Ethan Hawke On The Permission To Create

I know, you’re still not over Ethan Hawke being such a schmuck in Reality Bites and aren’t sure if you can take him seriously. It’s ok. Sometimes, me too, if we’re being honest. Just do what I do and re-read the Roger Ebert movie review for the 18th time (which deserves it’s own Cultish Creative post, now that I think about it).

And if you’re still salty, even after that Ebert review and trying to remember Training Day* or his part in Dead Poet’s Society, try on Ethan Hawke helping make Lisa Loeb a star in the most artist-supporting-other-artist ways artists can do - right here.

Are you ready to listen to Ethan Hawke now? Good. Because he gave a short little TED talk and it’s phenomenal. Here’s a snippet with my emphasis added:

I think that most of us really want to offer the world something of quality, something that the world will consider good or important. And that's really the enemy, because it's not up to us whether what we do is any good. And if history has taught us anything, the world is an extremely unreliable critic.

Right. So you have to ask yourself, do you think human creativity matters? Well, most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about poetry, right? They have a life to live and they're not really that concerned with Allen Ginsberg's poems or anybody's poems—until their father dies. They go to a funeral, you lose a child, somebody breaks your heart. They don't love you anymore. And all of a sudden you're desperate for making sense out of this life. And has anybody ever felt this bad before? How did they come out of this cloud or the inverse?

[Or] something great. You meet somebody in your heart explodes. You love them so much you can't even see straight. You know, you're dizzy. Did anybody feel like this? What is happening to me?

And that's when art's not a luxury. It's actually sustenance. We need it. OK, well, what is it? Human creativity is nature manifest in us.

Let me recap that for us:

Nature is WILD.

Human creativity is “nature manifest in us,” which means it’s the WILD inside of us. All of us.

The things we can’t find the words for—we are not alone, and art is others trying to describe it.

The good, the bad, and the ugly. But mostly, the WILD.

You can either connect to that WILD, or you can deny it. Wouldn’t you rather connect? If you’re reading this, I already know your answer.

Cheers my fellow Professional Slash Artists.

Do give this 9 minutes of your time:

h/t Dylano for flagging this

*the secret to remembering Training Day is remembering the Wayne Brady Chapelle Show sketch (which is up there with the Ebert review of Reality Bites for a “hey, that really did happen!” memory moment)