I wrote the following a little while back on a blog that appears to have gone defunct. A few readers said they appreciated the sentiment, so I figured I’d share it again…

Twenty years ago, I was tasked with keeping a Luxembourgian poet busy while various machinations unfolded behind his back. They weren’t nefarious machinations—just everyday, run-of-the-mill machinations like setting up chairs and making sure the finger sandwiches weren’t made with actual fingers. This was Philadelphia, after all.

In any case, the poet and I got to talking about poems and poetry and art more broadly. If I remember correctly, he said that a poem is like a potato. The actual word he used was “rhizome,” and I had to look it up later. It’s basically a plant that grows horizontally through the dirt rather than upward.

In any case, a potato lives underground and sprouts roots that travel through the earth and spawn new potatoes. Then the new potatoes sprout roots, and those roots spawn new potatoes, and so on.

Ideas, art, and ways of thinking can do the same thing. They travel underground in search of friendly earth where they can grow while life above ground carries on as usual.

It’s like when the Ramones or the Sex Pistols (depending on who you believe) toured England and a bunch of punk bands sprouted up in their wake. Or when everyone who heard the first Velvet Underground album started a band. None of it happened by way of a stadium tour. It all happened in dive bars and basements.

My point here is that a lot of musicians—and artists of all stripes—have been hoodwinked into playing the wrong game. Mainstream culture, for lack of a better phrase, tries to convince us that success means being the next big thing. They show us this artist or that artist who has the most streams on Spotify or who’s filling the most seats on the latest stadium tour. They tell us that success means lighting up the night like fireworks.

But my conversation with the Luxembourgian poet made me rethink that model completely: The job of the artist or the poet or the musician is not to create fireworks in the sky for all the world to see but to plant potatoes whose roots will gradually cross paths with the roots of other potatoes and take over the world.

Remember that episode of The X-Files with the giant underground fungus? That’s what we are. Snaking out beneath the surface of a world that’s completely unaware of our existence, covering miles and miles of ground in almost complete obscurity. We are unseen. We are underground. We are here for the hearts and souls and minds that need us.

In some ways, it’s like religion—finding the people who need us and the art that we create in any given instance to fill the voids in their souls. People who will love what we’re doing from project to project because it speaks to them. And we need to invite those people to feel personally invested in whichever project speaks to them—as musicians, artists, or fans.

The protean root meanders without a plan. It moves forward, snakes along, wends its way through the darkness. It takes neither the high road nor the low. It travels beneath the surface, out of sight, tunneling forever into the unknown.