The Bewildered

Only one characteristic of personality and orientation to life and work is absolutely, across the board, present in all creative people: motivation. – Albert Rothenberg, MD, from 35 years of research as the principal investigator for the project, “Studies on the Creative Process.”

Dr. Rothberg’s notion that creative people’s most universally shared trait is motivation is one of those findings that just seems common sense—umm… of course creative people are motivated, why else would we choose to work in very-much-less-than-financially-rewarding careers? Or spend our weekends tweaking semicolons and adjusting colour-balances? Or be okay with appearing in public as pasty, too-long-inside folk of the sort who do their grocery shopping midday, without a child in the grocery cart?

“Motivation” is one of those things we think of as unquestionably good—it’s meant and perceived as a compliment, an ideal, a standard toward which we should all strive. Of course no one really wants to be unmotivated. And yet, I wonder what it is we’re talking about when we talk about someone’s motivation. In terms of creativity, the pretentious have been on the subject of motivation for years—critics and academics want to discern an artist’s motivation, their reason for doing what they do, that inner trauma they’re trying to express in material form. But, as we perhaps move away from the era if the bereted art critic, I can’t help but think that the question of creative motivation has slipped into the realm of motivatedness where we judge creative types on the basis of their production, rather than their motivation. In other words, we move from questions of why or how into wondering to what end or how much. The motivated artist is a different figure than the motivationally-driven artist. I’m not trying to say that the former is not also the latter, but the idea of motivation now seems to mark a person capable of almost unbelievable output, physical and mental endurance and a nearly constant flow from a seemingly unending supply of originality. We conflate the two: the esoteric inner drive that compels an artist to create is harnessed now in the service of prolific production. And, since their work is motivational, fuelled by some deep-seated inner desire, of course the creator will find it personally rewarding, even as the effort it demands is sometimes superhuman. A creative person must love what they do because that love is part, if not most, of the payoff for a career spent in the expression of motivation.

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It’s pretty easy to feel like an asshole when travelling: no matter how lightly you pack, you’re always carrying too much with you, hitting people waiting for the bus with your backpack as you try in vain to orient yourself in the winding streets of a European city. You don’t know the intricacies of politeness in the place you’re visiting, so inevitably you tuck in before your host, accidentally eat the entire small dish of condiments meant to be shared with the table and choke on your shot of Schnapps. However, often the biggest hurdle to seamless travelling—the kind of travelling where you really feel like you can “pass”—is language. You probably don’t speak it, and yet you’re in a situation where you sometimes need to ask questions.

Think you don't need to ask questions? How else are you going to understand what this handsome Hungarian is trying to sell you?

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Mother’s Day is early this year, which, in combination with the fact that I don’t have cable (and hence can better avoid saccharine commercial appeals), seems to have translated into better-than-usual success in avoiding the build-up towards Mother’s Day. For me, it is always a build-up. My Mother’s Day comes at the apex of a crescendo, following weeks of growing tension as I am increasingly confronted with smiling visages of all that is missing in my life.

For motherless daughters, there are a lot of difficult days in the year: her birthday, your birthday, her death day, the days when you feel you have to “stand in” for her at family events, the days when you just need her advice, etc. For me, though, among the worst is Mother’s Day. Birthdays, anniversaries, these are personal, intimate. If they are shared, they are shared with those who know your loss or may even share it. Don’t get me wrong, these days are deeply felt, but at least they are publically invisible.

Mother’s Day, on the other hand, thrusts mothers into the foreground in a bald appeal to show your love through time and money, mostly the latter. Of course, we all know that the “mother” represented by Mother’s Day is a fiction: the tender, soft-spoken glue that holds the family together, the figure who packs the lunches, Swiffers the ceiling fans and tends to wounds. Sure, many of our mothers are lovely people, often caring, selfless, or hard-working, but, they are certainly not uniformly so. Most of us have an at least somewhat complicated relationship with our mother; many have mothers who aren’t necessarily figures who should be celebrated; some of us have mothers who’ve left us behind. But, on Mother’s Day, we’re meant to celebrate the fiction, the ideal, to focus on the golden moments that stick with us, however tenuously.

1920 Mother's Day Pageant, c/o Oregon State University Archives

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Memento Park is an open-air museum on the outskirts of Budapest (really, the outskirts—if you take the city bus, you have to change once and drive through sprawling suburbs and some near-countryside to get there). The park contains a collection of Soviet-era monuments that were once prominent visual landmarks in the city and were removed after 1989.

It was a shared problem among formerly Soviet-controlled states with the fall of the Berlin wall: what to do with the trappings of the Communist state? Along with violence and suppression (and not to underemphasize these), Soviet control was also achieved and maintained aesthetically—Socialist-realism was an artistic mode designed to teach good citizenship, promote a socialist way of life and imagine a communist future. The Soviets had huge visual presence in the areas they controlled. So, with the fall in ’89, questions around this ghostly visual presence arose almost immediately: do we remove the monuments to Stalin and Lenin? What about Marx? What about those of our own communist leaders and heroes? Practically-speaking, how does one get rid of so many tons of concrete? What does it mean to seek out and destroy aesthetic and artistic objects that have come to define a cityscape, even if they are reminders of a period of oppression? How do we account for the fact that these objects house shared cultural memories, even if they are not always good ones? Is it right to simply destroy them?

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