Playing God
Mid-semester check-in: creative processes, collecting, ways of knowing, and (most importantly) ways of playing.
I think I have my most evocative thoughts when I’m hitting a curve in a roundabout on campus. Maybe it’s because of the alertness you need to maintain in order to not run into someone on an electric scooter, or maybe it’s because it’s the start of my drive back to my apartment, but it tends to rouse my thoughts out of the playpen I have to corral them into for the purpose of getting schoolwork done.
This week, I was thinking about what people who aren’t creatives do as a way of processing the world around them. I do a good job of surrounding myself with artists who dabble in many mediums, on many levels. Some may not consider themselves to be creatives; I’m not necessarily pondering those people— most artists, I think, have a healthy dose of humility-bordering-on-imposter-syndrome that means they aren’t necessarily even cognizant of when what they’re doing is an act of making. (At the very least, this is true for those artists who I can stand to be around.) Nor was I necessarily considering the intent of the art, outside of as some sort of response/a need to make; the things I tend to love the most, for example, like the drawings my father makes on greeting cards, aren’t done for an audience beyond the recipient, but have a value outside of that party of one as an extension of himself. I play fast and loose with definitions of who makes art and what makes it worthwhile: I’m a creative writing major at heart who’s pretending to be an anthropologist a la three kids in a trenchcoat.
I wonder, though, about those beyond the boundaries even I instill. Part of this may come from my own changing relationship to art as someone who is, once again, a full-time student. When I was in undergrad, I didn’t have to think about my own creative process. I had a weekly outpouring of work, read consistently by classmates and professors— to make was to breathe (and the academic validation provided helped give me that kick in the ass I occasionally needed, too). Ask anyone who’s studied a creative or performing art in college— there’s an urgency that emerges alongside the senioritis, a knowledge that you’re running out of this seemingly unlimited access to the materials, spaces, and people you need to create freely. In the real world, it is easy to stagnate. In graduate school (for a social science), I’ve felt more shut out from my usual options than before.
I run a strange gamut between imposter syndrome and productivity, no doubt challenged by my tendency to play-it-by-ear regarding what of my own work I consider to be an act of creating. It’s important to me to continue establishing things like weekly deadlines in order to keep creating, but I fear everything I make turning into some op-ed column I’d expect to see in my hometown’s paper (my favorite column was written by a “J.T.,” which stood for Just Talkin’, and included seemingly positive announcements framed as secondhand news. It’s awful and Southern and art, but only in the sense that it would be really great if John Waters did something self-aware with it). This is further complicated by a strange shift in my activities towards collecting. In line with both my schedule/ability to travel into the city, along with my fondness for music and organized chaos, I’ve finally been able to fulfill my hobby-dream of becoming a DJ (expect more substacks about that later). While I’m working with art routinely, and even processing the playlists I make in a way that mirrors the creative process (What is the theme? Is it sonic or lyrical? What do I want to say to the world? What do I take away from this artist playing this song— is it different or the same root as the original?), I feel like it would be a lie to suggest what I am doing is creating. DJs, to me, are like archivists, or those people who have hundreds of beanie babies they share on Facebook pages: practiced at knowing the world through collection.
To me, collection and creation are deeply similar— I think that the dichotomy is similar to that of a god and a mystic. The god is focused on the act of making; to take nothing, make something, share it, and begin again. The mystic is focused on the act of interpretation; it is through their divinations and access to understanding common threads that they (and others!) are able to connect to their god. Of note, though, is the commonality they share in what each practice seeks to do. Both creating and collecting serve as a way to memorialize. Both say, “This is how I know things to be! Let me show you.”
I will tie things up with a note— I’ve been reading about divine play within non-dualism, and I was (and continue to be, in a way I didn’t necessarily anticipate) struck by the idea that God would personally need to play, and that that play is what results in the universe. Aside from making me feel a little bad I deleted the Sims 4 when they stopped doing what I wanted them to, it’s reemphasized the importance of giving myself the chance to play, without the thought playpen I normally reserve for school. (And that’s why I’m forgiving myself for posting my first substack of March three weeks in.)
