You do not have to be good

problems of art and being of service

On Christmas Eve, we always went to a party at my friend Simon’s house. Our parents were friends, along with the other back-to-the-land types who were typically educated, artists, liberals, ate hummus, carried NPR tote bags—it was sort of like an expat community in the middle of Appalachia.

Christmas Eve was the primary holiday of this expat family: First the arrivals, filling the vestibule with scarves and puddles of melted snow, then the cocktails and dips and cheeses, when we kids disappeared to Simon’s room to play, or if it was warm enough, ran outside to play Ghost in the Graveyard. Then dinner, a potluck smorgasbord of tremendous cultural breadth, but always including Yorkshire puddings, and Christmas party-favor crackers full of stale jokes and tissue paper crowns and tiny, choking-hazard toys. (The luckiest person, in my mind, was the one who got the fortune-telling fish made of red cellophane.) Then the weird public spectacle of presents—it was canon that everyone brought a gift for everyone, although you could always tell favorites because there would be an extra special green cashmere sweater thrown in with the default tin of biscotti. And somewhere, within all of that chaos, I would play violin.

At Simon’s house there was a long church pew in the entryway across from the furnace, which is where I would open my violin case and prepare to play Christmas carols. It was weird to step out of the party and suddenly feel that nervy pluck of the heart that came from waiting in the wings before walking out to play at recitals. Weird to feel like I was clocking in for a gig, no longer just another kid stealing yet another hamantaschen. In part because I had the sense people really didn’t care much to hear me play.

And I certainly didn’t—I hated Christmas carols. They were both sad and extremely boring to play. Christmas was a difficult holiday because it made my dad very depressed. There was a reason, an original very sad Christmas from his childhood, but I never knew what exactly had happened. So it felt like a volatile season to me, not really a happy one at all, and it didn’t help that almost every Christmas carol hid some sudden melodic minor twist.

One thing that’s funny about playing music is that the people who are listening to you can sometimes forget that you can see them, too. Almost like they think you’re playing behind the one-way glass of an interrogation room. And as a result, they can forget to guard their faces. Often, that’s a beautiful experience. But sometimes it gives you access to something you wish you didn’t know.

I remember clearly overhearing one of the other parents make some shitty little aside about how show-offy it was for me to play my violin like that. I remember watching her smirk as I played. And I remember feeling so angry—none of this was my idea, either. I didn’t want to play at the party. It felt weird and show-offy to me, too. But my parents, for their own reasons, wanted me to play. And like I said, I had clocked in. I wasn’t really being a kid anymore. The show must go on.

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Let’s throw ourselves forward thirty years into the present. I am a writer. I want the big microphone, I want a lot of people to connect with what I make, I want people to see the world that I see, because it is beautiful and unusual and much less despairing than the way it’s depicted most of the time. But also, when any of these opportunities to connect present themselves, I bolt. It feels like too much pressure. I work in fits toward presenting my work on a regular basis so that, you know, people who like what I do can find me.

But after a few days, I decide it’s too much. It isn’t authentic to myself. I don’t want to be a performing pony. And really, isn’t it true that the best writers detest performing-ponyhood? That’s right—I should devote more of my time to being cool. Seems like a more effective strategy. And the best way to be cool is to be inert and unbothered, AKA remote.

But here’s the thing: When there’s something you’re supposed to say, it hurts not to say it. It aches. You can pretend it doesn’t, give yourself a lot of busywork, bask in the approval of people who don’t know the first thing about you. That might sound grandiose, but I think it’s true. It’s like that line in the Gospel of Thomas: “If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.” I think you can die of not saying what is within you to say—it’ll just take a long time and look like a lot of random problems.

It looks like stasis, but there are tremendous currents of desire and fear pulling me in opposite directions. They’re just so evenly matched that I hover there between them, pulled in both directions and going nowhere.

Drafts of newsletters which I don’t finish begin to accumulate. I get fired up about something: minimalism can be a mask for cowardice! Here’s the time I played with an anarchist marching band outside the Eloy detention center in the middle of nowhere and realized that all the songs people really want to sing at a protest are actually love songs. Here’s a recipe I invented. Here’s what I think about social currency in the poetry world. But I stop myself: someone will probably want to start an argument about the semantics of “minimalism.” I’d better scratch the recipe because I’ve been eating plant-based for the last year, minus a few occasions when I ate a few eggs or a pastry with butter in it, but I’ve found that meat eaters get defensive even when I’m trying hard not to have a conversation about what I eat, and real vegans hate people like me so I’d better just keep that to myself. And social currency in the poetry world—go home, forget it, goodnight. The stakes are high: If I’m going to pole-vault over the distance between me and you, I need to be sure I can stick the landing. I can’t go in half-assed or unprepared. I have to bring out an ideal measure of beauty and justice in everything I write about, even in informal settings, because I need to get it right and make it good. Because somewhere in the space between us, I still see my friend’s mom rolling her eyes at another parent while I play Christmas carols I hate. (Playing at a demonstration outside a detention center—isn’t that a little show-offy?)

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I love my parents. And writing about parts of my childhood feels like the ultimate betrayal. Before I even say anything, I want to get out ahead of myself and tell you: They had to work hard to support us, and they supported us well. They had difficult childhoods. The world is a wheel that presses the same ideas into people over and over again. They are funny, brave people who did amazing things with what they were given.

But still. When they told me to play my violin at the stupid Christmas Eve party, they were asking me to clock in for a job that nobody can do.

In families, nobody takes you aside and says, “OK, here’s your job: You need to be extremely impressive and successful. You can steal cookies and eat yourself sick and indulge in arrogance and hide from the world as much as you want, you can black out from drinking every night, you can chain-smoke and be weirdly incapable of making a dentist appointment because taking care of yourself feels impossible, so long as you make everything look peachy on the outside. You need to validate the decisions made by your parents. You need to be the evidence that they were right. And if at any point this feels like too much to carry, you need to criticize yourself as a perfectionist.”

But that’s because nobody needs to say any of those things. You just know, because you feel it. It’s in the room. It’s a lesson hidden in the normal operation of reality. This is a fork, this is sunlight, this is a dog, this is an ancient shame we can never talk about under any circumstances forever for any reason.

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For the last few years, I’ve been trying to solve a series of riddles about myself: Why do I want so much to be seen, and also want so much to hide? Why do I sabotage opportunities to get my work out in the world while resenting the people who seem to make themselves visible effortlessly?

And for good measure, a few riddles about art in general: What makes a writer successful? How do you strike a balance between making art people will approach vs. making the art you want to make, even if it’s weird or alienating? Is the sizzle separate from the steak? Do artists need a message? How can writers market themselves without being weird sad thirsty ghost clowns? And so on.

I’ve made a lot of progress with these riddles. I’ve come to the conclusion that, much as it may seem that the best artists are just magically beloved by all, even in spite of their seeming disregard for self-promotion, they are successful because they have a concise, noteworthy, and appealing message. They’re willing to stand out and be themselves.

The idea of being of service sickens me. Which is too bad, because it is the underlying prescription of every spiritual path, every fucking one. And especially Alcoholics Anonymous. If you express so much as a crabby thought for a crabby moment, someone might just sidle up to you after the meeting and ask if you’re being of service. (Hint: You aren’t, bellyacher.) People rhapsodize about how much better their lives are now that they orient themselves toward meeting the needs of others in every moment of their day. I’ve always nodded along to this idea, but it makes me sad.

Back in Girlboss Hell, when I was trying to build a business and paying anybody I thought could help me, I brought this up at one of the coaching calls during a six-month mastermind. Our coach had made it clear: business was really about being of service. And if you wanted to have a good business, you had to figure out from the depths of your being how you wanted to give. So, in this zoom call of 150 people, I said: “When I ask myself what service I want to give, the answer I get is ‘no.’ I just don’t want to do it. It makes me mad.”

The coach said: “Everybody wants to be of service. What does your intuition say?”

I told her: “My intuition says: ‘fuck this.’”

She gave me some paint-by-numbers journal prompts to discover what my intuition was really saying about being of service, because “fuck this” was obviously not it. Just some mindset block I had to get over. I forget what she said after that because I was too embarrassed. Who is so selfish as to hate the idea of being of service? What kind of creep feels that way?

C’est moi, baby. Je’mapelle dirtbag.

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Which is not to say, by the way, that I’ve never been of service. To the contrary, I’ve done a lot of it. Given rides, stayed late, come early, listened, loaned money, loaned worry, given time, given ideas, baked cakes, decorated for public events, protested, marched, shared my experience, taught what I knew. Given the benefit of the doubt to people who didn’t deserve it. Given the time of day to people who didn’t deserve it. Maintained a standard of giving when I received less than I needed because that was what made me a good person. Believed others over myself. Adopted their judgments. I was, I think, 33 or 34 when I realized that my default assumption, in any disagreement, was that I must be wrong.

If you’re a child and you’re a part of a family system that desperately needs to hide something from itself, everyone in the family has a role to play. And by playing that role, you’re being of service—you are literally holding reality together for the adults around you.

I’m not suggesting that people do this knowingly, by the way. It is totally innocent. It seems like the best idea at the time. Etc. etc. And it still sucks.

But something interesting when I ask myself who in the whole world has been the most helpful to me, and for what.

Here’s a partial list: Mary Ruefle, for writing poems that disobeyed reality. Larry Levis, for writing poems that folded time into a box with a hidden magic inside. Denis Johnson, for writing stories in Jesus’ Son that feel like they take place in the world I live in sometimes, which can feel like a lonely and beautiful place. Madeline L’Engle for writing a cranky too-smart teenage girl who gets to be a hero. Noah Purifoy for the quality of attention in his sculptures, which make me want to be a better person. Wayne Shorter, for doing that whispery, feathery saxophone tone that is so cool. Eddie Hazel for the legendary “Maggot Brain” solo that destroys and re-creates the earth. Roberto Bolaño for seeing the sublime as a mysterious cloud towering over the desert. Alice Coltrane, for orchestral pentatonic riffs that tear the sky open. Liz Phair for singing with a voice that sounds like a voice and not a sexy velvet hat or something.

All of these people gave something to me by making what they made, in accordance to some weird inner rule about how it should be. If you had to look at them and ask yourself, is this person being of service? it probably would have looked like a no. Here’s Larry Levis walking in the dark to the University of Utah library to probably read something in an old book about Stalin. Here’s Noah Purifoy in the desert with a stack of cafeteria trays that he’s about to build into a roller coaster surrounding the a theater. Here’s Mary Ruefle in a cabin in the woods looking very closely at a bird eating one of the french fries she has left out. They are not teaching anything. They are not handing me a plate of beans and rice. They are not trying to solve my problems—if I exist to them at all, it is only as a hypothetical, and maybe not even then. They are not giving someone a midnight ride to the bus station (although from what I personally know of Mary Ruefle, she does indeed do such things with relish). But the parts that have helped me, that have reached through time and personally helped me be alive in a way I like, they were not conventional acts of service.

And this is also true of the people closest to me. My friends and loved ones help me in the conventional ways, but I really love them for being funny and particular, for doing what they want to do, for being tenacious. When I’m having a hard time with something, I am very seldom helped by a person who is trying to help. In fact, in my experience, “trying to help” type people are often trying to control more than anything else. Sadness offends them, so they must tell you to do yoga. Discomfort discomforts them, so they have to tell you that whatever you’re dealing with “isn’t a big deal.” That kind of help doesn’t help me nearly as much as hearing a friend’s story about their ongoing cold war with a co-worker or listening to them arpeggiate a chord in the next room.

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In 2018-19, I played trombone in the Mayday Marching Band, a loose (very) collection of instrumentalists who practiced under the Bloomfield Bridge Sunday afternoons and performed at protests and community events for free. It was an intense, amazing experience. A lot of the music was learned by ear, passed down by people, added onto and harmonized in slapdash fashion, changed and touched by every person who had ever played it. Some songs I learned off a post-it note where the trombone part was written by slide position with arrows to denote which air chamber.

That year, we were invited to play at the School of the Americas Watch in Nogales, a weeklong series of demonstrations and marches and teach-ins. It was a big deal, an honor and a challenge for a mostly white band to figure out how best to show up and participate in a way that was genuine and respectful and aware of the dynamic that we would bring to a Latin American solidarity organization. As such, we prepared mainly to play songs that were directly political and took our bearings off of Casa San Jose, which had invited us to be part of their delegation.

And while the topical content was welcome, what people wanted to hear most of all was love songs.

Love songs. Love songs.

We played Cielito Lindo and Cariñito most of all. Because when people are protesting, they are also finding a way to be together in a place. It’s easy to forget that the form of these things, the ultimate genre, is one of being together in a place. It is political in the most obvious way to play at a protest outside a detention center, it is an act of service to be there in the middle of the desert in the middle of the night facing a wall of—cops? correctional guards? both?—and get close enough that you can see the hands of people inside pressing up against the windows. And also, people need to sing a love song together to be there.

I love playing music, and especially trombone. Violin is the instrument I played because my parents wanted me to take lessons. Trombone is the instrument I picked up because it called to me. True story: I was supposed to play the trumpet instead, and at our school, there was a little ceremony where everyone who was going to begin learning an instrument in the 5th grade walked up to a table with all the instruments on it and picked up the one they had chosen. I forget why I was supposed to play the trumpet, but that was what had been suggested. At the last second I swerved and picked up the trombone instead.

Playing Christmas carols on the violin and playing Cariñito on the trombone, you could say they are both acts of service in some way. Both played by invitation or suggestion, to suit somebody’s need. But one of them comes from my whole heart, and one is an obligation.

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And that’s the thing—to me, the greatest forms of service don’t necessarily feel like they happen at the expense of anyone’s needs. I learned, somehow, that being good—being of service—meant doing something at the expense of your own needs.

And if that’s what it means to be good, my intuition was right: Fuck this.

It is too much to ask someone to give when they’re giving something that exhausts them to produce. Unlike love songs, silly poems, the things that when I give them, I end up on the other side having more to give.

This essay has just been an attempt to convince myself of this, because the message of being good and being selfless is everywhere in my world. And I don’t doubt that it works well for a lot of people, especially if the things that replenish their hearts also happen to resemble the kind of selflessness we’re supposed to cultivate.

But listen, if being good doesn’t replenish your heart, I want you to do whatever does. I want to be free, and I want to watch you be free. Because the service that my favorite artists give me is to demonstrate in the depth of ways possible: This is what it looks like to be free. This is what it sounds like.

It’s a love song.