Artists on Making Art  (other posts here, info/contributing here.)

Thoughts on Guilt

One of the first things I did when I arrived at the restive grounds of Mt. Tremper Arts was lay in a hammock for about forty-five minutes, while the passing clouds and a soporific breeze worked together with the sun's warmth to induce something close to but not entirely...sleep.

Yet even before I had laid my city-weary body upon the soft knots of the hammock, but after Chris (Schiavo, COC's visual director and my partner-in-residence) and I had driven out to Woodstock to pick up some groceries and also browse a flea market for oddities that might serve as properties for our opera, an emotion came up, cruelly paralyzing, to circumscribe an experience that I headed into with an openness of mind and spirit: Guilt.

Guilt's parasitic presence within the creative process is a prickly secret some other artists may relate to.

I think most people who know me would consider me to be on the productive end of human ambition, in terms of my various methods of artistic activity; be it writing (words or pitches), volunteering or performing (often one and the same), conversing (forget not the constructive value of discourse; it serves to give shape to a world that blindly happens to us), or attending any number of cultural activities. Nevertheless, I suffer guilt constantly for not using what little time I have daily to make art to make art.

So it's probably natural (for me) that, given five days virtually free from the obligations of city-life, I might begin to feel anxious (a result of guilt) that, already a few hours into the first day, I hadn't done an ounce of "work" aside from purchase a pair of red plastic sunglasses (which may or may not be used as costume in the  final product; see here) and a box of British vocabulary flash cards from, it seems, the 50s, which seemed like something we could make something else out of. Not exactly prolific, virtuosic, nor rigorous productivity; all things I assume to value in work.

To save the time (and length), I will spare meditating too much on the origins of my guilt. I will also withhold over-describing the sensations guilt produces. Nor will I explicate the fallacious and always bankrupt prescriptions guilt serves to the susceptible creative spirit.

More importantly, though, to eschew these things is also to avoid justifying guilt as something worthy of being rationalized, worked out, weighed, and ultimately, established as necessary to the act of creation.

My ultimate regard for guilt is that it is above all else a fatal hindrance to thought and to action.

However, in its place, I would like to count as necessary to art making those things that guilt proposes to negate; rest, sustenance (culinary, intellectual, spiritual), space, time, comfort, ease, attention, health, conversation, movement, freedom (from "should", from over analysis, to change one's mind ((multiple times, if necessary)), to let something brew, to be fiercely obsessive or to be unconcerned), and, perhaps the first thing that vaporizes when the call of guilt sounds its menacing horn: Pleasure.

Now, so much as one can harness guilt as a tool for positive motivation, then I suppose guilt might serve some constructive purpose. But guilt is one of the dark forces that often have their own agendas, and, untamed, wreak havoc on confidence and generosity of spirit, both which, as far as I can estimate, are vital to making great work.

For these five days (a good portion of the last of which I am spending riding a bus back to New York City), I managed to wage a largely successful battle against my own guilt, and much good work came, despite guilt's trepidation about my wanting to go running in the middle of the day, or at the end of an evening watching episodes of The Simpsons and Family Guy on Hulu, or taking an hour in the afternoon to read some Sontag (everyone needs to read "What's Happening in America" (1966), like now), or reading online news or checking email when service was good in the studio (ok, I may have looked at a little online porn), or hourly distracting myself from work with snacking, doing pirouettes in the studio, showering, lying down on the floor, singing along with YouTube recordings of Palestrina's "Sicut cervus", or from my makeshift desk, just staring out the window at that idyllic view across the lawn, over the house and out toward the verdant slope of the mountain that rises and rolls like a quiet, forested wave against the sky.

Like any secret, guilt's power is reduced (if not entirely released) with admission, which is what I did when, after Aynsley asked me to offer a piece of writing for the MTA blog, I suggested that I would write about how guilty I felt for lying in the hammock on that first day. (Aynsley had spotted me, and kindly told me she supported the choice, but, being seen had only turned my private guilt to public shame.)

Thinking now about the opera we're making--no less ambitious than a contemporization/adaptation of The Scarlet Letter (we're calling it "Scarlet Fever": Please come see it!)--it's auspicious that one of the central characters, Arthur Dimsdale, is made terminally ill from guilt; from a secret he fails to show forth in order to receive, we assume, the salvational rewards of confession.

I was glad to have confessed to Aynsley my guilt (thus transcending shame) for taking that priceless (some may say “well earned”) nap in the hammock.

But who will I confess to, back in the city, where the only watchful eye over my daily habits is the one inside my mind; the one that conspires hand in hand with guilt when I'm tired, and overcommitted, and I just need to lie down in front of the Tennis Channel for a few hours?

It's difficult to say.  But I might do good to follow this advice if, and when, guilt shines its violating glare upon the moments when I try to mark out for myself those precious pleasures mentioned above that are at guilt's constant judgment: If guilt cannot be reasoned with,—be merciless: kill it.

RYAN TRACY is a composer, performer and writer.  He holds degrees in music from Mannes College of Music and Chapman University, and has fulfilled residencies at the Corporation of Yaddo and The Edward Albee Foundation. He is the founder of the opera ensemble Collective Opera Company, and the arts criticism website countercriticritic.com. Ryan has also contributed to the Brooklyn Rail and The New York Press.