The Torch in Your Hand

Art in the long term is something that will do numbers to your brain, for the good. Art allows you to express yourself in ways that are simply endemic to art. It offers a level of cognitive stimulation that one can not find anywhere else. Think of it like this: you come to a place where you need your creativity; a job, an internship, a god forbidden school assignment, art can help you everywhere. If you spend your entire life being creatively suppressed as most of us are in this modern world, your creative ability will eventually degrade into a grey mush. Our modern world is simply non-conducive to art and creative expression, if one goes onto social media it is a remixed, uncreative, AI generated, mess of "brain rot" and time wasting clickbait. One can no longer rely on the world to be creative for them, so now you must do it yourself.

There are three key main areas art can help you in, first expression, then creative creativity, finally explorative problem solving. Expression is pretty self explanatory, the ability to express yourself goes past the physical arts, it moves into public speaking, social skills, relationships, and other areas that require clarity from both parties. Creative creativity is a little more vague, to be creatively creative is to be more than just a maker or inverter or drawer, it is the ability to hold onto your creativity and actually be creative, Tung Tung Sahur and Skibi Toilet are not creative, one must actually be creative with themself, henceforth creative creativity. Explorative problem solving is something that all of us should value. This is the ability to adapt to one’s surroundings and situations, to be able to explore your environment and the tools available to you and actually solve problems with them instead of following protocols and pre-made solutions. Life is not math and as such should not be expected to be solved like math.

001/Expression

Expression is the basis of life, expression is the light against the dark of ignorance and depression. Expression allows a piece of your mind to leave the confines of synapse and biology. Expression puts a piece of yourself into the world in a way for others to see and interpret or interact with in a way that is not done like anything else. Expression is the core of human society, without the ability to write or speak or any other form of idea transference humanity would do more than revert and regress.

The ability to express oneself cleanly serves as the goal of this word. If one can express themself at all they have taken the first step, if one can express themself cleanly then they have taken the final step.

Very few have taken the final step, and very few need to take the final step. The final step is something we should all strive for yet not something we all need.

The things that hold us back from the final step are numerous, each acting in their own unique way to dictate the way of our words and look at our creations.

One of the many monsters of vagueness that holds us back is the issue of translation. You or I can feel what we did not like in what they said, or the look of their sculpture, or the colors of their painting. There are many things that we can feel about their art, but very few of us can put those real abstract feelings into words that can be attained or acted upon.

Art is the key to that next world. Art is one of the few practices that punishes vagueness on contact. A vague brushstroke looks like a mistake. The longer you spend making things, the more your hand and your mouth learn to reach for the specific instead of the approximate. That habit does not stay in the studio. It shows up in the essay you write, the apology you owe, the argument you are trying to win.

There is a second beast who has its grimy fingers in most if not all of us, and it is courage. Expression requires putting something into the world that can be judged. Every creative act is a small act of risk. Scrolling is not a risk to you or your fragile ego scrolling is consumption without exposure, and a person who only consumes never builds the ability that real communication asks for. This is part of what social media has taken from a generation that was supposed to inherit it: not the time, but the willingness to be seen trying.

002/CREATIVE CREATIVITY

Creative Creativity is something that is hard to explain, it warrants the words in your mouth to say it.

The distinction is this: there is the kind of creativity that takes things which already exist and rearranges them, and there is the kind of creativity that produces something which was not in the room before you walked in. Both of these are real, and both of them are called creativity, but only one of them is in the trenches of our next generation, only one stands upon the block, only one is waging war and, let me spoil it for you, it's not the first one. A meme is a remix, a trend is a remix of a remix, and the algorithm rewards the recombination because recombination is cheap and predictable, and cheap is what an algorithm is built to serve. None of this is evil in itself, a meme still takes one person a little bit of insight to go viral, there is still a little bit of critical thinking in making something new from something old, but there is simply a greater level of creativity in putting something there that was not before, creative creativity.

The thing we are talking about is harder. It is sitting down with a blank page or a blank canvas or a blank track and producing something that did not exist before, knowing most of what you produce will be bad, in fact it will be so bad you fear the darkness coming for your and the torch you burn in your hand of originality, and yet your produce it anyway. Most people can edit something that already exists, far fewer people can build something that does not, and the gap between those two abilities is enormous and only grows wider the longer you avoid the darkness.

There is a quiet danger in the tools we have now, AI can hand you a draft, a sketch, a song, a paragraph, almost anything you ask for. What it cannot hand you is the experience of making something bad and recognizing it as bad on your own, and that experience is the entire mechanism by which taste develops. Taste is the thing that eventually lets you tell a good idea from a derivative one, and if you skip the loop that builds taste you will never know what you are missing, because the part of you that would have known will never have held the torch.

Creative creativity is not about being a great artist or making great art. It is about keeping the part of your torch that originates things alive long enough that you can actually use it when you need it.

003/EXPLORATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING

The modern world hands you protocols, schools hands you protocols, jobs hand you protocols, and a protocol is just a pre-made answer to a problem that somebody else has already solved. Most of the time the protocol works, which is the entire reason protocols exist in the first place.

But not every problem is the kind that a protocol can solve. Some problems are new, or they only look like the old ones from a distance, you need the torch to light your way of the new and the dark. A protocol is a flood light, it was placed there to illuminate the discovered and the understood and it worked, the illumination is there, unyielding, and blinding. The floodlight is there and it lights away the dark. But the floodlights reach is not infinite just as no one is omniscient and no light is forever reaching.

The protocol is built on a set of assumptions that no longer hold up in the situation you are actually in. When you meet one of those problems with a protocol you will fail, and worse than that, you will not understand why you failed, because the protocol was supposed to work and from the outside it looked like it should have.

Art is practice for other kinds of problems. Every creative decision is a small act of reframing, this is not a portrait it is a study of light, this is not a song it is a question, this is not a sculpture it is a shape in space that does something to the room it is in. Every creative project is a problem that nobody has handed you the answer to. You are the one who decides what the canvas is, you are the one who decides when it is done, and there is no answer key in the back of the book because nobody wrote one and no one has placed the light or plugged it in.

What this builds in you is two things at once. The first is a comfort with constraint, because artists work inside constraints constantly, the size of the page, the meter of the line, the budget of the production, the colors available in the palette, and they treat those constraints as the thing that generates the work rather than the thing that prevents it. Most professional environments treat constraints as obstacles to be removed, and the artistic habit of treating them as a light to be lit is rarer and far more useful, especially in a life where the constraints are real and not going anywhere.

The second thing it builds is a tolerance for not knowing what is looking back from the shadows of the light you cast. Art rewards staying inside uncertainty long enough for something interesting to come out of it, and protocol thinking rewards collapsing to the answer as fast as possible. The first habit is much harder to build and much harder to keep, and it is also the only habit that is going to help you when the problem in front of you is unlit and new and there is nobody around to tell you what to do about it.

00X/Synthesis

What you carry out of all of this is a way of being in the world that the world is not going to give you on its own; the world will not light your torch for you.

The ability to take what is inside of you and put it somewhere another person can actually find it. The ability to make something that did not exist or was not lit until you decided it be illuminated. The ability to walk into a problem nobody has solved before and not freeze, not reach for the nearest pre-made answer, not wait for somebody to tell you what the protocol says, not to wait for the technician and the flood light, but to actually figure it out with whatever you have on you and your torch.

You can let your torch go dim, and most people will, and you will not notice the light you carried in your hand is gone until the moment you reach for the light that was in your hand and find it empty. The modern world is not going to hold the torch for you. The algorithm is not going to hold the torch for you. The protocol is not going to hold the torch for you. The torch is yours, and it has always been yours, and the only person who can keep it lit is you.

So make something. Make it badly. Make it again.