One morning two and a half years ago, I found myself on all fours on my bathroom floor, my heart pounding in my ears as I prepared to throw up in my toilet. Nothing would come, so I struggled to get back to my feet. What I saw as I stood took me aback: a shaggy-haired, wide-eyed, frightened mess of a creature. It met my eyes in the mirror and the fear in the creature’s eyes only grew when I realized it was me.
I’m expecting this one to pour out of me. Or, at least I desperately hope it will. Compared to the past two summers — plus all the semesters between them and this summer — my commitment to writing has been wavering. Rather, I think my commitment has been to a great many things beyond writing: my work, my loved ones, my peace of mind. My relationship with those three things and more was fraught, to say the least, when I began writing for The Michigan Daily. Now it isn’t. So is there a point to what I’m doing now?
Author Martha Hinds once said, “On critique — those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. Those who can’t do or teach, criticize.” For the life of me, I cannot find any other work or context surrounding her or the quote (besides more quotes, which leads me to question Goodreads’s quote veracity). I’ve seen some manner of it repeated ad nauseam across a great range of discursive spaces, and I wonder for a second if there’s merit to it. Do my current internship creating educational resources and my new cover band with my friends drive all thoughts of critique out of my head? I mean, no, especially not the way criticism is broadly defined — not as simply plucking negative aspects of works to scrutinize, but to evaluating art as a whole and extracting meaning.
The definition of art I most appreciate is something with no intrinsic utility. If a pot is made on a pottery wheel, its use is known instantly. However, if a sculpture is made on the same wheel with the same materials, the human brain needs to do its own work to figure out its use. That work is interpretation, it is critique — a process that incorporates the interpreter’s own beliefs and biases as much as it does the potter’s motivation in sculpting. The critic has to explore this liminal space between the artist and the audience, trying their best to meet the artist’s invitation to interpretation and elevating that meaning to an audience the best they can. In some instances, I’ve even been more moved by a critique than by the original work — and that makes me strive to correct injustices in artistic interpretation and evaluation with what little influence I have.
Or at least, it did. The lightbulb, the muses, the inspiration that would move me before and fill me up because I had an empty part of myself to offer hasn’t hit me in quite some time. Some last-minute articles of mine have been on the way, but finishing and editing them has felt more like an obligation than an inspiration. Why is that? Is that the end-product of my time here, that as long as life keeps me full, I won’t be hungry to write anymore? And if that’s the case, what happens to the culture I’ve slowly become a part of with my time as an Arts writer — an assimilation that I’ve fought so hard for?
I’ve explained this before, but I’ve always been an anxious person — though it wasn’t until after a year of immunocompromised isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic that I realized that anxiety had expanded to be about the people around me. To go from only ever seeing my family and faces on Zoom to in-person mass meetings and giant lecture halls and huge parties was a transition that I didn’t realize took a toll until I received an email two-and-a-half years ago welcoming me to the Daily’s Arts section.
Bewildered excitement turned to confused dread in my gut as my brain processed how many people I would now be meeting. As I stared at the fight-or-flight frenzied eyes of the creature in the mirror, I gripped the edges of my sink and tried desperately to recall what my therapist said to do in moments like this. My heart now roaring in my ears, I remembered to slow down my pulse, staring down into the drain as I steadied my breath. This memory would return to me as I dodged into a bathroom the first time I walked into the newsroom for an Arts meeting. And the second. And then, as many times as it took for me to not feel like I was living in — that of other people.
This anxiety extended to interacting with editors over articles at every stage of production, but somehow never with publishing my work. I always considered my articles separate from me, even if they involved me — who I was in those articles was a carefully chosen and vetted version of me, even if it appeared like I was exposing everything. It was a way for me to be known to the people around me without having to actually take the steps my socially anxious self was too frightened to take. I haven’t felt that anxiety return for a great while now, and maybe that’s the root of the anxiety itself: a lack of desperation to be known through my work. Maybe I can lay this chapter of my life to rest and still stay connected through the friends I’ve made regardless.
And to my friends, I’m sorry for the unfavorable comparison that overcoming my fears to get to know you all has been a Satre-esque experience. The fact is, I would gladly go through hell for any of you and all of you — after all, I don’t know what heaven has that I don’t experience with you. I’m writing this for all of you. I can only write this because of all of you. Everything good I have is in some part because of you. I’m in love again and I’m fulfilled again and I feel so happy I remember to call my family to tell them about it.
Oh.
I had it, then it was gone. I was moved for a moment, to keep talking about the friends that the Daily and Arts have given me and beyond — then I realized I’ve already listed them all by name before, and then, it was gone. I still have that capacity, I guess. Oh, of course I do. Maybe I’ve used writing before to fill up the part of my life that felt empty, but I will always be filled with love and will always be able to accept more and will always find a way to put it into words, whether it’s for my loved ones, for art or for the world. I’ll find my way back.
So, hey! Do you want to hear about how Walter Benjamin predicted the soullessness of AI art in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” or about how Letterboxd has both democratized and atomized film criticism or how the platformer Celeste is a perfect anxiety-based artwork because it can comment on it thematically and mechanically or —
Oh, I’m out of time? I know I’ll always have more to say. It’s time for a different way to say it.
Daily Arts Writer Saarthak Johri can be reached at sjohri@umich.edu.
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