Cringe and Creativity

Part Four: Art and Freedom from Sartre's "Hell"

If you’ve been in a bookstore or an airport lately, you’ve probably seen Rick Rubin’s best-selling The Creative Act: A Way of Being. It’s a book about living a creative life, and it’s thick on pages but thin on words, it reads like lyric sheets, which shouldn’t surprise any reader, given the source.

Rubin’s book is constructed in wandering loops and mindful silences, rambles and riffs followed by attempted-koans. And I like it. I find the book a little “woo” (one of my students politely described its viewpoint as (searching pause) “romantic…” and I thought, this woman has a future in diplomacy!), but I still think it’s one of the best books on creativity I’ve read. And I’ve read a lot. Or I’ve tried to read a lot.

“Tried” because most books on creativity piss me off, usually within a few dozen pages, and I put them down. It’s rarely the research described or the theories proposed that piss me off — it’s the tone, the defensive, wincing tone. Authors publish whole books on Creativity yet seem embarrassed to take on the subject: they deploy excuses and defenses of why this is even something a serious person should seriously consider. They defend creativity from accusations of “woo.”

Then they surgically excise the “woo” — the otherwise brilliant Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi limited his study only to people with enduring social acclaim and material success. Why? Because if you do weird stuff and aren’t wildly successful from it, that’s not creativity, that’s just embarrassing? — Or at least it’s beneath the realm of serious study? At which point I say, screw you¹, Cheek-sent-me-ha-yee! (I’ve been practicing.) Most creativity garners zero acclaim or wealth, and that’s the real stuff, bro.

The psychologists and authors who take on this subject have a choice between writing something truer but a little “woo” or something un-woo-ified but therefore less true.

Creativity isn’t all “woo,” but it’s some “woo,” and if we try to pretend the “woo” ain’t there, we’re missing something essential — we’re missing the naked and try-hard fact of who we creative people are and why we do what we do — even despite the disapproval of society, or despite experiencing material cost, rather than gain.

Another word for this “woo” is “cringe.” I’ve been thinking about the word “cringe” lately, attuned to its uses in the wild. (I work on a college campus so that’s not hard.)

As a Gen-Xer listening to Gen-Zer speech, it seems to me that the use-cases for “cringe” in the early 2020s are exactly the same as the use-cases for “gay” in the early 1990s, when “that’s so gay” was basic shade, and Kurt Cobain sang “what else could I say? Everyone is gay.²”

“Cringe” is the new “gay” — minus the (assumed) deprecation of all gay people.

Both 1990s-“gay” and 2020’s-“cringe” indicate 1) the object is derided and 2) that the object is “embarrassing” in some way. Because the early 1990s was such a homophobic era, the most embarrassing thing you could be was “gay.” Today, being gay is totally great for most people (thank goodness), but the coolness police still need a label to describe that certain flavor of embarrassingly un-cool trying-hard-without-regard-to-social bounds, which back in the bad-old-days they called “gay,” and so today we have “cringe” — picture a next-gen-Cobain singing, “what else can I sing? Everyone is cringe.”

Not all creativity is called cringe, but a lot of what is called “cringe” is just what it takes to live creatively: you aren’t even thinking about the coolness police, you’re just making and being “because thinking and beauty and truth” and it’s so real that, even in an age that claims to celebrate “authenticity,” everyone turns bright red, cries Cringe! and lets loose the dogs of shame.³

The least-bad non-woo book on Creativity I’ve found is Wired to Create by Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire. It’s a collaboration between a psychologist (him) and a HuffPo author (her), and it’s based on an internet article they wrote together that went viral — a feature that perhaps freed them from including pages of exuses and defenses? Other books on Creativity written by famous psychologists or biologists excise the woo, and this book doesn’t quite embrace the woo at Rick Rubin levels, but it definitely Lets the Woo Shine In, and Faces it with a Grin! :D

Wired to Create actually draws heavily from the very books that pissed me off, but it’s written with a tone that assumes from the start that creativity is worthy of discussion. They pulled the diamonds from the dung-heaps and allowed a little “cringe” or “woo” to slip in the door. You can say it’s just “popularized for a wider audience,” but tone matters: tone is the difference between a cringe and a grin! Perhaps because Kaufman and Gregoire’s popularization⁴ doesn’t need to appease an academic committee, it shows a more-true vision of what Creativity really is. It also helps us understand something more.

The most-watched TED Talk of all time is Do Schools Kill Creativity by Sir (also sadly deceased) Ken Robinson, who argues that we’re all born with this spark of creativity and that schools extinguish that spark by stigmatizing failure.

Here’s a truth about being creative: you will fail and fail and fail, and if you can’t enjoy, gain from, or at least tolerate failing, you’ll probably stop creating. But the good news is that most failures are actually pretty enjoyable — Bad stories are still fun to write! Bad drawings are still fun to make! Bad songs are still fun to sing! Bad dances are still fun to dance! So you are motivated to continue making things even if your attempts aren’t great… at least until some other person comes along and makes it terrible for you. Yes, Hell (for Creatives) IS Other People, espeically if those people are judgy, like, oh, I don’t know, The Coolness Police, or A Rubric, or Authorities who Demand Conformity. Which describes a lot of: “School.”

Ten years ago, I had this exuberantly creative and talented student who’d made this insane boundary-pushing music video. It appeared to be a single take, featured his grandparents (who raised him) as the camera crew (visible in mirrors), showed set construction and destruction in real time, and was a high speeed, high fidelity, so-tactile-you-could-smell-it rage-choreography thru his family home during which he donned a dress and lipstick and utterly transformed. He showed it to the class and they all cringed — the music video was excellent, technically near-perfect and passionate, it was art, but it was also outside of the bounds of the current cultural language the audience knew: they couldn’t say it was like this or like that because it was like nothing they’d seen before; it was stunningly original. After class, I kind of shrugged and said, hey, if you’re gonna make art you kinda gotta have a “fuck you” attitude and just keep making, and he glanced up in surprise: “that’s exactly it” he said, “I’ve always had to have a ‘fuck you’ attitude — to survive.”

But the larger society is afraid of the “fuck you” attitude and they’re afraid of the stunningly original, and they’re afraid of anything that hasn’t already been culturally stamped and approved as “worthy” or “cool” or at least “celebrated” or “celebrated by a subculture” or, in especially nasty cases, “approved by tribalized subgroup and therefore hailed and defended as a sign of allegiance.” People fear what they can’t identify, what flies outside the social order, and what people fear makes them cringe, because they don’t know whether they’ll garner social approval or disapproval for their individual approval or disapproval. What a pickle! The position of the artist is socially harsher, tho: it isn’t about what you boo’d or clapped for, it’s what you made.

JE Petersen at Dispatches from Inner Space wrote a piece called “Is ADD a Scam?” in which he suggested re-categorizing people who might be diagnosed with ADHD as “polyfocal” (as opposed to “monofocal”). “Polyfocal” he proposed, is a state of mind defined by “the tendency to divide one's attention between multiple interests at a time,” and he asked his readers, “how can a polyfocal person take advantage of the advantages of polyfocalism? BECAUSE IT IS NOT OBVIOUS.”

My reply (in part) was focused on the “social metronome” or,

…the degree to which we internalize the "social metronome" that's always clicking way too fast.

If you can resist the beat, if you are arrogant, bull-headed, and self-directed, being "polyfocal" doesn't feel bad. It feels awesome. It means your mind is always making new connections and seeing new possibilities. It means you can see the details and the universe at once. It means you jump on ideas when you have them and you discover old ideas you half-finished just lying around. Life is a garden of wonder and delight.

Wonder and delight, IF you're a resistant, arrogant, bull-headed, self-directed polyfocal -- if you're more conformist, if your self-esteem is wobbly, if you like to go with the flow, if you prefer to follow rather than lead, then it looks to me like it must be hell. And I can completely understand why someone would complain.

But I'd still recommend resisting the external forces, following your own mind, believing in your genius, and cutting against the tide. It's more fun.

This against-the-grain way of thinking and being is what Rick Rubin writes about, and since Rubin has mostly worked with musicians who have had social and material success and find themselves pressured by media, fans, and business interests, ie: judgy coolness police, conformity-enforcers, prize and punishment-weilding authorities, all the things that cringe, he leans heavily into the woo. He works with artists who are stuck, who have lost touch with who and what they need to be to create, not because they’ve failed at anything, but because they succeeded at something that has nothing to do with creativity: they’re stuck because of material and social success.

In other words, social approval and material gain are not signs of exceptionally “pure” or “strong” creativity, they are just outside forces that creatives might end up having to push against, forces that make it harder to continue living creatively. If someone continues to innovate and create despite social approval and material gain, it’s a sign of the strength of their ability to shut that noise out.

The ability to shut noise out is what those with ADHD are said to lack.

Now in my response to Petersen, I called this ability “arrogance” — in his reply, that was the only word he quibbled with. But I think “confidence” undersells it. An artist stands up against social pressures small and large, local and global, and chooses to live for things not because the systems of the world have a place and a purpose for them where they may reap rewards, but just because they’re true and beautiful. I don’t know. To me, that’s arrogant. Big ballsy beautiful arrogance. I wouldn’t be here without it.

Rubin works to reconnect artists with why they are really doing this, which has nothing to do with social and material success. Repeat: nothing. To help artists get back to the creative space, he says out loud (on the page) the “woo” stuff: that we connect with the universe and speak for a consciousness beyond understanding.

“Connecting with the universe” will, at the very least, improve the odds of dis-connecting from social and material pressures — shut it out.

a couple of Rick Rubin’s pages I found online

So what is the relationship between creativity, “cringe,” and ADHD?

We are born with creativity, and “cringe” is the (current) shame-word for creativity running free, outside social (shame or acclaim) and material (want or wealth) levers of control.

At this point, things can go in a few directions, along a continuum-like landscape, which I have diagrammed here very scientifically:

From best to worst case scenarios (middle out) on the Very Scientific Diagram:

• the creative person cultivates a “fuck you” attitude, or becomes “arrogant” or “bull-headed” and carries on in the face of whatever, freak-flag flying

• the creative person keeps their work true but secret, “underground,” safe and unknown, or known only by a trusted few, freak-flag furled

• the creative person tries to bend their creativity to please others, chasing approval, good grades, praise, likes, views, and so on, fandom-flag flying

• the creative person forgets themselves and uses their creativity-born talents to make “commercial” art/music/copy, or finds another lower-risk route to social approval and material gain, serious judgy adult flag flying

• the creative person tries to forget themselves but can’t, their mind refuses to conform, and someone tells them they’re “broken” and that they need drugs so they’ll act “normal.” This is the path of diagnosed non-neuro-typicality (NNT). The NNT person is in a delicate and dire place: with or without drugs (up to them), whether or not they embrace the label (up to them) they need to believe in themselves, they need confidence to the point of arrogance, they need to shut out the stupid judgy gibbering outside world, and embrace the pace and rhythm of their inner world, allowing the wildness of their NNT mind to not only be uncaged but befriended. If they succeed they could easily find themselves living the best-case-scenario. If they fail to find their confidence/arrogance, they may end up forever begging forgiveness for the only them they could ever be; I consider this loss to all the world, a needless human tragedy.

• the creative person forgets themselves successfully and coasts through life with “normal” levels of social approval and material success, and a gnawing emptiness inside which expresses itself thru nastiness to service workers / internet trolling / pinching babies / kicking cats / raising thru the ranks of bitterness to become the Chief of the Cringe Police and the Standard Bearer of the Conformity Enforcers

Obviously that second-to-last (the Gingerbread Man) is where ADHD (but not just ADHD) comes into play. To have an unusual mind can be a great gift. Even if you need, or choose, medication, the gift is still there — adderall can’t take it away. A little bit of detachment from the social and material worlds, that’s all you need: a bit of arrogance and ownership over the playground of your mind. Detach when they cringe, detach when they clap. Care less, way less. Whether they pay you or charge you, contemplate what is given or taken in solitude, and laugh, because it’s all a great cosmic game in the end. And the views on this ride are amazing, the things you will see, as you chug towards the many destinations of your multi-track mind.

Edit/Added: a reader sent me this wonderful interview with Rick Rubin — I just listened to it while drawing dopey pictures in my sketchbook and I highly recommend! (both listening to the interview, and drawing dopey pictures :D )

1. In all seriousness, I love this man, and he died a couple years ago, so I have to add: his life story and his whole (positive!) perspective on psychology are both astonishing and valuable and beautiful (life story also a little horrifying, but he somehow makes it into beautiful), and his book Flow is one of my favorites of all time.

2. I think the song reads differently in hindsight, but in its time the line was more dismissive than a gender-rebel’s call for sexual liberation.

3. "To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up" - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900, Totes Gay)

4. I should point out that the reason I found this book is because a student who’d taken a course at my University in the Psychology of Creativity had been assigned it — she shared the syllabus with me, and it was the $8 text assigned alongside an $80 text (which I did not buy). This is just to say: Kaufman and Grigoire’s Wired to Create is not academic, but it is also not anathema to the academic world.