Critiques of Pure Freedom
In the introduction to Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant writes about the seductive illusion of complete freedom—a life with “no bounds,” where you can do whatever you want, whenever you want. He compares the longing for unbounded autonomy to a dove “cutting through the air the resistance of which it feels,” imagining that “it could do even better in airless space.” Reflecting on a similar illusion—that artists need to be totally free of restrictions and limitations—the 20th-century Nobel Prize-winning novelist André Gide wrote, “Art is always the result of constraint. To believe that it rises higher as it becomes freer is to believe that what keeps a kite from rising is its string. Kant’s dove, which thought it could fly better without the air to trouble its wings, did not realize that in order to fly, it had to have the air’s resistance to support its wings. Likewise art must be supported by resistance in order to rise.”
Some ways in which resistance, limitations, constraints, and restrictions are supportive—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
An Immovable Deadline
Jimmy Kimmel Live! airs four nights a week, 42 weeks a year. The writing team shares a floor in an office building, each with their own desk where they work on material throughout the day. I asked the show’s head writer Danny Ricker, “what do you do to be able to produce so much so consistently?” What I had in mind was: to come up with ideas every day, does he read a lot? Go for long walks? Have some kind of Random Episodic Silent Thinking practice? Danny answered, “An immovable deadline.” He referenced the famous line from Lorne Michaels, the creator and producer of Saturday Night Live: “we don’t go on because we’re ready. We go on because it’s 11:30.” “We have the same situation here,” Danny continued. “We can’t go, ‘we didn’t think of anything today!’”
The Catastrophe of Success
Three years after the Broadway success of his play The Glass Menagerie made him rich and famous, the playwright Tennessee Williams wrote an essay titled, The Catastrophe of Success, in 1947. “The sort of life that I had lived previous to popular success,” Williams writes, “was the sort of life for which the human organism is created.” It was a hard, bounded life: Williams worked menial jobs—as a factory worker, a theater usher, an elevator operator, and a manual laborer—making minimum wage, “which covered my [rent] and left me seven dollars for meals,” and writing stories and plays in the margins of his days. “I was not aware of how much vital energy had gone into this struggle until the struggle was removed,” he writes. When the struggles were removed and replaced with the luxuries of lavish hotel suites, expensive restaurants, and a constant stream of people offering to do things for him—Williams found himself feeling empty and depressed. He grew distant from family and friends, distrustful of people’s motives, and disconnected from his work, resenting it for bringing him fame and fortune. Without the vital efforts that defined and confined his earlier life, Williams writes that he came to “fully apprehend” that “the heart of man, his body and his brain, are forged in a white-hot furnace for the purpose of conflict and that with the conflict removed, the man is a sword cutting daisies, that not privation [a state in which things essential for human well-being are scarce or lacking] but luxury is the wolf at the door, and that the fangs of this wolf are all the little vanities and conceits and laxities that Success is heir to.”
Desperation Is The Mother of The Ollie
Tony Hawk was the first skateboarder to ollie into his aerial tricks, a move that fundamentally changed the sport. Before Hawk, a skater needed to be big enough to be able to generate the momentum required to get off a ramp and into the air. By ollying into his tricks, Hawk not only opened the door to a new era of technical and stylish tricks that now define modern skating, but also broke the size barrier, allowing smaller, lighter skaters to do things previously thought impossible. “It wasn’t like I was trying to create a movement,” Hawk said. “It was because I was desperate.” It was because he was too small and too skinny “to get the inertia needed to get in the air like other skaters.” Sort of like Kant’s dove, Hawk used an apparent restriction to support his flight—and in doing so, transformed skateboarding forever.
Pick A Date
Tommy Kail, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Alex Lacamoire—in just about every interview in which they are asked about Hamilton—talk about the turning point in creating Hamilton. Lin-Manuel wrote the first song, “Alexander Hamilton,” in 2009. He finished the second, “My Shot,” in 2011. He performed “My Shot” in front of a hundred people or so at Ars Nova in 2011. Everyone loved it. And at the post-show cocktail party, everyone told Lin-Manuel that they loved it. Fresh off the warmth of the applause—“that’s usually a good time to strike,” Kail said. So when he got his chance at that post-show party, Kail went up to Lin-Manuel. “God, everyone thinks you’re amazing,” Kail said to him. “But you’ve got two songs…and you started writing it in 2009 and it’s almost 2012…I feel like you should hurry up. So let’s pick a date—six months from now, and just write two songs a month and let’s just see what happens.” Flush from the success of that night, Lin-Manuel said, “I can do that!” “I know you can,” Kail said. And he did. Lacamoire mentions a quote he once heard, “If it weren’t for deadlines, nothing would get done.”
It Keeps You From Spinning Off The Planet
Supported by a series of immovable deadlines, Lin-Manuel Miranda finished writing Hamilton. It opened on Broadway in the summer of 2015 and quickly became a sensation. Famous people were in the audience every night. There were afterparties. There were lots of people telling him, “God, you’re amazing.” Asked, “What about your life allowed you to be able to handle the crazy success of the show?”—Lin said, “Vanessa [Lin’s wife]…and my first kid. He was born two weeks before rehearsal started.” So instead of attending afterparties with famous people who thought he was a God, Lin went home to his wife and newborn. “All the noise and things that derail folks—like the getting invited to parties and the famous people—I had to say no to ninety percent of it,” Lin said. “Because I had to sleep eight hours and I knew I was gonna wake up twice and change diapers. My family really saved my ass, because I think that’s how you lose it.” As Ryan Holiday put it after referencing that story, “People are concerned that having kids or getting married will tie you down. And it does. It objectively does. But it ties you down to reality. It tethers you to the earth.” Like the air to Kant’s dove and the string to Gide’s kite, “It keeps you from spinning off the planet.”