THE ARTIST AND THE HUMAN CONDITION
I have come to the conclusion that all I can write is what I experience, what I have experienced in the past month. And I think what I have experienced is central to my “writing persona.” It is not that infamous “writer’s block” which carries with it romantic images of the writer’s ink-stained fingers sitting inert above a blank page, desperately summoning his muse. It is something I see as part and parcel of the artistic self: madness.
In “Against Interpretation”, Susan Sontag comments that the artist has taken the place of the martyr, the saint in modern consciousness. She argues that the artist has become the exemplary sufferer, and “among artists, the writer, the man of words is the person to whom we look to be able best to express his suffering. As a man, he suffers; as a writer, he transforms his suffering into art” (42).
Sontag quotes the examples of Cesare Pavese and Antonin Artaud. She describes the artist as “pure victim of his consciousness” (17). She writes that “Artaud does not simply record his psychic anguish”. It constitutes his work, for while the act of writing ” to give form to intelligence” is an agony, that agony also supplies the energy for the act of writing” (20).
As artists we literally suffer for our art. Our art would not exist without our suffering. The prefaratory quotation to White Oleander encapsulates this idea: “one becomes an artist unless they have to.” We suffer because we are artists, we are artists because we suffer.
Writing for me is a commentary on the human condition. This task requires both objectivity and an intense experience of the will to life and the need to die that this condition is composed of. Writing stems from the will to life and is a representation of the will to life overcoming the need to die. The will to life is thus the foundation of writing. The will to die is the blank page.
I haven’t written because I haven’t been able to. It’s not that there’s been nothing to write about, it’s that I haven’t had the energy. Sapped by depression, suicidality, the need to self-destruct. No creativity can stem from these roots.
September 2nd, 2006 at 11:27 am
Speaking as an artist it is hard to stay in that place from which creativity flows. When the world blocks that peaceful centre from which an artist can create, the spirit required to create is difficult to access. One needs to work consciously to clear away this debri and access your creative spirit.