Tobias Tinker mad rant
"This is madness.
Right out of the starting gate, for one thing, to even attempt to create something artistically worthwhile, to even entertain the notion, for a moment, at this stage in the game when everything has been said and done so many times over by people more talented and brilliant than you can hope to be.
But more than that, to try to create something and give a shit about it. To put your heart and soul, and sweat and toil, and faith and talent, and everything else you can muster from God knows where into a project which is, in fact, doomed to fail, to shrink into insignificance in comparison to almost everything that inspired you to try to become a creator in the first place.
And even more than that, to give this futile process such importance in your life that it’s inevitable failure will come as a crushing blow, reducing you to a quivering mess, shivering naked in a parched emotional pit, from which the only thing that can offer the slightest glimmer of hope for salvation or healing is to do it all over again, and again.
If we observe this behaviour in some endangered animal species we might conclude that it was evolutionarily impossible, a charming, cosmic mistake, like the dodo, beyond salvation. In any case, definitely on the one-way highway to extinction, and perhaps we are.
But when you’re wired this way, no matter how you might look at it intellectually, no matter how you rationalize and break it down, you are left with no choice in the matter. Or rather, as mad and impossible and futile and disorienting and alienating as the process can be, the alternative to not create seems infinitely worse.
Not having ever been a junkie, I should be careful how I tread here but I can imagine there are parallels. Though the emotional and spiritual investment in the creative process raises the stakes a little. The psychic and existential danger as weighed against the more material degradation of physical addiction.
On the other hand, I have to admit, it ups the ante in another way, too. Occasionally, somehow, against astronomical odds, despite your usual fervent and misguided efforts to get in the way, the work is strong enough and urgent enough and it comes through clear, uncluttered. Cask strength, pure and intense.
And you look at it. And even after all the usual neurotic spirals of self-criticism and self-doubt, all the pointless deconstruction of analysis we cannot help but apply, though you know in your heart it’s wrong, somehow, the work is still there and you are drawn in an immersed in its beauty and strangeness.
And then, suddenly, the epiphany strikes. And you finally realize, in all honesty to your inmost self, “Hey, you know, that’s actually not half bad.” "
Tobias Tinker
Download Audio version (m4a)
Right out of the starting gate, for one thing, to even attempt to create something artistically worthwhile, to even entertain the notion, for a moment, at this stage in the game when everything has been said and done so many times over by people more talented and brilliant than you can hope to be.
But more than that, to try to create something and give a shit about it. To put your heart and soul, and sweat and toil, and faith and talent, and everything else you can muster from God knows where into a project which is, in fact, doomed to fail, to shrink into insignificance in comparison to almost everything that inspired you to try to become a creator in the first place.
And even more than that, to give this futile process such importance in your life that it’s inevitable failure will come as a crushing blow, reducing you to a quivering mess, shivering naked in a parched emotional pit, from which the only thing that can offer the slightest glimmer of hope for salvation or healing is to do it all over again, and again.
If we observe this behaviour in some endangered animal species we might conclude that it was evolutionarily impossible, a charming, cosmic mistake, like the dodo, beyond salvation. In any case, definitely on the one-way highway to extinction, and perhaps we are.
But when you’re wired this way, no matter how you might look at it intellectually, no matter how you rationalize and break it down, you are left with no choice in the matter. Or rather, as mad and impossible and futile and disorienting and alienating as the process can be, the alternative to not create seems infinitely worse.
Not having ever been a junkie, I should be careful how I tread here but I can imagine there are parallels. Though the emotional and spiritual investment in the creative process raises the stakes a little. The psychic and existential danger as weighed against the more material degradation of physical addiction.
On the other hand, I have to admit, it ups the ante in another way, too. Occasionally, somehow, against astronomical odds, despite your usual fervent and misguided efforts to get in the way, the work is strong enough and urgent enough and it comes through clear, uncluttered. Cask strength, pure and intense.
And you look at it. And even after all the usual neurotic spirals of self-criticism and self-doubt, all the pointless deconstruction of analysis we cannot help but apply, though you know in your heart it’s wrong, somehow, the work is still there and you are drawn in an immersed in its beauty and strangeness.
And then, suddenly, the epiphany strikes. And you finally realize, in all honesty to your inmost self, “Hey, you know, that’s actually not half bad.” "
Tobias Tinker
Download Audio version (m4a)