It is not news to you or myself or anybody that Columbia is famously easy for young creatives to hate.
I’ve known many to term this place as the "City of Dreams," often ironically. And though I’m not inside of every young Columbia heart, some may mean the phrase in earnest. I never have quite been able to.
I have lived in Columbia since arriving in the fall of 2016 for college. Since then, my loved ones have observed my waxing and waning distaste for the place — its hopeless irrelevance on the world stage, the consistent cultural hints that to be a true artist of any impact you’d better be somewhere else, somewhere real. These periods of stubborn aversion can go for days or weeks, during which I research wildly; midnight squirreling through homepages of artist residencies and graduate programs that shroud all my imagined lives elsewhere. Eventually I’d read a Wendell Berry essay or speak with a young punk or get swept up in a personal drama and place my feet blandly back in the dirt of my lived reality.
Even as I write this, I’m struck by that same sharp assurance of unimportance.
Local band Gamine opens the night with an energetic set at the Columbia Museum of Art's biannual Arts & Draughts event on Friday, Nov. 10, 2023. (Photos by Eden Prime/Special to the Post & Courier)
How groundbreaking is anything I say, how properly excited am I to be about it, as long as it is only going to be published in a local South Carolina publication? How prideful can I be about the local theater I am a part of here before my ego butts in, my sense of worldliness, making sure to remind me that the bigger stages, the New York stages, are the ones I dreamed about?
A close friend told me recently during a recurring mood of doubt that they appreciate their relative musical success in Columbia, but it feels like an off-brand version of their dream. What good is Columbia attention to the young dreamer, if it is not at any moment going to be stocked up and exchanged for the "real thing" — is Columbia’s exchange rate always destined to be so low?
I have had many friends move away. I’ve had a few friends move away and come back. I fixate on their stories.
One of these friends has built a better, richer life upon her return than she’s ever had anywhere else. She and I talk about this. I cling to her story as some sort of buoy on the heavy days. She says that Columbia is good to you as long as you know what it is, treat it as what it is. It is, to her, a playground — a safe landscape to experiment and play.
Maybe you learn you have a knack for swing dancing, or you pick up an instrument, but you sure as hell better know that Columbia is not the place that’s going to skyrocket you to fame. Columbia is not going to discover you. If you’re hanging on for this to happen, you are engineering your own part in that well-known relationship of disdain: the "City of Dreams" as only an ironic moniker, usually spoken with hurt.
I’m writing this now from within quarantine, as I tested positive for COVID five days ago. By force, I’m spending my first stretch of extended time in a new apartment. It’s a low, brick cluster of buildings in Old Shandon.
Today — in spite of soft rain or maybe because of it — I take a long walk around the neighborhood. I listen to a short fiction story I have never heard before, see yards and gardens and sloping, rotting porches I’ve never seen before. I’m not anywhere else than here, I’m not convinced by elsewhere.
If I am immersed in novelty, truly taken in by my life — an involved job, a rich social circle, a self-sustained creative world, a new walk, witnessing a new street or new art.
Spencer leads Gamine’s lyricism with thoughtful and passionate poetics. September 24, 2023.
Right now, I’m free of the Hollow Days, those that undermine my life and accomplishments here wholesale. I’m reminded of infinite platitudes, "The grass is greener where you water it." I’m reminded that no matter where I go, it is always the same work: to simply fill my life with compelling material and tend to it.
And yet always fielding the question — asked by some insistent piece of the psyche, standing by the back with a clipboard — isn’t there a place that would provide more compelling material?
This is a volley I suspect many young artists here are familiar with; likely many young artists whose lives are consigned — by whatever logistic or reason or excuse — to a place like this. A place that's mid-sized. Not grand. The place is not going to lift you out of your little self. So you learn how to: you get close, you build the makeshift stairs or stage or platform to bolster yourself where the city won't or can't. Maybe you even build high enough to hike yourself to the promised land: LA, New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta.
In an ideal case, regardless of location, you move forward now with that interior toolbelt — the ability to build for yourself what may not be given, the ability to devise intrigue and novelty where it’s not obviously provided.
But on the worst days, I’m just on the floor with these tools and my half-built dream, tired of relying on my weak ingenuity to get my morale, my work and my world off the ground.
