Envying the Bold

09 Aug, 2026

I continue to return to variations of the same conclusion: I lack the artistic creativity, vision, and intellectual confidence of true masters; in this case, Derek Jarman or Ansgar Allen. More than any of the other factors, the real lack may be the boldness necessary to believe in and carry through a bold project, but let’s look first at what’s occasioning these thoughts this time around.

I was reminded of the yawning abyss between my own offerings and the first of the two men mentioned while watching Jarman’s brilliant Wittgenstein the other night.¹ For me, at least, the film gets at the heart of the frustratingly, beautifully complex thinker-as-individual, and does so via an almost primitive stage set: a few props in each scene against a black background. While the costuming is often elaborate, it’s only in cases where it’s truly needed, and the complete lack of special effects lets the monologues and dialogues carry the show, as is appropriate for a man who didn’t publish much during his lifetime. Jarman, along with Terry Eagleton and Tariq Ali, put together something simultaneously straightforward, funny, poignant, and simple: a combination that turned out to be gorgeously unconventional, and which (I suspect) might not ever have gotten produced had famous names not been behind it.

Where Ansgar is concerned, I devoured his The Sick List last night, a work of fiction that manages to hit home all the ways in which academia, and the institutional university that now makes it possible, more or less willingly destroys its own promise and value. The signals of toxicity (egotism, defensiveness, assumed superiority,…) and readiness to succumb to market and other reigning mentalities are all there, without having to be laid out in a logical argument or justified point by point, or at all. The presentation of the situation is itself condemnation enough. Much like Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons, the book depicted everything I’d felt while trying to stay afloat as and shape myself into the “successful academic”—but which I was too cowardly to voice, or to present in any way that made my convictions unapologetically clear. After all, as Allen’s protagonist says (and in spite of the cruelty that often occurs there), “The university has long considered itself a source of good manners.”² Infuriated as I was with the whole scene, lack of boldness and invention meant I was perfectly suited for life as an obedient academic, delivering papers and publishing articles and even books that would be forgotten almost as soon as they were read.

The film, too, got at the heart of my felt inadequacies; at the end, a dying Wittgenstein reveals to the Martian that he would have liked to have written a book of philosophy that consisted solely of jokes. When asked why he didn’t do it, Wittgenstein replies that it turned out he lacked a sense of humor. In this same vein, I was at a reading about a month ago, where the author of a spectacular book expressed his frustration at (so he thought) being unable to provide a good-enough answer to his interlocutor’s questions and observations—because, he said, “I am just not that funny.” How, then, to recognize and see clearly one’s own limitations, but work within them and still produce amazing stuff, labor-fruits that may not be spectacular in one way, but that merit the efforts that went into them, and an audience’s attention to them, all the same, and because they are how and what they are, and not something else?

One niggling matter in this bout of hand-wringing has to do with an assertion of Allen’s narrator, citing ideas by way of Thomas Bernhard: “You cannot escape… your upbringing,…. not without contorting [yourself] beyond recognition.” In spite of a Bernhard character’s education and experience, he [I] “still remains the peasant his ancestors were.” Bernhard had a lot to resent, as I recently found out when reading his autobiography. So sure, he may never have been able to “escape Austria”—but that inability itself led to incredible work that only he could have produced; who cares what or who he wasn’t.³ Where I’m concerned, what can the product of a no-nonsense middle-American culture do with her own limitations, recognizing the way in which aspirations or even plain interests other than basic physical well-being and responsibility to one’s community were sneered at as ridiculous attempts to place yourself above everyone else? Art, literature, poetry: beyond the inoffensive matter and correct interpretations of them I dutifully learned in school, the worlds of these things, the nerve they require/d, weren’t anything in those pre-internet days I could even envision, much less have access to. It was fine to look at a pretty picture, but lingering with it, finding “meaning” in it, much less making your own and approaching that making in an unironic way, was just too much; taking the time out for something like a Jarman film or, say, a Francis Bacon painting, would have earned you a snort and some derisive commentary about hoity-toity types who must be lucky to have enough time on their hands to waste it. A latecomer to modes and material and motivations my people would have scoffed at as preposterously weird and pretentious, will I forever remain an effective stranger to it all? Essentially, will it always be the case that I won’t let myself believe my participation in the world of arts and letters is remotely valued or valuable—ever seeing myself (and maybe actually being seen as) the obvious peasant?

This has all come out in a much more self-pitying way than was intended, but the question, and how to deal with it, remains. Maybe there’s nothing to do but keep writing through it? Because in addition to being unable and unwilling to tear myself from the thought and work and necessity of audacious masters, one thing is quite obvious: hayseed or not, boldly creative or not, insider or not, I somehow can’t make myself stop putting down my own words and trying to live alongside those inimitable greats.

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