When old age shall this generation waste,  
	Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe  
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,  
	"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"—that is all  
	Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Last stanza of "Ode on a Grecian Urn", by John Keats

It's commonly said that "great art is the one that makes you feel something", but recently I realized that great art also plants a desire to make similar art yourself. It might not be that all people are affected this way (maybe just those who tend to be more creative?), but it's definitely something I see as true in myself and others close to me.

Another related insight is that "great art" can really be anything. I actually have a great example of this in this very same series of posts I'm doing here. As I mentioned in my first entry, I'm directly following the example of Visa, who has done almost a thousand "wordvomit" posts so far, with most of them being only one day apart. I read his motivation for doing so, and then read a bit of his first vomits (still catching up), and the inspiration blossomed in me—"man, I really want to do something like that; it seems so cool".

If you think about it, what was the "art" there? Was it maybe his first introductory post, or the first few vomits? No, I don't think so. They were definitely informative and somewhat motivational, but the true inspiration came when I saw he'd written so many posts. I admired the sheer willpower it must have taken him, the almost incomprehensible determination. I realized these were qualities I wanted to see in myself1, and this seemed like an excellent way to develop them. So what was the art there? It wasn't really any tangible "artifact"; rather, for me, it was the process itself. The artifacts are just the receipts. Proof that he did the work.

Whenever I think of "art", I always think of paintings, or poetry, theatre. It's always an "artifact", always something measurable, quantifiable, that belongs to a well-defined category. Most of us have been taught through our culture to regard these "concrete things" as proper "Art". But what if we allow for anything to be "art"? Every time you feel inspired by something or someone, that's "art". You're realizing a beauty that resonates with you. One that you can feel, right there, barely out of reach, but if you stretch... ah...

The sunset is art, as is the sunrise, or a night sky full of stars. The way a skilled barista makes a coffee is art, as is the way a good tennis player moves on the court, as is how a bird flies2. All art.

...

I can think of many examples when I saw something that inspired me to do something similar myself. The first one that comes to mind (probably because I was talking about games in my last post) is "Dwarf Fortress". The fascination I felt with that game, the depth of the simulation, and (more than anything) the "emergent gameplay" gave rise to an itch to create something like it, which ultimately resulted in my deciding to go for a computer science degree in college. (I still haven't done anything similar to DF, though.)

Or I remember when, during my master's degree, I was feeling a bit overwhelmed with everything, and one of my favorite escapes became reading the SAGA comics. When I had some time to chill, I would sit down and read, and slowly I started feeling like I wanted to learn to draw so I could make similar comics myself, and share perhaps a little bit of what I was feeling with others.

Another example was when I first read The Silmarillion.3 The depth. Oh, the depth! I frequently felt like I wanted to drop everything and just dedicate myself to writing a sprawling epic that would take all my life to complete.

The nice thing is that there are inspirations like this almost every day. All around us we see beautiful things that help us be more in the present. And sometimes they even gift us with the wish to give others the same experience. This last part is core, I think: "gifting others the same experience" that I'm receiving. Not because I want fame or riches, but just because I think this is awesome and I want you to feel awesome as well.

Reflecting on it, I did act on all of these inspirations I listed here. I've started more games than I care to count. I've started online drawing classes a couple of times. And yes, I've started writing stories. Sometimes the inspirations actually "stick", but sometimes they don't. I think there's a balance that must be reached between "excitement", "effort", and "perception of progress". If any of these three subsides, then the whole effort comes tumbling down. For example, with all three of these I did eventually abandon them due to frustration with progress. Of course, it's also partially my fault for wanting to be autodidactic.

Actually, an interesting anecdote comes to mind. I mentioned Dwarf Fortress and wanting to make a similar game, but really I became curious about programming much, much earlier than that, and I even tried my hand at learning it multiple times, but I always became too confused by all the options and not really knowing what to do, and I eventually desisted. It wasn't really until starting CS in college that it clicked for me. Once I had the proper guidance, I started thinking "Oh this is really easy!" (To be fair, I've always had a knack for logic puzzles, and programming is no different.)

This really goes back to what I was saying before about being autodidactic. Maybe I've tried drawing/writing/game dev and gave up in frustration, but maybe that frustration is just because I had no "base" upon which to build? For example, now in "programming" I can learn new related things with ease because I already have a well-nurtured tree to which I can attach new knowledge.

But what if the tree is not there at all? What if the "inspiration" is just like a seed, a sprout? It's like for these things I'm trying to learn as I go, and just maybe that style of learning is not what works best for me.

Maybe I should consider actually taking some courses for these things? Part of me wants to, while another part is ashamed of my lack of skill (yeah, I know, quite a silly behavior on my part), and yet another is throwing up excuses, screaming that I don't have time.

They are excuses though. I've been thinking a lot lately about how we tend to "not do what we say we want to do", and this is a perfect example of it.

Footnotes

  1. One of the top things in my mind at that moment (still is) was how I often say I "want" to do something but never do anything to get there. We say we want to reach goals or change our "situation" (whatever that may be), but really it's only a few who do something and actually walk out of the status quo. I was tired of not changing—of my stagnation—so I picked up a project that I thought was a good way out of it. ↩

  2. There's a quote I really like by Jan Van der Steen, who describes the way in which Go Seigen played Go: "He played like the birds fly: swift and light. Suddenly the position could get frozen though, and then one would get a glimpse of the universe of variations hidden below the sky that Wu had spanned in the earlier stages". Go Seigen's playing is definitely "art". ↩

  3. It was an especially nice experience because I was reading it chapter by chapter with The Prancing Pony Podcast. They would do a breakdown, chapter by chapter, of what was going on and what it implied for the story as a whole. 10/10 recommend! ↩