The Triforce of Art: Authentenshitty
The Robot Gospel, Part 100001
This is going to seem like I’m building up to talking about a song from my band’s demo tape like I’ve been doing in these alternating posts, but believe me, this is about authenticity and art...
Everyone has their High School Poetry period, right? You’re drowning in hormones, your body is changing, you’re feeling feelings with the knob turned all the way up to 12.
I was fifteen when I started dabbling. A year before I got my first guitar and started to raid my own back catalogue for material I could turn into songs. Because song lyrics seemed a little more like you have your shit together than just poems.
Why? Oh, people are potentially going to hear song lyrics, so there has to be some level of quality you wrestle with before deciding to commit to those in public. Whereas the personal and introverted nature of poetry means the critical self can take five and try to sneak a nap while you’re working on that stuff.
The thing is, though, at least for me, I kinda of wanted people to read my poetry.
Having a terminal case of introversion, I wasn’t ever going to express to other people my inner most thoughts and feelings. But like so much pressure building up in a can of soda you forgot in the freezer, I had to at least get it out on paper where it was safe — safer than actually, you know, talking or connecting with people. So I wrote stuff down.
I was also a Drama Dork.
Doesn’t make sense that someone as socially terrified as I was would be okay in front of an audience, does it? But here’s the difference: I wasn’t me when I was doing that. I was playing a part. I was someone that knew everything that they were going to say. All the ways they would react to every situation presented to them. Placed into an established timeline where the beginning, end, and every point in between was a known quantity. There were no surprises. I could finally be in control in a way that does not exist in the real world.
That was a big part of the appeal. Also, any time where I didn’t have to be me was a welcome respite from shouldering the Atlas weight of my own depressed existence.
So, I’m writing these poems, and they’re flayed skin personal. I want some sort of attention or recognition — just anyone to see me — and I’m too scared to expose myself to any kind of vulnerability, and I bring a notebook I’m writing in to a drama hangout.
According to some saved correspondence, this should have been the cast party for our performances of The Crucible. Round Table Pizza. Long tables, benches, the red plastic prismatic cups that were found exclusively at pizza parlors. I can’t remember if there were still smoking sections, or not, but we were in what used to be the smoking section1.
We would have been sitting in the smoking section because the cooler — and more attractive — members of our cohort were smokers, so we had to follow their whim in order to curry favor with the high status members of the only group that would have us. Although, that’s not entirely true. There were a couple people who were also in marching band.
Anyway, I have my notebook. I’m not waving it around in people’s faces. I’m not hiding it, either. And, it ends up getting passed around. I’m pretty sure I had some reservations about it. Like I said, the words were my raw nerves sewn into the pages. A map of my interior world tattooed from my own blood. Why would I hand over the nuclear football with the codes to my own self-destruction?
There was a part of me that wanted other people to read it though, right? Going through life feeling invisible. Those feelings of mine were how I saw myself, so perhaps they would allow others to finally see me. Maybe this little dropping of my guard would allow others inside the walls I had put up around myself?
But wouldn’t that be a betrayal of how I had been presenting myself? A Me not reflected in the hopeless void those words portrayed. After all, if I were really so lonely, why would I bother trying to hang out with people? How could I believe and trust that these people were my friends? Was I really that depressed? Was I really shy?
Well, here’s the thing — here’s what I’ve been slow building up to with all this talk of authenticity — there is no such thing as Authenticity. Whatever you think it means, whatever people tell you it is, it’s just smoke and mirrors. It’s marketing. It’s a buzz word. It’s a status game.
I mean, literally there is authenticity — in fact, there are all sorts of theories and other people have studied and analyzed what authenticity means in regards to art. You could study and talk about it your whole life and still have more to explore on the topic. So, seeing as how I’m a layman without an accredited education on the subject, and these are just my opinions I’m throwing out for free, let me just say: You’re getting what you pay for here, folks.
There’s something I heard that always stuck with me. It was in the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion. My brother and I were buying the VHS tapes from the SunCoast Video in the mall as they were coming out. We would scrounge up the thirty or so dollars in some miraculous way, since neither of us had jobs at the time, so we could watch the two English dubbed episodes contained within.
I’m not going to go off on a tangent about the series, but it starts off as a show about kids getting in big robots to fight monsters, and then takes a sharp turn into the philosophical and psychological.
What I remember being said in one of those episodes was:
There are two selves: The one that observes, and the one that is observed.
And that blew my fucking mind.
This was all around the same time — the dark teenage years. By this time I was either in my Senior year of high school, or was pretending to further my education at the local community college. But, I was still depressed. Still in a band and writing songs and lyrics and poetry.
Your Art is one thing to you, but once it’s exposed to other people, it changes. It oxidizes once exposed to air.
The instantaneous moment when inspiration and creativity and drive trans-substantiate into that “Ah Ha!” moment in your head, is the only purely truthful no-bullshit magick miracle step in the Artistic Process that is Authentic at the atomic level.
It can happen multiple times while creating, but the actual process of taking that sparkling mote from your heart and mind and bringing it to life where others can experience it, is to strip a layers away. You have to make a sacrifice. Kill your darling.
It could be to try to make your message clearer. Perhaps make it more accessible. Maybe make it better? If that’s the case, are these edits you’re making adulterating the concentration of authenticity?
You could just go with your instincts and first thoughts, and people are going to get it warts and all, because that’s what makes it Art to you. But even if it turns out exactly how you want it, it still needs to be filtered through the observational sieve that we all use to take in external stimuli.
How can authenticity exist when we all have our own minds and experiences that contort everything in the funky fun house mirrors in our heads? There will always be people that aren’t on the same wavelength. Always be people too hurt to open up and let something honest inside. Try as hard as you might, you will never be able to force people into taking in your art in “the correct way.”
Perhaps the only way art can be authentic is if it’s open to interpretation?2 If people do see different things in it. Some people will take in art superficially. Others methodically. Some will try to crack open the carapace with a mallet to get to the savory context and multiple meanings and homages tucked inside. Others will just treat it as something to exist in the background while life happens around them.
And in the same way that the audience sees the shadows of themselves cast on the art, that light shining on it comes from the multifaceted prism of the artist. Art should speak for itself, but there will always be the fingerprint of the artist somewhere hidden in there. But is what you think it is, really it, or is it pareidolia?
Authenticity — the only authenticity that matters — exists solely for the artist.
In one of the latest episodes of the podcast Blank Check with Griffin and David, they go over Amy Heckerling’s movie Look Who’s Talking. Now, this is not a movie that is going to find itself admitted into the National Film Registry any time before the heat death of the universe. You can hear the thoughts of a baby that can’t talk yet, and hilarity ensues...
What I never knew, were the personal trials that Heckerling went through that inspired the movie. The parts of herself that she bled into the soil from which this forth highest grossing film of 1989 bloomed. Listen to the episode — because I’m running out of room here to break it all down.
But the success or content or acceptance of this movie aren’t what makes that movie Authentic. Even though the notorious British band of anarchists, Chumbawumba, had a huge hit with their song “Tubthumping,” does that mean that they weren’t Authentic?
No. Authenticity is not just Presentation. It’s not image. It’s not branding. It’s not anything that us as an audience can determine. All we can do is feel it. Connect with it. Authenticity is for teenagers that think they know everything. Its for people who don’t want things to change. Who want things to be easy. People who don’t want to be challenged, just entertained.
For those that create Art, there is no Authenticity that is for public consumption. It gets burned-off like alcohol in a recipe. So if there is no such thing as Authenticity, that means we’re free to be whoever we want.
-bcp
For historical context for those that may be blessed by youth and have no concept of what The Smoking Section was: Smoking cigarettes used to be such a ubiquitous monkey on people’s backs, that it was utterly unfathomable to go the duration of a meal without lighting up a cancer stick. Yes, this was even after people knew that smoking was unhealthy. Yes, even after people knew that second hand smoke was unhealthy. These — and I use this word without judgement, because there is nothing wrong with being afflicted with this disease — addicts needed to smoke so bad that as a society we all made a concession to endanger all of our health by reserving an area inside restaurants where smokers could partake in their ritual without having to interrupt the flow of their meal. Were these sections sealed off and properly ventilated so as to prevent the ingress of smoke from permeating the entire establishment? No! Just like the borders between countries, or the sit-com trope where two roommates split their apartment into two sections where they were not supposed to cross into the other one’s territory, these were conceptual lines. These were the ideas of lines.
I think I’ve just figured out what my next Art Breakdown will be about...