Five years ago — half a goddamn decade — I found a beak on the porch outside a University building, and convinced a few friends to join in the madness. Anyone who cares knows the story by now, and anyone who doesn’t know the story can find it if they care.
We scribbled a series of Beak Scriptures (quite silly in retrospect), hastily set up a website, and started trying to change the world. The world didn’t change, so we bided our time by drinking a lot of beer, writing Scriptures a little less frequently, finishing college. We switched to writing political and pop-culture essays from a Beakly perspective, but inspiration was slow to arrive and we were lucky to produce two articles a month.
Parallel to this, I had kept up a regular e-mail correspondence with Horatio, and in the process he and I both ended up penning countless pages of absolute genius, and just as many pages of really funny drivel. Very little of it ever made it to the site, for reasons I don’t fully understand. I initially blamed a lack of motivation. Lately, though, it seems the issue was pure bad timing.
When you have a Big Idea (for example, a philosophy based around the discovery of a beak), that idea will manifest itself via the available resources. If you play the guitar, you take your Big Idea and turn it into music. If you like to paint, your Big Idea ends up on canvas. When we found the Beak, we simply didn’t have a lot of resources, so instead of taking advantage of our Big Idea, we postponed it and started gathering some.
In the five years since then, I’ve become a much better writer and artist. I’ve learned to use PhotoShop and Flash, to blog using WordPress, to put together a decent website (although this site needs a bit of work), to edit audio and video, and probably some other things I’m forgetting. Most of my friends have gone through a similar process. I can’t speak for them, but I know I didn’t learn these things because they’re marketable skills, or because I wanted to be a better, more well-rounded individual. I learned them because I figured that they’d eventually be useful for promoting this ridiculous Beak universe of ours.
Well, here I am five years later, facing off with a big old heap of irony. In the time it took for me to learn all those things, I sorta forgot what the original inspiration was. Here I am, able to make the most of my talents, and I’ve got no use for them. I’m reminded of the words of cartoonist James Kochalka: “Craft is the enemy.” From his letter of the same name:
“You could labor your whole life perfecting your “craft,” struggling to draw better, hoping one day to have the skills to produce a truly great comic… If this is how you are thinking you will never produce this great comic, this powerful work of art, that you dream of. There’s nothing wrong in trying to draw well, but that is not of primary importance.
“What every great creator should do, must do, is use the skills they have right now. A great masterpiece is within reach if only your will power is strong enough (just like Green Lantern.) Just look within yourself and say what you have to say.”
He’s addressing his fellow-travelers in the world of comics, but why shouldn’t this advice be just as valid for every other art form? People spend years preparing before taking on their Giant Personal Project. Most of them abandon those projects before they even begin because they can’t remember the last time it was fun for them. The few who soldier on find the experience slow and joyless.
There are few things that annoy me more than bloggers who make hollow promises to update more frequently. “I know I haven’t posted anything lately, but from now on things are gonna be different!” Those promises, though, are usually made by people who aren’t very interested in their own projects. They invest themselves in something that seemed like a good idea at the time, but lose interest after making use of their original idea; after that, they’re working out of their element.
For the last few years, I’ve been working like that, dedicated to a project I love but directing my energy in questionable directions. I’ve been looking, feebly, for some new complaint to make about George Bush, when I’d much rather be overthinking pop culture. So I had to ask myself:
Why sit around waiting for the day when I’m ready to write a revolutionary philosophical treatise, when I’m ready to write a critical analysis of Final Fantasy VI right now?
Cheers to my fellow Beakniks, for five years of this madness. May the next five be busy.
Campaign 2008. A canned response for every occasion. Pundits manufacturing ridiculous scandals from thin air. Enough candidates to form a P-Funk cover band. And more than a year before it’s all over.
