Finding Worth Among the Echoes
June 18, 2024 at 03:30PM
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Cameron Carr | Longreads | June 18, 2024 | 4,284 words (15 minutes)
We left the house with the terraced flower beds full of phlox and black-eyed Susans, with the backyard where squirrels feasted on our flowers and competed in a miniature Olympics, leaping from the fence and trees. We left the house with three floors and a balcony jutting out from the spare bedroom we’d filled with guitars, drums, and amplifiers. From that house, my partner, Sierra, and I moved into a one-bedroom apartment. Space was limited. A consolidation was needed.
We sold the drums and half the speakers, but it made little difference. A corner of our new place is decked in black, filled with plywood caskets dressed in leather plastics. These are our guitars, eight of them, in cases leaning warily against the walls and each other, learning to make friends with the dust. Before, I played the guitars every day, sometimes only one of them, but often two or three. The last time I touched them all within a day, the cases at least, was when I lugged them in and out of the moving truck at each stop on the three-day drive across the country—I still held them so tender then, couldn’t bear to leave them outside overnight.
The move is a clean cut between periods of my life, an incision that I’m still not sure if I should view as malignant or benign. Ever since I can remember, I wanted to be a musician—a rock star, I said when I was little. At least since I was a teenager, I thought some quieter version of that could come true. But then it didn’t, or maybe I gave up in the midst of it. Before the dream could mute itself, I moved across the country to become a writer. At the old house, in the extra room, pastel-colored shag rugs muffled the echoing shouts between amplifiers, hardwood floor, and plaster walls, but then I found the rugs served just as well for cushion while I read in silence. What I’m struggling to determine is what remains after everything’s gone silent.
What I wanted, always, was to create something worthwhile of music, something great and meaningful.
I suppose the before period began when, at age 11, I purchased a CD called Ramones Mania. I chose it over others because I calculated that for the price of one CD, I could have 30 songs instead of 12. Thus began my primitive understanding that the worth of something could be measured by music. When I got my first job at 16, I saved my money to buy microphones so I could record my own music. As I got older, my understanding shifted, refined. I chose jobs based not on how much money they would allow me to spend on music, but on how little they asked of my time and mind. I worked in a shipping warehouse and a children’s play café. I delivered Italian catering and convinced friends and then other musicians to let me record their music in my basement. I made very little money, but I made music freely, and that was what I cared about.
I did all this believing sometimes in a dream that held a constructive future—a career, fame, at least stability—but mostly wishing only to make songs and hold the lingering hum quietly within me. What I wanted, always, was to create something worthwhile of music, something great and meaningful. That unspecificity felt poetic, generous, but it left room for compromise, a complacent middleground somewhere between the worth my parents taught me and the intangible worth I felt when I first heard, say, Jimi Hendrix tending to a guitar he’d set aflame.
Before turning 16, I’d read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success and calculated that I could reach his 10,000-hour bar for greatness by practicing three hours every day until I turned 26. I’m not sure I’d thought of greatness before, but what more could a person want? Greatness seemed worthwhile, meaningful even. I had questions though: Was I training to be a guitarist? Songwriter? Performer? Did it count as practicing if I only rehearsed things that I already knew? And what would this greatness do? Who defined the success that followed? Even if I didn’t understand, the promise of greatness was enough to make me want.
Support for the 10,000-hour theory in Outliers comes from a study of the prestigious Academy of Music at Berlin University of the Arts. The researchers asked instructors to assess the student violinists: who would become the great, the good, the rest? Then, they helped the students to estimate their lifetime hours practiced. By age 20, the lowest group had logged some 4,000 hours while the greats, of course, had reached 10,000. The greats, the study proposed, would go on to be top-tier soloists. The lowest group would become teachers. This was inherent: these students were selected from a music education program at the academy.
The researchers conducted a partner study, this one more blunt: what separates professional and amateur pianists? Thousands of hours. There were no outliers.
So I practiced daily. Why risk it? It couldn’t hurt to spend more time making music. If not success, something good had to come of it.
By this 10,000-hour standard, success is of a specific type: it involves performing, traveling, acclaim. In the version of success proposed by these studies, success means to be one distinct from many—an outlier. Teaching stands in contrast. Those who choose to dedicate their abilities and passions to support others disappear into a mass. The implication is that to exist within a community or to practice a craft out of passion and joy is not success. To many, maybe, that is true. But how limited is our potential, our community, our creativity when success is defined like that?
What might happen if those hours were packed away, put in cases and stuffed in a corner—not forgotten, but repurposed? I don’t mean to question the value of practice, effort, time. My questions are about how we choose to look at both skill and success. I want a specific definition of what skill it is that anyone is building and what success it will bring them, and then I want to look at another part of their life, any other. What fulfillment might time bring outside the intention of those hours? I’d like to imagine a world where time spent forming chords and fitting words to feelings does not have so limited an application. I’d like to imagine a world where time spent on any task or craft or passion does not only apply to a single predetermined purpose. I’d like to hear the echoes.
It has occurred to me that these questions are self-serving. I’ve been rereading my copy of Outliers and discovered its margins full of anxious math. I’d highlighted a line that declares 10,000 as “the magic number for true expertise.” This math guided the rest of my teenage years. I would shut myself in my room immediately after school, set timers, allot extra practice time before taking trips. “Whatever you’re doing, it’s working,” my older brother said of my singing. I took it as proof, but I’d started near tone-deaf, and the song of 10,000 hours moved to a glacial rhythm.
This logic seemed to hold little appeal to anyone else I knew. They preferred to think of themselves as naturally inclined in their passions or of their art as dealing more with inspiration than practiced craft. They were uninterested in art transformed into work. At other times, they shifted the topic from process to ethos and said they didn’t have the motivation to work that hard or said they didn’t understand the motivation to become an expert; they would rather have the purity of an innocent and untrained mind. They turned greatness into a dirty word. I didn’t blame them, but I kept up my routine as best I could.
I’d like to imagine a world where time spent on any task or craft or passion does not only apply to a single predetermined purpose. I’d like to hear the echoes.
My pursuit of success faltered after moving back to Ohio from New York City, a year after finishing college. Before I left my boss warned me, “You know if you leave you’ll never work in music again, right?” I didn’t want to let music go, but love was calling me elsewhere and I could not reckon those two things. At that point 10,000 hours and my questions of what reaching that milestone meant felt either more vital than ever or beside the point. If I didn’t want success in a traditional sense, 10,000 hours didn’t matter. But I needed to know, or thought that I needed to know, what kind of success I did want. New York had enchanted me, but I missed the unfinished basements and uncovered ceilings pasted with signs to watch your head. I missed the chains of duct-taped power strips threatening the electrical wiring of an entire house. I felt more at home in those spaces, in any space where I could make as much noise as I wanted without worrying about the neighbors. In New York, instead of making noise, I spent time writing and reading books. In hindsight that seems an obvious foreshadowing.
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That same summer, Sierra’s parents bought a farm. Property, they called it. This was a lifelong dream for them, having grown up in rural Ohio. On the property they built a house, tucked a quarter-mile from the road on a winding drive they called Disaster Lane, plotted fields of lavender and sage, and made a kitchen garden beside the house to grow tomatoes, strawberries, peppers, squash.
Each time we came to visit they would have something new for us to see or do. The tractor came first—I think Sierra’s dad, Brian, mowed the lawn (the pasture, he calls it) three times a week that summer. A German shepherd followed. Then a golf cart they call the mule. Chickens and a coop, a bigger coop, bees, another German shepherd. I helped lay the irrigation system in the fields and plant the first seedlings of lavender and sage in even rows. I came to pack stones into the wall that would form garden beds around the house, and when we built a windmill to aerate the pond, I was the one who climbed to its top to start the propeller.
“Where did you learn all this?” I asked Brian one day while weeding. He tells stories of his dad’s upbringing, where cows could be cherished pets, but Brian’s dad did not grow up on a farm. His memories are inherited. I expected him to explain how much time he’d put into learning this, but he didn’t. “I guess it’s in my blood,” he said. I found that hard to believe, as we were weeding with a blow torch, but he didn’t think that was as funny as I did. I asked if the flames would actually kill the roots below the dirt, but he shrugged me off and we kept using the blow torch.
A week later the weeds were back. I haven’t seen the blow torch since.
I wonder where the farm fits in all these attempts to trace success. It’s miniscule in comparison to the megafarms that feed the country, but this is success for the family, the realization of a lifelong dream. They want self-sustenance, the security of owning the place you live, a place to play with fire unquestioned. This part of the country—the Midwest, Appalachia, the Rust Belt—tends to value that independence. The farmers and residents may be physically apart from each other, but they enjoy the separation as a means of blending in rather than distinction.
After Sierra’s parents bought the property, they quickly put up no trespassing signs around its border. When the house was finished and the family moved in, Brian set up cameras throughout the surrounding woods and an alert at the bottom of the driveway. The electronic voice repeating alert—zone—one annoys me, but it’s pure excitement for Sierra’s dad and grandpa. They can hardly bear the two minutes it takes a vehicle to make it up the driveway. Is it Amazon? UPS? A guest? They go out to greet whoever it is. They live so far away but are so eager to share it.
It’s the same with the cameras. Security is mentioned first, but the only trespassers they’ve had are lost hikers and high school runners at the property’s edge. The cameras, like the alert, are mostly for entertainment. They move around and multiply as Brian learns the best places to spot animals overnight. He must spend hours watching the footage and researching his findings. Then he shares his work on social media. He becomes an amateur biologist.
I love him. I claim him as my own: an amateur like me.
I like Sierra’s dad. Before Brian and I met, Sierra showed me a picture of him with wraparound sunglasses and a long goatee, one fist flexed in rock horns. I was surprised to have to coax words out of him in person. He was more like me than I’d expected, a collector of odd interests and passions. Before the farm, Brian was a photographer. Before that, an archaeologist. At some point, he ran marathons. He is a serial amateur.
When he and I first met, the living room of their house doubled as his photo studio for greeting clients. Family pictures, senior photos, and action shots from sports doubled as promotional images, framed alongside people with no relation to the family who I memorized all the same.
He’d probably take offense to the term amateur. He does run a business. Brian was one of the first in the area to offer overhead drone shots and 3D interior images—prime opportunities for realty. He gave up weddings and family photos for housing complexes and factories. But his love is for photography, not real estate or industry. Landscapes and nature are what he really wants to shoot. On the farm, he’ll wake up at two or three in the morning to capture the moon and stars in an empty midwestern sky.
Since moving out there, Brian seems to spend less time on photo jobs, but the gigs he does take on are bigger. In one weekend he might cover a month’s salary. They’re never landscapes or nature shoots, though. “Those don’t pay,” he tells me.
I love him. I claim him as my own: an amateur like me.
The last time I touched all of my guitars on the same day was on a trip to the farm. Sierra and my band had decided to record an album in the barn. It felt like a homecoming but in retrospect seems more like a goodbye: a last great musical act before leaving that period of my life. It felt romantic, anyway, to record in a barn. We set the drums next to the tractor, tried to coax the chickens into cooing for the microphone, and had a bonfire at night. The biggest appeal was that we could all record together. In a basement we had to squeeze side by side, cautious not to swing the head of a guitar into the head of a person. The sounds were so close together that a microphone on a guitar amp would inevitably also record the bass, the drums, the air conditioner kicking in, so we recorded one person playing at a time. In the barn we were able to spread out but still play together.
Earlier that summer I’d helped my dad remodel the house that I grew up in. I drove out on weekends to plant flowers, repaint doors, tear out the old floor. He could’ve paid a professional to do it, but he said he liked having me around and would rather give me the money. I was in a dry spell of freelance gigs, delivering garlic dough and pomodoro pasta while waiting for the school year to bring back a regular substitute-teaching paycheck, so I didn’t argue.
My younger brother sometimes came too, and we found our initials in the grout between kitchen tiles where we’d hidden them two decades before. Then we smashed the tiles with a sledgehammer. My brother was training to lead construction crews, so this was familiar to him. I was an amateur at tearing up tile and using a sledgehammer. I pretended to know my way with the tile. I didn’t need to pretend much with the sledgehammer; you just lift it up and smash it down. It is kind of exciting.
We didn’t save the grout with our initials, but from the carpet I cut giant fabric swatches, lopsided rectangles big enough to roll a body in. I knew they would be good for music—carpet makes a buffer to still the echoes of hard surfaces. I added them to my other collections of oddities: power strips from the ’80s, grocery store twist ties, large cardboard boxes. These are the types of things it pays to have handy as a hobbyist. Cardboard on a drum creates a fatter thunk. Twist ties organize the tangling gnarls of cables. Power strips anticipate that there are never enough outlets (and the ’80s was the decade that power strips improved in safety and needed replacing, according to a school where Sierra’s grandpa had done maintenance and collected unused odds and ends).
When we recorded our album in the barn, I used all of this. In a professional recording studio, the instruments would move to isolated smaller rooms that still let the musicians see each other, with an elaborate web of headphones, mics, and cables allowing them to hear each other, too. At the least, an engineer would separate them with gobos—jargon for movable acoustic panels that go between. But we didn’t have any of those things, so we used carpet and old mattresses propped up between chairs. Half the carpet covered concrete below us, and the other half hung above in the rafters between our instruments and the metal roofing. We wanted to hear the barn, but we didn’t want to hear it that much. The challenge when recording is to hear just the right things, just enough.
The album came out mostly as we hoped, but the chickens refused to speak. I can hear everything else, though: that little bit of barn, us playing to each other, battered power strips, even the carpet I had walked on for almost all my life. It sounds perfect, at least for me.
The first time I visit the farm after we move across the country, Brian offers me his home office, “in case you need somewhere to work,” he says while he mimes typing. I spend an afternoon in there beside his Iron Maiden beer bottle collection and his We the People mouse pad. The window to my right looks toward the edge of the farm and the freckled autumn leaves. He comes in only once, as the daylight sinks into the tree line, and silently grabs camera equipment so as not to interrupt me.
I feel guilty because he’s making accommodations for me to work, but really, all I’m doing is reading. I take notes on the décor and try to find words to describe seeing fall leaves after returning to Ohio from the desert. I wouldn’t call it work. Mostly, I look at trees out the window and I read.
Here, I am able to be idle in a way—isolated from the pressures and productions of whatever job I have at the time. But nature is never idle. It works toward desires unapparent to an unfocused human eye.
In his office, I’m reading “Mrs. Mean,” a story by Ohio-raised writer William H. Gass about a man who spends his days observing and considering his neighbors. He doesn’t seem to work at all. “When I bought my house I wished, more than anything, to be idle,” the narrator says, “idle in the supremely idle way of nature; for I felt then that nature produced without effort, in the manner of digestion and breathing.”
Idleness and nature are part of the appeal of the farm—the rural valued as an escape from the contemporary stresses of the city, from the constant emails and social media and devices that track and nudge and notify you at every step. I do love the isolation of the farm, but mostly for its sounds. I can hear the leaves falling. If I walk to the wildflower field, full of goldenrod and blue wood aster, I can hear the bees humming. I don’t believe in the strict dichotomy between the country and the city—a cellphone tower was essential when they built their house here—but I do see how nature and natural can relate. Here, I am able to be idle in a way—isolated from the pressures and productions of whatever job I have at the time. But nature is never idle. It works toward desires unapparent to an unfocused human eye. Here, I have the privilege of idleness, of attending to the things that I can’t get out of my head when I’m supposed to be working.
One thing I envy is that Brian has never worked for anyone, excluding part-time jobs. As an archaeologist, photographer, and farmer he has always had his own business by choice. He tells me this with as much anxiety as pride. He couldn’t imagine adopting another’s purpose. He spends his time on things that allow joy rather than require work.
What he does “breaks the rules of work by playing, rather than working,” as Eula Biss writes in Having and Being Had, the other book that I’ve brought with me to the farm. The quote refers to how a musician’s work doesn’t appear as working at all. I don’t want to say that what Brian is doing doesn’t take effort—I’ve spent enough time alongside him sweating in the rows of lavender and splitting wood behind the barn to know otherwise—but Gass is right that it sometimes feels like producing without effort. It’s more about conscious effort. What the family wants from the farm is the space and opportunity to do what they naturally desire, for their effort to feel as natural, as Gass writes, as breathing.
Later in Biss’s book, she considers the other end of the paradigm, how what is commonly seen as pleasurable—playing music, reading, planting—can come to feel like work. Why, she asks, does one do these things that turn pleasure into strain? Of course, no one asks this of work in the traditional sense: we’re expected to tolerate the displeasure of it. For this other type of work, Biss concludes a different word may be needed. I agree.
During our barn recording, Sierra’s dad kept working through the weekend, though he made a point to save his lawn mowing and loudest work for when we took breaks or rehearsed. Work, again, feels like the wrong word. He tended to lavender that they hoped to sell but didn’t need to. Need feels wrong, too. Do we need lavender? Music? Yes, I think we do.
What I’m struggling to understand is what things mean when moved to different contexts. Like how what words mean is not always what I mean when I use them—and that meaning is also not always what I interpret when I hear them. In this, I do not think I am alone. I let the purposes shift. I ask questions but let myself move on without expecting tidy answers.
The implication is that to exist within a community or to practice a craft out of passion and joy is not success. To many, maybe, that is true. But how limited is our potential, our community, our creativity when success is defined like that?
The barn recording now feels like the last great act of a prior time in my life when I still believed myself to be a serious musician. But that phrasing feels wrong, too: I am still a musician and serious. The problem is a lack of a word to describe my relationship to music and its making. I’m as much an amateur as before, but there’s a difference in aspirations. I do still have dreams some nights after spending time with a guitar in my hands, but I don’t see my future revolving around music anymore. Perhaps I’ve moved from one phase of amateurism to another. In one, the passion is the purpose of a life. In the other, the passion brings purpose, but it is not the center of it.
On this first trip back from our new home, we arrange our time by what to do around the farm in the same way we might organize another trip by museum hours or dinner reservations. Brian and I spend a morning in the woods cutting thin, fallen tree limbs into timber that we use to replace fences. The natural wood doesn’t last as long as store-bought, processed planks, but this doubles as cleanup, and we think the repurposed stray limbs look more appealing anyway. When we’re done, we split wood, making a circular pile next to the circular pile leftover from last year. We’re making work for ourselves, but we like what we’re doing, and we like doing it together. It’s about process more than product.
When the sun sets on my final night there, I finish working in Brian’s office and find him outside on the porch, standing behind a tripod. He’s waiting for the moon, he says, pointing to where its light is starting to illuminate the trees. In the meantime, he’s found Jupiter. He shows me the planet in his camera’s viewfinder. It looks like any other star in the sky, but in his pictures it’s blown up and flanked by moons on both sides. He can’t get the image right, though. Jupiter appears washed out—a smeary gob of light no matter how much he spins the settings. He concedes he would need a telephoto lens to get the shot he wants. But that would cost thousands of dollars, and he can’t justify the expense for something that doesn’t pay back, something that isn’t work. Nothing will come of these attempts—the time goes uncounted. But we stay there anyway, because it counts for something to us. Besides, the sky is speckled with beauty. Each tiny star a dot of distant magnificence. He takes a few more pictures and keeps waiting for the moon. We wait together.
Cameron Carr is a writer from Ohio. His work has appeared in The Missouri Review, The Hedgehog Review, The Smart Set, and elsewhere. He is currently an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at the University of Arizona and at work on a book about amateurism, failure, and love in the arts and everyday life.
Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/06/18/worth-work-success-music/
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