The Healing Practice of Gratitude

What do we do with the prospect of failure as entrepreneurs? I’ve spent the last several months working on preparing for a Kickstarter campaign that is poised to run out of steam before reaching its funding goal. We’re just over 50% funded with only 5 days left on the clock. Big gulp.

The obvious temptation is self-pity: “Boo-hoo, nobody loves me. Nobody appreciates the art I’m trying to bring into the world.” This is an energy sinkhole. Self-pity is a form of narcissism. You can feel yourself crumple in on yourself – face meeting navel – when you nurse it.

I’ve been tempted to go there. I’ve found my mind wandering to how I might word my various concession speeches (topical, eh?!) How might I spin the disappointing news or explain Tune & Fairweather’s failure to the novelist Charles McNair who entrusted us with not just designing but finding and cultivating an audience for his book?

The anti-gravity boots that have helped me resist that urge: reflecting on the words of my creativity and business mentors Elizabeth Gilbert, Brené Brown, Seth Godin, et al. The path through the bramble of any “vulnerability hangover” is to shift the focus away from oneself toward generosity. So here’s one thing I did today: I made a Spotify playlist for the 224 people who’ve already backed the Kickstarter campaign.

I’ve resolved to counter anything that has a shrinking, contractive energy. Gratitude expands, unfurls and opens us up. So I meditate on all the people who have helped along the way.

John Battle, my former colleague and craft lead at Riot Games, is a professional voice actor in his off-hours (he’s done a Super Bowl commercial FFS!). John did a reading for us of the book’s first two chapters and ignored my repeated pleas to let us pay him for his contribution. Bonkers.

My wife spent a few hours reaching out to Irish press and local libraries here in Dublin to see if they might want to boost the signal on the book’s Kickstarter campaign. I’ve had friends and even strangers share news about the campaign with their followers on social media.

The more I reflect on these acts, the more I feel my spirit expand and calm. Was it C.S. Lewis who wrote about heaven being a feast where everybody’s spoon is too long to reach their own mouth so they happily feed their neighbours and get fed in return? That visual feeds me.

If the Kickstarter fails, that’s OK. I get to follow the example of another mentor Tim Ferriss and meditate on the worst that can happen. Hint: it doesn’t involve death or dismemberment or shitting through white jeans in public. We’ll problem-solve another way to cover the printing bill. If we fumble at the goal line and miss our funding target, I get to build empathy and equanimity.

Wikipedia describes equanimity as “a state of psychological stability and composure which is undisturbed by experience of or exposure to emotions, pain, or other phenomena that may cause others to lose the balance of their mind.” I’ll order as much as the universe has in stock, thanks.

I’ll sign off with a Norman Mailer quote: “Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.” I quit my job in video-game marketing to publish (and market!) beautiful books. That’s my job. Even if I’m depressed, even if my monkey mind is trying to convince me I’m a failure or a fraud, that’s the work I get to do. And I count myself lucky to have this job. Even on a stressful or down day.

There Is Nothing To Fear

“Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever modest, whatsoever just, whatsoever holy, whatsoever lovely, whatsoever of good fame, if there be any virtue, if any praise of discipline, think on these things.” Philippians 4:8

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I was raised to fear God, and fear the world, and fear my body, and fear the condition of my soul. I was raised to fear.

The apostle’s urging to think on things pure and lovely – a gospel passage relayed so often in my household that I could recite it by heart – became a divine injunction to avoid R-rated movies, Dungeon’s & Dragons, sexually explicit material, a vast array of dangers. Any interaction with dark or perverse subject matter, I was told, opened a window for “the evil one” to infiltrate my life and tempt me away from God. My mother used the phrase “spiritual warfare” to describe this cosmic struggle for my soul.

I was a sensitive kid, eager to please and preoccupied with these powerful forces I could not see or comprehend. Journal entries kept by my mother enshrined early-childhood remarks of the following sort:

“I like God and the angels. I don’t like the devil. He makes holes in my teeth.” November, 1982. I was three.

“God has eyes all over him so he can see when we’re doing bad even if Mommy isn’t there.” September, 1983. I was four.

“I wish I’d be killed… so I can go up to heaven to live.” November, 1983. I was four.

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My fascination with darkness and death and demons persisted. I carried it with me into adolescence. I latched onto heavy metal. I bought a black Yamaha electric guitar from a friend at school, its headstock bearing a gash where it had split in two and been inexpertly glued back together. The scar remained visible. 

The guitar cost 20 dollars. On it I learned to play as many Metallica songs as my fingers could traverse. I think it was my way of asserting dominion over something wild. 

To listen to James Hetfield’s growl felt like standing outside in a thunderstorm. It was powerful and untamed and I could emerge from its presence intact. My parents were not cruel in wanting to offer me a sheltered upbringing, yet I wanted to feel the storm beyond that protective awning.

The voices of all those heavy-metal singers I loved contained a power that I lacked, a power I craved – to do what? Raise my voice?

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When I left home for college I began seeking out movies that made me uncomfortable. Magnolia. Requiem for a Dream. 21 Grams. Dancer In The Dark. I forced myself to keep my eyes open and gradually found them adjusting to the dark.

That condition you hear about in which some pregnant women stuff their mouths with soil because their bodies crave some mineral contained in the dirt? Maybe that was me. Needing to find something in the soil of those flickering images, some nourishment in the immodest, unholy and unlovely.

I felt – I knew – the world was a dangerous place. I knew this because I could feel that tumult and chaos within myself. No matter how antiseptic the backdrop of my upbringing, I could feel the germs within. I needed exposure. My awakening to the power of art involved a search for a diluted specimen of the darkness I sensed within. To survive that, I needed to learn how to commune with it, somewhere beyond judgement and fear.

I needed to place my arm in the wolf’s jaws voluntarily... and trust I would be fine.

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I have not exhausted my fascination with shadow.

The publishing company I have founded as an adult – Tune & Fairweather – enables me to usher into the world the varieties of art that coal-fired my imagination as a younger person, and still do to this day.

Our first novel is called The Epicureans, written by Pulitzer-nominated author Charles McNair. It’s a disturbing book full of unnatural appetites, serial murder, sex, a form of animal predation that would make David Attenborough blush. Given my childhood preoccupation with hell and demons, it probably shouldn’t be surprising that the book’s cover features depictions of demons and hellfire.

Exorcism is all about getting the demons out where you can see them.

My wife cheers me on and wishes the project every success but does not have the stomach to read the story herself. The vulnerability of young children strikes close to home. I respect her squeamishness. There’s no shame in fearing the dark. We all find a way to abide the spectre of evil in different ways. There’s no obligation to meet its gaze. Most days I avoid the news headlines.

But there’s something about the dark that I love. When you get rid of the dull haze of city lights and civilization you can look up and find bright points of light stabbing through.

The Epicureans has those underdog specks of illumination as well. You can see them clearly in the darkness, tiny specks of fire interrupting a sprawling void. The love of family, the unexpected decency of strangers, the warmth of community. Most stubbornly, perhaps, the humour that carries us through the unbearable and the morbid. Human beings are made of strong stuff. We can survive almost anything.

Even children can survive. I am still here, after all, eager to see what happens next.

Why Candie Bolton started drawing lewd sketches in Animal Crossing

“You’re really tapping into that whole ‘sex sells’ thing,” my wife told me – not entirely sarcastically – when I showed her the first proper video I’d posted on my new YouTube channel. 

To be fair, the title was “Filthy Animal Crossing” (I got a kick out of the throwback Home Alone reference). But she was right. It’s probably a questionable way to get a channel off the ground. When you only have a couple videos up on your entire channel, any one video is going to be seen as a mission statement of sorts.

But I couldn’t help myself. The conversation I’d had with Sacramento-based artist and toy designer Candie Bolton on my podcast about her virtual graffiti tagging – drawing naughty pictures of Animal Crossing characters in string bikinis – captivated me in a way I couldn’t shake. It wasn’t merely a cynical “hurrr… look at Isabelle flashing underboob” attempt at baiting a few clicks. There was something meaningful in what Candie was doing.

It’s a story about virtual community and virtual art collecting and finding ways to make our friends laugh during stretches of forced separation and stressful uncertainty.

It’s a story about an artist picking up the china vase of her audience’s expectations and smashing it to bits on the floor. Simply because the work was so outlandish it made her smile. 

It’s a story about making art for art’s sake. Having the courage to shove terms like highbrow and lowbrow through the airlock and jettison them into outer space.

It’s a story about curiosity and being willing to be distracted by a shiny object glimmering in the periphery of your vision, which just might be a will-o’-the-wisp that wants to lead you somewhere special. After all, that creature from English folklore that appears in dark woods and gives travellers a beacon to follow, is a metaphor for hope, direction, inspiration. The inner compass suddenly, mystically externalised.

It’s a story about artistic mastery and self-handicapping as a means to better flaunt one’s prowess. The art of the virtuoso performance artist. Houdini not being content to merely escape from a straitjacket but adding chains and being forced to do it underwater with oxygen running out. 

Candie’s Animal Crossing art delights us because we know she’s the illustrator version of a juggler who’s just swapped out her bowling pins for growling chainsaws. And learning how to pull off this new feat with the audience watching her figure it out in real time. That willingness to throw oneself into a challenge, to finger-shush the voice of self-judgment and enjoy the learning process, what an inspirational example for the rest of us.

It’s a story about the comedic arts – the power of surprise and juxtaposition. The intimacy and bonding power of humour, of crassness. The odd reassurance many of us feel in the company of transgressive art. That we can explore the most primal aspects of our humanity – sex being one of the most central, closely followed by death, which is just the other side of the yin-yang of the cycle of life and death I suppose.

It’s a story about the way that artistic vandalism, because of how unassuming it is, can be the jester at the feast who says profound things about the world, even talks shit about the monarch, but can get away with it because the whole thing is just a bit of fun. Is it really? To paraphrase what a wise man once sang, the words of the prophets are spray-painted on the subway walls. The trickster, the truth-teller.

Well… shit. Maybe “Filthy Animal Crossing” really is my channel’s mission statement.

Here’s the transcript of my conversation with Candie about the Animal Crossing prank.

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JASON: So how did this whole thing get started?

CANDIE: I guess we should start explaining what Animal Crossing is. It’s a game on the Nintendo Switch. And it’s a very wholesome, kid-friendly game. You have an island. There’s cute little animal villagers who live with you. You basically collect items, make your island look beautiful and you can play with other players who have their own island and you trade items and interact with them and visit each other’s islands.

So I got super into this game and the past two weeks I’ve been playing a lot with Luke Chueh and also Scott Tolleson and Patrick from Munky King. We joke that we’re the west coast toy crew and we’re all playing Animal Crossing together. And we have a group chat where we’re talking about all the items and different things happening on our islands, and all that.

So in this game you can also write on each other’s bulletin board that’s located on their islands. And I didn’t even know that you could write or draw on this bulletin board. I saw posts somewhere that sounds like, by the way, you can draw on here.

JK: That sounds dangerous.

CB: Oh yeah. Especially because it’s meant to be a kid-friendly game. I think it’s rated ‘E for Everyone’ or something. But it was really interesting to me. I just wanted to give it a try. I was on my friend’s island and I just wanted to make something that was really funny that would make her laugh. So I think I just drew a really giant ass and I wrote “THICC” and there’s this girl’s ass with a thong. And it was a really crude drawing. It wasn’t very good but it was good enough. I showed it to her and it made her laugh. I showed it to my boyfriend and he thought it was hilarious. I just thought, this is really funny and unexpected because the last thing you expect when you look at someone’s bulletin board in this game is something inappropriate.

JK: Yeah, you expect that in a subway or a metro stop, or something like that. But definitely not in Cartoon Happy Fun Land Family-Friendly Nintendo World.

CB: I just thought it was funny and I wanted to keep trying to get better at it. Because the other aspect of it is that it’s incredibly hard to draw on this thing. So the Nintendo Switch has a touch screen but it is not as good as your phone or a tablet. Definitely not as easy to use as an Apple Pencil on the tablet, which basically feels like real drawing. I’d say that the bulletin board is between those pads that you write your signature on when you’re checking out, it’s between that and an Etch-A-Sketch. It’s very difficult.

I’m using my finger so the whole time that I’m touching the pad, I can’t see what I’m drawing because my finger is covering it up. So when I’m drawing, I feel like I’m just hoping the lines get placed in the correct position. And if it’s not then I have to erase or redo the line over and over. So it’s really hard to work with. And you’re limited with how many lines you can do. If you want to fill up the whole page with ink, you can’t do that because you run out of ink. There’s a gauge on the right side of the screen and as you’re drawing it’s slowly depleting.

There’s only four colours – black, yellow, pink and blue. And there are three line thicknesses. So it’s really not intended for anyone to do any kind of masterpiece on here. But because you’re so limited, that’s kind of what I found fun about it. Because then it’s like, let’s see what I can do with these very limited tools.

JK: Those constraints always make the end result more interesting if it was very effortless and seamless to work with.

CB: When you have unlimited possibilities it’s easy to overthink it, you’re like, I can do anything. But on this medium you can’t do anything that you want. It’s super limited by even just how many lines you can draw on there. So that’s what I found appealing about it.

JK: Because the drawings are sexy, have you had any issues with them getting reported or removed by Nintendo?

CB: I haven’t been made aware of it if it has. I think that when you look at someone’s bulletin board, you have the option to report something. So I think if someone reports it then it might be looked at and they might have to evaluate that.

I should maybe explain what I’ve been drawing since my first drawing. After I drew my first drawing of the ass I started drawing actual girls. Mostly girls wearing bikinis so there’s no nudity. I haven’t drawn anyone that’s naked.

JK: It only looks nude in the process videos before you add the clothes.

CB: That’s true. That’s just part of the art process though. When you’re drawing a person, you start drawing their general form and then you add clothes to them, right?

JK: Yeah, it’s a figure-drawing exercise before it transitions into Barbie dress-up.

CB: Yeah, but I can see how it is totally unexpected. Not only because it’s in basically a kid’s game but also because I don’t really draw this kind of thing. I’ve always been really into anime and video games. And if you play Japanese JRPGs and if you watch a lot of anime, this is what the girls look like in this genre of stuff. So I’ve always been a fan of this art style. I just never really did it too much. I used to draw more in this style when I was a teenager but since I’ve been starting my art career, I was like, I need to take it seriously! I need to do serious stuff! So I’ve been doing Japanese creatures. It’s been a lot of dragons lately. 

I just wanted to not take it so seriously. I wanted to do something fun, something that I thought was funny. I hope people see that there’s a sense of humour in it. I don’t want anyone to take it seriously. And I’m sorry if I’ve offended anyone. Because when I posted the time-lapse videos of my drawings of these girls in bikinis, I lost a lot of followers from that. So, yeah, I think I did offend people. But, yeah, you can’t make everyone happy!

The characters I’m drawing look like animal characters from the game. So I just think it’s really funny. The character in Animal Crossing turned into some sexy character.

JK: Then you opened it up for commissions?

CB: It happened really quickly. I just started doing these drawings. I think it was just last week. At first it was really hard to just draw anything in general. And within just two days, I was like, I’ve kind of got the hang of things, now I feel like I can draw whatever I want on there, practically. At first people were messaging me, seeing on my Instagram Stories that I was posting my artwork there. And I was getting a ton of DMs from people saying, please come to my town and draw on my bulletin board! I think in the first two days of me starting to do it, oh gosh, I got way too many DMs about it. I was travelling from town to town. I made over two million bells doing this. And before that I was poor. I was lucky when I had 10,000 bells at any given time.

JK: Was it always in-game currency or did you toy with the idea of making a bit of side-hustle money with it?

CB: Well, I did this for two days where it was only getting tips in the game currency. And that was fine and I had fun with it. But they were taking up a lot of my time because some of these drawings, I was spending maybe 15-20 minutes. But yeah sometimes I’d hang around at their island. I’d want to check things out or they’d want to talk. And then it would end up taking half an hour. I’m actually working on a lot of projects right now. I should not be spending any time in Animal Crossing at this moment. That’s how bad it is. I am super behind. But I kept doing this because it was just a fun distraction. It kept me motivated I guess to keep going. And it’s just such a fun, really quick, stupid drawing. And then I post it on my Instagram and then I go on to the next island.

But like I said, I was playing this game with Luke Chueh and Scott Tolleson. They're both artists and they were like, we see you spending a lot of time on these drawings and you do a really great job on them. Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to start asking for real money. So after two or three days I decided, I’m getting way too many commissions, I can’t keep up with them and I have real work I need to be doing so I’m just going to ask for five dollars in real currency and then also ask that they tip me with in-game currency. As soon as I started that, I got way less DMs about it. But I’m also like, that’s fine because it was taking up way too much of my time.

I needed to slow it down anyway.

JK: Is there any element to this whole side adventure in terms of resetting or having a brain injury, waking up and needing to learn how to be an artist again? How much did that factor into it? Becoming a beginner again at this thing that you’ve spent so many years refining.

CB: I think that might have been what really encouraged me to keep going. Because when I first started, I could barely draw anything on the bulletin board. And then I saw so much progress in just two or three days. And that alone is what was the most exciting part of this whole thing for me.

Just seeing that I could take this really crude drawing tool that’s not meant to be for drawing anything besides just some smiley faces or something and seeing what I could do with it. That was the funnest part about it to me. Well, that and I think the drawings make people laugh, and I like that.

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[If you’d like to eavesdrop on this conversation in its entirety, check out my full conversation with Candie.]

Podcast Episode #6: Candie Bolton

In this episode of the podcast, Jason Killingsworth speaks with artist and toy designer Candie Bolton about what prompted her to start drawing naughty pictures on bulletin boards in the video game Animal Crossing. They discuss the enjoyment that comes with trying to master unfamiliar creative tools, perfectionism, the challenges of working in non-digital media where mistakes can't be solved by an "undo" keyboard shortcut, and how she made the transition into working as an artist full-time.

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Candie Bolton x Kidrobot

What I learned from the Advertising & Creativity MasterClass (Part 1)

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MasterClass: Jeff Goodby & Rich Silverstein Teach Advertising And Creativity

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On the definition of advertising…

Jeff Goodby: “Advertising, in the biggest sense, is a corporate-funded study of what people love and hate and think is beautiful. And we get people to pay us money to study that stuff. Amazing!”

Rich Silverstein: “I don’t come from a point of you that it’s even advertising. I come into it with… I want to tell you a story. And it will be represented by the brand. We understand it’s commerce. It’s art serving capitalism… We want to be artists in a business world.”

Goodby offers a quote from the advertising legend Howard Gossage, one of his greatest heroes in the business: “People read what interests them. Sometimes it’s advertising.”

Trailer for “The Socrates of San Francisco”, a documentary about the life of Howard Gossage.

Rich: “Advertising is so fluid that there’s no consistency that this is what you should be doing. It’s ever-evolving. Except for storytelling. And telling the truth. And doing something with heart. That’s forever.”

My thoughts:

• Despite being regarded by many as suspect, morally compromised and exploitative, good advertising represents a fundamentally virtuous (or at least a fair-trade) cultural exchange. The ad has to earn your attention by having something interesting to say, by telling you a story in a very short space of time that will lodge in your mind. A single fluffy piece of popcorn. Chewed and swallowed in a flash but leaving behind a toothsome, buttery aftertaste. Advertising is a street performer who earns the currency of your attention by doing something genuinely surprising or transporting out of the mundane.

• Advertising and mainstream commercial art (music, film, whatever medium you like) bear notable similarities. Both ask the audience to vote with their disposable income. Or simply with their positive regard if social validation is the artist’s objective. The ability to measure the monetary success or reach/engagement of a particular work demonstrates how efficiently a cultural artefact has tapped into the psychological circuitry of human beings. Beauty, mystery, a good story. All art made public is a bid for attention of some kind.

“Can’t Touch This” (Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, Client: Cheeto’s)

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On the importance of cultivating inspiration through habitual exposure to culture…

Rich: “Jeff and I are students of the world – of music, of theatre, of art, of food... Appreciating everything there is in the world and using that.”

Jeff: “Appreciation is a really good word because if you’re appreciating the things around you and communicating that to people, people will listen to you.”

My thoughts:

I love this suggestion that marketing can be motivated from a place of generosity. Like cultural magpies collecting small yet beautiful shiny objects in order to feather a nest for the audience, the advertiser curates (and occasionally, in exceptional circumstances, even creates culture).

This calls to mind all the curation of art that I did as a magazine journalist, listening to new music, playing video games, etc, and making decisions about what I wanted to recommend to readers. Isn’t that a kind of propaganda, after all? Was I not advertising those artists’ products to our readership? When a marketing department put a quote of mine on a game box or a musician’s tour poster, were we not both engaged in the same occupation?

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On the quest for excellence and obsessing over how to improve one’s creative output…

Rich during an acceptance speech at Cannes Lions ceremony: “We’re so hard on ourselves, it’s crazy. I know I could improve this too (points at his printed speech). I’m trying (laughs). I’m gonna rewrite it.”

Jeff offscreen in a separate part of the episode: “What am I doing? The usual. Just trying to make the greatest advertising in the whole fucking world.”

“Cool Ranch” (Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, Client: Doritos)

My thoughts:

• Reminds me of the old proverb about the furniture maker who gets asked, “How do you know when a piece you’re working on is finished?” To which he replies, “It’s never finished. The customer just comes and takes it away from me at a certain point.”

• The obsession with constant iteration and improvement is apparent with these pair (and presumably, by extension, the culture of their 300-person firm). We can always do better, there are always avenues to improving the work. The audience is typically only treated to the final product and doesn’t get to see the dozens or even hundreds of evolutionary steps between the single-celled organism of the idea and its final form.

Letterpress Workshop @ Distiller's Press, Dublin

Every aspect of letterpress printing is slower, heavier, more laboured. Every mistake requires a surgical intervention to correct. The process of repairing a typo perfectly resembles surgery. The workshop instructor takes a pair of tweezers and tenderly extracts the leaden “d” from the typeset block that was meant to be a “b”. It can be confusing since the metal slivers of type appear in mirror image and backward. The phrase “mind your p’s and q’s” originates from this very confusion.

You have to work for each word. Fishing each letter out of a drawer segmented into compartments of various sizes. A large rectangle full of e’s, a smaller one for the less frequent x’s. You reach the end of each sentence feeling like a marathon runner passing a mile marker. If talk is now cheap, so is type. This was not always so. Our instructor informs us that apprentice typesetters had money withheld from their pay for any mistakes. They learned to be careful even as they learned to be swift.

Even though the behemoth of a machine that creates our day 1 print project is all but extinct – few print engineers remain who can service such a device – it also seems somehow indestructible, immortal. I get to turn the crank and make a print. You walk several steps beside the machine as you rotate the crank. You feel the lumbering inertia. Heavy gears turning, dragging the paper across the typeset chunks anchored into place with magnets and lengths of metal. So much exertion for a single print.

Yet it is this very exertion that makes each print feel earned. Created from ink but in some respect a donation of blood for every ink-stained page. Set aside to dry overnight in metal racks. The ordeal of childbirth to help us cherish our new arrival.

Pain to italicise the sense of reward.

Podcast Episode #5: Luke Chueh

In this episode of the podcast, Jason speaks with pop-surrealist painter Luke Chueh about creativity, drug addiction, embracing his Chinese heritage, the commercial pressures of being a full-time visual artist and the technical limitations that led to the creation of his signature style. Chueh has become an icon of the LA underground art scene and has enjoyed many successful collaborations with art-toy designer Munky King. A collection of his paintings from 2003-2009 has been collected in the book The Art of Luke Chueh: Bearing The Unbearable.

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Corey Helford Gallery - Artist Page

Podcast Episode #4: Edmund McMillen

In this episode of the podcast, Jason speaks with indie video-game designer and comic-book artist Edmund McMillen about mental illness, religious dogma, the dark corners of family legacy, his lifelong fascination with the weird and grotesque, and the necessity of weaving deeply personal themes into his creations. McMillen has created some of the most successful indie games of all time, most notably Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac.

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Podcast Episode #3: Pádraig Ó Tuama

In this episode of the podcast, Jason speaks with Irish poet and theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama about the virtues of exile, the vulnerability of writing poetry and the effort to reconcile being a gay man in a religious tradition that has long demonised (literally) LGBTQ identity. He has published several books of poetry and prose, including "In The Shelter", "Sorry For Your Troubles" and "Readings From The Book Of Exile".

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Poetry Unbound podcast

Podcast Episode #1: Mugison

In this episode of the podcast, Jason speaks with Icelandic songwriter Mugison about untangling the mystery of creative inspiration. They discuss how Mugison decides which voice and style he will explore in a given song, Icelandic music's reputation for weirdness, creating art without worrying about the permission of gatekeepers, and his fascination with Jesus and spiritual belief.

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Visiting Mugison in Iceland

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On Childhood & Exploration Through Art

In his essay “The Wilderness of Childhood”, author Michael Chabon frets aloud about the narrowed confines of the world contemporary children are free to explore without adult supervision. He notes some of the rationale for this curtailing of adventure and shutting down of Wilderness – heightened anxiety over child abduction due to lurid news cycles, a society predisposed to tort cases over even minor scuffs, etc. – and ponders what unintended effects such diminished room for exploration might have on creativity at large.

“Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map,” Chabon writes. “If children are not permitted – not taught – to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?”

My own parents never stood between me or my siblings and the Wilderness. We spent entire childhood summers in southern California barefoot, burning our soles numb on the blacktop. We rode bikes all over the hills surrounding our Mission Viejo neighbourhood. We speculated about a splotch of red staining the wall lining one of those hilltop bike paths. Neighbourhood lore had it that a child had struck his head against the wall after somebody who lived in a house up the hill had launched a gobstopper at him from a slingshot. The stain on the wall allegedly evidence of where the blood from his head had oozed, baked into the stone beneath unstoppable sunshine.

But when it came to ideology and politics, that’s where the Wilderness experience ended and the metaphorical chainlink began. Only approved music and literature found their way inside. Our primary social circles conformed to the demographics of the church youth groups and Christian school clubs we frequented. Though Chabon laments the foreclosure of physical Wilderness spaces and geographical exploration, you could just as easily apply its logic to the realm of imagination. When children are penned in and prevented from poking around the Wilderness of ideas, having adventures outside the confines of parentally mandated wisdom and party lines, you can train a child to fear knowledge, to regard it as forbidden fruit.

I’ll confess to interpreting the Garden of Eden myth differently today. The Garden seems an obvious picture of childhood, before shame enters the world. Family photos of me as a young child naked from the waist down building sand castles, unconcerned with my nakedness. The Garden, where Adam and Eve walked alongside their parent in the cool of life’s morning. When they developed an appetite for knowledge, he kicked them out. Instead of being fed and pampered they would have to struggle with soil to grow their own food, irrigate fields with the sweat of their brow, bring forth new life in agony. The scriptures deemed such toil a curse.

If only I’d realised then what I’ve come to understand since, that the difficulty and struggle to feed oneself (either physically or intellectually) is one of life’s most ennobling privileges. That to stay in the Garden, even if it meant the company and protection of a helicopter parent, is no life at all. The walled Garden doesn’t need bricks to form an enclosure. The moment we leave the Garden and undertake the toil of living and learning, even if it means losing the father’s presence, that is a blessing to be cherished. Let Jesus curse the fig tree while we reserve our spite for its discarded leaves, the ones Adam and Eve used to shield their skin as the axe of separation fell. The fallen leaves. The fallen axe. My fallen forbears. The fall from the nest that had to inevitably occur before I learned how to fly.

I needed a new spate of experience. I craved exploration. The nascent Internet, the strangers I met there, opened a crease between me and a wider intellectual wilderness, the world outside the Garden of childhood. I caught a glimpse of something.

On Perfectionism

Of all the oasis mirages at which I’ve knelt and gulped, Perfectionism has been the most unexpectedly rancid. The conviction of its reality and the mental models I built atop that foundation may take the rest of my life to disassemble. And I'm OK with that. It will be time well spent. No illusion has been more stunting in my growth as a person, more counter-productive in the furnishing of my worldview and ethical intuitions, more corrosive to my mental health, more devilling in my attempt to get a finished sentence on the page. If a theoretical perfect sentence does exist, you could spend a decade trying to crowbar the one you’re writing into closer resembling it. You might die trying. Or die from the trying. If you had an obsessive enough streak you might never arrive at sentence two. And by you, of course I mean me.

In its most popular usage, “perfectionism” refers to a lofty personal standard or philosophy that rejects any contribution judged inferior. I’ll call that lower-case “p” perfectionism, the sort author Elizabeth Gilbert warns against in Big Magic, her book on creative living:

"Perfectionism is just a high-end, haute couture version of fear... perfectionism is just fear in fancy shoes and a mink coat, pretending to be elegant when actually it’s just terrified. Because underneath that shiny veneer, perfectionism is nothing more than a deep existential angst that says, again and again, ‘I am not good enough and I will never be good enough.’"

I’m not using the idea of Perfection to mean, simply, top marks. As in the phrase ‘Frightened Rabbit’s album The Midnight Organ Fight is perfect’ (though it is). I use the term 'Perfectionism' to describe a belief system, predicated on the existence of an ideal form against which we can measure deviation (a.k.a. sin). It's then a natural follow-on to bring that almost mathematical certainty into arenas of life filled with ambiguity: art, ethics, faith, etc. Guilt can be understood as the psychic angst and frustration experienced by the inability to bring ourselves and our contributions to this world sufficiently into alignment with this hypothetical ideal.

After becoming disillusioned with Christianity in my mid 30s, I assumed the root of my quarrel with religion hinged on its peddling of truth claims that didn’t stand up to scrutiny. That the world was created ex nihilo in six days. That death and suffering entered the world because my ancestors snacked on the wrong piece of fruit. That Jonah survived in the digestive tract of a giant fish. That there was an otherworldly inferno called Hell into which God would one day plunge his adversary Lucifer along with the rest of the world’s unbelievers. At five years old I anxiously informed my mother, “If the devil has wings like an angel and God throws him into the lake of fire, he could fly out again.” I was doing my best with the facts I'd been given.

Much of the modern case made against religion in the years since the attacks of September 11th has focussed on the ills of religious fundamentalism – terrorism (the attempt to move the world closer to one's model of Perfection through armed struggle), apocalyptic ideology, dogmatism, imperviousness to any scientific finding that contradicts one's holy book, etc. Yet the more I attempt to understand what injury I suffered in my evangelical upbringing, if any, it wasn’t just the systematic teaching of the scriptures as an exam answer key. Religion, and not just its fundamentalist strain, rests atop the premise of Perfectionism – a fundamental faith in the existence of Perfection. Fundamentalists carry this assumption further than their more liberal co-religionists, granted, but the vast majority of Christians take at least a handful of the following from religion's buffet:

• There is a perfect being: God

• Parent: also God

• Human: Jesus

• Book: the Bible

• City: heaven

• Earth: the Garden of Eden, before humanity’s rebellion

• Morality: whatever is consonant with God’s nature

• Sexual expression: straight, married

I could list more, but you get the gist. Religion thrives on the steadying benchmark of Perfection. Having such tidy parameters removes guesswork. People often describe the fundamentalist mode of thinking as ‘black and white’. Even the notion of black represents a taxonomical Perfection. Unambiguous evil. Perfection boasts a reassuring simplicity, whether earned or not. The more perfect the model against which one bases a judgment, the more certainty one feels entitled to marshal.

Bless This Mess

© Richard Hogg

Let's call the antidote to Perfectionism “Messiness”. In almost every zone of knowledge the fundamentalist argues, “It’s simple!” Even as the progressive, fielding the same question, surveys the Messiness before her and says, “It’s complicated!”, deploying caveats and further considerations. The fundamentalist will immediately detect such a response as weakness, insecurity, a smokescreen, a dodge. This is why fundamentalists have a relatively easy time winning converts – they radiate certainty, which makes their conclusions, even the bankrupt ones, feel unassailable. As a child I preferred simplicity. Who doesn’t?

The belief that every living thing appeared on earth in its present form, immutable, unchanging – that’s Perfectionism. Asking somebody to embrace the veracity of evolution, on the other hand, invites them to make a truce with biological Messiness on a grand scale. Whales with hip bones left over from their landlubbing ancestors. Humans with tail bones. Human embryos with gills, with coats of hair covering their entire body but shed prior to birth. Unending change, every living thing a so-called “transitional form”. A whopping 4,500 different species of cockroaches alone. It’s enough to make a Perfectionist dizzy. Ask a creationist about abiogenesis and they’ll tell you, “It’s simple: God did it!” Ask a scientist and they’ll tell you, “It’s complicated! There’s so much we don’t know.”

In Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth, a book-length appreciation of Darwin’s theory of evolution, he considers the biological version of Platonic essentialism, the widespread creationist intuition that animal species possess essential forms in the way that geometric shapes do. That there is, for example, an essential rabbit, a sort of celestial cookie-cutter shape with floppy ears that could be used to stamp out such a form at the dawn of creation. The basic act of giving animals names further adds to the aura of immutability.

"The Platonist regards any [evolutionary] change in rabbits as a messy departure from the essential rabbit, and there will always be resistance to change – as if all real rabbits were tethered by an invisible elastic cord to the Essential Rabbit in the Sky. The evolutionary view of life is radically opposite. Descendants can depart indefinitely from the ancestral form, and each departure becomes a potential ancestor to future variants....

"If there is a ‘standard rabbit’, the accolade denotes no more than the centre of a bell-shaped distribution of real, scurrying, leaping, variable bunnies. And the distribution shifts with time. As generations go by, there may gradually come a point, not clearly defined, when the norm of what we call rabbits will have departed so far as to deserve a different name. There is no permanent rabbitiness, no essence of rabbit hanging in the sky, just populations of furry, long-eared, coprophagous, whisker-twitching individuals, showing a statistical distribution of variation in size, shape, colour and proclivities… All is fluid, as another Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, said; nothing fixed. After a hundred million years it may be hard to believe that the descendant animals ever had rabbits for ancestors."

It’s a seductive idea: that we might be able to file living things into categories as clearly labelled as “triangle”, no additional qualification needed. And not just rabbits, but an Irishman, say, or a Christian. I suspect that xenophobia and resentment for immigrants owes much to the dissonance that arises from seeing a Platonic ideal muddied. The smile of a flag-pledging American patriot framed by the fabric of her hijab? Nice try, scoffs the jingoist in his camouflage cap, swatting away the cognitive dissonance, that orbiting mosquito whose buzz never quite goes away.

Perhaps my childhood experience growing up in Ireland in the early ’80s contributed to my illusion of a perfect Irish archetype. We shared an accent. We shared a paleness. How clearly I remember the classmate of mine who spent the entirety of his summer holidays in Africa and returned with his skin tone noticeably darker than when he departed. His transfiguration confused me. Six years on the planet by then and I’m not sure I’d seen anything resembling dark skin till that moment. Homogenous communities, how deftly they trick us into believing cultural purity exists outside the mind.

It’s comforting to imagine we live in a world of sturdy taxonomies. It helps us orient ourselves in the cosmos. Christianity’s various simplifications appear to arise from the same urge. The waypoints of a prepackaged moral system. The equatorial delineation of God and Devil, good and evil, angels and demons, heaven and hell, lost and found.

Culture Warriors

© Richard Hogg

Once the software of Perfectionism begins running on the human brain, however, it doesn’t stay corralled within the religious sphere. If there’s a perfect God and a perfect book, why shouldn’t there be a perfect mental archetype of what it means to be American? The famous metaphor of The Melting Pot, after all, is simply one way of expressing the desire to reduce the Messiness of cultural pluralism down to the simplicity of a uniform ideal. When Obama took office, the conspiracy shit-show of Birtherism seemed to ooze from a desire to resolve the cognitive dissonance of an American President that diverged from the perfect mental model of what an American looks like, the sort of name he ought to have. It’s easy to understand how a certain kind of fundamentalist would find in WASP-y homogeneity a sort of Perfection. Multiculturalism, after all, is demographical Messiness on a grand scale.

It’s no coincidence the American culture war between Left and Right tends to centre on the issue of abortion. To many opponents of abortion, there couldn’t be an easier ethical quandary. When does life begin? “Simple! At conception, end of story.” When Obama was asked by Rick Warren, at a 2008 campaign stop, when life began, he claimed the question was “above his pay grade”. Obama’s critics pounced on this answer, characterising it as a weaselly attempt to sidestep a question that has a simple answer.

However flippant Obama's answer may have come across, the phrase “above my pay grade” is simply another way of saying “it’s complicated". If a foetus has a heartbeat and can respond to stimuli, can we then conclude that it possesses an immortal soul? That the stopping of its heartbeat ought to be classified as murder? To the Perfectionist, any assertion of Messiness in such an allegedly tidy moral issue will seem unconscionable. To concede that foetal development is a nuanced progression, and carries with it corresponding nuances in our ethical obligations, would require a stand-off with Messiness that might never be satisfactorily resolved. The path of least resistance is to just affirm a belief that life starts at conception, that we have the same ethical obligations to an embryonic stem cell that we do to a 20-year-old college student, and move right along.

In his controversial book Godless Morality: Keeping Religion Out Of Ethics, Richard Holloway, who was still serving as bishop of Edinburgh at the time of its publication, writes:

“I regret it when either side in the abortion debate assumes the moral high-ground, so that prohibitionists give the impression that those who believe in choice have no moral basis for their point of view and are little more than murderers; while pro-choicers sometimes give the impression that abortion is as morally unproblematic as a tonsillectomy. That is why some of us feel acutely uncomfortable in positioning ourselves at either end of the continuum and prefer, however agonisingly, to pick our way with considerable care through the middle of the battlefield.”

It’s hard to imagine a more articulate contrasting of Perfectionism and Messiness.

Like the abortion debate, it’s also no coincidence that the gender issue has become another key battleground of the culture wars. When right-wing Americans get distraught about transgender citizens using bathrooms that align with their gender identity, that anxiety isn’t just about safeguarding the nation's youth against pedophilic opportunists. The opponent of transgender rights, the person who would rather we just file gender dysphoria in the drawer marked mental illness and move on, the person who may even flat-out deny the possibility of sexual ambiguity or hermaphroditism, is simply building a big, not-so-beautiful border wall between themselves and Messiness. Don’t even try to break down the tidy categories of male and female, they seem to be saying, don’t you dare. Boys have penises, girls have vaginas. It’s simple!

The conservative right wing hardly holds a monopoly on Perfectionism. The same propensity manifests on the far Left in abundance. Asserting that all people who oppose gay marriage are bigots – Perfectionism. That all people who have concerns about immigration are backwoods racists – Perfectionism. That all Americans who deem Islam’s radical fringe a threat to national security are paranoid Islamophobes – Perfectionism. All I hear in these epithets is a conviction that, in making such judgments, it’s simple! Human beings are not complicated, the illiberal Left has them all figured out. (Granted, some of the above folks might actually be honest-to-god bigots, racists and Islamophobes. But to tell one from the other, you'd actually need to interact with them and give their views an honest hearing, you'd need to lay down your bag of slurs and quit broadcasting long enough to listen.)

At this stage in my own political affiliations I’m trying to carve out room in the rapidly shrinking centre, but it’s hard. The dialogue polarises to the fringes as people strive to impose a Perfectionistic narrative. Good and evil. White and black. Republican and Democrat. Christian and Islamic. My own father, who delighted for eight years in referring to Barack Obama by the nickname “BO” (geddit? the acronym for body odour) claims to this day that nothing good came out of the Obama presidency, that it was an unqualified mess from start to finish. Partisan Perfectionism, that’s my heritage. To acknowledge the presidency of a rival political party to have produced some positive results, and some negative, that would be a cognitive dissonance too Messy to bear.

Rehearsals For Departure

© Richard Hogg

My long, slow disillusionment with Christianity occurred in direct proportion to my willingness to declare a ceasefire with Messiness. Going all the way back to my high-school love affair with the roots-rock band Vigilantes of Love, who sang about God but also about sex and depression and Eleanor Roosevelt (really). The band’s songwriter Bill Mallonee dropped the occasional bit of profanity, which felt to my Perfectionist sensibilities like eating a healthy salad and occasionally cracking my teeth on a Gobstopper. I would be forced to reconcile that even sentiments laced with profanity could speak a truth worth hearing. A band that was, as the saying went, “too Christian for the secular market, and too secular for the Christian market”, this was Messiness in the artistic domain. The Perfectionism of the Christian music industry demanded that Christian artists sing about Jesus in as literal a manner as possible, and leave the ambiguity and metaphor to their secular counterparts. Anybody raised in the evangelical subculture has seen the chart on the wall at the Christian bookstore: If you like Perfectionism, then you'll love [Christian Artist X].

As I grew older, the dominos of Perfectionism tumbled in slow motion, over the course of years:

• The Bible’s Perfection eroded by my reading of scholars who worked unbridled from the yoke of apologetics.

• The Perfection of my own snazzily costumed Christian family, as it fissured and cracked in ways both overt and subterranean.

• The assumption of one Perfect sexual expression undermined by friendships with flesh-and-blood gay friends and colleagues.

• The Perfection of creation quaking as I took the time to understand how fully the theory of evolution departed from my unchecked checkmates (“then why are there still monkeys?”), as I engaged honestly with the supporting evidence.

• The Perfection of God and the morality to which his nature supposedly gave shape, destroyed by a frank appraisal of his Old Testament rap sheet, refusing any interpretive contortions to make apology for his poor behaviour. The growing feeling that to do so would be tantamount to a battered wife saying, He loves me, he just has a strange way of showing it.

Every time I looked within myself, I observed Messiness, a fact I’d once lamented but had started to regard with more compassion. And, increasingly, pride. Here’s the rub: imperfection is so much more compelling. Imperfection is texture. Imperfection is the Rice Krispies snapping and popping of a record needle on a beat-up LP. Imperfection is the crack in the singer’s voice at the edge of her range. Imperfection is the recipe for surprise. Imperfection is you, and me, all of us beneath our party masks.

A Stepford Wife fem-bot is perfect; yet I still prefer the grit and opinionated spikiness of my wife Summer. Plastic is perfect; I prefer fabric, wood (splinters included) and leather. The auto-tuned pop diva’s voice is perfect; I prefer the idiosyncratic voices of Bob Dylan and Tom Waits and Tom Petty and Scott Hutchison and Bill Mallonee and Dave Bazan. Classical music is perfect; I prefer traditional Irish folk music with its improvisation, unpredictability and unpretentious humanity. A mainstream summer blockbuster may have a two-dimensional villain trying to blow up the world; I prefer films (and television and books and video games) in which both the good guys and bad guys have a yin-yang mixture of dark and light.

Certainty is perfect; I now prefer doubt, the modesty it engenders, the journey of learning that terminates not at any destination or epiphany but only at the hard stop of death itself, cutting us off mid-senten_. In the face of such consorting with Messiness, many fundamentalist Christians double-down on their faith. Richard Holloway, a personal hero of mine who I've quoted earlier, describes this impulse in his memoir Leaving Alexandria:

"How does such hard and punishing certainty emerge from the existential gamble of faith? Paradoxically, it is lack of faith and fear of doubt that prompt it. What do you do if you can no longer live with the doubt that is co-active with faith? You try to cure yourself. And the best cure for doubt is over-conviction. A well-known mark of the uneasy doubter is over-confidence. It is like the refusal to let pity weaken you in the face of your enemy. Doubt, like pity, erodes certainty.

"If you are desperate for certainty because you believe only it can hold chaos at bay, including your own inner chaos, then you have to repress your doubt and pump up your convictions. Tone is the giveaway here. If you want to sell something, whether a commercial product or an ideology, hyper-conviction is an essential element in the transaction. Pooling your doubts, sharing your uncertainties, may be humanly more interesting, and may even lead to genuine discoveries that prompt a rueful, modest sort of faith, but it will never persuade multitudes. Or yourself, for that matter, which may be the real name of the game."

When the realisation dawned sufficiently in my mind that God, more than likely, did not exist, I fumed at my indoctrination. I veered into an atheist facsimile of the over-conviction Holloway describes. I splashed offensive memes across my Facebook page, one of which boiled down Christianity to the belief that “some cosmic Jewish Zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.” And there was the meme I posted of Jesus in his crucified posture photoshopped onto a water slide, arms outstretched as he hits the splash pool. (My older brother sent me an angry message telling me I was acting like our father's blowhard hero Rush Limbaugh, and he wasn't wrong.) I was busy working through my anger, my regret over pointless self-chastisement, my embarrassment over what I’d put stock in for so long, for too long. Just like that crucified Jesus, I had my own puncture wounds, many of them inflicted by the very faith I'd embraced with open arms.

I Of The Storm

© Richard Hogg

At a certain point you have to move from the question of “does God exist?” to the more nuanced question of “what are the consequences of believing a God exists?” What are the consequences of Perfectionism?

I’m starting to mellow. I still think the idea of God is a bit nutty – an assessment my Christian friends would likely endorse, even as they press forward into that presence they feel but are happy to consign to mystery. Embracing Messiness to any degree hardly obligates a person to renounce her faith. The move away from Perfectionism can be roughly measured by how many tenets of Perfection mentioned earlier, how many absolute certainties, one has foreclosed on. Is the Bible the perfect inspired word of God or a messy, fascinating porridge of poetry and metaphor? Were its pages written by a perfect God? Or messy humans?

The Bible has transformed in my conception to a work of classical literature, as worthy of study as Homer’s poetry or similarly important works of antiquity. Ethically instructive with sufficient cherry-picking, but hardly a Perfect guide to living. The ritual of prayer has been replaced with mindfulness practice. Being present, being non-judgmental of the Messiness of my own thoughts, attempting not to get swept away in that whitewater. I need infinitely more practice.

I still battle my addiction to Perfection and the easy certainty I once possessed. But I can't afford to keep up the habit any longer. The clinical depression I’ve struggled with throughout my life, for decades unnamed, drew nourishment from my Perfectionism, which in turn drew nourishment from my religious conception of the world. I still feel the overwhelming urge to check out, either mentally or physically, when the Messiness surrounding me gets too intense. Having two young children means I can’t escape it. But it’s a process. I’m getting there slowly. Bear with me. These are the musings of an Irishman with an American accent, remember.

It’s complicated.