Art, And The Artless

The second is the hardest step of almost any process.

People think a lot about the first step. It is a doozy with which the journey of a thousand miles begins, and all that. But that is the delight of a first step: it is an unknown, an adventure, an experiment.

Second steps aren't like that.

A second step must fight against not just the resistance of the first step's shortcomings (and it must fight those - every mistake made in the first step counts twice over as the second compensates, and the simple fact of those failings can be cripplingly demoralizing, both to the person taking the steps and to anyone else watching the process), but against the first step's success. After a good beginning, there is an irrational desire to rest on one's laurels and skip the second step with its capacity to fall short of that mark entirely. After a while, built up momentum will keep you going, but a single success casts long shadows of fearful failure.

This isn't just my opinion - the international community calls a democracy functional after the second free election (so often, the winners of the first free election decide they don't need another), many hostile standoffs end after the second show of force (this is why the U.S. government decided it needed to slaughter two large groups of Japanese civilians with atomic weapons in 1945), and rhetorical lists like this one tend towards three examples because of how uncomfortably the inconsistencies get highlighted between just two (yes, there are other reasons as well - start your own blog to talk about them).

There are other challenges as well: an artist, for example, has to worry about their second work being too similar to their first, lest they go the way of Guy Ritchie and M Knight Shyamalan and become shoehorned into a single oeuvre*.

Which leads me to this rant. A part of me just wants to make a random bit of fiction as I did yesterday - really, I expect most of the posts here to lie in that vein. But I want to remind myself and the vast, callous reaches of the internet that there's more to Cogito Ex Nihilo than flash fiction (for a blog of nothing but that, check out Ommatidia.org, which really does that better than I am yet able to, anyway). This is the canvas of my ever-changing mind, on which to practice my art, and sometimes, that means a self-indulgent rant. Actually, it almost always means a self-indulgent rants, but some rants are more involved with humor and fiction than others.

Because I do intend to be an artist. The term is irritatingly hard to define, and anyone who really tries to narrow it down generally cuts out verbal arts first, on their way down to leaving nothing but oil paintings and classical concertos. I am seldom one to argue against an elitist definition, but that one seems silly to me: Limiting art - a term so often associated with pushing the limits and boundaries of thought and society - by anything so crass as mode of expression is caging the angel. At the same time, I wouldn't want to leave the notion utterly undefined. You cannot simply shit on the ground and call it art (at the very least, it would depend on how well you did it). Therefore, I propose this standard: Art is the striving to approach perfection. And that striving, that desire for both practice and feedback (and I urge you, as-yet-theoretical readers, give me feedback - glowing praise and vitriolic hatred are equally valuable to me in this) is what Cogito Ex Nihilo (by any other name, should I change it) is all about.

That's my outlook right now, anyway. I'm sure that eventually, someone will find a hole in that definition, and I shall need to think of something much more difficult: a second try.

-- The Ben Freeman