What if the Internet Can't Help Art?
“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
So, here is the thing, my main homie Seth and I talked about Billie Eilish selling 64 thousand copies of her book this week. I think Seth thinks it might have been a disappointment. I, by contrast, think the selling of 64 thousand copies of a book is a massive success.
I think WRITING a book is a massive success. I think WRITING a book is THE SUCCESS. It is THE ACHIEVEMENT. Writing the song, painting the picture, doing the dance, singing the song, whatever. The doing is the thing.
And maybe the internet does not help us doing anything artistic. Maybe. I mean, surely there is a gazillion forms of art on the internet in all the mediums I cannot possibly fathom. And all of that needs to be respected.
But, maybe none of that needs to be sold. And if it does, maybe the selling is not thing, maybe just maybe the art is the thing. What if its this…
I remember in college, as a young poet, and we talked endlessly about doing the work needed so that we could write ONE TRUE THING.
Hemingway said, “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
Zora Neale Hurston wrote, “If writers were too wise, perhaps no books would get written at all. It might be better to ask yourself ‘Why?’ afterwards than before. Anyway, the force from somewhere in Space, which commands you to write in the first place, gives you no choice. You take up the pen when you are told, and write what is commanded. There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.”
Jimmy Santiago Baca wrote “Every poem is an infant labored into birth and I am drenched with sweating effort, tired from the pain and hurt of being a man, in the poem I transform myself into a woman.”
I remember tearing myself apart trying to be a writer. Trying to be a guy who had a trusted crew of writers around me, who I could MOVE with my writing.
Tell me, how many lines of lyrics did Springsteen writer BEFORE he was able to write, “Wendy let me in, I want to be your friend, I want to guard your dreams and visions.”
How long did it take Rakim to become this guy?
What price did Hagler and Hearns pay to be able to do this? Or Gatti and Ward to do this?
My point is, how does the internet help that happen? I mean, sure, the internet sells everything. But, maybe, just maybe, the internet does not help someone be a great wood carver, or whatever.
Maybe the constant discussion about metrics and audience and all the rest, maybe that is just nonsense. My late friend Pat made pens. For people. And Pat is gone now. And each of us can hold the pen from Pat, and remember Pat. And we can write out checks, or we can write a poem, or we can write a prayer to our chosen Lord.
Pat never had a website. No one ever wrote a review of any of his pens. He sold them to people he knew. And he sold them at a local book store. And the first pen I got from Pat is completely different in its soul from the last one.
My friends all got pens from Pat. And maybe they feel connected to me a little bit, and that connection gets them to Pat somehow.
But, Pat never started an instagram, or anything. Pat wanted to turn wood on something called a lathe and then do some other things, and in the end his hands had generated a piece of art in the form of the pen. And he did it all alone in his basement.
Now I get it. I am writing here, on the internet, talking about how the internet does not help art. And here is the thing, I have a feeling the internet does not help my actual writing. I mean, I write here and I sometimes write something I dig, but no one is moved by this. No one reaches out to me and says how brave I am for writing whatever, how they see me laying it on the line and going for it and getting better. Nah. No one does that.
I wonder if people still do that. I wonder if there are writing workshops in which people who have day jobs, come together and have embraced the freedom of writing short stories for the pure hope of it feeling good to them, and maybe feeling like they are getting the hang of writing.
Billie Eilish sold however many books she sold. I could give a shit less about that number, and the surrounding discussion ABOUT THE NUMBER…not about the book, or the act of writing the book or the ideas within the book. The discussion is JUST THE NUMBER.
Maybe we need to consider the act of creation. Maybe that struggle should step forward, as maybe that struggle brings us to cool things. To the divine.