I have just spent an hour and a half sitting on the can, with my notebook, thinking about manifestos. I quit the bathroom without having produced anything noteworthy from my fore or my aft end.

This is the perfect time to stop. When you haven’t a clue what you’re doing, and you’ve just made a joke that may or may not make sense, and may or may not be in poor taste, there is so little certainty to your succeeding at this piece, that you might as well give up.

But no! I will continue, I will persist. Perseverance is the habit of the champion, the absorption and traversal of challenge and of hardship to fulfill one’s obligation to humanity, to one’s friends, to one’s world.

I’m not sure I can qualify that; and I’m certainly not sure that I believe it, but look at me, I’m going onward! I’m persisting and persevering!

An act of quitting is an act of the utmost selfishness and cowardice. Quitting (as well as its precursor, self-deprecation, and its exemplar, suicide) is a symptom of a mind so lacking in empathy that it utterly discounts and detests the opinions of those closest to it; particularly if those opinions are favorable or encouraging towards itself.

Don’t give up, you miserable sniveling artist! Don’t run-away, you self-conscious social retard! If you’re depressed, don’t off yourself in the vague hope that you’ll turn into a happy ghost! You, the depressed, you the poor in spirit, are blessed . You are the secret heroes , hoarding the woes of the world for the betterment of mankind!

By gritting your teeth, and finishing the piece of art you know is absolute shit, you are like Superman, courageously saving from disappointment all those poor fools and dear friends who actually think it’s really great for some reason. You alone retain possession of the disappointment.

By opting not to turn into a happy ghost, you are like Robin the Boy Wonder, heroically saving Batman from having to work his ward’s funeral preparations into his busy crime fighting schedule. You have refused to lance the boil of misery and saved Batman from getting covered in its sad, gross pus.

Gilgamesh, the first recorded hero, wandered 12 leagues through the lightless, black tunnel Road of the Sun before encountering a jeweled garden of unparalleled beauty*. Perseverance! The first recorded light at the end of a tunnel would never have been reached without first traveling 40-some miles of unchanging darkness (and about 40 lines of unchanging repetitious verse). Paradise almost always comes second, or third. After much less pleasant things.

Great work, maximalist, overworked, obsessive work, is produced when an outlandish proposal is made, and the artist goes through furious hell to produce it. Yuri Norstein hand-animating elements on 20+ panes of glass, Howard Finster creating 46,000 works of sacred art in 25 years, the construction of the 22-domed shimmering wooden Cathedral of the Transfiguration at Kizhi with out the use of a single nail. This type of fastidiousness, this type of bountiful creative output, lends itself to works of manifold complexity, and great beauty, rife with so many elements that it is impossible for anyone to not be changed by some aspect of it.

If the very purpose of such tenacity is to ensure a respect for those who expect much of you, there’s nothing to fear from respecting the critiques of those who expect more from you. One can be self-conscious without being self-crippling. Perseverance is not blind, is not necessarily thoughtless, it is simply seeing-through a plan or a goal that has already been thought.

To fulfill any goal, especially an artistic endeavor, one must take it as seriously as possible, must render their whole being into its service (not serious as in lacking humor, but serious as in ‘being dedicated’). Artmaking has the capacity to become one of the most futile exercises possible. You could be using your studio time to pick potatoes at the Food Bank Farm, or using it to volunteer educating children at the Kids’ Museum, you could be in Central/South America with missionaries building houses for people who’ve never had houses. If you don’t feel what you put into your art practice gives you as much self-actualization as these alternatives (or any others that reflect or surpass your personal highest ideals), if you don’t think it even approaches them in terms of its potential to affect people and to communicate a love of them, then your artmaking is unnecessary. There’s no room, there’s no time, to be half-hearted. Persevere.

This is serious, but not really.