The Long Way Home

About a year ago, I was standing on a subway platform late at night when an elderly, eccentric-looking gentleman approached me.  “Are you an artist?” he asked, pointing at the guitar I was carrying.  “I’m a musician,” I said.  “No,” he said emphatically, “Are you an artist?”  I realized I recognized this man: I had met him about seven years before at an art opening, at which he had introduced himself to me as a composer, inventor, and advertising agent.  He was hard to forget: he sported a bright blazer with a sequence of colored handkerchiefs pinned to the lapel, a thick, bristly mustache, and shocks of white, Einstein-ish hair shooting out from just above his ears.  I realized he didn’t remember me, so I just said, “Yes, I guess I am an artist.”  “And do you know what is death, then?” he asked me.  He seemed a bit drunk.  “Death?” I said.  “Death,” he repeated.  “Death for an artist is walking home the same way.  Don’t do it!  Ever!  Never walk the same way home!”

After he left, I pondered the meaning of his words.  My first thought was that there are only so many ways a person can walk home, and it would be hard not to exhaust these pretty quickly.  But then I considered that if a person deliberately takes a longer route, there are, in fact, an infinite number of ways to walk home.  I started to see the metaphor in all this: an artist has to be on guard against routine, against choosing the same, easy solutions again and again.  He has to take the “long way home” in the sense of experimenting and deliberately trying to disrupt his habits.  But it also dawned on me that the old man’s advice might have been meant quite literally.  In order for an artist to undermine his habitual mental orientations, he needs his physical disorientations: taking a walk, going to a museum, or even bouncing a ball against a wall (I’ve read that this is how Paul Simon writes songs.)  So maybe being an artist is just as simple as choosing to walk home a different way, and letting an inner wisdom take care of the rest.  Artists have always had an affinity for drugs and travel, after all, and probably for this very reason, that such “derangements of the senses,” to quote Rimbaud, inevitably lead to new discoveries.  This seems both like a good method for making art and also a good way of taking the agony of ego out of the process.  Just take the long way home and be ready to receive whatever comes!

There’s a beauty to this simplistic view of creativity, but there’s also a problem with it.  In order to take the long way home, you have to know where your home is.  In other words, for creativity to mean anything, for it to be really fulfilling, it has to be based on a sense of purpose, a sense that, though there are many options and paths, there is some singular and necessary goal that is calling you to it.  Yes, creativity requires that we question our habitual, goal-oriented thinking; yet, without any goals at all, we will ultimately find ourselves more deeply entrenched in our habits — much like the college undergraduate who takes LSD or goes to India, only to find after graduation that he feels compelled to take a dreary job in his father’s law firm.  If we take the long way home without defining what home is, the world will makes that choice for us.  So creative death might be walking home the same way, but it’s also not knowing where home is at all.  In the end, the two amount to the same thing.

As a man in his thirties, I’m very intrigued by the phenomenon of other men my age choosing to start families and then feeling, quite unexpectedly, as though their creative lives have come to an abrupt end.  Maybe this is a particularly American phenomenon.  Maybe in other countries fatherhood is seen more as an extension of a man’s creativity than as a responsibility that leads him away from other creative pursuits.  One thing I have noticed is that the men who most experience tension between family and creativity are the ones who are determined to be better fathers than their own fathers.  I have seen this pattern many times: a man who grows up with an irresponsible father at first uses art to express himself in contrast to his father.  But when he becomes a father himself, he feels that his new family is keeping him from his art.  And this is because, in trying to be better than his father, the man has become impatient with arriving at home.  He keeps telling himself he is home, but what he experiences is not his real home, rather, an imaginary one he keeps insisting on.  And as he keeps insisting on being home, he keeps going over the same path in his mind, digging a deeper rut each time.  He feels the death that the old man warned me about.  He starts to take the same way home every day because, in fact, he could not be farther from his true home.

So what is a person’s true home?  Ajahn Chah said it very well, I think: a person’s true home is peace, but he finds this peace not by grabbing at the false ideas of security and stability in the world around him.  No, he finds peace by systematically rejecting all the premature and unsatisfactory ideas of “home” that the world throws at him.  Just as an artist must learn to say no to the half-baked ideas that spring from his imagination, so too a person must learn to say no to incomplete versions of home that the world tempts him with.  If he fails to do this, he will encounter much sorrow inside and outside himself.  Look at the way people make themselves miserable with dating.  A man meets a woman he likes, and for a while, spending time with her feels free and wonderful.  But then she does something that gives him a glimpse of “home,” and his freedom is suddenly eclipsed by impatience, either to grasp onto her and possess her fully, or else, to push her away and search elsewhere for his home.  Once he’s succumbed to this impatience, it doesn’t actually matter whether he stays or goes; either way, he has replaced his true home with an imaginary one and will find no peace.  Just like the frustrated artist, he finds himself repeating himself in failed relationships.  And though he may think the problem is that he hasn’t put enough energy into building a home, the real reason is that he hasn’t put enough energy into letting go of his illusions.

In the end, both creativity and happiness come down to the same practice: learning not to lie to yourself.  This might seem easier said than done, but the way to learn honesty is really quite simple.  You just have to keep noticing your own lies, over and over again.  As an artist, you have to notice when what you are doing doesn’t feel authentic, and learn to trust the gnawing pain inside that tells you when you are lost.  As a person, you have to do much the same.  It is a long way home, not because wandering is a practice that miraculously leads to becoming a genius or a saint, but because it is only in wandering that we can glimpse all the lies we’ve been telling for so long.  But the good news lies in this paradox: as soon as we discover how lost we are, it’s then that we know the way home.

 

Paul Weinfield is the singer, songwriter, and founder of Tam Lin, a New York City-based band whose sonically-adventurous brand of folk music has earned it comparisons with Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, Radiohead, and Talk Talk.  Tam Lin’s newest album, Garden in Flames (October, 2011,) is available for free download at http://tamlin.bandcamp.com/

 

Advertisement