At the end of this last May, I left what I have no doubt loved most in this world, which was being an elementary school teacher. Working with those kids taught me and changed me in ways far past what I am able to put into words, and these lessons from my greatest teachers will surely come up often. I decided not to come back next school year because (among other reasons) something has been pulling me for a while to spend time with music. That force is outside of my current understanding, but as much as I loved my job, I had to follow it.

Now, was this a stupid idea? People have asked me a nicer version, which has been something like: “so… what are you going to do now?” I’m starting to get a mouthful-of-mints kind of feeling the more I get this, but I can appreciate the concern that often lives in it. Once you strip away the career-language from all this, though, the real answer is just:

‘I’m going to spend time with music.’ And under that is really: ‘I want to follow the paths that music uncovers within me.’

My answers, I am seeing, don’t have much to do with the logistics of “making a living” or “being successful.” I think these goals exist according to the rules of a game that tends to lavish a few and starve a whole lot more, and which pushes us to fight over crumbs that are becoming smaller and smaller over time. Apparently, competition is the name of the game, and in my current position, this entails something many are reluctant to do: self-marketing. I am about to launch my artist website and with it, the picture, the bio, and… the artist statement™?

The cringe is old news, but whether someone is doing the “no, look at me!” thing to survive or because they seem to actually believe they are a cut above the rest, ‘this is not what making art is about!’ On what authority do I make this claim? None! And who am I to decide what is and isn’t art? Nobody! “Art” is a definition some of us assign to some things and not others, and different cultures and eras do and did that differently (if at all). To me, “art” has become a nothing-word, and I think people use it to describe a very narrow snapshot of what living is. Whether someone is playing a three-chord song in a Walmart parking lot in Carlsbad, New Mexico or presenting some insufferable edgelord installation at a gallery in the Lower East Side of NYC, they are participating in this individual-collective process of being and becoming. As far as what’s art or not, isn’t the difference really just clout?

This is all to say that I’ve really never been a good candidate for the self-marketing game, and I think I might be becoming worse. By this point, I can’t even tell you what I think “art” is, let alone what is “good” art, and definitely not why my art is special-er than the rest. The other day, someone asked me “what if AI makes better music than you?” Well, first decide on what parameters you’re using to define “better”… and then I’ll do whatever I was going to do anyways, regardless of the judgment. And I couldn’t even tell you why.

Either I’m flunking the class, or maybe there’s something up with the questions themselves.

Midnight,
No waves, no wind,
The empty boat is flooded with moonlight.

– Eihei Dōgen

Over this last month, I walked silently for hours and hours with the questions: “why make art?” and then ultimately “why do anything at all?” But those “why’s” were mixed with inbred values of accumulation and achievement. In the attentive moments I managed to listen past them, I was left with just an ‘empty boat.’ Well, it felt more like I was in a boat and spent the month throwing old maps overboard. So, where to next? It reminds me of something I read recently:

This man loved his stillness, and I am coming to love it, too. But “the only reality is silence” is definitely a pretty buzzkill answer to “so Mathias, what are you up to these days?” It’s also pretty atrocious for a musician’s artist statement. And the whole ‘the universe is devoid of any meaning’ thing could easily (at least based on my first read of existentialism) lead someone to “we should just give up then!” The issue is that, as my boat has been getting emptier and emptier of old motives, I have been playing more music, not less.

In another time in my life, I would’ve answered the question “what are you going to do now?” with “I’m going to be a a musician,” and I would’ve meant a “successful” one and all the baggage that comes with that. I would’ve answered “why make music?” with something like “to change people’s hearts,” and I would’ve meant “get people to be kinder” and with that the looming fantasy of “saving the world.”

I don’t think these are necessarily bad reasons, but none of them have been able to withstand the constant erosion of living. They’ve turned out to be more like sandcastles on the shore of an endless sea of mystery. And to stay attached to them would have been to fight against the unrelenting tide. It’s analogous with Vine Deloria Jr.’s analysis of Christianity in God is Red— that the idea of a higher, better, and more godly world separate from this one is at irreconcilable odds with living harmoniously and meaningfully with the earth as it is. The question I am left with is, then:

What does a “successful” music career, “good art,” heaven, hell, or “saving the world” have to do with life as it is in our bones at this moment?

My former students taught me, by their being, to trade abstract notions like those for presence. When a young person is looking up at you, listening to you, or sharing something with you, being a loving presence is pretty high up on (if not, at the top of) the list of responsible pedagogical practices. That is, at least, what I was immediately compelled to believe. “Saving the world,” for example, is a grandiose but paper-thin concept, and authentically navigating a deep interaction with another person is ocean-like and bewildering. Said a different way, one activity is love, the other is an achievement: a living, talking person contrasted against a golden statue of one.

Or maybe, contrasted against a gold-plated, formaldehyde-encased one. This is The Golden Calf by Damien Hirst, sold in 2008 for ~$18.6 million. Forgive us, Dorothy!

On the last day of that job, when the last kid walked out and the door closed behind them, I remember feeling such a full silence, a living emptiness. Emil Cioran might call this “the silence of [someone] who has said everything [they] need to say.” In those final moments, I kept thinking of a line from Farid ud-Din Attar’s Conference of the Birds: “the fruit of love’s great tree is poverty, whoever knows this knows humility.” Ironic, too, because it is now July, and I have definitely not figured out how I’m going to make a living with all this. The savings will run out quite soon, and I don’t even have an artist statement™!

But “poverty” as Attar uses it has other connotations than what we might think of today. Watching the sea erode all my old sandcastles (musical “success,” “saving the world,” etc.), the meanings over which I thought I had control— this made impermanence feel like an enemy. But in watching those kids leave, painful as it was, that impermanence felt different. Though in both instances no sandcastles endured forever, in one I was caught up in what I lost and now lacked, and in the other I could listen to the voice of the ocean, singing my grief, my joy, and much more that was beyond my understanding. What a beautiful bewilderment.

It’s hard to come back from that to trying to think up things like artist statements and getting bookings. A friend of mine said it best the other day: “none of this is about me but I have to pretend that it is.” So, in lieu of artist statements— and given the endless expanse of mystery one fragile degree away from all those kinds of concerns— I think that, for now, asking questions seems like a worthwhile way to explore the edge of that endlessness.

So, that’s what I’ll do.

---

Questions for you!

(Feel free to partake in any or none)

Q4U #1:
Do you have an “artist statement” that doesn’t make you want to throw up in your mouth when you say it out loud? If so (or not), what is it?

Q4U #2:
What do you think of Cioran’s statement that “the only reality is silence?”

Q4U #3:
How would you answer the question “what if AI makes better art than you?”

Prompt 4U #1:
Make something so unoriginal that it horseshoes around to being kind of interesting.

Thanks for reading, and find more like this on my Substack, Fugaz!