I’m trying to read more art criticism. I write here about video game narrative, and I come at it from a very bookish, literary background, and I’m starting to feel that I’m limited in how I can talk about games when I can’t talk easily about how they look. I’m comfortable with plot and dialogue and text, but not really with filmic language or art direction. It’s a gap – so I’m trying to read more art criticism. I’ve recently read Hisham Matar’s A Month in Siena (his dad was vanished and he spent a month looking at paintings in Siena) and Christopher Neve’s Unquiet Landscape (reasonable introduction to 20th century British landscape painters), and there’s a stack of others on the shelf – Helen Molesworth’s Open Questions, another Christopher Neve (Immortal Thoughts), Derek Jarma’s Chroma, and just today I was gifted Benjamin Moser’s The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters.

I’m also winding through Stacey d’Erasmo’s The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry, a series of interviews with older artists that asks – what keeps you going through a whole career? What gets you through the long run? It’s not art criticism per se: it’s about artists, creatives. She talks with dancers and writers and painters, and includes a bunch of her own autobiography – after Neve, it’s such a relief. It’s like being let out on the water. It’s smooth, beautiful prose – I felt stupid reading Neve, which probably wasn’t helped by being hideously sick these last few weeks – but with d’Erasmo I feel welcome. “In the summer of 1981, after the miserable girlfriend dumped me, I met a tall woman who wore button-down white shirts and jeans every day, smoked underhand, had a New York accent, and was frequently mistaken for a man.” It’s clean, crisp writing. It’s not the jockeying, road-weary stuff you get from magazine feature writers, and it’s not the tortured poetics of a recent MFA graduate. It’s joyful, level, open. The autobiographical aspects are acknowledged in the prologue (“this book is a fugitive, occasional memoir”), and reflected in the ordering of the essays, which are structured around the progress of her own life and career. The first interview is intertwined with her reflections on young love, and in the later interviews she talks about having tenure. In some ways the book feels more weighted towards memoir than towards a deep investigation of what keeps artists going – that is, inasmuch as it’s an exploration of the long haul in art, I don’t know that it really achieves that stated goal. Each chapter features a different interview subject, and a different theme that supposedly keeps that particular person going. They’re themes like ‘Freedom’ or ‘Exile’ – if we’re being honest, relatively generic ideas that aren’t really full explanations in themselves. When you come away from the Samuel R. Delany chapter, ‘Desire’, you don’t feel that d’Erasmo has captured the essence of what actually keeps him going. There’s an interview, sure, some nice prose (“I am getting it wrong with Samuel R. Delany”), appropriate biographical detail, and the key theme is tied in, but even all of that is clearly just scratching the surface. Each chapter feels like it fails to pierce the question, each deflecting in a different way. None of the explanations are good enough. In every case there’s a nub, an unarticulated core, something – something – unspeakable. To the question of how you keep working over the length of a creative career, all the answers are no answer at all. They are asteroids in the orbit of a white-hot molten core, the irreducible person.

And I understand that failure, right – it’s not a bad book, it’s an impossible subject. There’s a core to a person that can’t be touched. You can predict surface level behaviours, maybe prompt or provoke certain types of response, but you can’t get in there. There’s something in there that can’t be spoken. Why keep making art? What makes someone continue throughout their whole career? That’s in the black box. It’s unspeakable. It’s never going to make sense, and all the attempts to make it make sense feel obviously hollow and incomplete. Honestly, the thing I feel most with this book is the same thing I feel with a bunch of my own video game criticism – it’s incomplete, openly. Sometimes I look back on a piece, and it might be pleasingly arranged, but I still sort of think – yeah, but you’ve not quite captured it. There’s always something deeper to the game – not just some additional feeling or sensation that might be added to an extant list of feelings and sensations, but a fundamental core that has not been articulated. I’m happy with my recent essay on BioShock, for instance – I think I’ve carved something interesting out of the title – but in another, deeper sense I feel like I’ve still just glanced off it. There’s still something more – something in the constant security puzzles, the pipe hacking minigame that’s forever interrupting your progress, or the blocky, clumsy combat. It’s in the whistle of the security bots, the gaudy circus bulbs on the vending machines, the heavy thump of the Big Daddy boots. You can talk about these games forever and still not come to the heart of them. There’s something impossible in there, something elusive. You can gesture towards it, try and talk about it, but there always remains this unarticulated nub, lodged deep, inaccessible to our surface scrabbling.

I think that core is part of the answer. Whether you’re making art or talking about art or talking about the people who make art, part of what keeps you going is that you never really get it sorted. You never get to the heart of the thing. You go off, you try some other stuff, and then some time later you come back and take another pass, and you might get closer, but you’re never there. Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland is about this same problem from the other side: it takes as given the inexpressible inner life and focuses on practical techniques to harness and direct it. It teaches you how to make art, consistently and over the long term. It teaches you how to ride the dragon. How’d the dragon get in? Not their business. Stacey d’Erasmo looks for the nature of the dragon, the reason why people pursue art across a career – and she comes up with some reasons, some scrapings, but they’re not that great. More compellingly what she gives us is her story, and the stories of others. She shows us human connection, relationships, the way we reach across to each other even when we don’t really understand what’s happening on the other side. We’re here together, beyond words, beyond sense, beyond any plausible form of explanation. It’s not a satisfactory answer but it’s true.