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7/2026:
At this point in time, after having been recording these aphorisms for over 35 years now, it's probably a good idea to revisit the early ones, especially the first one.
Identity, especially to artists, is very important. important because it's directly related to style, and after you've been doing it almost your whole life, you develop a core style. Some artists work in the same style their entire career, like the artist Peter Halley, an artist I always cite because he's been doing the same painting his entire life. Of course, he's done other things, as I have, but I think I have retained my style ever since childhood because it started with an interest in architecture and I'm still working in an architectural way, with frameworks and systems.
In music, identity is sometimes something that can be a foundation of your entire life if you've been doing it since your 20s. Take the band Rush, for example, who is currently on tour and playing all the songs that they played when they were in their 20s. So, their identities haven't changed. They're still in the world of their 20s and they are immensely popular across many generations because it's something that all people can relate to: the identity that you developed when you were very young. But typically what happens in life, usually around the age of 30, is that people get married and they raise families and they live in suburbs and they lose their sense of identity, partly because it's required: you have children, a spouse who doesn't share your interests. And so you go along with that, and there's no identity left from your childhood. You yourself recall it, but your spouse wouldn't, and your children might not be interested. Identity kind of goes out the window if you let it. The flexible identity never throws the baby out with the bathwater.
An AI analysis of my old Evernote (2009-2026) account where identity was a theme:
For an artist, identity is not a fixed state but a "continuing act of creation" that is often forged through their work. The sources suggest that artistic identity involves a complex negotiation between the private self, the public persona, and the evolving demands of technology and culture.
Fluidity and the "Protean" Self
A central theme in modern art is the malleability of identity.
Self-Morphing: Cindy Sherman is described as the "ultimate master of self-morphing," using makeup and prosthetics to portray multiple identities that reflect our image-saturated culture. Her work explores the idea that we can be "anything you want to be any minute of the day".
The Protean Self: The Internet initially promised a "protean self," allowing users to segment their identities through pseudonyms and avatars. However, social media platforms like Facebook have increasingly pushed for a merged identity, eroding the line between one's "work self" and "leisure self".
Flexibility as Truth: A flexible identity is seen as a tool for searching for "deeper truth," whereas a fixed identity can be dangerous, locking an individual into a myopic view of themselves and the world.
The Role of Anonymity and Masks
Artists often use anonymity or pseudonyms to subvert societal expectations and focus attention solely on the work.
The Finished Work: The writer Elena Ferrante argues that "what's essential is the finished work" and that the personal details of the author are irrelevant.
Privacy and Freedom: Salman Rushdie’s struggle with Facebook's "real-name" policy highlights the tension between a system that demands a "digital passport" and the artist's desire for the "right to don different hats—and sometimes masks" to express themselves without fear.
The Flâneur: The traditional "flâneur" (and its digital successor, the "cyberflâneur") represents the Master of seeing without being seen, preferring to stroll incognito to cultivate a "gastronomy of the eye".
The Boundary Between Life and Art
The relationship between an artist's personal life and their creative output is often fraught with contradiction.
Autobiography as Disguise: Pablo Picasso claimed his paintings were an "autobiographical... diary in disguise," yet they often functioned as a "tease" that invited the viewer to invent their own narrative rather than revealing the artist's actual feelings.
The Burden of Character: There is a long-standing debate about whether a "swine" can be a genius. While talented people may use their "burden of talent" to justify bad behavior, some argue the work is distinct from the man—Shakespeare’s work would remain sublime even if he were proven a villain.
Vertical vs. Horizontal Identity: Andrew Solomon distinguishes between vertical identity (traits inherited from parents, like ethnicity) and horizontal identity (traits that diverge from parents, such as being gay or a "genius," often found within a peer group). Artists like Glenn Ligon use these labels to explore "outsiderness" while simultaneously resisting being "boxed in" by them.
Identity as a Creative Process
Ultimately, an artist's identity is an active choice rather than a passive discovery.
Inner Work: True identity may be found in "inner work"—the part of ourselves that is not technological and recognizes that knowledge is precious because of its precariousness.
Feedback Loops: We are our own "feedback loop of self-efficacy," and the things we choose to reflect in our metaphorical mirror are what make the image of our identity appear.
Afterthoughts: Life and identity exist in a "trail of afterthoughts"; it is the internal dialogue and the "slow transformation of truth" that ultimately shapes who we are.
6/2024:
It's sometimes interesting and informative to revisit the "one" of something. If you've ever kept any kind of a list, beginning with 0001, you can make thousands of subsequent entries, and 0001 looks different from that standpoint: How is your life different? What kind of person were you at the time you wrote the first one? Who were the people in your life at that point? How is your life different now? Who are the people in your life that would make the "one" different?
Using a musical metaphor (as I frequently do) you can use a pickup bar, where the downbeat of the first measure is preceded by an eighth note, quarter note, or a half note. You can also displace the first beat by an eighth note, or a quarter note. How does that relate to revisiting something you were thinking of 30 years ago? You can decide to change the One, or keep it as is. The point is that you keep checking back to re-think it or re-affirm it.
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8/2025:
I found the exact date that I wrote this in my diary, and it was August 21st, 2004. I realized that when I started numbering the entries, I wasn't doing it chronologically. I started making the entries around 1989, but it was in another volume. As I recall, the two books that inspired them were a book by Asleigh Brilliant and The Notebooks of Paul Brunton, which was also a series of aphorisms. Also, at the time, I was moving away from instrumental jazz and into songwriting with lyrics, so I was doing a lot of writing in my diary with ideas for lyrics. Very often, things would jump out at me as being philosophical in nature, and so I started to write them down and put them into another book, which was called Code of Wisdom, around 1991.
I think what I was getting at with this entry is that when you write music, you're using different instruments, and those instruments have different characters. When I'm using a guitar, it will produce a song that has a certain character; if I'm writing using a bass, it'll be another character, and if I'm using a piano, it’s yet another character. So you have to be flexible so as to let the ideas come alive. Otherwise, if you're always imposing what you think is yourself in your music, you're probably not going to be very inventive. You probably will be able to write songs, but you're going to have too many identity blocks that will prevent you from doing certain things. For example, a white person might have a hard time doing something that's R&B and funky. If I've gotten certain ideas that are in that genre, I don't stop myself because I don't think that I can pull it off.
If you have a brand identity of yourself, it's going to be a very narrow experience of life. I would say this in defence of a postmodernist approach by distancing yourself from the work so as to not be too sentimental about art and not really caring about craft, or suggesting that craft is dead, or any kind of traditional forms are dead. I love postmodernism. It's the most fun thing about creativity in my view. It's where the ideas become the art. But postmodernism can take you out of the body and into your head, which is why I'm moving towards this idea of metamodernism (or Stuckism as it was once called in the 90s).
In their 2010 paper, “Notes on Metamodernism,” Vermeulen and van den Akker identified this new age by focusing on “deviations from the postmodern condition” that bring meaningful connections and sincere engagement rather than postmodernism’s ironic distance. What would have been an ironic exercise, deconstructing our structures and showing them empty, is transformed for the metamodernist. What the postmodern tore down, the metamodern rebuilds, creating new meaning from what was once proclaimed meaningless. We are now in the era of postmodern politics, although it probably started under the Clinton administration, about the time David Foster Wallace said, "The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of “anti-rebels,” born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that'll be the point, why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk things."
Any country will probably have its divisive identities, especially in larger countries where there's just more geography. In the United States our identities are wrapped up in the things we do and the things we own. During the Bush administration, the pickup truck started to be an object of identity–a flag that you could fly. In the book “Something Between Us” by Anand Pandian he states, “Trucks are vehicles of identity in the United States. What people say with these vehicles and with their exhaust reveals much about how they see themselves and others. The pickup truck is deeply ingrained in our national life and culture. For many Americans keen on conveying personal relationships with the rural and rustic, even as the cost of making these Automotive statements continues to decline. the pickup truck has emerged as a means of establishing their ties to a distinctly blue collar identity in the course of flaunting their bourgeois prosperity. Rolling coal is always an assertion of both identity and power, a way to express who truly belongs on the American road, and who or what ought not to be there. Plumes of black diesel smoke were gleefully cast as “Prius Repellent”.”
A fixed identity is obviously more comfortable to people because it can be a point of community, where everybody is thinking and believing in the same things. People in cities do this as well, but those aren't fixed identities, the people in cities might be more open to trying new things and not sink all their costs into one identity. I never wanted to, but at the same time I think all of us regardless of political views have a baseline of what we've always liked in our lives, the things we were doing when we were children inform our lives as adults. Our brains are wired by age 25, both physiologically, and culturally. But identities could also have some kind of epigenetic effect to where if you moved away from a city and lived in a rural environment for 20 years, you'd probably have different values. So identity probably has a lot to do with place. People that move around a lot probably don't have any fixed identities. Even people who have lived in cities their entire lives, are essentially more transient, because they're in a psychic space with a lot different kinds of people, and they just naturally don't have fixed identities.
I think a more flexible identity is the way to go. Even though I'm deeply philosophical, I'm not a wet blanket all the time. I want to be able to explore ideas regardless of genre. Everyone likes the idea of "roaming"--that we can move about freely. Imagine everywhere you went was a guided tour and you could never explore the things that interested you. It seems that it is a universal sentiment, but it might not be universally true. Strict linearity might be all people want, and observations of what people do bears that out. People actually choose the guided tours for life. Speaking of photography (Dynaxiom 0002), it could be that walking around with a camera gets you into this "roaming" mode.
