The drive to be remembered

Just a few days ago, I was reading a very entertaining blog entry from none other than Stephen Fry. It’s a known fact that he’s not only a talented actor but also a great writer—one who has authored some amazing volumes throughout his life. It seems that this year, he finished another book, a retelling of mythological tales from the ancient world, and these blog entries serve as a sort of promotion for the endeavor.

I have to say, his blog entries are delightfully entertaining—not only because they’re masterfully written (which might be obvious), but because he also adds voiceovers to them, making them stand well above the rest.

At any rate, I’ve been ruminating on an idea he shared in passing: the distinction between artists and artisans. He carves out an important difference between the two. An artisan or craftsman can make the same chair or pair of shoes over and over—they’re specially skilled at being efficient through repetition. An artist, on the other hand, has no idea what he’s doing. He stands in front of a canvas, attempting to find a way to express his soul outward, and sometimes fails miserably.

Like him, I find it a bit cringe to call myself an artist—at least here, on my own blog. But just like Stephen describes, I can’t for the life of me make the same thing over and over. In fact, I can’t think of a worse way to spend my days in the shop. Imagine building the same instrument until the unavoidable arthritis claims my hands. That seems like purgatory, buried in wood shavings.

My indescribable drive to express might also be the very reason I began writing poetry as a young kid—a desire to explore, to understand myself. The idea of having an audience, or not, never crossed my mind for more than a second, and it certainly never stopped me from writing. By the time I graduated high school, I had gifted hundreds of poems to people—none of which I remember in the slightest. Not a single line remains in my mind.

What does it mean, then, to be a creative? To be an artist? If you were to ask filmmaker Werner Herzog (an anti-heroic hero of mine), he would probably answer, “To survive pain and channel it,” and there might be some truth to that. But the answer still feels insufficient to me.

There's an idea I’ve shared before—one that I think all creatives have danced with at some point in time: the notion of finiteness. The realization that we are but a blink in the story of humanity. The acceptance that our death is the only guarantee we have—and that our second death, when nobody remembers us, is just as unavoidable for the average man.

Maybe, just maybe, that’s all the drive we need after all: to make a mark, to leave a footprint in the sand.

So maybe, a great artist is just someone who took a lot of steps in life, and also got really lucky.

MenO