defining ourselves by time
reflections on the ever-changing perceptions of creative work in relation to time, intention, and success
There’s a song on the album So Much for Stardust by Fall Out Boy titled “What a Time to Be Alive” that I’ve been thinking about lately. In an interview, bassist Pete Wentz explained that the song, written by lead singer Patrick Stump, is about how humans are always thinking about how the present will be retroactively viewed by the future.
Ironically, I was watching this interview after binging tons of interviews with alternative rock (often dubbed “emo”) bands in the early 2000s. I had recently developed an obsession with learning all I could about the music scene in the 1990s and 2000s. One part of this history (and it’s strange that it’s already considered history because most of these bands are still around, or at least the band members are) that’s fascinating is the way online blogging and social platforms like Livejournal and MySpace have been sort of immortalized.
There’s the saying that you can never truly delete anything you post online, and that definitely proves true as online archivists have detailed the rise and origins of bands like Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance with collections of grainy concert videos, vlogs, and interviews.
But the preservation of this type of history, stories told by artists that have become part of a larger mythology, isn’t new. Take the way personal accounts of famous artists and writers have become Penguin Classics books.
Van Gogh’s letters to and from his brother and various other artistic correspondents in the late 1800s were published by Theo’s wife, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger in 1914 after his death. Emily Dickinson wanted her letters destroyed, but her correspondence, dating from as early as 1842 to as late as 1886, still lives on.
These people likely didn’t expect anybody other than themselves and the recipient of their letters to read the stories. It appears that nothing is really safe from the prying eyes of the public as some writers’ journals have been published too, like Keith Haring’s journals and Sylvia Plath’s journals from the 1980s. All these documents, intended to be private, have been read by thousands of strangers over a century later.
Thus, there’s a certain type of privacy artists and writers are denied, especially after their death. Because these creatives often put so much of themselves into their work, in a way, the public and perhaps history itself see it as an invitation to let themselves in on artists’ personal lives.
When I first started writing, I had been fiercely protective of my own work. I’ve always been a shy kid, but even as I’ve become slightly more outgoing, I’m still stubbornly defensive of a lot of what I write. I want to curl up like an armadillo, grubby arms and legs around my words and hard-shelled back to the world.
On reflecting on the death of my first guitar, I wrote “It’s a strange feeling to produce a creative work and know that at the end of the day, I might be the only person to ever see it.” That sentiment is elevated whenever I think about how all these creatives—musicians, artists, writers—have had their work defined by time.
Still, there’s also an undeniable power to having others recognize your work. Especially in an era where it’s normal to share everything online, fame is often conflated with being successful and talented. A part of me feels that pressure, especially when so many people around my age and younger than me gain recognition for their creative work while I’m still happy if just one or two people take the time out of their day to read what I write.
For a person in their early 20s, I feel oddly existential all the time, though I suppose that isn’t too unique for people of my generation. I try to grapple with the inevitability of both myself and my work becoming a victim of time. I wonder if I’ll ever look back at this time and be burdened by regret.
“What a Time to Be Alive” ends the same way it started—with the lyric, “Sometimes you wonder if we’re ever lookin’ back.” The cyclical nature of the song is a stark reminder that we’re fated to always think about our present is soon to become the past and how the story of our lives, perhaps immortalized by internet artifacts, is doomed to become colored by nostalgia or disgrace.
If that is indeed the case, then maybe it’s better that I stay balled up and tightly secretive. Yet, I still unfurl and let the time pass.