Language that doesn't stink

I turned 40 last month.

This was just before the election, so the waves of dread and discomfort that accompanied that milestone were immediately replaced with different waves of dread and discomfort. Nevertheless, I had sat with it for at least a little while and one of the things I decided was that I wanted to ensure that I live a sufficiently creative life.

I felt very sure about that, but I'm not entirely sure what it means. I know, for instance, that it doesn't necessarily mean that I need to be a professional writer. I have seen enough professional artists to know that the median creative profession consists largely of graft, angling, compromise, and unanswered, unsolicited submissions. My current job consists of mostly the same, but most of my Slack messages eventually get answered.

I've always had normal day jobs, even as I've always thought of myself as one kind of a creative or another. Until ten years ago, I was very satisfied that all of my creative efforts would be strictly extracurricular: when I was in my twenties I wrote doggerel, and then graduated to making rather good music with my band. My job was completely undemanding.

Ten years ago I started programming professionally, and the calculus changed considerably. Programming has always felt deeply, authentically creative to me:

• It engages the full extent of my mental problem-solving;
• It activates my sense of aesthetic pleasure.

I'll go further to say that, quite often, the problem I am solving when I program is an aesthetic one; usually, the specific output of a computer program is fairly easy to achieve. The work consists in finding a configuration that achieves that output with the least ugliness and faff.

Over the last few months I've been engaged in a new project that operates on similar lines, a system of shorthand. When you design a writing system you've got to solve a very well-defined problem: you want to be able to record language efficiently. You have lots of knobs to turn and levers to pull, trading off on things like the ease of writing versus reading, physical space, time, and not least, the appearance of the written text itself. You seek not only a beautiful appearance but an elegance and parsimony in the design.

In other words: on paper, I have, since my doggerel days and extending into the present, led a creative life.

Usually you use the phrase "on paper" immediately before you demonstrate how the seemingly true thing is definitely not, in the truest sense, true. I'm not ready to do that yet. I think there's a coin-flip likelihood that my life is precisely as creative as it ought to be, and I ought to continue doing what I'm doing, and that my sense that if I am not truly creative in my next decade I shall surely die is a misplaced outgassing of my unsatisfiable sense of self (♄) and should be resolved with meditation and therapy.

But I think there's another thing that art (!—the vocabulary shifts!) does, a change it effects in the world and not just in the artist.

I've noticed that the reason I'm glad that art is in the world is that good art is, basically, language that doesn't stink. In my experience of the world, it is generally full of language that sits around and almost immediately upon entering it starts to rot. This language is dead, odoriferous weight. The language of officialdom, and politics, and even the language that I create in the course of my job: it doesn't need to be malicious or stupid or even badly-crafted to be basically unnecessary, and therefore to be noise.

The art that I am glad for in my own life is that which justifies its existence: its beauty, or truth, or humour, is sufficient that it is in fact preferable to holy silence. Not only does it justify itself—it justifies its medium! Language is beautiful, not only because it provides a medium for an engaging puzzle box of syntax and sense, but because it is capable of doing more than just filling the air and making sure that software features get shipped.

Perhaps this is the challenge of the next decade: what can I create that justifies its own existence? Am I capable of speaking a sentence such that someone else is glad it was spoken into their world?