Hi, I’m Max and I write fantasy, science fiction, and all sorts of genre stories as well as essays on the craft. If you enjoy what I write below, I’d appreciate you sharing the piece or subscribing to my newsletter more than you know!
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I’ve been thinking about the ethereal nature of art a lot recently. A concert only lasts for the moment that it can be experienced. We are in one of the very few times in history where music can be listened to outside of a live setting. For 99% of the approximate age of civilization this was impossible.
Art is ethereal. It is life, and life is ethereal. Writing feels so much more permanent. These symbols on the page will last as long as the page does, but as A Canticle for Liebowitz and all the dystopian tales that followed it show, those pages don't last forever either.
As far as a scale can be applied though, I'm fortunate that my chosen art is one of the more concrete styles. Painting is even older than words, we had drawn art millennia before we have the written shape. An image can dazzle now as it did while our species began stepping away from neanderthalensis to sapience.
But there is a magic to the ethereal.
A performance at a brewery is never the same as the CD you buy from the band afterwards. There is a life there, a richness to the experience that cannot be contained in a recording.
Moreso, I've been thinking of vaudeville: the circus, the dancing, the performances: juggling and magic and comedy. So much of history isn't recorded and so much of human's time on earth is spent entertaining ourselves. We sleep, seek food, procreate, and faff about. The first and the last of those tend to take up the most time, outside the direst, or most amorous of times.
A lot can get done in the time we faff about. Invention happens then, as we piddle about with items and concepts and take yesterday's problem into today's hands. Art happens then.
Sit a human still for long enough with their needs (mostly) met and they will mess about and create something that wasn't there before. They will create anything, whether it be a painting on a cave wall, or a song, or a game with stones tossed in the air in a way their brothers and sisters cannot seem to do. They smile. The audience smiles. It’s a show. No one is bored anymore. A week goes by, and needs are met again. The show improves. It changes, grows and shrinks and diverts from the original course. Creativity takes over and takes each demonstration in a new direction. Some don't land and the audience gets bored again, but some do. Those are pressed and pulled and reshaped into new things for a new day and the audience returns to see more.
None of it lasts though.
After the performance, only the memory of it remains. Only the stories told by those who saw and those who performed linger on in the aftermath. you had to be there.
A generation goes by, and the performance is barely a tale, not even a myth. Another and its gone.
Out of it, new art is born. Someone watched that show and wanted to do those things, make people smile, be centerstage and make something from nothing, but where the child grows the parent fades.
How many magicians worked crowds where not a single patron was an artist or a writer? Nothing recorded of their feats. How many circuses passed through a town with naught recorded of the wonders within the big tents before moving on.
There is a purity to the stage. Performers have one attempt to get things right, to land the joke or the trick for this audience, this singular entity before them. They don't get to touch up the canvas or redraft the words.
Good or bad, it’s gone after the moment passes.
All of this is.
But what isn't seen is the same for all mediums.
No matter how ethereal the performance, the practice remains. Endless pages of drivel and endless hours tossing clubs in the air before moving onto the performance torches. Art is lonely. Even communal, it is performed in public but it is lived alone, it is created alone. The performance isn't the work, everything before it is. That is what we all have in common.
It’s all ethereal: the juggling, the words, and the work. None of it lasts a moment beyond a lifetime.
Don't worry about your work lasting beyond your life. Nothing really does last beyond your life anyways. Eternity lives on faith. Faith can be good, but I prefer practice.
Art is not eternal, and practice is work. Practice rewards with those liminal moments which are most wonderful.
It doesn't matter if the band's CD sucks.
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Love ya!
Max