Lower Your Voice
To everyone outside of my daydreams, I was the kid who was drawing all day. But to me, drawing all day was all I could do to keep my insides from bursting.
"Lower your voice," might be the most common sentence I've ever heard directed at me from my mother. I'd hear it from her at restaurants and in grocery stores. She lived in a constant state of fear that someone may give her side-eye for being a bad mother and having a loud child. This ridiculous directive was omnipresent every day and everywhere. To speak as if we were forever inside a library and desperately trying not to bother anyone or give anyone any possible fuel for gossip and judgment. Iranians of her generation seemed to me to be forever concerned about 'what others might say.' To be a physically large person, to have a thirst for rambunctiousness, or to possess opinions which strayed from that of Iranian norms could make one a social pariah — and I was inflicted with all three of these. In her defense, I did not find her paranoia to be completely unwarranted. Iranians have been indeed, in my experience, some judgmental-ass gossipy mother fuckers.
I knew I was an Artist long before I was given permission to say as much aloud for others to hear. I knew I had an unquenchable thirst to create, which I did my best to repress as much as possible. I was seen by most as the creative kid, seemingly never caught without my sketchbook. Little could they have possibly known what a tiny part of my creative drive could ever be held in those ripped up spiral notebooks. To everyone outside of my daydreams, I was the kid who was drawing all day. But to me, drawing all day was all I could do to keep my insides from bursting. Sketching comic book characters was a guard rail. It was my methadone, keeping me just barely from fevers and shivers. It was a form of expression controlled and quiet enough not to bother anybody.
Throughout possibly the entirety of my expressively sequestered youth, I'd watch publicly-known Artists from a distance with rainbow-eyed envy as they poured their insides out and seemed to thrive in their own strange ways. They were getting away with the kind of shit I could never dream of and that filled me with resentment. I internalized the judgments of the Iranian community. In order to justify my own suppression, I needed to buy into the narrative that those messy debaucherous drug addicts, with their ridiculous outfits and pink and blue mohawks — those people 'over there' were obviously mentally ill. We, over here, were the civilized people. But secretly we fumed. Subconsciously I raged. A sea of fury that, like any other form of expression, I had to censor in order to minimize the possibility that I may provide gossip fodder for the Iranian community. I kept lowering my voice.
I'd grown to convince myself that in order to create great Art, one must be toxic. That in order to produce true and meaningful work that truly punches its audience in the guts, one must be a floundering unstable mess. Certainly the media imagery of the messy heroin addict rock star with massive international success didn't help. I'm often reminded of the story of how Keith Richards wrote 'Gimme Shelter,' supposedly at the tail end of a bender, while he was coming down from various drugs and suspecting Mick Jagger of having an affair with his girlfriend. While he wrote one of the most iconic songs in music history, outside a storm raged, mirroring social turmoil of the time — the Vietnam War, civil rights struggles, and widespread protests, the world and possibly the very fabric of reality teetering on the edge of unraveling.
Certainly and quite logically, one needn't be a toxic narcissist in order to create great Art. It is entirely reasonable that this image simply exists in the zeitgeist because we, the Artists, have been selling it. The first rule of writing is said to be to 'write what you know' and Artists most often draw from our own lives. The most sensational stuff may often seed the most interesting stories and that's the stuff that sells the most. Entering my fourth decade of life, I now understand that it wasn't the mental health challenges and addiction issues that yielded great Art. It was and is the storyteller's authenticity. What I was witnessing, what I envied, was a life lived with integrity — in whatever form or shape that happens to take, messiness and all. The 'full catastrophe of living' as the Buddhist might say. Life has ups and downs and true unabashed freedom comes from not hesitating in embracing and celebrating all of it, the ups and downs and all arounds.
Patrons are the other half of this careful balance. The people who finance Artists' lives so that Artists can make more Art. Many of those who buy Art are often, themselves, living in a much safer space with off-cream colored walls. Their driveways have parked in them a Mercedes, a Tesla and/or a BMW SUV. Their kids go to summer camp. Hanging in their lobby might be a painting by an Artist who lives a more dangerous life than the buyers might ever dream of living themselves. The story of the Artist is half the appeal of the purchased Art. Artists, to these folks, are like anthropologists of consciousness. We coordinate expeditions deep into the inhospitable forests of emotions and experiences where most men dread to dwell, surviving wild animal attacks, befriending untouched tribes and bringing back with us artifacts which the safe royals can display in their collections for their dinner guests to fawn over.
It's a symbiotic relationship, the Artist and the Patrons'. Within the capitalist framework, for an Artist to successfully be able to finance our lives with our Art, we must keep our shit together just long enough to systemize our process. To rinse and repeat. "Repetition is reputation," Calvin Klein would say. We pour our insides out in a controlled manner in order to fit it inside the regulated standardized four sides of a canvas, so that the experience can be explored by passersby in a manner which allows them to dip their toes in without the entirety of our shared realities unraveling. If the walls within these safe spaces were too colorful and messy themselves, the Art won't pop. If the spaces where Art is exhibited were as messy as the Artist, we wouldn't know where to look.
We, all of us, Artist or not, desire a wide repertoire of experiences. It’s why the junior accountant in Nebraska loves watching Keanu Reeves massacre the population of a small country in under two hours or why the monogamous soccer mom married to her high-school sweetheart blasts Britney Spears singing about having a threesom in her minivan. But not all of us are built for all of it. The Patron may only dare to dip their toes in danger and that resistance is necessary for our society to exist. The Patron can't go all in. Because she or he needs to take the BMW SUV in for an oil change before picking up the kids from summer camp. Because we still need someone to build roads. The Artist living within the confines of the capitalist framework could not exist without the Patron. So if the stuff that sells in this society is the sensationalist stuff, then the Artist, intentionally or not, is enabled to make more of what sells. So we can keep the lights on and make more Art. So I guess, in some regard, regardless of our level of liberation from the off-cream colored safe spaces, we still have to kinda mind the volume of our voices. Just enough.
Arash Afshar, a photographer, community-driven storyteller, and host of the decade-spanning and globally-syndicated Burner Podcast. His Substack features raw excerpts and early drafts from his forthcoming book, Yesterday I Was Clever, an intimate exploration of identity, culture, and 'Artist Consciousness' through the lens of the Iranian American experience.
