An Extremely Unreliable Critic

Why trying to give the world something good can be the enemy.

Actor/author/director Ethan Hawke said something beautiful in 2020 about giving yourself permission to be creative.

He tells a story about the poet Allen Ginsberg.

One night Ginsberg got invited to appear on William F. Buckley’s public affairs television show “Firing Line.” From what I can find about Buckley online, he was a brilliant guy — he spoke three different languages — and his Firing Line show ran for 33 years, a record for a public affairs show with a single host. Maybe the most telling sign of Buckley’s intelligence was that he knew how to evolve — he went from defending Southern racism when he was young to openly rooting for the election of Barack Obama.

So my point here is that Buckley was smart, this was an intellectual’s sort of television program, and then Allen Ginsberg went on there and….

He pulled out a harmonium and he sang the fucking hare krishna.

It’s truly wild and bizarre, especially in the context.

You can see Buckley’s eyes explode in delight, a kid again for a minute, astonished by this clearly insane poet.

It’s fucking beautiful.

Back to Ethan Hawke…

He tells this story and then he tells the story of what happened with Ginsberg next:

“He got back to New York, to all his intelligentsia friends, and they all told him, ‘Don’t you know that everybody thinks you’re an idiot? The whole country’s making fun of you.”

And he said, ‘That’s my job. I’m a poet, and I’m gonna play the fool. Most people have to go to work all day long, and then they come home, and they fight with their spouse, and they eat, and they turn on the ol’ boob tube, and somebody tries to sell them something.

And I just screwed all that up.

I went on and I sang about Krishna.

And now they’re sitting in bed going, ‘Who’s this stupid poet?’

And they can’t fall asleep.’

“And that’s his job as a poet.”

And the point, Hawke says, is this:

“I find that very liberating, because I think that most of us really want to offer the world something of quality — something that the world will consider good or important. And that’s really the enemy. Because it’s not up to us whether what we do is any good.”

This is so good and true. And it echoes something else I read the other day, from author Mark Manson: “You know that saying, ‘It’s none of your business what people think about you’? That should be true with yourself too. It’s none of your business what you think about you. Just fucking do good things and stop worrying about yourself so much.”

And besides, nobody knows anything anyway.

One of my mentors, a guy who’s published a dozen or more books, ghostwritten dozens, and edited dozens more, is more or less set for life after one of his books got turned into a movie starring a famous actress.

The book that made this happen came out a decade ago and only sold a few thousand copies.

But it was a great and beautiful story well told, got the attention of the right people at the right time — producers loved it, screenwriters loved it, the actress loved it — and the book got re-released on an initial print run of some several dozen thousand copies. Everybody’s getting paid.

That’s because his book is good, and it accomplishes exactly what you’re doing here, too, and why you want to make the things you want to make. “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time,” writes author and monk Thomas Merton in The Seven-Story Mountain. “The mind that responds to the intellectual and spiritual values that lie hidden in a poem, a painting, or a piece of music, discovers a spiritual vitality that lifts it above itself, takes it out of itself, and makes it present to itself on a level of being that it did not know it could ever achieve.”

Art does this for us because of what art is. “Art,” once wrote French novelist Andre Gide, “is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.”

The less the artist does, the better.

That’s the real trick. Getting out of our own way, move past all of our own internal bullshit, and relentlessly prune everything tripping us up to do it. Usually what’s in our way is fear. That’s not a terrible thing on its face. “The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident,” Steven Pressfield writes in The War of Art. “The real one is scared to death.”

So if you’re scared at least that means you’re real and you care. The problems really start with all the ways we tend to try to get away from our fear. “Master is a function of mastery of self,” writer and ultrarunner Rich Roll told performance psychologist Michael Gervais on a recent podcast. “And if I was to think about greatness, I would contextualize it in the construct of what it means to grapple with who you are. And I think greatness, or mastery, is pursued in the process of self-knowledge and self-understanding in a fearless and courageous way … Are you courageous enough to really look within yourself and try to excavate and understand who you are? To address your blind spots? To untie those knots that hold you back? And mastery, in whatever form, artistic, athletic, professional, business, whatever it is, will be a byproduct of that journey that you go on, which is a lifetime journey. For your lifetime, it is a path that you will trod that’s not linear and fraught and confusing most of the time, that will have you going backwards a percentage of that time. That’s what we’re here to do, man. We’re here to grow.”

This isn’t all just theory and speculation and philosophizing about ephemeral concepts that may or may not be real. There’s real scientific evidence to support it all.

Neuroscientists have discovered a brain structure called the anterior mid cingulate cortex. And what they’ve found is that when people do things they don’t want to do, this area of the brain grows bigger, stronger, more capable. In obese people, this anterior cingulate cortex is smaller, but when obese people diet and exercise, not only do they lose weight and experience other health benefits, but this area of their brain also grows larger.

The same is true for anyone who anyone who does a hard thing that is good for them even though they also kind of particularly hate it — getting more exercise, eating healthier, not drinking or doing drugs, going celibate, writing overly emotional and too-long screeds in their newsletter and nearly deleting it all out of fear of people thinking they’re just too fucking crazy but then saying fuck it and hitting send anyway. Just, you know, for example.

And perhaps most remarkably, this area of the brain, once built up, keeps its size into old age, particularly among people who live an especially long time. “In many ways,” neuroscientist Andrew Huberman recently said on a podcast, “scientists are starting to think of the anterior cingulate cortex not just as one of the seats of willpower, but perhaps actually the seat of the will to live.”

Isn’t that the whole point of making things, in the first place? To be fully alive?

So fuck the critics, man. Do you really want to let them rob you of something you want to create just because they might talk some shit about it?

No — do you really want to rob yourself of that?

To quit something just because someone might say something mean about it is to kill part of yourself — is to hold yourself back from being fully alive.

Besides, as Ethan Hawke says in that talk that sparked this whole long fucking essay in the first place: “If history has taught us anything, the world is an extremely unreliable critic.”

And you’re no better a critic of your own work than anybody else.

One of the best/most heartbreaking literary tragedies is the story of Herman Melville and Moby Dick. When Melville first published it in 1851, then called The Whale, it sold just 300 copies in its first four months. Critics hated it. They called it “an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact” and said the story had “obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition” and described Melville’s writing as “mad English” and characterized the book overall as — I am not making this up — a “catastrophe.”

Melville changed the name to Moby Dick but it didn’t matter much — 1,500 copies sold its first week and a half in the United States, but only 300 copies over the next year after that. Over the course of Melville’s lifetime, Moby Dick sold just 3,200 copies and earned him a grand total of $1,260, worth around $45,000 today.

Now? The book’s sold tens of millions of copies and some first editions are going for some $65,000.

So take Captain Ahab’s 11th commandment to heart: “Think not.”

Think not and go make things.

Go be alive.

Because the truth is that I don’t think you’re ever actually scared of what critics might say — I think you’re either (a) scared that they’re right because you already think fucked-up shit about yourself, and/or (b) scared of what actually making things you want to make and doing things you want to do will require of you. It more often than not means becoming a new version of yourself, and that can be fucking terrifying.

Our brains are programmed to drive us not toward what’s necessarily good for us, but what’s familiar. That’s why we find ourselves in fucked-up relationship after fucked-up relationship or struggling to pivot in our careers or figuring out how to be the right kind of parents in a new and ever-changing world.

And especially when it comes to making things that we love to make but the world has never really seen before.

But the thing is, we have to just turn that brain off sometimes and let our heart and our guts take the wheel.

“Almost anything that truly calls your soul will take you off the certain and consistent path that a million others have carved out of the unknown,” writes author Brianna West. “It’s never going to be reasonable to travel, or pursue art, or love the person you love. There will always be a reason not to, another thing you could or should or might be doing with your time. Sometimes in an effort to make sense of our lives, we end up more lost than ever because love isn’t logical, joy isn’t logical, passion isn’t logical. You have to find the courage to paint outside the lines you once drew for yourself.”

This might sound ridiculous and trivial and silly, but I’m dealing with that directly through this new newsletter and the way I’m writing it. All my life I’ve written relatively conventional narrative nonfiction, a lot of it telling stories of people who’ve been through some brutal shit, but never fully embracing just how raw some of these people are, let alone just how raw hearing their stories makes me feel — let more alone just how raw I often feel as I go about my life, especially as a writer.

I feel like I’ve been writing how I’ve been taught to write instead of how I really think and feel. Sometimes this is probably for the best, at least to ensure publication in more mainstream outlets, and I get that, and I’m fine with that, because they have their audience and that audience has certain expectations and they do have a whole business to run.

But the whole point of my doing this is to embrace the rough draft nature of the thing as an ongoing experiment in writing stories that are more honest and open and raw — and simultaneously more hopeful and beautiful and pure. That’s what I love to read and want to write more of.

The darker and more honest someone is willing to get about their lives the more light the good parts make.

But you know what’s wild? I legitimately get scared every time I write something here that feels more raw and vulnerable and honest. I have some asshole in my brain who tells me that writing something like that will somehow ruin my life. It’s completely insane, when I really think about it. But it’s there.

All of us trying to do anything creative, trying to make things, deal with insanity in our domes. Because the real insanity of me even worrying about that is that I’m writing for a different audience here. The whole point of this place is to be different. To reach a newer audience, to connect with people in the trenches of life and the making of art and the glorious struggle that comes with that.

I’m treating this newsletter like the spiritual equivalent of lifting weights. This will make me a better and stronger writer in the long run but shit’s gonna suck for awhile until I actually build a little more spiritual muscle and figure out exactly what the hell I’m doing here.

One thing that helps a lot, though, is remembering why I do this. Because, see, Assholio in my brain has one hell of an imagination and he’s really good at peppering me rapid-fire with conversations others will theoretically have with me and the ways they can take things the wrong way or criticize me or pull my words apart and use them against me for whatever reason someone might want to do that.

I don’t think I’m brave enough to share a specific example yet. It gets pretty dark in here. But the thing is, none of that is actually about those hypothetical terrible situations, anyway.

It all has to do with fear — those stories are just fear lying to validate itself.

Because the thing is, we’re all dealing with it, however old or young we are, whatever level of the game we’re at — all of us trying to engage in any creative act are stepping foot in a kind of universal psycho-cosmic thunderdome. And anyone criticizing how any of us move through it has never been through it themselves.

The way through? We have to ignore the bullshit and tell ourselves better stories. We have to tell ourselves stories that are true. And the truth is that when we make the art we love the most, we’re just making things like the things others made before us that we love, and we’re telling stories like other stories that we love — stories that have been good to us, in all their profanity and honesty, and stories that have moved our souls and saved our lives.

Maybe we’ll make something in a way that’ll hit someone else the way others have made things that hit us, and that’ll help someone else dealing with the same shit we are.

I mean, maybe not.

But holy shit, what if we do?