But if I can grant myself confidence, it seems to me I should earn it from myself. Faulkner said, "[a]lways dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself." I am always growing. This involves self-reflection as well as observation of the world. I don't take it for granted that I am right or know what I know. I am always analyzing the situation. But when I observe, I often see very clear solutions and preventions. I see the possibilities because I open my eyes and ears. I open my mind. This is the difference between working and creating. This distinction may explain my difficulties relating to those who are more impulsive.
We boast of American ingenuity, but the truth is, not all of us like to invent things. We like to pound the hammer. The drummer in the bar band across the street interfering so obliviously with the rhythm of my writing is like this. He's just thumping that bass drum like it is a coconut he's hungry to get open. It makes me picture this guy in other rhythmic applications of his daily life: at work at the factory, at home in bed with his wife. He's not creating, because he's not listening. He's swinging the hammer like a novice blacksmith, forced to resort to an artistic vocation by the death of craft trades. He cannot make a beautiful pot or a pan, so he makes ugly music instead. I suppose he has the spirit of the American pioneer.
I work with some arts organizations with this pioneering spirit. They decide to start up an art center, they blunder ahead, they make assumptions, they break the law, they beat common sense into submission to enthusiasm, and they "make things happen." This pioneering attitude is completely different from the way art is made, or used to be made. Van Gogh said that we make our lives the way we paint a painting. If that is true, then the way to make a life or a career, and the way to do business or politics, is to pay attention to what all the elements of the project are asking for. What does the paint want to do? What does the foreground want to do? What does the green triangle want to do? What works? What will not work? When one project is finished, we start another and proceed in the same way, building a series, and then a body of work.
"We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it."—William Faulkner
But my world doesn't like to live this way, and that's one of the reasons I struggle. I do not live in a world that appreciates living life in a creative way. I do not live in a world that appreciates observing the situation. I live in a world that grants short term rewards to people who blunder ahead without much reflection.
This bumptious spirit is built on a kind of blind optimism and ignorant confidence that whatever we want to do, we can do it because we have freedom and God said it's our right. Of course, we put those words in God's mouth as surely as we forge his name to the words we write on the billboards we construct. Nonetheless, we feel very much rightfully in control as we blunder over swamps and mountains, cursing the Indians, making our way westward, staking our claims. There is no apprenticeship in America. One does not go on a quest or a pilgrimage or retire to nature to contemplate life before opening shop. You just hang the shingle over your door, tell the world you are open for business, thank God for your willfulness, and learn as you go. You just, as the athletic shoes tell us, do it. We worship this spirit.
Shakespeare wrote, "If my slight muse do please these curious days, the pain be mine, but thine shall be the praise." In the playwright's view, the artist puts in the work, but the job is done by the muse, not the artist. The artist listens. Listens.
We might try to equate the muse to the hand of Providence, but it doesn't equate in the American narrative. If we listened to God, we'd hear Him telling us that there are consequences to our arrogance and that's why He is changing the weather. But that's not part of the equation. We just blunder ahead. We just do it. How many times have I heard a manager say it? "I don't want to hear about problems. I just want to hear you tell me you will get this done!"
