Boxed Sets & Glory Days
EPISODE 067: BOXED SETS & GLORY DAYS
If the last episode of A Beautiful Anarchy was about failing to move on from past defeats and choosing not to get stuck there when things inevitably go wrong, then this episode is about the dangers of camping out on past successes, and getting sidelined when everything goes right. There's got to be so much more to the creative life than resting on our laurels and cranking out boxed sets of our past work. Let's talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
In his song, Glory Days, Bruce Springsteen runs into an old friend as he's walking into a bar. They go back inside to share a few drinks and catch up but this friend, back in school a very accomplished baseball player, just keeps talking about the past, what Springsteen calls the glory days. The old times. The remember-whens.
In the second verse of the song he's hanging out with a friend he knew in high school, now divorced from her husband, her looks, apparently, faded. Over drinks she tells him that when she feels like crying it's remembering the glory days, back when she could turn all the boys' heads, that cheers her up. That conversation, like the first, never moves beyond talking about the past.
Finally, the songwriter reflects on himself. In the final verse he says,
Think I'm going down to the well tonight
And I'm going to drink till I get my fill
And I hope when I get old I don't sit around thinking about it
But I probably will
Yeah, just sitting back trying to recapture
A little of the glory of, well time slips away
And leaves you with nothing mister but
Boring stories of...
Glory days
I love this song in the same way I love Billy Joel's Piano Man. Both are tremendously sad to me, songs filled with a longing for what never was, or what was and will never be again. They are cautionary tales about the dangers of not moving forward when you still have time to do so. Warnings against being tripped up by looking backwards and not living in the present. Springsteen's Glory Days is about the sadness of living in, and longing for, the past, and the paralyzing and stagnating effect of resting on our laurels.
What's that got to do with your and your creative life? I'm David duChemin, and this is episode 067 of A Beautiful Anarchy, let's talk about it.
Music / Intro
In ancient Greece, winners of the pre-Olympic Phythian Games were given wreaths of laurel leaves in roughly the same way todays Olympians might be given medals. The tradition continued into the Olympic games and was later adopted by the Romans who presented laurels to commanders that won significant military victories.
Laurels were trophies, tangible reminders of accomplishment and success. Even today we have Nobel Laureates, and Poet Laureates. A laureate is one who is crowned with laurel, though it's been a while since those laurels were anything but symbolic. To rest on those laurels, to stop there as if we've hit a pinnacle in our lives, is to not move forward, and that's a problem because life, and our creative efforts to engage it–and fully inhabit the moments of which it is made–always moves forward. When we fail to keep up, I think we lose our place in time.
If the last episode of A Beautiful Anarchy was about failing to move on from past failures and choosing not to get stuck when it all goes wrong, then this episode is about the dangers of camping out on past successes, and getting sidelined when everything goes right, both of which result in inertia, repetition, and the absence of flow.
The people in Springsteen's Glory Days got stuck in the past. They don't talk about what's going on in their lives now, there are no current love stories and no recent ball games. Reminiscing about what was has replaced what might have been the daily business of getting on with their lives, because–one assumes–they peaked too early, like the guy in Bryan Adams' song, The Summer of 69, looking back on the days when he was a high school kid with a guitar, falling in love for the first time, and now, looking back he sees those days, long in the past, as the best days of his life. I hear that song and I always want to say, "That was it, Brian? It never got better than that?" What a waste.
I know these are just songs, and it could be they're more about the feeling that life never got better than it was in those carefree younger years. But there's a reason they resonate isn't there? Some very real fear that echoes back at us and asks: what if this is as good as it gets? What if it never gets better than that?
What if I've written my last good book?
What if I've make my last good photograph?
What if the next album is the first step on what Lester Bangs in the movie Almost Famous called "the long journey to the middle"?
The trouble is, the strength we need to cling to past victories is the same energy we would need in order to move on, and we've got to let go of the one before we move forward into the other.
That's not to say we need to forget them, or that there isn't something powerful in nostalgia and the warm golden glow that surrounds our best memories. It's just that the creativity we expend in the re-telling of those stories is energy unavailable to us for creating new ones. Stories of Glory Days, when we believe them ourselves, encourage safety and discourage risk. They tell the story in reverse, beginning with the accomplishment of celebrated work and working backwards from there, every step an inevitability, none carrying any real risk. When you know the end of the story, that the hero prevails, there's no real tension or fear that this time it might all go off the rails. When you know it all works out in the end, then the question, "What's the worst that can happen?" isn't much more than rhetorical.
Past successes have a way of making us crane our necks to look over our shoulders, and re-write our narratives into something more simple than it ever was at the time. They give us something profoundly unfair against which to compare our current efforts and our current results. Not just because current efforts always feel so much harder than what we did in the past, but because when we do manage to do or to make something great, it raises unfair expectations about the next thing, the one with which we're currently struggling, stuck in the messy middle, when the last thing we need is to be sidetracked with thoughts of how much easier the work once was. How much more inspired it felt. Or to carry into our current work the very understandable temptation to repeat ourselves.
Going in circles is not moving forward. It's just moving. And when we repeat ourselves and remain camped out in one place, as Springsteen sings it, "just sitting back, trying to recapture, a little of the glory" we get numb to the fact that glory fades, or it has diminishing returns, leaving us not with glory, or anything that made those memories or accomplishments glorious in the first place - the risk, the possibility that it could just all go wrong, and the way we fought so hard to pull it off - it leaves us instead, as Springsteen so achingly put it, with "nothing, mister, but boring stories of glory days."
You're not the only one who looks back into the past for some sign that if you pulled it off then, you can do it again. You did work in the past that mattered and made you proud and gave you some proof that you might just be getting somewhere in your efforts, creative or otherwise. But when the thing that once gave us hope that we were getting somewhere becomes the thing that keeps you from going any further, from moving beyond, it's time to apply our efforts to something more creative than the polishing of trophies.
Einstein said the definition of insanity is repeating the same steps expecting to get different results. But isn't it just as crazy to keep repeating the same steps and getting the same results, rather than trying something new, and forging ahead into the unknown and the what-if?
Creativity is a forward-moving impulse. It is not the stuff of boxed sets, re-issuing past hits in newer packaging and slightly different versions of what once worked. Creativity doesn't live in the past, no matter how good it was; it lives in the present. It moves forward. It moves toward whom we are becoming, pulling us along in its wake. It responds to current problems, hungers, and curiosities. It moves into new territory rather than setting up shop and re-drawing the same maps of a place we know all too well and in which there's noting new to discover.
There is a difference between celebrating past victories and camping out on them. A difference between resting on our laurels and standing on them to reach forward into whatever is next. I think this is why so many truly creative people don't fuss about the imitators, they know that by the time others get around to copying what has worked for them, that they'll already have moved on to the next challenge. They know that their best, most engaging, and most authentic work is still ahead of them, far out of reach of anyone grasping for a piece of what has already been done and hoping to find within it some second-hand glory.
To be an artist, a maker, or creator is to always be making. It is to live a life in which we delight in and find meaning in the process of making a thing not merely the having made it. We make because we need to make–now, fully engaged–not because we really need the thing being made. We make because we know the real glory isn't in the trophies or the accolades, it's not in the praise that may or may not come this time around, but in the effort to become the kind of person that could make the thing for which we might one day win those accolades in the first place. It's in knowing that our best work is not behind us, but ahead of us, and that the real glory, the prize that most excites us, isn't in our past or even our latest work, but in discovering and making what comes next.
Thank you so much for joining me again, and for giving me the astonishing privilege of being part of your creative life. Hey, if this podcast makes a difference for you, if it's important to you, can I ask you to share it with others. Point them to ABeautifulAnarchy.com and they'll find their way from there. And if this podcast is new to you, you'll find it takes a short break every 4 weeks when I send out a new issue of On The Make, which is like a written episode of this podcast, sent to your inbox every fourth Sunday morning. If you're not already getting it but you'd like to, just go to StartUglyBook.com, scroll to the bottom, and let me know where to send it. Once a month I'll draw the name of one listener to whom I'll send a signed copy of A Beautiful Anarchy, the book that started all this, as a thanks for listening. And if you ever want to do more than listen and you've got something to say, you can get me anytime at talkback@aBeautifulAnarchy.com. Thank you again for being here. We'll talk soon. In the mean time, go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0