Anting: Not Just for the Birds
The niggles of criticism may sting, but they make us stronger in the end.
Note: Don’t like reading? The Podcast audio is at the end of the story.🫡
Walk into the center of it. Stride on in, brave chickadee. Walk with spine erect and arms hung loose and free. Set your eyes to a fierce gaze, one that stares directly at the bright light of challenge and burns out the bulb. Walk in, little birdie, to proudly perch upon that seething anthill. Glance at the black and petty static swarming at your feet, but don’t lose your poise. Breathe. Breathe deeply and fully as you splay your arms to indicate the approach of some kind of private rapture. Now take a knee. As you crouch atop that shimmering pile, fan your feathers, present your humble body, and expose your soft, bubbling dough to the heat of the unknown below.
A hush.
YOU:
“I am my art; my art is me. Groom me, destroy me, delouse this house of the parasite of self-doubt. Though my instinct says to remove myself from this anti-me anthill, I choose to fan my feathers and invite you in. Let the passive anting begin.”
Annnnnd scene.
Critical ants. The comment section of your life will be filled with the hot swarm of them. Pinchers and pincers, they’ll nip and tickle at your confidence, driving you insane with their relentless constancy. “Don’t like. Don’t want. Didn’t ask for. Garbage.” These are the scritches and gnatterings of mandibles gone wild. Why subject yourself to them? Because +1-ing critical armor is always a good thing. Submitting yourself to anting—allowing critiques to gnaw to the raw of you—is right up there with deconstructing your Hostile Architecture in the Defense Techniques for Sensitive Artists manual.
Critical armor, aka the one created by receiving criticism, is the best armor. You might think you already have top-notch creative armor because you built it quietly in your bedroom with no one around, but as an ant would say: it’s shit. It’s cheap and delicate and you never test its limits because you only show your work to those who love it (even if they don’t), or you don’t show it at all. It’s got that “tree falls in a forest” perfection vibe and you don’t want to ruin it. But safe from the crack of the ‘I don’t get it’ lash, that tree never grows any taller.
Your forest needs ants. You need to feel the ant crawl of their acidic disdain and learn that you can take it. You need to walk to the center of that anthill of anty anti-pander and submit to it. Crawling, nipping, stinging—may the tingle of it make you whole as those ants nibble off your microscopic parasites of self-doubt, and remove that dead skin habit of confusing worth with value right off your husk.
It will hurt at first. Sting a bit. It will ache and twist your insides. This radiating fire on your skin will be like hot water on a poison oak rash. The first few seconds of flinch, followed by the delicious burn of a skin brought alive. Take it you can. Tolerate it you will. Be like the crow, black and majestic, head humbly bowed with legs of stinging insect. Be like the crow and receive all the gifts that passive anting will bestow upon your creative psyche.
Are you done? Now stand. Walk from the center and away from the bristling nest. Look back at those ants and say thank you.
Thank you for your constant misunderstanding.
Thank you for the reminder that I am not original.
Thank you for alerting me to the fact that your grandchild can do better than this drek.
Thank you for your dumb and brutal honesty, but I’m now leaving you on that hill you will die on but I refuse to.
Thank you for leveling up my shield to 100% weapons-grade Dontgiveafuckantium.
They say one of the reasons birds take ant baths is that the process releases formic acid. I’m no formic acid academic, but if we join the dots I think what this means for sensitive artsy types is right there in the name. Form a coat, form a shell, form some impenetrable confidence to be bold and fearless from the soothing acid balm that ant critics provide.
Anting1: Available at any comment section near you, should you be so bold as to strike a pose.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
This week’s amends…
“So what does it all mean? Myself and a lot of other songwriters have been influenced by these very same themes. And they can mean a lot of different things. If a song moves you, that’s all that’s important. I don’t have to know what a song means. I’ve written all kinds of things into my songs. And I’m not going to worry about it – what it all means. When Melville put all his old testament, biblical references, scientific theories, Protestant doctrines, and all that knowledge of the sea and sailing ships and whales into one story, I don’t think he would have worried about it either – what it all means.
John Donne as well, the poet-priest who lived in the time of Shakespeare, wrote these words, “The Sestos and Abydos of her breasts. Not of two lovers, but two loves, the nests.” I don’t know what it means, either. But it sounds good. And you want your songs to sound good.”
- Bob Dylan – Nobel Lecture. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2021. Mon. 26 Jul 2021.
Listen to Bob the read lecture, or you can read the transcript here. It’s a typically meandering Bob ramble where he tries to figure out where songs fit in with literature.
A little African Garage rock for ya…
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Via Open Culture
I hate this game. Yes, I’m bad at it, but in my experience, it turns people into monsters. If I found this under my carpet, I’d consider the house cursed.
Did any of this spark a tiny thought of your own?
From what I can tell, they don’t really know why birds dig anting. Just another reminder that nature is metal.
Monopoly is like a Oujia Board with dice. Ain't nobody got time for that.