forward. All the roadmaps are for roads that no longer exist and places long since torn down. The systems we thought would always be there are on their last legs. The world you knew is more or less over.
So many of us asked for this, and here it is: tomorrow. The page has been turned, and there is no turning it back. The sun has set on the old world.
What will you do, in the meantime? There is a lot coming down the turnpike, many of which will be ignored or forgotten out of the gate. Perhaps this new thing will eventually hit later, perhaps it will only hit a niche group. The point is that this material will be new, not rehashed or rewarmed leftovers from some stale zombie age that refuses to die. Will you cling to this moldy carcass forever, or will you finally let it go and bury it in the grave it belongs? Whatever our decision is, it will impact what comes next.
Let us then make it something to remember, then. Let us finally make a step forward and away from these endless mistakes of a century that won't die. We can do this. We just need to finally out the past where it belongs.
This was one of the reasons I assembled the free book on Generation Y. We are 25 years divorced from Cultural Ground Zero and the bottom is finally falling out of the old world. This book is the final word on this undying era, and it will hopefully let us move on to what awaits us ahead. Generation Y might be defined by the past, but we can use that to build a new future that expands on it, instead of living in the scraps of a world that has been over for a long time now.
There is no Star Trek utopia coming, no matter how much useless lore one spouts about it--the 20th century is done, as are its visions of utopia. We're going to need larger dreams moving forward. Better ones.
This doesn't mean that we throw the past away. Of course not since the past can't be killed. However, we are going to need new things to aim for, more than the temporal, more than the here and now, more than visions of unrealistic materialist utopias that will clearly never arrive, and more than corporate product. There is more to shoot for than the same mistakes of the bloodiest century on record repeated indefinitely forward.
Even though there is no end of history, times do in fact end. New eras begin as others fade into the past. We are at that point right now, and it is about time.
Tomorrow is here. I can't wait to see what this new day brings.
Have you been feeling down, pushed around
Feeling like everything has been done before?
Do I need to understand every word from every man
Or everything from every band?
Can I say it's all been done before?
Religion, science, similes to metaphors
Can it be that there's nothing new
When there's more ways of looking at the truth?
Of looking at the truth...
The more things seem to change
The more they just stay the same
But now it's called a different name
Can you say things are new
When you look at magazines
And things you've seen in the news?
And can I say it's all been done before?
Religion, science, similes to metaphors
Can it be that there's nothing new
When there's more ways of looking at the truth?
Of looking at the truth...
It's 4:00 AM
And I just passed the westside buildings, all the broken glass
As I try to shake the cold away, but anyways
It's late at night and I'm about to crack
And decide to just walk the tracks
That I just walked yesterday
But have I been thinking too much tonight
When I realize just how my life's gone by
I check the time!
It's 4:00 AM
And I just passed the westside buildings, all the broken glass
As I try to shake the cold away, but anyways
It's late at night and I'm about to crack
And decide to just walk the tracks
That I just walked yesterday
But have I been thinking too much tonight
When I realize just how my life's gone by
I check the time!
It's 4:00 AM
And I just passed the westside buildings, all the broken glass
As I try to shake the cold away
But I'm okay.
"Let us then make it something to remember, then. Let us finally make a step forward and away from these endless mistakes of a century that won't die. We can do this. We just need to finally out the past where it belongs."
ReplyDeleteThis sums it up. There's no need to "kill the past," which is a big part about how we got here in the first place, but we also cannot be trapped by it. We can USE it and build something new.
Exactly!
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