Ye and Your Creative Voice
In college, I felt pressured to find my “voice” as a writer. How to find it was never explained. Now I see the absurdity of expecting a young person to find their voice before they have a song to sing, and I finished university with neither, lacking either the requisite life experience or the temerity to collect it. As it turned out, at 19, I had nothing to say.
Which isn’t a bad thing. Having nothing to say is a key propellant of youth that pushes one to do; to be a collector of experience. With time, wisdom begins to work its way through its muzzle and that stream of youthful insouciance runs thinner and thinner until it is but a slow drip into a sea of churning knowledge. The drive to do becomes increasingly mitigated by reasons not to do, giving wisdom that dour affect we ascribe to it whenever it disrupts our youthful exuberance. Gradually our “voice” is no longer something we search for, but something we cannot avoid, impregnating our every utterance with a history of compacted experience.
Recently, I asked my Norwegian mother for her lefse recipe, a 5-ingredient list that took 45 minutes to work its way through her life experiences, thoughts and pathos. I did finally get the recipe, but also a family history, childhood memories, and other unrelated information. I received so much more than how to make lefse. I also wanted to slam the phone down after 5 minutes and google it. At 72, my mother’s voice is so strong I can barely stand it.
But when you are young, your voice is a delicate sapling. My college classmates and I sensed its fragility and often resisted making changes to our work, out of fear that it wouldn’t survive a pruning. “I don’t want to destroy my voice,” one of my classmates said, rejecting our professor’s suggestion of further editing. Unwilling to take the risk, he carried on producing a stream of disjointed and mangled writings that ultimately became boring in their inscrutability.
The fear of losing our “specialness” often prevents us from acquiring the skills needed to build lasting structures. We end up with edifices that are wonderfully unique, but that topple directly after their erection. A lot of people have a strong voice paired with weak architecture. For example, the one and only Ye.
I recently watched his 2 ½ hour interview with Lex Fridman and it was…..BORING.
Not because it lacked “provocative” moments, but because Ye struggles to strap his thoughts to any kind of infrastructure. It felt like he was amassing a pile of muscle and organs, but had forgotten the skeleton. The result was a collection of jumbled thoughts, invoking in me the same feeling I get when seeing the chaos of my son’s room. It makes me feel physically tired just looking at the mess that needs to be gathered, sorted, organized. Usually, I just walk away.
That’s how it feels listening to Ye. It’s just messy. I can pick up glimpses of places he is visiting, but then he flits off to another destination without disclosing which bridge got him there. It’s a bit like that asshole that says “You don’t need the address–just follow me!” but then proceeds to drive like a lunatic and invariably leaves you stranded at an intersection after they blow through a yellow light.
This is Ye explaining himself. Of course, this pisses people off. There’s nothing more insulting than someone saying “let me explain” and then making it incomprehensible. It’s often a sign of deep insecurity, like those “smart” people who pepper their prose with inscrutable references and codified language and then smirk at your inability to “understand the concept.”
It’s not clear to me which tactic Ye is employing; is he purposefully being cryptic or does he simply lack the practice of giving his thoughts a framework? This may account for how easy it is to accept the “mental illness” explanation.
Telling the truth, as you see it, is not difficult. The truth is simple; its form is large and solid and lends itself to careful description. The challenge lies in seeing it clearly enough, understanding it fully enough, to accurately portray it in whatever medium one chooses. It’s the unseen, dirty work that holds all creations aloft. But, it isn’t sexy. It’s a bit like plumbing; you rarely think about it and it feels almost inconsequential as it takes a back seat to other more “exciting” aspects of your home, such as interior design. After all, no one’s plumbing prowess has made it onto the cover of a magazine. But faced with a choice between the two, very few would choose a home without plumbing, no matter its design. Working to understand and describe our truth is the dirty trade of creativity; unsung, but absolutely vital.
But, it’s difficult for an artist to train themselves to clearly portray their truth. Just like my college classmates, I think we feel that comprehension somehow threatens the magic of our creations; as if too much clarity will pull back the curtain and break the illusion. I’ve felt this thread of anxiety in many “artist’s statements,” that so-called explanatory piece of writing that precedes an art exhibit. But is the purpose really to explain the work? Many read as a kind of justification, with a bloated explanation for a simple idea. Perhaps the artist feels insecure about the simplicity of the work because they have forgotten that it is the telling of the story that moves the audience. The fact is, the stories we tell have changed very little. But the way you tell it is new. That’s your “voice.”
This realization got me writing again after taking a 20 year hiatus. I had been worried about having a unique “voice”, because I didn’t understand that by carefully and deliberately describing the truth, as I understood it, the emergence of my “voice” was inevitable. Too often we place the focus on enhancing our style or “voice”, when it should be on getting better at understanding and describing our truth.
It’s hard work, and often uncomfortable, describing our truth. But, by skipping that careful process, you become responsible for misinterpretations. In the end, what is communicated is not what you said–it’s what is understood. And in this world, where we all fast-forward through 90 second Tik Tok’s, being understood isn’t easy. We have less and less of the architecture that supports understanding, but our desire for it has not waned. This may be why long-format content is becoming more popular, with audiences routinely tuning in for interviews that last hours. It’s also why Lex Fridman’s style of probing, but non-judgemental questioning is so appealing. Because it takes time, grace and patience to understand and to be understood.
Your truth wants to be told; it will not elude you if you put in the effort. If Ye is struggling to have people understand his truth after a 2 ½ hour conversation, he might consider that perhaps he hasn’t quite reached it.