笔日札记
The experience of doing this PhD has made working with the visual increasingly harder. It appears to be a few factors, as listed below:
- time
- energy
- self-questioning
A PhD journey is first and foremost a forceful gesture of will to undertake an experience which lasts four years if not more. One hypothesis was that since given time, a PhD is not necessary, with accessibility of resources online, in addition to the availability of public libraries.
Time, I have to argue, has long been historically misunderstood. Linearly, time progresses and counts as 86,400 seconds a day. Yet one would soon, if one ever undertakes a creative journey that requires intense intellectual labor, find that time either suffices not or ends up evidence of one's incapability of producing work.
In the case of Zarathustra, Nietzsche took around ten days each to finish the first three major parts of the book. The actual writing lasted as short as such an unimaginable timeframe. Should we say that a month's worth of time, if offered to anyone who is literate and able to hold a pen, would allow them to generate works as transforming and fundamental as Zarathustra? I dare to doubt such a crude utilitarian point of view.
The second important point is energy. It appears to me increasingly underappreciated how people spend energy to take care of themselves. There is taking and giving. The act of one-directionally sucking up the energies seems unsustainable and self-destructive. The current art education scene on a global scale should put more effort into building a sustainable career for artists not through the capital aspect, but their mental health.
The aforementioned two points, however, could at least be eased from stress with enough material support. Yet I am worried that the most critical issue most young artists are facing is the constant self-questioning. In an essay written by Marilyn Barnett (Barnett, “What Brings You Here?”), the author summarized that a key motive to drive people into the industry of therapy is not purely altruistic. Instead, the drive of narcissism surfaces clearly.
It is hard to judge without thorough study how the factor of self-orientalizing narcissism has been either widespread in our industry of creativity. If the readers allow, my hypothesis stands that it is impossible for a purely non-narcissistic person to dive into writing or art creation. Deep inside, there exists a strong motive to support themselves, which relates to their self-value or self-esteem.
I do not intend to conclude anything from this text. It purely serves as a small documentation of thoughts.
