Dear friends,
I've been keeping a creative journal while wrestling with the edit of my new documentary.
After some thought, I’ve decided to share it.
I hope it might help someone out there battling with their own resistance or stuckness.
Life in the Arts is often a dogfight.
But it’s a kaleidoscopic fight.
One that reassembles you from the breakdown of dream into a deeper living potential.
Each stage of our growth is preceded by the question: do you love what you do enough to keep going?
Often stuckness happens before we are willing to answer that question.
Why?
Because we don’t yet know if we have the strength for our next rebirth.
But that’s the paradox: it’s in the rebirthing itself that our energy is revived, returned, renewed.
In this process of breakdown and reassembly, I’ve found a commitment which is unconditioned by the vagaries of success and failure.
Nietzsche wrote:
“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
It is our journey as artists to find motivation beyond what it is we once wanted from the world.
Once you find that, your path is no longer conditioned by needing strength, but by the energy of purpose.
What are you willing to give?
What is the purpose of your life?
Do you have the courage to find out what message is in you?
I feel extraordinary gratitude for this journey, for the people I’ve encountered, the friends I’ve made and the ways it has taught me about love, life and creativity.
Below is my creative journal as I’ve been going through my most recent reboot.
It’s purpose is the noticing itself.
I believe that the greatest lessons of the Arts happen in the process itself; that is the mental conversation we have as we attempt to create something from nothing.
Our inner conversation forms our reality. And just as it’s important to notice what it’s saying, it’s important to learn that we can shape this conversation.
Through our attitude.
With heart.
With gentleness.
With the courage to draw lessons from your journey.
And the belief that sharing it has the potential to help another in some small way.
I share the first half publicly and the second half for my paying subscribers. (You continue to play a vital role in the glorious, kaleidoscopic dogfight, that is life in the Arts!)
With love dear friend - and keep creative!
Jim
Tuesday 29th August, Berlin
Distraction is the unwillingness to be in your thoughts.
The gift of going away is to crack open your process. The opportunity in return is to revitalise it. The difficulty is the space before new patterns emerge.
Realisation: We get attached to our routines not because they are the right ones, but because new ones are so dam difficult to build.
Self-development is not just about building our structures; but the courage to dismantle them.
The previous version of my artistic system was undoubtedly the most effective I’ve developed.
Productivity, positive outcomes, and continuous progress.
But, somehow flawed.
It propelled forward a series of projects, but only because of the insanity of my multi-tasking.
I seek again a deeper balance.
What is it that was missing? The revelation that only comes out of “world rejection”?
Troubling:
The effectiveness of “good habits”, while perfect for the modern game, cauterizes the connection to the underworld - where great work comes from.
Wednesday 30th August, 2023
Started reading “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”. Fell in love. I don’t know whether with the journal or Sylvia Plath (why distinguish, fool)
Not since Nietzsche have I come across a writer willing to be brave. That is: here are my thoughts, as they are.
Yet even more than Nietzsche, they are unbound.
I breathed.
Here, at last, someone with the courage to bear an inquisition of self.
It’s dismissive of her spiritual power to read it in light of the outcome, the end.
I don’t know enough about it to comment. But I’m swallowed by her greatness; the gravity of her thought.
I felt for a moment threatened. That space I know. But then realised it was an older part of me. And then I just felt grateful. To identify. To feel. To understand. And then desperately sad.
Some stories you’re condemned to know the end before the beginning.
I would rewind Sylvia.
To make what was, not.
Isn’t that always the way with people we love?
That we would give everything to protect them.
Most of all from themselves…
Life is richer for keeping a journal.
I tried to stop. I wanted to be more instrumental with my time.
Yet I felt less linked to life. To my experience. To words.
Some things need to remain private. To be only for your communion with the world.
“Writing is a religious act…It feels to intensify living: you give more, probe, ask, look, learn, and shape this: you get more: monsters, answers, colour and form, knowledge. You do it for itself first. If it brings in money, how nice. You do not do it first for money.”
(Grammarly was trying to correct the Sylvia Plath quote. Sorry, Grammarly, poetry, like icons, exists outside your rules…)
Thursday 31st August, 2023
Each of us has an “Albatross Project”.
The project we wish we started or did, but never completed.
We have to address what we will do with them.
Two clear options:
Resurrect Frankenstein (The Mary Shelly option)
Throw it overboard (The Hemmingway option)
What is certain: we have to be decisive about the past to move forward with the future.
While away in the van, I thought about the footage from “The Isolation Diaries”.
I am weighed down by it.
Why?
Because I never set out to make a documentary with it.
But I know that there is a documentary in there.
The resistance is how much it conflicts with other projects.
My other projects have lightness: the podcast, newsletter and musical side of “The Isolation Diaries.”
The documentary is heavy.
There is no making a documentary without the deepest time commitment.
It will consume everything, and my highest value this year is the commitment to the whole. I am slowly developing an artistic ecosystem.
Will the documentary vanquish it?
I resisted it all year. It was the voice in the dark yapping away at me.
While in the van I recognised it had become a pain point: an Albatross.
Either way, I needed to do something with it. That is let it go, or take it on.
The complexity of the problem is that this realisation arrived simultaneously with another:
It is time to complete “The Isolation Diaries”.
But what does this mean?
Musically: I have finished the 5th and final EP and am setting it up for release. And then I will release a full album - a best of the project as a Vinyl.
But it would be incomplete without an accompaniment. I know the written side isn’t for now. 1500 pages which the gods will decide.
For another time.
Yet there is a film in there too.
That is the bottleneck. Knowing something is trying to be, but which is competing with the other aspects of my life.
“The whole” I have tenuously built, threatening to be ransacked by Artistic Will.
Yet perhaps that is precisely the point.
Art is bound to its own heaviness. The time it takes. Its depth.
The rest, though it has its place, has a disposability.
Yes, that’s it.
It is the Art vs. Content war playing out in my spirit.
Sometimes all that is clear is this:
That you have to try.
Thank you for reading everyone!
Part 2 continues below,
Part 3 next Wednesday for my paying subscribers
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