Have you ever felt like a broken accordion sometimes? Like life has stretched you as far as you think it possibly can, and like you could do with some time to shrink back and be very small for a while, but, no! — something (or more likely, someone) pops up and demands that you stretch yourself eeeeeeeeven fuuuuuuuuurther in order to fit in with their priorities, and so you do, and then at some point, the pleats in your concertina suddenly SNAP, just like they’d been warning you they would if you pushed them too hard?
George Carlin, the stand-up comedian, actor and author, was interviewed for Playboy in 1982, and said this:
“It’s the American view that everything has to keep climbing: productivity, profits, even comedy. No time for reflection. No time to contract before another expansion. No time to grow up. No time to fuck up. No time to learn from your mistakes. But that notion goes against nature, which is cyclical.”
The bold type, as usual, is my emphasis, because that’s the bit I’m really intrigued about. (The core of this quote first came to my notice in Austin Kleon’s Keep Going and I wanted to find out more about its context. The bulk of the Playboy article is taken up by Carlin being asked AT GREAT LENGTH about his years of substance abuse, and eventually, I got so bored that I stopped reading, so if the interview swings back onto something more interesting, I’m afraid I’ll never know.)
Contraction and expansion are parts of the same process. I’m no physicist, but even I know that much; you can’t have one without the other. (I think this is Isaac Newton’s equal and opposite reaction stuff, isn’t it?) But if something only ever contracts, it will eventually implode on itself, or else just come to a dead stop. If something only ever expands, it will inevitably tear itself apart. The natural pattern, the only functional sequence, is a continual shift between periods of expansion and periods of contraction. This is, after all, the basis on which an accordion manages to play music under our touch.
However, all forms of industrialised cultural activity, and any creative practice which places too much emphasis on what other people think and not enough emphasis on what YOU think, is skewed massively towards expansion, and only towards expansion. “Produce more! Do multiple things at once! Promote more! Post more! Employ more! Sell more! Earn more! Output! Output! OUTPUT!” Without fail, the more of this you do, the worse your art becomes. And the likely response is for you to feel that you have to work even harder to fix the problem. A problem you have, ultimately, chosen to impose on yourself. A problem which did not and does not need to exist.
Unrelieved expansion drains joy, depletes energy, erodes dignity. It makes you resent making art. It makes you hate your art. It makes you hate other people because you blame them for making you keep expanding. Eventually, when you’ve gone past hating your art and everyone else, it makes you end up hating yourself.
It’s widely known that the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister takes a sabbatical every seven years. That’s a noble achievement. It’s also a luxury most of us simply can’t afford. But it needn’t be all or nothing. I strongly suspect everyone would be able to take some amount of time off their treadmill, whether they’re in full-time or part-time employment or whether they’re a freelancer. It brings us back to the old chestnut of “In order to say yes to something, you have to say no to something else”. It can be hard, no doubt. But any kind of creative career or practice means reconciling yourself to some degree of sacrifice, compromise, going without. I honestly don’t think there’s any other way to do it. (If there is, PLEASE show me.)
So, what it boils down to is this: CHOOSE YOUR HARD.
Earn more, and be less creative? Or earn less, and be more creative?
Be creative, but only in the service of paying clients? Or be creative for yourself, even if nobody’s buying what you’re making (or if it’s never monetised in the first place)?
Make the work someone else tells you to make? Or make the work you want to make?
Choose your hard, and once you’ve chosen… well, then, you just have to get on with it — WITHOUT COMPLAINING. (Here, once again, is Sandra Hüller bollocking her husband in Anatomy of a Fall to remind you that you can’t treat yourself like a victim of your own choices.)
As a little bit of bonus content, here’s Grace Jones with I’ve Seen That Face Before which draws on Argentine composer and musician Astor Piazzolla’s magnificent Libertango. Strictly speaking, I think he played the bandoneon rather than the accordion, but I also think it’s okay to stretch the point, no pun intended…
