(abandoned substack draft)
I used to be a very active member of my local music scene. I’d attend a lot of shows. I wrote commentary online about the gigs I’d attended and about the state of the scene. I started and played in several bands of my own. I organized concerts myself. I felt very strongly about it all. Musicians were my people, the scene was my oasis in the desert. I was – and kinda still am – a True Believer in the possibility and potential of a music scene to invigorate people. In 2017 I wrote the draft of an entire novel about my experiences, which I will someday rewrite and publish when the time feels right.
This is where things get a bit more complicated, because with all of that love comes criticism. And that’s… always the case, right, for any thoughtful, honest, perceptive, open-minded, open-hearted person? It’s rare that there’s anything that we can love blindly. To hop and skip a little – James Baldwin said, “precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience… you must find yourself at war with your society”. My instinct is that this applies all the way down. Everything is conflicts. We’re internally conflicted, too. So everything is about managing conflicts. A major theme in my book Introspect is the idea that “the hardest thing is managing your psychology, everything else is just moving things around.” And, the hard thing about managing your psychology is that you will be faced with conflicts, and conflicts are scary, painful, uncomfortable.
So yeah. I love music, I love musicians, I think of them as my family, I’ve said before that I would die for them and I think I mean it, because they taught me how to live, how to love, how to express myself, kinship and belonging. I hope that’s clear. Now we get to my conflicts, and I’ve come to realize that maybe I am some kind of outlier on this, I have some strong feelings that not everyone shares, I might be a bit of a radical. I think that art is important. It’s serious business. Karl Paulnack said in his speech to Boston conservatory, musicians are spiritual first responders, they heal people’s broken spirits. I don’t mean that it should be solemn business and that we should be all uptight, pretentious wankers about it. Art is also silly and hilarious
When I talk about seriousness I’m talking about real commitment. Skin in the game. Flesh in the game. Soul in the game. Knowing that you’re going to keep doing it, day after week after month after year. And here I flinch a little bit knowing that I haven’t performed live music in, gosh, several years. I do still play the guitar and I have some recordings of songs that have come together for me… and I would say that I’m still open to music becoming the main thing in my life again at some point.
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ideals are for striving towards; we can’t embody them 24/7
One of the tricky things about writing about ideals is knowing that you don’t live up to them perfectly yourself. So there’s a bit of maneuvering that’s necessary here. I want to be honest about the genuine feelings I have about bombastic goals and claims, about striving for Valhalla. And I also want to be honest about the fact that I don’t always feel that way all the time. On my personal website visakanv.com, the header reads “My mission is to build the greatest social graph of friendly, ambitious nerds that the world has ever seen.” This is true. This is my mission. I remember articulating vaguer forms of it when I was 19, 20 years old – back then the phrasing I used was something like “the legion of heroes project”. In my mid-20s I remember describing it as–
It’s clear to me that I’m going to be working at this for the rest of my life. But I also want to be honest when I say that sometimes I wake up groggy and tired and I think “man, fuck that guy, I’m going back to bed.” I’m both of those guys. They’re both honestly, truthfully me. And so “seriousness” for me is about managing that tension as artfully and gracefully as I can, so that I don’t quit, but it also doesn’t blow up in my face. I’ve condensed this to an aphorism: “Show up, Don’t Die, Don’t Quit.” Lots of people seem to struggle with this. I struggle with this too. But some people struggle better than others. Maybe we can learn to struggle better, and support each other in our struggles?
I wish we lived in a world where nobody had to struggle to make a living, struggle to put food on the table, have shelter over their heads, have relationships with other people who care about them… maybe if we play our cards right, our descendants might live in that world. In the meantime, there are some harsh realities that we have to contend with.
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The word “serious” appears to have its its origins in older words that meant “weighty”, “important”, “grave”.
I have an old twitter thread where I talk about how it seems to me that people mis-distribute their seriousness.
Long game stuff.
/// abandoned