true art is like jorking it

31 Jul, 2026

last modified 2 days, 14 hours ago

I wrote this in mid-june and postponed posting it nearly into august for reasons I elaborate on later in the post, but, TL;DR: I was making moves in silence. I hope you enjoy whatever the fuck this monstrosity is!

What an absolute fucking title. I love clickbait, especially if it’s funny! Yeah, I'm coming back from my hibernation with this one. For sure.

I had this train of thought while yapping aimlessly about an essay I am (currently, as of june 18th) working on. This has been my first proper year of my Literature major, graduated from basic general courses into the (beginnings of the) good shit, and my prompt involved crafting an argument out of a series of quotes from multiple essays by… uh, a variety of russians from the early-mid twentieth century, like Bakhtin and whatnot. Formalists mostly. You know, our good friend, russian formalism…

I was specifically talking about one text I read that I immensely enjoyed — “Art as Device” by Viktor Shklovsky, who I am now learning was bald as fuck. (Awesome!) He essentially argues that art is made for the purposes of defamiliarization. See, a human’s mind gets too used to the reality around itself, and thus forgets it; Shklovsky cites Tolstoy saying he cleaned his living room without thinking about it and then forgot about it, and thus the cleaning might as well not have happened at all — not in the sense that the room isn’t clean, but more in a, “it might as well have cleaned itself”, “if a tree falls in the woods does it make a sound” kinda way. (Also, extremely relatable anecdote!)

So if we just go around life in automatic, we don’t really see what we’re doing, we can’t really perceive the world around us and how we affect it. But through art, reality is obfuscated: for example, consider the beloved Alien from the Alien movies, which looms ominously in one early scene (allegedly) and yet isn’t understood as an organism foreign to its backdrop until far later, whereas if the ship were more familiar to us, the Alien would be quickly recognized as some other fucking thing. Or consider how a movie might involve many characters acting in an unpredictable manner based on some shared information the audience is not privy to, and it might dare its audience to try to make sense of this situation far before the information is revealed on-screen.

Or we could repeat Shklovsky’s own example, of a short story by Tolstoy himself written from the perspective of a horse, where said horse attempts to explain the human concept of ownership from its own experiences and what it has deduced from them, even though the idea is foreign to the horse: Tolstoy takes this intuitive idea of “ownership” and re-words it thoroughly, so as to examine its component parts, and more importantly, bare them. (The horse concludes horses are better than humans because they don’t have this concept of ownership; I think many humans would agree! It also contains a very casual cucking joke that made me genuinely laugh).

Shklovsky thus says:

And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition. By “enstranging” objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and “laborious.” The perceptual process in art has a purpose all its own and ought to be extended to the fullest.

(tr. Benjamin Sher)

So, uh, art is basically one of those feeding toys for cats that only dispenses food pellets when the cat figures out its puzzle, made so that cats won’t just gorge themselves mindlessly on their own food and get super-bored and freak out. Art is enrichment for your enclosure.

And this really harmonizes with my perspective on art, and What Is Art, and what is the purpose of art, etcetera. Right? Like, this is literally what the quote on the front page of my blog is about: “[t]here is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Salomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.” Plato said no one gains new knowledge, but rather remembers ideas from the plane of ideas; and Bacon states that there are no new things, but rather, old things that have become forgotten, and thus seem new again.

I’ve sort of dedicated my gay little life to writing and fiction, not really meaning to but also unable to regret it, the same way I think other people might dedicate it to, I don’t know, mycology or biophysics or economic history. And I spend a lot of time thinking about what the point of it all is, because like, obviously to me the point of fiction is fiction, but there has to be something beyond this… I dunno. Equis:¹ I’ve lived most of my life experiencing things first through fiction and later through real life, and so I strongly resonate with the idea that art is a method of reframing, re-presenting reality to make it newly visible. Because that’s, y’know, my lived experience, essentially.

And it also harmonizes with a thought I’ve always had about art — maybe even expresses it better than I could — which is kind of a thought about what art even is. I think, in many ways, art is a natural byproduct of experience; art is a type of residue left at the end of how humans process their experiences, and it reflects and is made up entirely of said experiences, reshaped and recontextualized in a unique way to appeal to a series of conscious and unconscious sensibilities too vast in number and vague in shape to count or define. Art is the re-expression of experience, mind, and memory, as filtered through each other.

Venn diagram: who you are, what you’ve seen, and how you remember it; in the middle, your fifteen-year-old SasuNaru fanfiction. Or the way you re-tell the story of that fucked-up thing that happened to you to a new therapist, which is also art, since speechcraft is art; or the drawing of flowers you made, even if it has no deeper connection to your psyche, but which is still a depiction of a thing you saw, chose to portray, and filtered through your memory of the real thing. (Or your mental copy of the image that you recognized as “the real thing”, which is, functionally, what a memory is. That’s why you can alter memories by rephrasing them, because they’re copies of images, and never the real daffodil, growing inside your head. Ceci n’est pas une pipe!).

This is why art takes so many weird forms and seemingly has no limits. Human experience has no limits we can conceive of, as whatever we can conceive of is, (A), built of our previous experiences (imagine a roman noble attempting to imagine Fortnite); and, (B), necessarily limited, too, by our ability to experience. You can’t imagine a new color because you can’t physically experience it. The limits of art are set at the limits of human experience, and I don’t mean “three days of torture” as a limit — clearly it can be experienced, as it has been experienced. (If you really want to toe the limits of human experience in art, look no further than the psychologically-weirdest xenofiction you can find, then ask yourself if an alien wrote it!)

And sure, it’s possible to gesture beyond human comprehension (cf. Discworld’s concept of “octarine”, an imaginary color with a contradictory description), but those gestured ideas can’t be meaningfully explored without falling back into human potential. The first law of stories about sapient beings without emotions is that, if the story goes on for long enough, the sapient being turns out to have always had emotions and simply been really bad at feeling them.

(Sometimes this is disguised as “the sapient being developed emotions”, but this is bullshit. Emotions are a prerequisite for sapience, evidenced by how plenty of non-sapient real-life animals are still sentient, that is, experience emotions; and emotions, after all, are reactions to one’s environment, and so the sapient being would need to be actually vegetative and wholly unresponsive to successfully not experience emotions. Every human being experiences emotions, they might just be bad at communicating them, or even at feeling them, the way you might not notice you’re hungry. There’s this cottage industry of people who call other people “unfeeling” for being sadists and it pisses me off, because sadism is the quality of deriving pleasure from the pain of another, and this is literally an emotional response. This sidebar-within-a-sidebar is already so long, I might as well denounce my least favourite type of fictional sadist: I hate the type that’s a sadist in absence of all other stimuli, i.e., “the only thing that stimulates me is the pain of others”; as a dabbler in both schadenfreude and long-suffering anime twinks, I find this the least interesting possible kind of fictional sadist because it’s some thought-terminating bullshit placed where a complex and compelling emotional motivation for pursuing sadism would normally go. Christ alive!)

Equis! A human is stimulated by its environment, and it creates a mental image of this stimuli, which is infinitely complex due to the nature of the mind (even the idea of one distinct stimuli, silhouetted against a backdrop of other but less-important stimuli, is a notion you’re conceiving of because it’s the way your brain works, and thus the scaffolding of your mind, rather than anything actually material; you trace the lines of where all things begin and end by the act of understanding everything in separate pieces). Then, the human wants to make an object or do a special action of some kind, or emit some sort of vibration, maybe. And this is for whatever reason: intellectual, emotional, or physical stimulation, or as means to an end, or whatever else. Thus, the human takes stock of its mental images and selects, cuts, pastes, reshapes, remixes, takes one inspiration, takes another, draws its mom, pours a couple insecurities, shapes it according to its worldview… and voilà: art has been made. This is why it’s possible to imagine an alien species making art, and yet art is considered fundamentally human: art is an expression of your experience, which, by dint of your being human, is a human experience.

If you’re otherkin, that’s an otter experience. (Ha ha, get it, like “another”. I just thought of that as I was writing this!)

So that’s the other thing art is like: not only is art enrichment, art is also expression. I’m certain smarter people have said it better than me, but there’s value in me expressing it my own way. (Foreshadowing is a literary device in which a writer mentions something early on in a casual manner, only to reveal the importance of said thing to the story they’re telling at a later point²). We will get to the title of this post when we get there, but rest assured: I would never clickbait you with a lie. Many things are like each other.

Anyway, there I was, yapping about the fun things my lit theory classes are teaching me, and I started thinking about something. Okay, so, you can probably tell from everything I’ve told you, but I’m a hobbyist writer. Not just non-fiction, which is writing (congratulations to anyone who realized they’re a hobbyist writer from me pointing out that running a blog is writing!), but fiction too. I don’t link it on this blog, but I have an Archive of our Own account I post things to! I have long original pieces in my phone’s notes application that go nowhere, I have original characters I’ve invented and swear I’ll do something someday with, and I would very much like to someday write a wholly original novel. I have been futzing around with words at least since I was 9 and trying to re-enact Eragon from scratch.

Actually, just yesterday my mom was telling me about something she found: short stories I wrote down, with her help, when I was about five years old, before I could properly write words down. Apparently I wanted to “fix” the Three Little Piggies’ lives by having them and Little Red Riding Hood unionize? You go, past me, that was a great idea. I know adult writers who would butcher that concept, I trust my child self did an admirable job.

Point is, though there’s been stops and starts and hiatuses and moments where I thought I’d been burned out forever, I’ve always told stories. In keeping with my regurgitative theory of art, I think this is because my childhood was full of fiction: my mom told me a lot of bedtime stories, and then I learned to read and was indulged way too freely by my parents. Again: most of the things in my life I seem weirdly zen about, I’ve experienced before in books. Just like the simulations! I am actually Raiden Metal Gear Solid, and my Kobayashi Maru test was reading the entirety of Shadowhunters at 11 years old (do not fucking let an eleven-year-old do this).

Seen from this perspective, it makes all the sense that I’d go for a literature degree in university —frankly I don’t know if I’ll even finish it, but I’m kind of intrigued to see how far I can take it— because, if fiction is my lifeline, obviously it’s what I’d specialize in professionally. Right?

But there’s a trap. My mom knows people who have loved writing, who’ve professed themselves enthusiasts of the art and of books and of reading, who have gone for a Lit degree and emerged broken. There are so many moving parts to a work of literature, you see: there’s so much infinite complexity, and such good fiction, such masterpieces, that you’re exposed to in the course of studying… really any type of art, that making art yourself feels impossible. It’s a little Dunning-Kruger-shaped: you’re suddenly aware of everything a writer does subconsciously, and thus feel the need to do it consciously, and this is fucking impossible. More knowledge creates this yawning void beneath your feet. Right? You’ll never be as good as people who are good at it, so why even try?

But I think this is, and please forgive me for what I’m about to say, chump shit. Falling into this trap is weaksauce behavior, and if you do, you haven’t developed the true Warrior’s Spirit. I’m not saying you should feel ashamed; rather, you should get to a point where you find it faintly ridiculous you ever felt this way, because it’s like being scared of penguins. I swear to god, it’s like being scared of penguins. Walk with me.

I don’t write because I want to be a good writer. I do want to be a good writer, and I make efforts to improve my writing skills when I feel like this is merited. But I don’t write because I want to have written something good. I did this in the past, and it only leads to not fucking writing. To write, you should not want to have written: you need to want to write, present tense. Put one word after the other in the word processor.

Writing is sort of a slog if you haven’t developed the perversion for it (because that’s what it is, you’re a pervert for words; this is irreversible). But if you don’t like the writing itself, yet, you can temporarily sub in a desire for writing, for a specific piece of writing, for more writing, for the writing you want to read to come to exist, and enact it with the “I’ll try my hand at it” spirit of Do It Yourself. You can’t want to have made a great piece of art that leaves people thinking. You need to be a plumber. Okay? You need to make something you will use; the use of art, as we’ve established, is the artificial extension of perception, or in Shklovsky’s own words just a sentence later, “a means of experiencing the process of creativity”. You need to make art that you, yourself, want to experience. You need to write the fanfiction you'll kick your legs and giggle reading. You have to laugh at your own joke. No one else will make it if you don’t make it.

Now, the trap here is in wanting to write something good. You’ll read something you wrote and go “this isn’t good enough, I should never write again”. My antidote is truly stupid, but it works for me and it might work for you. (My catchphrase, unfortunately, seems to be “Problems have solutions”). First, consider why you don’t like your writing. Don’t consider “what is bad or flawed about my writing”. Quoth the tumblr post: there is no such thing as good art, you’re free. Consider this: do I think what I wrote is bad because its quality is low, but the contents expressed through the quality still compel me? Or do I find my own writing boring?

If you find your own writing boring, throw it out and write something you actually want to re-read. Because that’s the secret to art, again, as I mentioned: you are the change you wish to see in the world, you write the fanfiction you want to read, and then you actually do, in fact, reread it. You don’t just write what you “think should exist” in a vacuum, you write what you, specifically, find entertaining to read. Even if it’s dogshit, even if it’s mass-market slop, you can write it and you can be a huge snob about writing it, too. (If you’re enough of a snob, you’re probably mad that nobody has done a specific obvious-to-you deconstruction of your favourite mass-market slop; this is your Green Goblin mask and it is your duty not just to write it with as much unfiltered vitriol as possible, but also to link me, because I love reading spiteful deconstructions and piss-takes). If you find “high-quality” literature boring, I mean… I personally thing you’ve either had really bad luck with a language barrier or a shitty teacher or something, because most classics are classics because people like them, simple as… but also, you don’t need to write anything classy or high-class if you don’t find reading that sort of thing fun.

(…Why would you not find classics fun, though? Shakespeare has dick jokes and crossdressing! Moby Dick is literally doomed yaoi! Don Quijote de la Mancha is literally Shrek! One particular classic, sure, you’re allowed to hate on things, but the only thing that unites classic works of fiction is “old and enjoyed by many people”. Even Dostoeivsky had jokes!)

The other problem you might have is that you find what you write immensely compelling, but you think it’s low-quality and are embarrassed of this. And this is, unfortunately, where I keep not coddling you: problems have solutions. I’m not telling you to get good at writing. I’m telling you: writing is a lot of things in a trench coat. What’s the actual problem and what is a realistic way of fixing it that will not shoot clean through your effort-budget?

Here are a list of fixable problems: I don’t have the motivation to keep going with this story for as long as I think it deserves to go on. (Solution: write an open ending for the point of the story you’re in right now and then go back and re-frame the beginning so that the story looks like a vertical slice of a bigger story you don’t need to write). I have these characters that I want to put together, but I can’t get them to kiss. (Solution: write them together in a situation without expecting them to kiss or even like each other and the romance will flow almost by accident). My sentences suck because they’re short and simple. (Solution: either look for celebrated authors with a simpler, more dry or clipped style of writing and learn to enjoy the style, or look for authors who write good purple prose and challenge yourself to in-line poetry). I don’t find writing fun to do for extended periods of time. (Solution: don’t force yourself to write shit you already know happened, and instead focus on the stuff you don’t know about and are finding out as the characters do). I’m a terrible improviser. (Solution: don’t improvise, fivehead, plan your story out ahead of you). Problems have solutions! I keep telling people this and they don't believe me!

The hairiest problem you might find yourself stuck with is Ogre. What is Ogre, you might ask? Well, everyone call Ogre stupid, and it true! Ogre barely literate! Ogre finally finished Ulysses, but Ogre can only identify surface level themes like Religion and Nationalism, etcetera! That is to say: you might think your story is not valuable because it isn’t deep. Other people have gone so far and so deep, and awed you so greatly with their mastery of ~themes and such³. How can you compare?

I have four responses to this, more or less in order. The first one is, uh, kind of dumb: what are you, chicken? What, do you think Joyce just did that? Everyone who reaches a great height gets there by climbing. Embrace the shonen mindset. You can be the Hokage. Your fear is bullshit. If you don’t want to be the Hokage, that’s fine, you can set other goals, but potential is bullshit; there is only interest. And the second one I’ve already quoted: making good art is impossible, you’re free.

The third one, though, is a little longer. See, I don’t really worry myself about writing something good or meaningful, because I think all writing is meaningful if you’re sufficiently honest through it. We’ve established art is an expression of your experience, right? Well, what makes art worse is expressing something you don’t mean. If art is there to make the old feel new again, to make existence complex so you can comprehend it again from scratch, then what’s most antithetical to this purpose is to say shit on automatic because it’s just what is done. That’s the real reason snobs dunk on genre fiction: they’ve seen elves before and they don’t have enough of an emotional attachment to see elves be done again.

It’s not that you need to create something completely new, because this is impossible —“all novelty is but oblivion”, I told you— but that you need to be as unflinchingly honest as possible. And when you are honest and state the contradictions inherent to making sense of a nonsensical life, meaning and metaphor naturally emerges. That’s sort of what themes are: saying something you’ve observed out loud, but like, subtler, and slowed down with reverb. Say something true with a sicknasty sexy little bassline. The bassline is real too. You need to be brave, and then you need to be honest, and once you’ve done both of those things, you start posting truth nukes. It’s that easy. Even if you want to write clichés, think about why they appeal to you: don’t you think they’re kind of true, in their own way? Or that it would be nice if they were? There’s truth everywhere, for those with the eyes to see it.

And finally, the fourth thing: you’re not going to write Ulysses because someone already wrote it. You can only ever write something new. (Paradoxically, considering Bacon). You’re not James Joyce, you’ve probably never been to Dublin, that’s fine; James Joyce probably never thought about what it means that Gen Z is getting really into Newports, specifically, after a near-complete cultural anti-tobacco victory. Seriously, I don’t smoke: why Newports? Let me know, I wanna know. Don’t email me if you don’t know and don't smoke and don't like smokers and are just guessing, though. That’s how you make lying art that lies and isn’t saying much of anything; by presuming to do the impossible and understand someone else, particularly someone with habits you think unhealthy. People use the word incurious to mean stupid nowadays, but this is actually, literally demonstrative of a lack of curiosity: don’t you, too, wanna know why, specifically, Newports? Besides your disdain for cigarettes?

Equis: you’re not James Joyce, you’re not Pierre Menard, you’re you. Write something that’s yours. Smoke your own cigarettes. Go.

And finally, secret fifth thing: you should read more crap. You should read more dogshit you think is beneath you. You should read more stuff that you stop reading because it’s bad. Dunning-Kruger: you read too much good shit and now you don’t remember what bad fiction is like. Compared to some of the villainess webtoons I’ve had the misfortune of starting, I bet your story’s fine! Being a voracious reader is the easiest way to be a good writer, because you're learning about the context you find yourself in: not just the people you want to write like, but the people whose writing you hate, truly, from the bottom of your heart. To build a house you need a floor and a ceiling, ya dig?

And, yeah. That’s why I’m not cowed in my writing endeavours by learning about the complexities of speech and literature. (So far! I might become afraid of penguins tomorrow). But for now, I just wanna make the best art I can, and make art that I enjoy reading later, in bed, fifteen minutes after writing it down, when I’ve forgotten the specifics of it. That’s the Warrior’s Spirit. Comparing yourself to James Joyce when you don’t wanna write Ulysses is like shooting yourself in the dick while your spouse is doing IVF treatments; nothing’s gonna come out of that!

I think a lot of people will be offended by now, because they’ll see my post as “just git gut and not insecure 5head”. Not my intention, not wholly, please believe me — the thing is, here I talk about writing, not about posting. And this is an important distinction for reasons I hope are obvious. Don’t post your writing until you’re sure that you want to share it, and certainly don’t write for the purposes of posting, unless posting truly and duly is your passion. If sharing your writing makes it feel less ‘yours’, you should lie to everyone and say you’ve never written a thing, then let it be published after your death (because I’m nosy and I wanna see; Kafka did it!). Confidence is built up in private and destroyed in public: if you have no confidence in public, you need to keep more stuff private. Make moves in silence! Withhold until you wanna speak!

The Warrior’s Spirit, the true Warrior’s Spirit —for all art— is making the best art you can and always being open to improving, even if it stings, but never letting the fact that you suck ass stop you from doing art. This goes for drawing, writing, collaging, convincing people of things, making playlists, and whatever else you want. It's all art. And there’s no such thing as there being no room for your work: maybe no oxygen, as in, no attention, but there’s still room. I mean, if you’re writing stuff for your own self to re-read, do you really need to be paid attention by other people? You’re the audience, not them. (Doesn’t it feel a little naked, anyway?) And it’s not even a big deal if someone else did the thing you wanted to write but earlier and better, because if you still wanna write it, you know something they don't (tee hee!), and if you don’t wanna write it anymore, then you have the thing you want to read already written for you at zero personal effort on your part. Genuinely aerodynamic. Embrace the zen of sloth, you know you want to.

It was at this point in the ranting where I stopped myself. I thought: am I making any sense? (No, when have I ever?) And as usual, trying to recoup distracted me. I ended up with this: I’m telling you that to write something, you need to want to read it; to draw something, you need to want to look at it; etcetera. If you make art and then hate it, or if you force yourself to make art you don’t wanna make to fulfill some made-up quota, this will quickly lead you to stop making art, or at best will create a dysfunctional relationship between yourself and your art that will damage you and others in the long term. Really, you shouldn’t make art that’s “good”. You should torture your brain homunculus until failure, failure caused by lack of interest, and then as soon as that happens you should end your piece there and start anew.

Yeah, art is watching yourself kick something in the vulnerables and liking it until climactic catharsis is achieved and then getting up off your desk to do something else. Right.

...

…Just like jorkin' it!

I have other thoughts about art I'd like to share — you can probably guess I can exposit at length about my thoughts on artistic personal glory, on effort, on consumption, how I reached all of these conclusions in the first place, all the points of failure I can see in my extended self-help ramble... damn, this really is self-help, huh? Well, at least I'm not charging you for it. Yeah, yeah, I could talk your ear off about what is art and so on, and about seeing art not as "good and bad" but as "successful at accomplishing its goals or not" and as "ambitious or not"... yap on about imaginary quotas even further, why not...

But, y'know? I'm gonna leave it here. And you wanna know why? Because I'm taking my own advice. This is one concise block of text I've written here. (For a given value of "concise"... It's a block of text with a beginning and an end, I'm fuckin' ending it, that's what I mean.) I don't feel the need to extend it further. Honestly: it already goes on for way too long, I could trim most of the self-help off and it'd be better for it. But I wanna keep it, so in it stays! And hey, you wanna know something else? I had another post planned for my return. I wrote two bullet points and left it for later. You know what would be a made-up quota, for sure? If I waited to post this until I wrote that other post, so I could post that one first. Haha, yeah, can't imagine ever disobeying my own advice again. (Imagine I'm sweating).

Anyway, I'm getting off my desk now. I'm hungry and I know I've got a croissant in the kitchen. I've gotten about half my essay done and I hand it in on sunday, today being thursday (well, thursday night going into friday), and I can get two pages of shit-chat about language and a page of inflating my word count done in two days. Fine by me, really!

And, as always:

thank you for reading!

#2026 #longform #🌕