Finnish bus lines
Hello!
I don’t know about your state or town or country, but here in Oregon, we’ve recently crossed the half-million-vaccines-administered milestone. Most days we’re vaccinating between 15,000 and 20,000 people. Is that fast? Are we lagging behind other communities? I’m not sure. The county in which I live has vaccinated just under 3,000 people, of a population of about 52,000. There’s progress; I just don’t know if the progress is as good as we can hope for, or if we can do better. (Well, we can always do better.)
What I’m consuming
At the moment, I’m still slowly making my way through The Idiot. I’m a compulsive book-orderer, and I’ve added a few new titles to my to-read stack: A couple of short story collections, including Lauren Groff’s Delicate Edible Birds and Jeffrey Eugenides’s Fresh Complaint; a biography of the film and theater director Mike Nichols, Mike Nichols: A Life, by Mark Harris; and a debut novel, Fake Accounts, by Lauren Oyler. I’ve also recently learned about an author named Keith Houston, who writes books about typesetting (Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks) and books (The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time) themselves, and am considering ordering some of his work. (A sample post from his blog, Shady Characters, about the typography of obscure street signs, makes a solid case for my being into his books.) I pile books like nobody’s business, so I might get to any one of these in the next few days, or the next two years.
I’m all current now on The Expanse, and nearing the final season of Breaking Bad. The latter is a fine show, but I’m not sure why it’s often regarded as one of the greatest shows ever made. A year or two ago, I read TV (The Book): Two Experts Pick the Greatest American Shows of All Time, by Matt Zoller Seitz, one of my go-to television critics, and Alan Sepinwall. Breaking Bad was the #5 show of all time on their list. Maybe the final season really elevates it, but so far, I’m just not seeing it. It’s a very good show. I’d be hard-pressed to put it in my own top ten, though, if I were making such a list. And honestly, Breaking Bad over Mad Men? I really don’t see that.
But then, art is subjective, we all know that. And so must be “best of all time” lists about said art, I guess.
Catching a bus from Helsinki
Recently I stumbled across Oliver Burkeman’s writing, and quickly found a piece he wrote for the Guardian nearly a decade ago: “This column will change your life: Helsinki Bus Station Theory.” It’s a pretty standard click-bait title—Here are some photos of a baby eating a cantaloupe and you will NOT believe what happens in photo 23—but something about this one worked. The words “Helsinki Bus Station Theory” were just weird enough to merit a click.
First outlined in a 2004 graduation speech by Finnish-American photographer Arno Minkkinen, the theory claims, in short, that the secret to a creatively fulfilling career lies in understanding the operations of Helsinki's main bus station. It has circulated among photographers for years, but it deserves (pardon the pun) greater exposure.
Burkeman recaps the theory, and I’ll re-recap it here briefly: At the heart of Helsinki, there are many bus platforms, where you can catch one of many different buses. It almost doesn’t matter which bus you take, because for a short distance, all the buses make the same stops.
"Each bus stop represents one year in the life of a photographer," Minkkinen says. You pick a career direction – maybe you focus on making platinum prints of nudes – and set off. Three stops later, you've got a nascent body of work. "You take those three years of work on the nude to [a gallery], and the curator asks if you are familiar with the nudes of Irving Penn." Penn's bus, it turns out, was on the same route.
Artists, generally speaking, crave the idea of being original. On this bus route, after having spent a year chasing a particular style of work, the artist discovers she wasn’t making anything original at all. Plenty of people have been here before. So she gets off the bus, returns to the bus station, and finds another bus.
Three years later, something similar happens. "This goes on all your creative life: always showing new work, always being compared to others."
But wait!
A little way farther on, the way Minkkinen tells it, Helsinki's bus routes diverge, plunging off on idiosyncratic journeys to very different destinations. That's when the photographer finds a unique "vision", or – if you'd rather skip the mystificatory art talk – the satisfying sense that he or she is doing their own thing.
Burkeman asks the question: “What’s the answer?”
It’s simple. Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus.
I adore this metaphor for the creative life. None of us is who we’ll ultimately become, and none of us becomes that person without sheer force of will. Staying power. Determination. Persistence. Burkeman pulls on this thread a bit:
…it illustrates a critical insight about persistence: that in the first weeks or years of any worthwhile project, feedback – whether from your own emotions, or from other people – isn't a reliable indication of how you're doing.
He also touches on the myth of being “original”:
The second point concerns the perils of a world that fetishises originality. A hundred self-help books urge you to have the guts to be "different": the kid who drops out of university to launch a crazy-sounding startup becomes a cultural hero… yet the Helsinki theory suggests that if you pursue originality too vigorously, you'll never reach it. Sometimes it takes more guts to keep trudging down a pre-trodden path, to the originality beyond.
This brings to mind many accounts I’ve heard of what makes an artist successful, particularly authors: This notion that the most valuable trait any author can have isn’t a special skillset, but the ability to sit down, day after day, and do the work. That same author might look up one day and realize they’ve built a career, a full life’s pursuit of their chosen art.
It also makes me think of a critical fear I have about my current book project. In December 2013 I was laid off from a job. I spent every day thereafter searching for the next one, contracting out as a book cover designer, etc. As a result, all the interviews and design work kept me fully occupied for a few weeks. I felt like I was missing all these important, formative moments with Squish, who had just turned two.
One afternoon, after spending a day working in a library, I found myself starting this short story. I wrote it in the space of an hour or two, and when I was finished, I had this little, precious, very personal story about a father leaving Earth on a rocket ship the very day his daughter is born. A central concern in the story is this notion of leaving behind a message for his child, and then waking up, many, many years in the future, to receive a message in return.
A few days after I finished the story, the trailer for Interstellar was released. And right there, among the lovely shots of spaceships tracking against Saturn’s rings, or skimming the event horizon of a black hole, was this brief scene of Matthew McConaughey’s astronaut, who has left his daughter behind on Earth, receiving a message from his children:
I noted this and filed it away; it didn’t really bother me much, this similarity, at the time. I self-published my little story, and it later appeared in a few other places, and that was that.
But now I’m taking that story and expanding the idea into a novel, and I find myself thinking of this similarity quite frequently. I genuinely liked Interstellar the first time I saw it; I’ve now seen it many times, and like it a little more, for new reasons, each time I see it again. The difference between now and 2013 is that, in 2013, nobody had seen the movie yet. In 2021, everybody’s seen this movie. When I finish my novel, and someone reads it, I fully anticipate that someone to tell me how much it reminds them of Interstellar.
…if you pursue originality too vigorously, you’ll never reach it.
The bus station theory is useful not only as a reference point for a whole writing career, but as a reminder that, for this one project, it’s not the end of the world if my work isn’t the only piece of fiction with an absent astronaut father. What’s important is that my work pushes along that bus route beyond the first few stops, to discover what’s beyond, and what will make it very much its own—my own—piece of art, unique and incomparable to other things. (I suppose I should cut all those scenes where my protagonist says, “All right, all right, all right…”)
✏️Stay on the bus, my friends!
Jg
About the author
Jason Gurley is the author of Awake in the World, Eleanor, and other books. He lives and writes on a hill in Scappoose, Oregon. More at www.jasongurley.com.
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