One of my newer duties at my university is to attend the Registrar’s Roundtable once a month, a gathering of associate deans, enrollment and financial aid specialists, advising coordinators, and the like in an effort to coordinate our collective efforts across campus. Our meeting on Friday was focused entirely on the fact that, as a result of the pandemic and its pervasive effects on campus life, everyone here – administrators, faculty, staff, and students – is stressed out and exhausted in ways we have never experienced before. Given the ludicrous teaching and learning conditions we are faced with, we have been telling faculty to dial it back, to address only the most critical 60% of their course content. We have repeatedly given them explicit permission and encouragement to do so. But what we are finding is that there is some kind of disconnect, that despite our permission and encouragement to do less, most faculty are nonetheless doubling and tripling their efforts to be effective teachers and mentors instead, working only harder in a hyper-engaged effort to make up for the impoverished nature of current undergraduate education.
On the flip side, in conversations with some fellow musicians and artists, I know that some of us are finding it very, very difficult to be productive right now. In addition to all the disruptions to our normal lives and creative routines – having kids at home all day, having no separation between work life and home life, having to take special, stressful precautions just to get groceries, etc. – I think we are struggling with how to respond to the ever-increasing difficulty in our subject matter, unprecedented in our lifetimes, which is the nature of being alive and aware in a pandemic. Everything is fraught, heightened to a nearly excruciating degree, and the artistic stakes are raised accordingly. Our ideas, emotions, and the meanings we are trying to render and share are elevated to critical levels. And that’s why WE are stressed out and exhausted. I sit daily with the realization that my words and music can never do justice to these heightened ideas and feelings and meanings. Everything I try feels weak or stupid or impossible in comparison. So I end up doing nothing. Rather than struggling with being hyper-engaged like my faculty colleagues, as an artist I seem unable to engage at all. There is actually a learning disability in this vein called “motivation to avoid failure.” If a student’s every attempt is doomed to fail, they end up doing nothing. Feels about right.
Perhaps it’s all about entropy again (see my post here from 4 October 2020). A corollary to “It’s all about entropy” is “Everything is a control issue.” Once we have a glimpse of how everything is always already falling apart, we can be forgiven for fighting like hell to keep that from happening for as long as possible. Knowing that we are on the cusp of higher education truly coming apart at the seams, I understand why my colleagues who love their subject matters, love learning, and love students are killing themselves to keep the best possible semblance of our mission intact and functioning.
My lack of artistic output seems to be a function of my lingering perfectionism. I am a recovering perfectionist, I am relieved to say, but I am a perfectionist nonetheless. It is an unfortunate personality trait I share with most of our honors students. Indeed, I long ago learned to counsel them that “The pursuit of excellence is noble, but the pursuit of perfection is neurotic.” I think perfectionism is another way we respond to entropy. It’s certainly a symptom – as in a desperate cry for help – indicating we have serious control issues. But if we could make something perfect, make something perfectly, perhaps it would not decay or come apart. Our efforts in that direction would thus be efforts toward immortality and thus heroic battles against impossible odds.
But perfectionism IS neurotic, obsessive and stressful and unhealthy in an endless, inescapable loop. So I have been working on mine pretty hard with this blog, just throwing my work out there, putting up first and second-take recordings that are lo-fi and pitchy and glitchy, full of tongue clicks and breath sounds, putting up videos that show me with a shocking array of mortifying quarantine hairstyles, just painfully imperfect artifacts in an effort to come to grips with my neurosis. Calling them “demos” has certainly helped me be willing to share them.
Perfectionism in my artistic pursuits is just silly, of course. If I am going to wait for or pursue perfection, nothing will ever come. Perfection is an inhuman standard, and attempting work that elevated can only make me freeze up given my rather pervasive imperfections. Motivation to avoid failure again. But even the pursuit of excellence in my songwriting is doomed to fail. It’s a simple math problem: in any given set of work, most of it must be average, a smaller segment might be above average, and only a very small portion of it can be exceptional. That’s the definition of exceptional, after all – it is the exception to the rule – which means a great deal of other work must be produced to create the occasional piece of exceptional work.
I need to get comfortable with Theodore Sturgeon’s famous assertion that “90% of everything is crap.” Bob Hicok, a very productive and well-known poet at my university, talks about “shooting free throws,” about how 85 out of 100 things he writes are never even finished, are the equivalent of calisthenics before the big game, but completely necessary for success of the other 15.
And I need to admit that I am not a good judge of my own work, anyway. I am repeatedly surprised by how my listeners respond enthusiastically, just really, really well to songs of mine I think are OK but decidedly less interesting and less successful than others in my catalog. And I am equally surprised by how frequently they pass on songs of mine I think are brilliant.
When I was working on my dissertation, the most ambitious, most important, most stressful writing project I have ever undertaken, I regularly came close to freezing up, to falling into writer’s block. So I taped an index card just below my computer monitor that read “Drop your standards and crank out text.” That dissertation, the second half of which I wrote in two months, was published verbatim, without any revision whatsoever, by the National Council of Teachers of English.
There is method to this madness, and I need to cut myself some slack.