We Regret to Inform You That You Are Free

A number of my friends went through a “zine phase” in the mid 90’s and early 00’s, making and trading tiny publications for fun and no profit. Those pamphlets were as rough and handmade as they were heartfelt and vulnerable. Some of these folks eventually went on to blogs; most of them just went on to other things.

There was and still is simple a freedom in self publishing—you fold a little airplane, weigh it in the front with a paperclip of a mission or something you felt you have to say, then set aloft with a humble aspiration for resonance and echo. The artifact wasn’t the goal: the hand trimmed and stapled copies made at Kinko’s (or more likely at work) were currency honored by other like-minded oddballs.

I observed these endeavors from another lane on the freeway. I was focused on making music and producing singles and CDs at the time. More monetarily skin in the game for sure. It was a more expensive ride, fashioning these artifacts, with ego and self riding shotgun, windows rolled down, grinning into the slipstream, while questioning my own relevance before anyone in my social circle had heard of imposter syndrome.

Eventually you feel you’ve run out of things to say or at least have said what you wanted to say. Either realization would have been cause for an existential panic. You were your product. No product, no more you. A songwriter without a song is bankrupt. A dancer without a dance is a mountebank. Laurels, however small, aren't for resting on; they're for the compost bin.

If you’ve been propelled by your mission, and once you’ve done your thing, then you find yourself like the Coyote, hovering over an abyss after chasing that Roadrunner. Gravity would like to have a word, and they’re quite insistent.

I’m not sure where I am now on that trajectory, although that sense of free floating feels immediate. But that feeling of uncertainty is actually welcome. Am I finally at a place where relevance is a two way street—whether the artist matters to the audience is as or even less important than how the audience matters to the artist?

Validation had always been set as the counterweight propping up the creative act; without it, whispering to the void is seen as simply expending breath. Maybe I don’t want the scaffolding anymore. The signal could be important, but what if the carrier wave became the point, despite or because of the inverse square dissipation into null and infinity?

I still make “things.” My current mirror collaborators’ refrain in our recurring, recursive creative play is “to drift,” which implies aimlessness from a certain, product-rooted perspective. However in our context it’s the spiral without the inward or outward direction, a spending of momentum that requires no destination, expectation, or transaction.

The artifacts we make are still dear to me. They’re footprints we leave in the sand as we gambol in the sun and waves. The remembrance is all internal, and the memorials are palaces and hovels of the mind—no audience or visitors, thanks. But the trinkets we craft still shine and charm, even if they hold nothing down, especially the egos.

We drift, not because we tore up the maps. We still have them archived somewhere; we’d rather plot our way by the stars we barely recognize. The songs of the siren are melodies we hum ourselves.

I often hear “unmoored” spoken with despair, disconnection being a perdition, with lodestones demagnetized and polestars obscured. I'd like to counter that with words of comfort and offer a redefinition: no longer being anchored to a dock that you don’t feel is your home port isn’t a bad thing. It’s not a call for rejection or abandonment; rather a gentle acknowledgement of discovering a different and new kind of liberation.

As a postscript, I have to admit that it is a privilege to be able to opt out of the creative act as work when I don’t depend on it to pay the rent. For many people, the product/identity entanglement is an economic millstone, and being able to declare independence requires a deep, systemic transformation that a single individual refusal can’t achieve.