Writing Wednesdays
The Free Agent Mindset, Part Two
By Steven Pressfield
Published: May 22, 2013
The artist’s mindset has always been that of the free agent. The painter, writer or filmmaker by definition can only follow her own vision. She has to know (or teach herself) how to be self-defining, self-motivating, self-reinforcing, self-validating.
Street protests in Athens. Solon would have approved.
And yet artists have always run in schools. Paris in the 20s, Rome in the late 50s and early 60s, New York any time. I wish I had been part of a school. I once went to Paris and did nothing but ride the metro to the places Hemingway had mentioned in his short stories and in A Moveable Feast. I would’ve loved to have hung out with kindred spirits anywhere. It would’ve made me feel less alone.
Here’s what I found out about Hemingway by the way. In the short stories like “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” you felt like he was in some workingman’s café writing fiction with a half-inch stub of a pencil because he couldn’t afford even a crayon. Turns out the Closerie des Lilas and many of the other watering holes he mentioned are high-toned, high-cotton joints. Zinc bars, walnut-paneled walls. I was kinda depressed to discover this. I thought, “Hem was a swell!” I was disappointed.
Bottom line: I never could find a school. I never managed to hang out with anybody. Wherever the school was, I always got there twenty years after it had packed up and split.
But we need schools. We need the tribe. It’s too lonely being a one-man band all the time. Maybe the web is our school today. Maybe it’s Facebook, I don’t know. I’m missing that school too.
But to get a little more serious, the point of this post is that we need both sides of the dime. Each of us as individual writers, artists and entrepreneurs needs to be able to flip the switch and become the Incredible Hulk of self-discipline and self-sustenance. But we gotta be human beings too. The free agent mindset is too hard to sustain. In my own life I’ve probably arced way too far into that end of the pendulum swing. It’s not healthy. It’s not good for you.
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SUBSCRIBE to "Writing Wednesdays."The Warrior Ethos
The Spartans do not ask how many are the enemy,
but where are they.
The Warrior Ethos was written for our men and women in uniform, but its utility, I hope, will not be limited to the sphere of literal armed conflict. We all fight wars--in our work, within our families, and abroad in the wider world. Each of us struggles every day to define and defend our sense of purpose and integrity, to justify our existence on the planet and to understand, if only within our own hearts, who we are and what we believe in.
We are all warriors. Do we fight by a code? If so, what is it? What is the Warrior Ethos? How do we (and how can we) use it and be true to it in our internal and external lives?
From the Introduction by Steven Pressfield.
[The following is from chapter 12 of The Warrior Ethos:]
12. HOW THE SPARTANS BECAME THE SPARTANS
All warrior cultures start with a great man.
In ancient Sparta, that man was Lycurgus. He took the city from a normal society to a warrior culture.
So that no man would have grounds to feel superior to another, Lycurgus divided the country into 9000 equal plots of land. To each family he gave one plot. Further, he decreed that the men no longer be called "citizens," but "peers" or "equals."
So that no man might compete with another or put on airs over wealth, Lycurgus outlawed money. A coin sufficient to purchase a loaf of bread was made of iron, the size of a man's head and weighing over thirty pounds. So ridiculous was such coinage that men no longer coveted wealth but pursued virtue instead.
Lycurgus outlawed all occupations except warrior. He decreed that no name could be inscribed on a tombstone except that of a woman who died in childbirth or a man killed on the battlefield. A Spartan entered the army at eighteen and remained in service till he was sixty; he regarded all other occupations as unfitting for a man.
Once a Spartan was visiting Athens. His Athenian host threw a banquet in his honor. Wishing to show off for his guest, the Athenian indicated several illustrious personages around the table. "That man there is the greatest sculptor in Greece," he declared, "and that gentleman yonder is its finest architect." The Spartan indicated a servant from his own entourage. "Yes," he said, "and that man there makes a very tasty bowl of soup."
The Athenians, of course, were outstanding warriors in their own right. The great playwright Aeschylus, composing his own epitaph, mentioned nothing of his ninety plays or of any other civilian accomplishment.
Here lies Aeschylus the Athenian. Of his courage at the battle of Marathon, the long- haired Persian could speak much.
Lycurgus decreed that no man under thirty could eat dinner at home with his family. Instead, he instituted "common messes" of fourteen or fifteen men who were part of the same platoon or military unit. Above the threshold of each mess was a sign that said:
Out this door, nothing.
The point of the common mess was to bind the men together as friends. "Even horses and dogs who are fed together," observed Xenophon, "form bonds and become attached to one another."
The payoff came, of course, on the battlefield.
Here's how Spartans got married. Lycurgus wanted to encourage passion, because he felt that a child—a boy— conceived in heat would make a better warrior. So a young Spartan husband could not live with his bride (he spent all day training and slept in the common mess). If the young couple were to consummate their love, the husband had to sneak away from his messmates, then slip back before his absence was discovered.
It was not uncommon for a young husband to be married for four or five years and never see his bride in daylight, except during public events and religious festivals.
