can't speak

I can’t explain why I love books. Seriously. I can’t talk about books—or any other type of art--in an intelligent way.

In my day job I often have to speak to things I don’t fully understand, but still project a voice of authority and, in many cases, ensure that a client is confident that any issues will be resolved and/or I know what the hell I’m doing. Even if I don’t. This is pretty common across many lines of work, and it’s a skill I gradually learned over time. I believe I’m fairly successful at it, if my professional track record is any indication.

But of books? Or any form of art? For a guy who, you know, writes stories, I am unable to actually talk about art at all. It’s in my head but I can’t get it out in the general framework of how we talk about art in any terms beyond “I like that” or “I don’t like that.”

I have a big skeleton in my closet: I am uneducated. I graduated from a small rural high school that had, let’s just say, extremely low educational standards. I was living on my own young, dealing with a host of issues, and working full-time from the get-go. I have attended a grand total of one semester of community college. One. That is the extent of my higher education—three classes (Intro to Existentialism, where I realized I had already read the textbook in high school, Beginning Anthropology and Pacific Northwest Native American History.) While I have always been a voracious reader (reading Dostoyevsky in junior high, to pick one of many examples) and I consider myself to be a capable critical thinker, I have never learned how to talk critically. How to discuss a work of art in aesthetic or academic terms (I question how much value the latter has, but that’s also essentially a reaction of ignorance, isn’t it?) I’ve never attended lectures or debated art or participated in a writing class—all things that teach one how to interact on this level. I’m not sure how I feel about this, but I can say that the rare times I find myself around discussions of art, I say almost nothing. Because I have no way to articulate what I may be thinking—it may not even be clear to myself. It would be useful, considering a decent amount of the most important art in my life comes from genres that skirt around some sketchy edges (horror, exploitation, heavy metal, transgressive cinema.)

Historically, I have been tremendously insecure about my intellect (ask my long-suffering wife.) Close to ten years ago, however, I found that I had moved up in my profession to the point that my co-workers were more likely to have PHD’s than not and that there was no room for any insecurity or I’d get eaten alive. Fake it ‘til you make it, right? And I did. I mean, nearly all of my friends are highly educated. And professionally, I knew I had something to offer, a lot of experience that made me successful in my career to that point and was the reason I was there in the first place. It was good to go through this: I became much more confident professionally. But this has never translated into my creative life.

Do you know what it’s like to have someone you respect want to discuss a piece of literature with you that you both love but while they can discuss it from a hundred different angles—theme! Setting! Context!—you can’t do much beyond nod your head and say “I like that book a lot.”? To not be able to articulate in your own head why you like that book beyond “It captured my imagination and moved me.”? Yes, sometimes that is enough—I mean, that’s ultimately the most important thing—but it makes for awfully boring conversations. It is deeply frustrating. I don’t even know if I have a valid perspective on anything because my head doesn’t think in those terms. BUT I WANT TO TALK ABOUT THE BOOK! (Or the record, or the film.) I want to passionately discuss it all night because I’m a driven creative person and the work of art is meaningful to me! I have an opinion—but I have no ability to back up that opinion or debate that opinion. I’m incapable of critically discussing subjective work.

I am insecure about my actual creative output, for sure—what creator is not, at some point or another? But that is based on my valuation of the actual work I create itself, whether it accomplished what I wanted it to, whether that vision in my head got anywhere close to being on paper (hint: it never does. My talent is meager, and I’d never claim otherwise.) But in a way, it’s much easier to deal with this kind of insecurity, because it’s small and private and doesn’t actually prevent communication with others. Also, there’s a part deep in me that knows how valuable I really think a piece of my own work is, and it’s brutally honest without being full of my other hang-ups. It gives me a pretty good radar and lets me know when I should tell myself to shut up. In other words, I just keep working at writing to varying degrees of success. It’s fully in my control because it doesn’t take two to tango when you are creating. (That’s not to say you can’t collaborate, of course—many do so successfully. But it’s an option, not a prerequisite.)

Sharpening one’s critical discussion skills requires opportunity, and truthfully I don’t have many. Particularly with literature, I have few friends who have an interest in the same stuff I do. Ironically, I think that makes this worse—because I’d like to be able to discuss it with people who *aren’t* necessarily interested, who maybe have no context. Trying to explain why a piece of art resonates with you can be hard in the best of circumstances, harder when the work may run afoul of commonly accepted norms. (I suppose one definition of art is to push those norms, but that does seem a limiting definition of art to me. A work should be judged on its own intrinsic value, which in my eyes is how you reacted to it personally.)

I don’t think it’s a matter of conversation skills: I can converse with people in general, though I’m no great conversationalist and too much of an introvert by nature. It’s that ability to talk intelligently to a piece of art that I lack. It’s deeply frustrating and on the worst days, incredibly depressing. Fortunately there is always the work of art itself, there to take me away to different worlds and make my own world more tolerable, more beautiful, more mysterious. The magic lives.