Dear Reader,
I have a confession to make: I hate writing.
I mean, I also love writing. It’s definitely a love-hate relationship. But as a creative person, writing was not my first love. Probably not even my ninth or tenth.
As a kid, I loved to draw and paint and sew, to make art and weird crafty things. I remember once “wasting” most of a box of tissues making little puppets and stuffed animals. I regularly raided my mom’s scrap material box and sewing chest for my strange little sewing projects, and my dad’s woodshop for things to carve or paint. I still have a scar on one wrist from a woodcarving project gone awry.
I also loved to sing and often spent long mornings in my room making up rambling strange songs. As an older kid, if I happened to have the house to myself after school or on weekends, I would sing at the top of my lungs just to enjoy the acoustics of the empty space — or I would sing while I was by myself outside, rambling the back field like Maria traipsing through the hills.
The craftiness also showed up in an early love of baking. There was a line of microwavable cake mixes that came out while I was a kid, which were probably pretty mediocre as cake but excellent as a kid project. And then my mom bought a set of cake decorating supplies, and I learned how to make buttercream roses — the absolute pinnacle of elegance.
I had a brief flirtation with photography as well, borrowing my dad’s camera to tromp around outside and snap pics of trees and cows and clouds. This was before digital cameras, when cameras used actual film that had to be developed, which in my small town meant dropping it at the local grocery store or pharmacy and waiting a week for the photos to come back.
And I loved drama and acting. I signed up for anything drama-related that my school offered. I played dress-up with the flamboyant hand-me-downs I got from an artistic aunt, and in my bedroom I acted out favorite scenes of passionate heartbreak from movies and books. That’s part of how I fell in love with stories, alongside my early and abiding love of fairytales.
Writing was, well, something I was good at. Writing was a more relatable talent to pursue, and a less noisy one. It doesn’t take up a lot of space, nor does it require much in the way of materials. And once you really crack the lid on it, writing opens up a whole universe of creativity in a way that is hard to match — because it’s pure imagination. Words are a uniquely malleable medium.
But writing has always been hard for me as well. Writing stories is tremendously hard. Writing nonfiction isn’t much easier. Maintaining a consistent writing practice has always been a struggle — I’m not really a consistent habit sort of person, except when it comes to my morning tea. Getting my words into the shape of my thoughts is hard, when my thoughts tend to zoom around like glittering schools of fish, or maybe like a murmuration of starlings.
I love writing. I do. But god, I also hate it.
I’ve been thinking a lot about art lately. The thing that distinguishes any sort of art, I think, is intention. Found art is maybe the purest example of this. What was, say, a busted plastic fork is captured as art, purely through naming it so.
Art is definitely subjective. Not everything requiring craft and skill is necessarily art, and not every artwork is rendered skillfully. One person’s collection of toenail clippings is another person’s masterpiece waiting to happen. (Have I told you the toenails story? No? That was a college roommate, a passionate guy in the MFA program who loved art that was visceral and provocative. Once he was telling me about his philosophy as an artist, and he grabbed a little Carmex jar off a shelf in his bedroom. See this? See this? I’ve been collecting my toenail clippings. It’s almost full. This is real, you know? It has intensity. Art should evoke a response. That’s what art is. I can’t recall how I responded, but he did stop waving his jar of toenails around, so I must have said something acceptable.)
As with fashion and music, I’m not sure that I have any discernable taste in art. My taste is expansive. I can appreciate most things for what they are, and there’s no particular rhyme or reason to what kicks up my enthusiasm or makes me swoon with admiration. I do tend to like things that are a blend of whimsical and transgressive or just bafflingly weird, and beautiful portrayals of mundane things, and things of astonishing craftsmanship, and things that have a pleasing earthiness or tactile quality. But that covers a lot of ground, and I also like things that meet none of those criteria, so really, it’s anyone’s guess.
For Christmas last year, my elder brother got me this masterpiece from The Art of Pants:
I love this so much. I love the concept and execution. I love the vivid touches of blue watercolor, the delicacy of the drips, the sense of motion. I love the sloppy handprint, and I love the smudge of blue on the other cheek that creates the illusion of depth — one of the few places where the artist has carefully colored inside the lines.
Intention is a slippery concept. Subjective intent is untrustworthy, but intent is hard to discern objectively. In the law, a person has intent when they act with purpose to cause a result, or when one can infer that the person is aware their conduct is going to cause that result. Intent is a necessary element of certain legal claims, like intentional torts or crimes requiring proof of mens rea (Latin for “guilty mind”). In art, on the other hand, it’s an open question whether the intent of the artist means anything to the work, whether that intent survives the release of the work into the wild. The artist must have intentions in creating the work; but ultimately the audience gets to decide what the work means.
This game of when intent matters, and who gets to determine intent, and how intent relates to culpability or to meaning — this is all over the place in human interactions and culture.
I generally fall on the side of the death of the author. Similarly, I think Constitutional originalism is dumb. Saying “But that’s not what the founding fathers meant” is a lot like the witch in Cookie Monster and the Cookie Tree being mad that her only-give-cookies-to-people-who-share spell backfired.
Yet, intent means something. Doesn’t it? Veering away from art: Kindness is intentional. Compassion is intentional. You might mean well and fail miserably, but still, the good intent has to be there in the first place.
But intention is nothing without action. And then once there is an action, a manifestation of the intent, then it’s the manifestation that matters. If you meant well and failed miserably, you still owe an apology to the wronged party. If you meant well and did exactly what you meant to do, and then later you realize that your well-meaning actions hurt somebody, you owe the exact same apology. And if you meant well and did nothing, then you did nothing, and you get no credit.
In a convoluted way, that brings me around to my latest book binge, the Necessary Evils series by Onley James. This series follows a set of adopted brothers who are all psychopaths, raised by their adoptive father to leverage their lack of empathy and murderous tendencies to avenge wrongs that would otherwise escape justice. So, bad acts aren’t redeemed by good intent, but what about good acts done with evil intent? Or evil acts done to achieve good results? When do two wrongs make a right?
I had seen these recommended multiple times and kept hesitating because, you know, psychopaths. And yes, these books are very definitely on the violent and murdery side, but also? It turns out that they’re kind of weirdly adorable. Like, who knew violent psychopaths could be such cuddly sweethearts?
I think part of what makes these books work so well is that everybody in them is damaged, and they’re good for each other in the way their damage lines up. Most romances are redemptive, one way or another, and putting together characters who can help each other with their unique baggage is a common device. This is a creative take on that. Bad guys end up getting what they deserve, while the good guys (for a certain definition of “good”) get what makes them happy (even if it might make someone else run screaming).
The other thing I appreciated about these books is that the author is thoughtful in her treatment of psychopathy as a form of neurodivergence that exists on a spectrum. The brothers are not all the same. Traits associated with psychopathy are found in all of them, but not all in the same way or to the same degree. I mean, they are all kind of murderous, but other traits vary. This series makes for an interesting entry in the running of hot takes on neurodivergence in romance writing.
I don’t have any particular plans for the weekend. A few weeks ago I was all talk about doing a closet clean-out project and then having some girlfriends over for a clothing swap, to raid each others’ stuff before donating the leftovers. But did I actually act on all my big talk and follow through with an actual plan? No. Although I guess I could still clean out my closet.
Meh. Maybe I’ll make some art instead.
Love,
Beas
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