New Scientist recently wrote an excellent piece on the truth behind the excitement commonly associated and expected in scientific exploration. The inside scoop revealed? It's boring. Astonishing discoveries aside, "Science is not a whirlwind dance of excitement, illuminated by the brilliant strobe light of insight. It is a long, plodding journey through a dim maze of dead ends. It is painstaking data collection followed by repetitious calculation. It is revision, confusion, frustration, bureaucracy and bad coffee. In a word, science can be boring."
What immediately struck me in these opening paragraphs and caused me to reread them and by extension the rest of the article in a different mode of thought, was how analogous this was to art, to writing, fiction in particular (but only in particular because that's where my preoccupations are aimed by default and obsession). Books, like the scientific discovery (aren't books discoveries?), like the new knowledge or insight into humanity gained (can't and don't books provide both of these?), are the embodiment of stimulation, intellectual hunger and sated curiosity, filling those fortunate enough to read with a sense of the thrilling exploration of self, society, and world. Behind the pages and behind the covers and behind the sentences, for the artist, things aren't quite the same.
Sure, there is excitement in the process; there has to be, there must be. If there isn't exhilaration somewhere in the process, the praxis of writing daily, then you're doing it wrong. A colleague of mine recently put it this way: "process must be fun." One must find a way to adore and take from that boredom and frustration a kind of hunter's patient anticipation, hungry for the find, constantly searching. Without a doubt, though, the process can be a painstaking one filled with, as the article pointed out, dead ends, revision, confusion, bad coffee, long and plodding journeys marked with precipitous highs and hollow, lonely lows; on the other hand, when things are rolling, the adrenaline soars, pulls down clouds, a world-birthing joy. But it is, to use a well-worn cliche, a labor of love. Like science, all good art is an exploration, an experiment with the unknown that may or may not prove successful. Before an author can even begin to worry if his or her book will be critically successful or commercially successful, or even published, the author must worry whether or not everything will come together, whether the variables will add up and work, whether the experiment (because what is a book or a poem if not an artistic experiment?) will come to fruition, at least to the artist's designs. Characters come into the story that never spark to life the way they were envisioned and are axed; the point of view isn't working so it gets changed, a solitary sentence receives a day's worth of assiduous care just to make it sounds right and (one can only hope) carries the intended meaning. Hemingway wrote some of his endings thirty to forty times.
Somehow, the idealism behind this idea of a finished product and unleashing a glossy-covered book upon the world needs to meet with the blue-collar reality that it requires tireless work and effort; and it's not always going to be constant flood of intellectual breakthroughs, philosophical and human revelations, and worldly candlelight.That only comes by way of going through this "boredom", which isn't quite the same kind of boredom as, say, watching celebrities dance on television; that's an existential, purpose-questioning boredom. Much different. Boredom isn't even quite the right word. It's more of a murkiness that grabs hold of its victim, containing both moments of unharnessed wonder and seemingly impassable hardships.
A few description in the article regarding astronomers as being most familiar with this kind of drudgery resonated with me. Astronomers, famous for "the long stare", pry patiently into the cosmos, waiting, waiting, waiting all with the hopes of snagging a glimpse of something spectacular, a supernova, looking through the lens of telescope to spot an exploding star, the wispy tail of a meteor burning across the sky, anything, without ever knowing if they will in fact ever be so fortunate.Metaphorically, this sounds similar to the job of an artist - except the artist doesn't have to wait. They can succeed where the astronomer is helpless; they can create their own supernova, their own galaxies, their own cosmic vibrations and electromagnetic spectra of whatever it is they want to shed light upon.
None of this is to imply that science and art are complete equals; obviously, science serves to us certain things that art can never hope to do. Art won't cure any epidemics. The two do, however, stem from a similar root: an unquenchable thirst for knowledge; an endless series of questions about the world and our place in it and all that is entailed with us, our emotions, our aspirations, our fears, our morals, our decisions, our politics, our endeavors, everything; and a tenacious curiosity. In short, to push the envelope ever further so that we may better understand us, this heart-stopping perplexity we find ourselves thrown into, life. Together, they are a twin-chambered lantern with which we rifle through the folds, layers, and dark corners of the universe, our planet, and its people. The article, and Marie Curie, sum things up nicely:
"But here's the surprise. The Curies actually enjoyed their work. 'We were very happy," Marie wrote. "We lived in a preoccupation as complete as that of a dream."
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