A tutorial with a smart but thus far undisciplined masters student, where I was quite definite about the draft paper he'd sent me – I thought it was chaotic and touched on an unmanageable array of topics, and said so. Fortunately he didn't seem to mind, and went home to rewrite the whole thing (not a stressful prospect for him – he may be scattered but he is highly productive, more than I was at his age, or in fact ever).
Much like O., another smart masters student, he is (or has been) a composer, also – so that the entire network of questions around creativity, freedom, and what all this work is about becomes important, but also harder to answer. Is writing a critical paper like creating a work of art? – well, yes and no: although admittedly my own writings have been very speculative, in bizarre forms or containing peculiar material not common in scholarly rhetoric, I do hope that I have tried to focus on material that has some meaningful relation to the subjects at hand, that helps and interests a reader rather than merely indulging a writer. But it does make me wonder if I'm being too hard on my more creative, although admittedly sloppier, students....
At one time I was enchanted by the idea of making: making music, making compositions, making writing, poems, stories. Great operas, novels, art. Creating things that would somehow... well, I don't know just what they were all supposed to do; but they would do it with fantastic power.
Then I discovered I wasn't much of a composer: a handful of small works, a few worth hearing, and no prospect of developing the talent or ability to write anything much larger. I was better at poems and stories, but still not good enough to have a creative career; and I abandoned those fields, content to have done a few pleasant things in them, and comfortable that I would never be a great conqueror of materials and visions – that I would never really be a maker.
My recent interest in becoming an analyst is somehow linked to all of this: I don't want to worry about things that have been made, not any more – not by me, and not much by other people. I want to go back to the people themselves, and their existences, thoughts, dreams – these things seem more real, more important, more alive than the things that are made. Because made things, though they may have incredible life in the process of being made, quickly become merely records of experiences: we may have experiences when we re-play them, but in themselves they are memories, echoes, not realities.
Or at least that's how I feel at this point in my life. I hope that I'm not just being hard on that creative instinct – the one that also drove Michael, the one that drives many of my colleagues – in order to justify my own abandonment of the field....
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