necessity of creative suffering, ?
“I know I’m an addict, but the problem is that I don’t know what I’m addicted to.” D is an intensely creative person. I’ve always pushed him to take his own writing and editing more seriously because he is frankly amazing at it. F and I read his piece - they are few and far in between - and exhaled, said “Boy, he can write. I don’t know what it’s about, but he sure can write.” Before I was a writer he was my editor, I would say things, send long meandering text messages about nothing, and he would remark how good the words were, how well they made some part of life shine. His taste preceded mine.
“Beware the sensitivity loop,” warns F, a writer. The sensitivity loop is the particular hell that the melancholic artist types circle around. The sensitivity loop works like this: you are born into this world as a sensitive person. You see some very small part of reality - likely negative, discomfiting - with a clarity so precise and searing so as to be profoundly idiosyncratic; it feels a little, or a lot, lonely. In order to feel a little less lonely you go and acquire language for this particular spot of reality, you bring the pixels into focus - political irony, maybe? Inherent meaninglessness, perhaps. Or a shameful feeling. Your mileage may vary. F claims, then, the dictate of the sensitivity loop is that by acquiring more language, you notice more, and you articulate more, and you notice more, and… It never ends. The melancholiae accrue.
I don’t know about this one. There’s something there, but loops can be left, moved around, redirected somewhere. I rebel against any tight coupling of creativity and suffering. I believe in pain, sure, I love pain, I love the way it tucks itself inside of pleasure, I relish the way it cleaves bright boundaries between things, inflames histories with regret and longing, shapes us into newer more defiantly hopeful beings - tenderness connotes beauty, softness, pain at once - I do not believe in the value of suffering. The suffering will get done anyway - it does not require you to believe in it.
But there is something to be said about the strange relationship between creation and suffering. I think the sensitivity loop is the wrong framing, too tragic, too bored a story about depressive writers; the loop is more accurately some desire to act or create which can never satisfy itself. Whether that is good or bad depends on what you’ve made and what it does to you.
I’ve long felt that for D to make use of his creative talents would see all of his emotional problems solved. Two birds with one stone; “Screw healing, let’s dance.” (via M). The terrible paradox is that nothing will destroy you faster than yoking your salvation to your creativity - and yet you do manage to do avoid it, it will save you. That’s what I really think. Does that make any sense?
I think the designation of anyone who has found what it is they want to create in this world becomes very simple: stay sane, stay loving. Also, stay financed. By that point the rest of your work has become automatic, and your life will rearrange itself around it. The logistics hardly need to be fussed over, because the creative spirit is an addict, just as the addict is also a creative spirit, who will exercise exceptional logistical means to find her fix.
Something I’m playing with: devotion over obsession. Obsession, there is no virtue in losing myself. Devotion, there is virtue in choosing over and over to subjugate yourself in the eyes of something I deeply love, the key is in the choosing, in habit, in regularity, in worshipping the mundane that fractals up into a higher cause. I hate it when people talk about their higher selves - the highest places have no self, they are where I disappear.
THE DISAPPEARING ACT
”The cursor reads 5’15”, fifteen seconds before 5’30”, the time Erica indicated to me in the subject heading. I wonder what’s going to happen, and here’s what happens: we’re at the last notes of the garland before the theme returns, grand and joyful, from the right side of the keyboard and the right side of the screen. Carried by this return, Martha Argerich rides it like a surfer on a wave. Abandoning herself to it completely, she can no longer stay in the frame, she jerks her head and leaves the frame to the left with her mass of black hair, disappearing for a moment. And when she comes back into the frame she has a smile on her lips. And at that moment … The little girl’s smile that comes both from childhood and from the music, this smile of pure joy, last for exactly five seconds, from 5’30” to 5’35”, but during these five seconds we have a glimpse of paradise. She was there, for five seconds, but five seconds are enough, and by watching her we have access to it. Access by proxy, but access nonetheless. We know it exists.” - Emmanuel Carrère, Yoga
"It's the door to the disappearing that I've already described as my ultimate desired creative state - being able to get 'gone' enough long enough for a song to appear. In the end, learning how to disappear is the best way I've found to make my true self visible to myself and others." - Jeff Tweedy, How to Write One Song