#47: put your heroes on a pedestal
on the difference between inspiration and comparison, and using the fantasization of your heroes to your advantage
I set out to make this entire past weekend a prolonged artist date with myself. I woke up early on Saturday morning feeling even more existential than usual, perhaps because I’d just had the type of frustrating dream that happens only when you’ve slept too long. On my 10th hour of rest, my body swelled with anxiety and I got out of bed to tie up my curtains and position my pillows for a morning read. I finished my book, Candy House by Jennifer Egan— one that took me a while to get into and then I devoured the rest.— The type of book that makes me immediately want to watch interview after interview with the author. The plot and character development were so deeply interwoven that I felt simultaneously smart for being able to follow along and completely idiotic in comparing my normal waking thoughts to the type of mind that could construct a narrative of this complexity.
I stood before myself in the bedroom mirror above the vintage blue dresser that I found outside my apartment the other day that still smells slightly of rotten wood and its previous owner. I fashioned my hair into a slicked-back ponytail and laughed to myself as I saw the image in the mirror reflected back to me as a live “Instagram vs reality post.” The Instagram version being an attempt to Bella Hadid my face with this eye-lift-inducing pony and the reality being the 12-year-old colonial boy I resemble with an aggressive middle part. But the satisfaction of this internal banter superseded any actual insecurity about my taut pony appearance so I set out to go on a meandering run for the majority of the afternoon. I had no idea where it would lead me but I craved the sound of a melancholy playlist and the ache of my bones getting back into running again.
This isn’t the type of writing that I usually do. Or at least it doesn’t sound like it to me. When I write, I usually feel like I’m just having a conversation with a friend or giving myself advice based on what I’ve just learned. But the longwinded description I’ve just given you of my Saturday morning above (which I re-read to myself saying who the fuck cares about you putting your hair in a ponytail??), I include for a reason.
And that reason is because writing this newsletter has been a pet project to test out this theory that I have about loving to write. It’s been really clear to me in the past year of email blasting you with my “journal entries” (as my younger brother describes Char’s Web) that I do really love to write. I look forward to getting something out once a week and the high I get from pressing send tends to be stronger than most other things I am working on throughout the week.
But the more I admit how much I love to write and think about what that might mean in the long term, the more pressure I put on myself to make it better and more formal. To clean up my style. To keep improving. To keep going.
And so this weekend, I noticed that after finishing Candy House and being so infatuated with a certain narrative tone, I started trying to adopt it. I am laughing to myself thinking about some of the internal narration that was going on in my mind during my run. The type of obnoxiously close attention to detail that sounds like a parody of teen melodrama fiction. Think: noticing the protruding wing bones of the thin runner ahead of me, or eavesdropping on the little girl and her dad talking about aliens coming to earth and finding toilet paper to be the most divine invention ever.
We do this though. We discover that we really like to do something so then we start doing it for fun and at a certain point, the pressure that we put on ourselves to keep going can momentarily take us away from why we like to create in the first place.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with taking inspiration from other people and integrating it into your own life and style. I do this all the time. I also adore the ideas behind Steal Like an Artist by
. But there’s a big difference between the feeling of taking inspiration from the people around you and comparing yourself to them. That’s where I needed to check myself.I’ve also found myself in a community of people who have many varying interests and also a whole lot of overlapping ones. Which made it even more important to remember that the end result of what you make is less important than the feeling of resonance it inspires in people. And that feeling of resonance is nearly ineffable and comes from the smallest of details that create one’s tone.
It’s like having a really connected conversation with someone. You can just feel in the way that you look at each other, in the gentle movements of the muscles that pull their mouth into a smile, in the pauses for thought that cause a momentary break in eye contact for one to collect themselves in a gaze to the upper left, in their word choice, and the number of times that they use profanities in a sentence. There are really small things about how we communicate that make us feel connected to and seen by others. And they are different in every relationship. But the feeling of validation that follows realizing that your crazy is the same as someone else’s crazy is universal.
There’s a verse in an Olivia Dean song called “Everybody’s Crazy” that I love. It goes:
You told me you felt insecure
And that makes you no less of a man
It only made me love you more
'Cause I find it hard to say I am
And you forgot yourself and that's okay
Open the door and let me see
All of it when you say
You feel as crazy as me
There’s something otherworldly about finding out that other people are as insane as you are. And it’s always in the slightest of details that we feel the surprise of connection.
The chorus follows:
Under the table, squeeze my hand
I need to know you understand
'Cause I've been thinking lately
Everybody's crazy
It’s true. Everybody is crazy. But when you learn that you’re the same type of crazy as someone else, it feels like going home.
Rick Rubin talks about this in The Creative Act. He says, “What causes us to notice a piece of art is rarely the point being made. We are drawn to the way an artist’s filter refracts ideas, not to the ideas themselves,” (179).
In other words, sometimes it’s not even the particularities of shared experiences that make you feel connected to someone. Rather, it’s the way that someone pulls you into their perspective and shows you the world through their lens. I have a lot of favorite feelings (homecoming, discovering a new interest, and the elation that comes from knowing how much new content you get to consume, the type of laughter that forces you to excuse yourself from social settings, etc). But at the top of that list is the absolute honor of getting to learn how someone else sees the world.
And that is why I love to read. And why I love to write. And bring people together in ways that create more moments for you to really get to know someone, not just on the surface, but to the point of glimpsing their own filter.
So now we are back at my long ramble at the beginning of this that was inspired by reading a lot more fiction lately and taking note of how other writers refract their ideas. The beauty of finally admitting to yourself that you like to make art in any form is that the world becomes your playground for taking inspiration. But I needed the reminder this week to not go too far with comparison. And that the way that I refract my own ideas is inherently different than how anyone else does because of the tiny subtleties of my tone, which just comes from the 24 years I have spent looking through the world through my two eyes.
But even more important than that is the reminder that your perception of my words is outside of my control. Resonance takes two. But the only thing I can do is speak what’s true to me and trust that this will land in ears and minds of those who want to hear it.
It was also a good reminder of what my intention is in sending this out.
If I write something that resonates with ONE single human being in a way that helps them process something or inspires them to be more creative in their own right, my job here is done. The rest is gravy.
So now I’ll share something from another artist that has both resonated with and inspired me recently.
let your heroes walk before you
let their voices become your imagination
be with them as a lover in the first few months
not as they are, but as you need them to be
- Edward Moravcsik
In taking inspiration from other people, we often fantasize about who we think they are instead of observing them as human beings, just like the rest of us. We do this when falling in love too. We momentarily suspend our connection to reality and concoct the best, most admirable stories about the other person that we can possibly fathom. We also tend to see this as a bad thing but what I love about this poem is that it invites you to take advantage of pedestalization instead of falling victim to it. In the same way that we fantasize about a potential lover, these words encourage you to envision the best version of your heroes and use that refraction of them to continuously pull you forward. On your own terms.
Sometimes we know what we want out of thin air. Other times, we need to be shown a lot of different versions, forms, and styles before we tune ourselves to quickly say “I like that” “I don’t like that.” Next time I find myself deflated by comparison, I hope to come back to this poem and use it as a reminder to highlight what I am drawn to in the world and become more of it, once again, on my own terms.
The more we allow ourselves to be inspired, the more we are able to bring our own filters to our creations, and the greater the likelihood that your work will have its intended effect on others: astonishing resonance.
That’s all for today! Thank you so much for Getting Caught Up in Char’s Web this week and I will catch you here next week.
Love,
Char
**And an always thank you to my brilliant curator and friend, Xandra Beverlin, for tying this whole newsletter together with her recommendations of Wolfgang Tillmans this week! Always blown away by the pieces that she pulls.
P.S. David Zwirner is currently presenting Tillmans's fourth solo exhibition, Fold Me, at 525 & 533 West 19th Street until October 7th. I haven’t been yet but dying to go and you should catch it too if you can!
One of my favorite newsletters, starting from nix by
, includes a French song of the week. I’ve found a lot of cool music through her so I’m going to test out sharing a personal fav song of the week too.Char’s Web Song of the Week
All past issues of Char’s Web are available for reading here. A few samples below…
#1: A first of many.