professionalism

I had a very strange dream last night.

And not strange in the way my dreams are usually strange, with the megalomaniacal squirrels and the houses that are bigger on the inside than the outside and the unnaturally colored cats everywhere, watching and blinking.

This one was philosophically strange.

I dreamed that, many years ago, elisem had started an artists' commune somewhere in Europe (part of the dream seemed to think it was set in Greece, and part in East Germany, so I'm gonna go with somewhere in Europe), and at some point had left it to pursue other things--like ya do. (In this dream, Elise worked in textiles instead of metal, I assume to make things easier for my subconscious.) So she and I were traveling through Europe, unlikely though that seems, and we visited the commune.

It had changed, and not for the better. It was now being run as a sort of artists' retreat, and what they were teaching all these eager and malleable young artists was the value of professionalism.

No, that's not how it was. Excuse me.

PROFESSIONALISM

Like that.

Professionalism was what would make them real artists; professionalism was what would keep them going through the rejections and starving-in-a-garret and whatnot. Professionalism was the most important characteristic any artist could cultivate.

In the dream, I knew this was wrong. (Well, in the dream, I had a screaming hissy-fit, and told them all what they could do with themselves for sneering at Elise and me for not being "professional" enough and betraying the principles of the commune and art and all the rest of it. But never mind that.) And then I woke up, and lay there kind of blinking for a minute, and an hour later, I'm still kind of poking at it with a stick, going hmmm.

Because the thing is, I think professionalism is a valuable mindset to cultivate. I actually think artists (in all fields) have an obligation to cultivate it if they intend to inflict their art on anyone other than their family and close friends. And I think they make the rest of us look back when they insist on being prima donnas or woolly-minded oh I just do it for the love of it fruitbats or any of the thousand and one other "artistic" poses that people use as excuses when they don't want to behave like responsible adults.

Let's be clear. I'm not talking about money. I'm talking about the attitude with which you present your art to the world. I'm talking about people who assume that standard manuscript format doesn't apply to them, or who ignore submission guidelines because surely the editor/agent/grand panjandrum will see how Special they are.

If you want to play in a communal sandbox, you need to obey the sandbox's communal rules. If you don't want to play by the rules, that's your choice, but in that case, stick to your own sandbox where the rules can be whatever you want to make them. Let the rest of us get on with trying to play nicely together in as much peace as we can manage. Because it's a big sandbox, and there are a fuck of a lot of us in it, all clutching our little spades and buckets, and if we don't stick to a few basic rules together ... well, we've seen this movie, and it's The Lord of the Flies. And most of us, let's be honest, are Piggy.

So, given that that's my stance on the subject of professionalism, what on earth is my subconscious on about in this dream?

I think it's trying to talk about passion.

Because the ultimate professional, of course, is the hack, who will write/paint/dance/act anything, as long as the right kind of money is involved. Who lives and dies by "professionalism" because there's nothing else there.

And I fully support the right of the hack to earn a living. Laissez-faire capitalism saith, you gotta earn a buck somehow, and if hackery gives you what you need, more power to you.

But it's not who I want to be.

It's hard, if you write science fiction and/or fantasy and/or horror, to talk about your work in terms of art. Because the wider world is determined to see it as pulp. As the ultimate bastion of hackdom. (As opposed to the ultimate bastion of hackerdom, which one might argue it also is, on certain days and in certain lights.) SF isn't "serious" literature (witness the haste of certain "serious" authors to disassociate themselves from the vulgar words "science fiction"), and if you're serious about it ... well, you get the fishy look and the hairy eyeball and the blank incomprehension. It's so much easier to talk about it in economic terms, because everybody understands those. Laissez-faire capitalism, like I said.

Also, like P. T. Barnum said, There's one born every minute.

And it's always easier, always less threatening, to pretend you don't really care about your life's work. If you take the pose of the hack, no one looks at you like you've got a squid on your head. No one makes fun of you for being "too serious." No one condescends to you about these silly little things you've been childish enough to imagine are important.

"Professionalism," in other words, can be armor. Not the kind of professionalism I was talking about earlier, the responsibility to be an adult and abide by the rules, but the kind of professionalism that denies passion, that says, with a shrug, Well, it pays the bills. That despises its own audience for caring about these lies.

For isn't that what's at the bottom of it? That grim Puritan notion that fiction is lies and therefore unimportant? That if you care about the lies you tell ... well, at best you're a fool. At worst, you might be a witch--in the Puritan sense of one who consorts with the Devil. But also in the sense Bear and I talk about in this glass_cats post.

Because witches, like harpies, care. That's what makes them dangerous. They've found what's important, and they're telling the truth about it (even if through the medium of lies). And this makes the rest of us--who aren't sure we know what's important and are afraid of being laughed at if we try--uneasy.

How can you say that make-believe is important?

How can you say that it's not?

If you deny your heart often enough, sure enough, you'll turn it to stone. That's what the people in the dream were doing, in the name of professionalism: teaching artists to deny their hearts. And a stone heart can't be hurt.

But it can't dance, either.