Fruitless Labours

Trying to become an artist is a soul-wrenching thing. I can only assume that being one is no bed of roses either. When you’re in the zeitgeist, you’re assumed to be infallible. When you’re not in the zeitgeist, it doesn’t matter how good you are. So why would anyone in their right mind want to make the gargantuan effort?

It’s a difficult endeavour, getting into an artistic profession. Unlike a job, a career, an education, there aren’t many forces behind your artistic pursuits other than your own inner fire. Your limping, withering passion that needs to be utterly dauntless. Society doesn’t give a damn about another bohemian artist. The government would rather that you produce taxes like a good little cog. And your friends, your family, well… they may support you, but even the most fundamental relationships are difficult to maintain without some ”practical” life choices.

It’s a scary thing. The empty page. The unstrung lute. The blank canvas and the unsculpted clay. Unrealised potential demands so much of us.

Because today, as an artist, you need to be provenly commercially viable before being allowed to prove it. You need to be controversial without offending a single porcelain soul. You need to be visionary without straying from anyone’s comfort zones. And anything less than the next Just-Kidding Rowlings, Garotte-Revered-Rabble Martin, or the reincarnation of Mister Mercury is considered an abject failure.

There is no room for ‘good-enough’ in a world of stars and gods…

I’m yet to be published. I do not know what success looks, smells, or feels like. To me it seems like an amorphous pipe-dream, and I’m unable to take the possibility of it seriously. Thus, I don’t rightly know if it’s all worth it. I don’t know if the potential for accolades, royalties, or the prospect of having touched another human soul is in the end worth all the misery, sacrifices, and hardships getting there…

Maybe not. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why depression, substance abuse, and general mental unwellness seem so rampant within the artistic fold. Maybe the pursuit of the creative dream isn’t worth the effort at all. Not worth the tangible struggle against mortgages, bills, debts, and rent. Not worth the constant stream of rejections and disheartening responses.

But despite lacking evidence thereof, I have to believe that it is worth it. If only for one solitary reason: What ever would the world look like, whatever would our disparaging civilization amount to, if not a single one of us made that struggle? What would our world be like if no one ever lifted the pen, the plectrum, or the brush?

Because this, whatever we want to call this mess of world affairs that we have on our hands right now, has got to be better off than it would be without the artist’s thankless struggle.

/Sebastian Lindberg 24/8-2018

The Merit of Meaning

“Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. [-] Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future. Choose life.“

This is how Rent-boy (played by Ewan McGregor) introduces the cinematic drug-debacle called Trainspotting. And while his point rambles away from him in his rapid fire disregard of societal conceit, the poetry of it strikes a cord. Or, it should strike a cord. Because life has to be more important than to just be about which cellphone operating service you chose to subscribe to, or which insurance plan is “just right for you”.

I don’t know if there’s an objective point to existence. I’d like to think so, but I can’t for the life of me grasp one. We crawled out of mud, not wasting a cosmic second before we started beating our meat against each other in carnal rivalry. Now, we’re erecting phallic symbol after phallic symbol out of steel and glass, the next larger than the last, all the while our fertility rates plummet. Shit’s fucked up, and it can be difficult to see a point to it all if you don’t shove your head into a delusional mire of religion.

Some find meaning in perfecting an art; a craftsmanship. Some find it in raising a family. Some find meaning, like our dear Scottish Renton above, in industrial grade drugs that fry your neural pathways until they’re more similar to Spam than brains. I rightly don’t know if there’s any meaning to be found in any of these pursuits. But I can tell you where there’s no meaning to be had: Becoming another cog in the tax factory.

Which seems to be what politicians wants us to be. Almost to the point of taking it for granted. They openly proclaim that the pinnacle of the human condition is being a compliant tax payer. Someone that funds the administrative juggernaut, carving it’s way through history like a strip miner, without putting up any resistance or asking any questions. A person that obeys every law, not because it’s right but because it is ordained from on high. A person that goes to work, pays their bills and never ever wonders why. A person that is more concerned about the plumpness of their pay-check than what they have to do to get it. Your leaders want you to find meaning in being a “good citizen”. A loyal serf.

Which is fine. Kinda fine… Expecting politicians to be concerned with your personal fulfilment above that of the state is akin to expecting a butcher shop to provide vegan options. It could happen, but you’d be an absolute imbecile if you expected it. Their intent is to grind you into becoming another brick in the wall. One might even say that it’s their job to do so. You’re not electing them to office to keep your personality safe, but to keep your precious society rolling onward to mutually assured destruction. You can’t fault them for it.

So, what’s your excuse?

The meaning of your existence is not to uphold the state. It isn’t to fund a G-man’s extramarital affair. Not to make sure that cars are being sold and driven by government bailout. Not to sing the national anthem at every “special” holiday. It’s not even the meaning of your life to make sure the lights stay on and to provide care to every poor sod that rolled a magnum on the Russian roulette of personal health. If you only exist for the benefit of other people, then what’s the point? Are we all just the safety net for every other moron that was shat out of a cosmic cause-and-effect asshole? It can’t all be just a self-perpetuating circle-jerk. And I refuse to have the meaning of my life be defined by people eating unfertilized sturgeon-spawn for breakfast on a gilded throne.

Consider all the bills and taxes and other bullshit to be necessities of the current societal paradigm. But don’t let that be the reason you’re eating and pissing and fucking your way through life. It’s not worth it. Find something else that makes all that other bullshit worthwhile. Something which’s benefit to others is a consequence. Not the goal.

Your life must be about you, in one way or another. Anything else is a bloody waste.

/Sebastian Lindberg 30/5-2017