The second movie in a trilogy
Messy perfectionism and a resistance to endings
What do you do when you encounter a mountain? Two friends and I debated this question and broke down our personalities as follows. One of us is a summiter: he needs to climb the mountain, stand at its very top, to be satisfied. Another is a climber: he’ll survey the mountain, find the rock face with the most interesting problem, and devote himself to solving it.
Perhaps unduly influenced by my undergraduate Buddhism studies, I self-selected as a circumambulator. Give me a mountain pass, a valley, a route with a view of the peak, and I will walk around it in circles forever. Once I’m in motion, walking becomes the task. Although the competitive side of me wants others to know that I can summit the mountain, that I’m fit enough for it—when left to my own devices, I’m happiest being near it, and admiring it, from below.
After all, from that vantage point, it’s always possible to summit. There’s still a chance I’ll do so. In the meantime, I keep going. I never want a good thing to end.
If anyone’s keeping track, I started The Artist’s Way twelve-week creativity course in early April. Even after allowing myself a few days off for a friend’s visit, I should have finished the course last week. Instead, I’ve been stalling.
In a recent interview promoting the new boygenius album,1 Phoebe Bridgers expounds on the notable lyric, “How long’s the Chevy been on cinderblocks?”
The image is familiar: a front lawn covered in half-finished projects, Chevy included. Instead of asking how long it’s been there, the discussion turned to why it’s there at all. It was a good car, the band surmised. Maybe, with enough tinkering, it’ll run again.
But for Bridgers, the task’s incompleteness is its own balm. She fears what happens when she completes a project. What if, despite successfully fixing the Chevy, at the end of it you still feel bad? What if, to paraphrase Bridgers, “it doesn’t work?”
Endings come with their own expectations. Reading others’ reflections on finishing The Artist’s Way, I put pressure on myself to be similarly transformed.
I’ve never felt how I think I should at such times. I get a lot of joy out of being in something: a task, a book, a school program. Starting the work can be hard itself—once I’ve begun, once I’m in it, then it flows.
The end of something brings a fear of grappling with where I’ve been and where I’d hoped to be. Like all good things, I don’t particularly want The Artist’s Way to end. I’ve been dragging it out. Until I decide what I’ll keep from it and how I want the next twelve weeks to look, I’m hanging on. I’m circling back. I see the finish line and I’m slowing down, which I think marathon racers would say is not the best practice. There are orange slices at the end! Bathrooms! A shower! You must want all of those, right?
I’m not sure. I’ve written before about how school graduations are some of my lowest times. I was content as a student. I was working toward something. Working toward something, for me, is more pleasurable than reaching the thing itself. Circumambulation: the movement is the goal. A finish line breaks the flow.
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Before Sunset is the second movie in Richard Linklater’s trilogy that follows Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy’s love affair after their chance meeting on a train. It’s my favorite of the three. We already know the characters and their backstory from the first film, and we jump right back into their banter when they reunite nearly a decade later.
It’s a story in motion, as the videography itself captures: although all three movies employ Steadicam shots, this one feels like it has the most flow. We, the audience, get to follow Delpy and Hawke around Paris as they walk and talk in the waning hours before Jesse’s flight back to the states. They have history, but also promise: we watch as they move together through the city and through their relationship, destination unknown.
I’ve recently learned the term “disorganized,” or “messy,” perfectionist. It means that, although we have tons of enthusiasm for beginnings and ideas, we struggle to complete our tasks. It goes back to the idea of: what if this doesn’t work?
If I can’t ensure that I’ll do something perfectly, might as well not risk completing it at all. The Chevy is safe there, out of commission on its cinderblocks. If I don’t try to fix it, there’s no chance it can reveal my own lack of improvement after getting the car to run.
Bridgers seems to accept this aspect of her personality in a way that my striving millennial soul cannot. I still see it as a negative. Modern life is full of so-called summits: if I don’t scale them, if I don’t charge through the finish line, doesn’t that mean I failed?
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This week I finally got around to reading the last chapter of The Artist’s Way. It turns out Julia Cameron, the author, might have a similar hang-up around endings. In the epilogue, she writes about her yearning “for a final flourish, some last fillip of the imagination that would sign the book.” But she realizes there shouldn’t be one. Instead, she leaves us with a quote from Paul Gardner, an artist who seems to paraphrase Leonardo DaVinci when he says: “A painting is never finished—it simply stops in interesting places.”
In writing this, I realize I have learned things from the twelve-week course. I’ve gained the tools of morning pages and weekly solo dates. I’ve made a vision board-esque collage and hung it unironically above my desk. I’ve uncovered new projects and laid the groundwork to begin them.
It turns out that all my hemming and hawing, my hesitation about endings, was not warranted. The Artist’s Way is a book that reminds us the work never ends. Although my twelve weeks are more or less up, I get to keep working for as long as I’d like.
Life is a spiral path, a circumambulation, so long as we want it to be. The so-called endings might feel arbitrary, and that’s okay. I can smile, and say thank you, and hold my bouquet of graduation roses lovingly brought by those wishing to celebrate me. The ending can be for them. In the meantime, I’ll keep walking, around this mountain, one step at a time.
Life-changing; that’s all
I really like the boy genius and Phoebe bridgers break downs in these recent newsletters.
I love this so much Julia! “Life-changing, that’s all”