Colin Sheridan: A process lies behind every perfection, it's why we jump through hoops

Irish Examiner

24-05-2025

"For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun."
— John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel, The East of Eden Letters.
I have seen the band Bon Iver many, many times. So many times, you could say I discovered them long before they became de rigueur for deep-thinking empaths with a penchant for lumberjack shirts. Yeah, I was there when Justin Vernon — the band's creative north-star — lived above an Eircom store off Eyre Square in Galway way back in 2001. He does not know it, but I'm pretty sure we chased the same girls, and certainly locked eyes more than once over a Taco fries in the wee hours outside Abrakebabra. I might even have been in Taaffe's the night he met Emma, the girl who broke his heart so bad he disappeared to the woods to write one of the greatest break-up albums of all time, For Emma, Forever Ago.
Bottom line, I was there from the start — from before the start — so when Vernon and his band come to town, I'm there, the guy at the back who catches his eye during the encore and raises a glass to his tortured genius. I quietly sneer at his new fans — hipster dilettantes, all — and head for the exit early, content that I've kept up my end of a non-existent relationship.
'You've done good, kid,' I say aloud to myself, to him, to nobody. And indeed, he has. His latest album, Sable, Fable recently dropped to universal acclaim. One track in particular — 'Speyside' — provided the soundtrack to what was an incredibly brutal few months at the back end of 2024, as the world seemed to implode from within. One lyric hung like the perfume of an ex on a sweater you never want to wash: - 'As I fill my book/what a waste of wood/nothing's really happened like I thought it would.' Yeah, there's pain and there's poetic pain and then there's Bon Iver's music. A whole different kind of pain, all the more beautiful for it.
Obsession with process
One thing I've come to learn to love from Vernon is devotion to process. At a concert a few years ago, my eye was drawn to the side of the stage before the main event, and a pair of screens depicting a rather unremarkable scene; a man — maybe Vernon, maybe not — shooting a basketball in a backyard. In the corner of the screen was the shot count. Filmed in real time, the footage was set against a backdrop of daylight fading to evening, before receding to nightfall, the shooter backlit against a streetlight. The scene continued for almost half an hour before Vernon took to the stage with his band, scored by nothing but the expectant din of the thousands present.
Understanding Vernon's obsession with process, I understood this was not absentminded filler, but a fable all by itself. The shooter was one of us, clearly amateur and imperfect in his motion; but, watching him as the sun set was to bear silent witness to mundane beauty; a silhouetted man clearly passionate about his own process, sometimes missing, often scoring, perpetually striving to be better. All the while nobody in the arena paid any attention.
Watching it was the perfect prelude to what was to follow. Vernon, like the anonymous man with the basketball shooting hoops, has always been one of us, just set apart by a God-given talent that has often threatened to suffocate him
A friend recently gifted me a copy John Steinbeck's Journal of a Novel. Every working day for ten months in 1951, Steinbeck wrote a note to his friend and editor Pascal Covici to warm up. It was a way — he later said — to get his writing brain in shape 'to pitch a good game.' Well, it worked, as he got his best book out of it.
While one wonders what a contemporary version of that journal might look like — 'Dear Pascal. Hit snooze button five times. Woke late. Scrolled X. Deleted X. Downloaded TikTok. Deleted TikTok. Bought dog toys on AliExpress. Don't have dog. Tried to buy dog online. Can't. Looked out window. No writing today. Best, JS' —the gift has proved the perfect accompaniment to my own doomed pursuit of perfection. If for no other reason, then to remind that we all want the same thing.
Whether we write, read, or draft solicitors' letters for a living, each one of us engages in that thing we call 'process.' Artists — successful artists like Vernon — can often give the act a gravitas that makes it alien because, well, they're geniuses. But — and I think this is what I understood from the man with the basketball — regardless of talent or audience or ovations — most of our working life is spent underneath a streetlight shooting threes, over and over again.
Maybe, 389 shots in, we discover something.
And that is why we keep going.