About the hardest thing for me lately is to differentiate between a good idea and a bad idea. When it comes to design, at least. I still recognize that heat is a good idea if one wishes to stay warm but that doesn't mean one should go shoving one's arse in the furnace. Bad idea.
It's one of the reasons why my writing died though I imagine it's also one of the reasons why I feel I can still have a go at this whole visual arts thing; if I can't tell whether or not what I produce is worth producing, I feel like I ought to be less inclined to produce anything at all, seeing as I feel like I've reached the point when I really ought to have figured that sort of thing out. But at least with design-related stuff I can fall back on the whole "newbie" thing, and take comfort in the face that some of my seemingly best ideas have been the ones I've initially ignored as they found root in tossed-off things I felt could have had no intrinsic value. Being tossed-off, as they were.
It's been weird--and it's been weird realizing how weird it is to have to realize this sort of thing--realizing how much beauty there is in irregularity and impurity. The ragged edge is sometimes better than the perfect circle under the influence of the right context.
From another angle: learning to let go has been great for my design efforts though it's been absolutely shit for my writing. A good plan, I've learned, can only take you to the end of the planning itself: what lies on the other side is up in the air. With design I feel like I might be able to wring gold out of an ignorance of direction; with writing, ignoring the initial quality of the work only got me more work of the same quality. I gave myself permission to draft, but never much more than that.
At least with this other set of pursuits a big blank stretch of white seems to hold more possibilities, less of more of the same.
In other words: there's nihilism, and there's figuring your shit out. And a lot of blurry, beautiful lines in the middle.
No comments:
Post a Comment