Art, creativity, and despair

[Teremia]

Tolstoy. It's the first line of Anna Karenina: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

vison, what you say resonates for me.

Happy families CAN also be interesting, I suppose. The Moomins are happy, but rather different from most of us. For instance.

[Frelga]

I've always thought Tolstoy got it backwards. But the, what would he know about happy families.

I think what vison said about the thin skin rings true. Artists do tend to have heightened perception, and if what they pick up is painful, they are not always any good at coping with pain.

[Primula Baggins]

Any time my universe has turned un-pink and un-unicorn-bunnyish I have always at some point thought, quite consciously, "I'll be able to use this in my writing." And I have—always twisted into some other form, because I don't write autobiography; but I know it's there.

It's a way of making sense of things, or at least of not letting a bad experience be a total waste, that I find comforting. I know other writers who've said the same.

But it's not the same as creating art out of despair. It's more a kind of recycling.

[vison]

Despair is just days and days of pain.

I really don't know, of course, since I don't feel despair or if I do it is only briefly. For some years I felt a kind of low-grade common depression, not enough to make me suicidal, just enough to make me indolent and self-pitying. The kind that "women's magazines" talk about. Nothing grand or abysmal.

But there are, obviously, who are mad with despair or just mad. The thing is, there are an awful lot of crazy people who create nothing, who don't make art, they just make everyone miserable.

And Tolstoy, whether he was crazy or not, made a lot of people miserable, including his long-suffering wife, and me. Although I didn't hate Anna Karenina at all, I quite liked it.

[baby tuckoo]

Artists may or may not feel deeply, may or may not be personally mad.


For us to remember them, they must do another thing: they must observe acutely. They must observe both happiness and despair. They need not portray extremes of these (though it is the modernist habit to do so), but they must at least show the textures of life. Otherwise we have only Strauss waltzes, over and over.


Van Gogh's color and composition show us the depth of his observation. His rough textures show us the depth of his feeling.

It's, like, ironic.


I love "The Stranger." I think it's really funny. I think it was meant to be.

[Primula Baggins]

The gray times. They do go on sometimes. But I'm like you, vison; I don't think I've ever faced actual sustained despair. (Just a week here and a week there. . . . ) Mostly it's just a continued feeling of, is this all there is to life?

I think there's something to be said for the continual demands of caring for kids. I know that can be too much sometimes, for people with difficult kids or who who also have other problems. But sometimes, for me, it's just enough. "This has to be done, and I'm the only one who can do it" pulls me out of the gray times and back into life.

So does writing, surprisingly enough; sustained and hard writing. I've never done it before, not like this. It's demanding and scary, but it's also something serious to engage with. Sometimes in a position like mine (and I know you know what I mean, vison), it's worth solid gold to have something to fight with, something to accomplish. Another chapter; a decent dinner; the month's books done right; a clean kitchen. . . . Some morphous victory, to beat back the amorphous enemy.

[vison]

Yup.

Them amorphouses are everywhere.


Although they say those new glue traps work pretty good.


Seriously, though, I do know what you mean, Prim. It is the dailiness of things that tends to grind us down, but it's the dailinesses that keep us going.



baby tuckoo, I am a watcher. I see things. Things I saw in the past are coming to the front of my brain these days and surprising me.

Between them and the amorphouses, my poor head feels like it's going to 'splode sometimes.

[Inanna]

One role of the artist is to help people paths towards a more meaningful and, yes, happier life.

I think society might want the artist to adopt such a role, but I don't think it is a role an artist takes on, or even wants to take on, and neither should he/she. The artist creates because he/she loves to create, not to help anybody find happiness or meaning in their lives.

And is it really possible for anybody else to give meaning to one's life than yourself? I might feel happy when I look at the Kandinsky on my wall, but I doubt Kandinsky had me and my happiness in mind when he painted "several circles". Am pretty sure, he didn't.

[Primula Baggins]

I'm suspicious of all didactic and political art, by which I mean art that is intended to urge people to take particular action or to hold particular opinions. No matter what those opinions are, even if I passionately agree with them, the art still seems a weaker thing to me.

Real art can change people's ideas through the skillful and honest portrayal of something we accept as true—something we might not have known, might not ever have noticed, might have forgotten. But it works because we move toward it in response. It's not nipping at our heels.

I think the Kandinsky has meaning for you, Mahima, because it had meaning for Kandinsky.

[baby tuckoo]

Ooh, ooh, ooh, Mahima.


I love "Several Circles."


And "Counter Weights" is on the wall of my bedroom.


Sorry to veer off topic.

[Primula Baggins]

How we respond to art seems entirely on topic to me. In fact, I see the response as an essential part of it all: if nothing about a piece of "art" can stir thought or emotion in a human being, is it art at all?

[axordil]

Well, my feelings on the subject are well known at this point--I am moved by the process as much as, if not more than, the result. I can admire pure craftsmanship, but it rarely moves me like something the artist obviously engaged with on several levels. Thats why I can like Pollack the way I like Matisse or van Gogh, or for that matter Blake or Goya. It's also why a lot of very aesthetically pleasing artworks don't do as much for me.

[Jnyusa]

I love "The Stranger." I think it's really funny. I think it was meant to be.

Hm. What Camus said about the Stranger: "Mersault, poir moi, n'est pas un epauve; mais un homme ... qui est amorieux du soleil qui ne laisse pas d'ombre."

liberal translation ... Mersault, for me, is not depraved, but a man ... enamored of a sun that casts no shadow.

(he inserts some other adjectives that I've forgotten ... poor, humble, naked, something like this)

That statement by Camus has stuck in my mind for decades because I think he captured something quite true about the nature of the suffering that we cause to ourselves and others. Existential literature is not about despair, imo, but about the terror we feel when we awake to the thoroughness of our freedom. Suicide is often the central metaphor used to point out that even though we did not choose to be born, life is nevertheless a choice we make continuously. This should not be understood as a prescription but as a contrast.

What Camus argues, through Mersault, is that the refusal to choose, to accept that the sun also casts a shadow and say 'yes' anyway, is what leads paradoxically to perfect indifference toward death and toward cruelty. "Cela, m'est egal," is Mersault's answer to everything - it's all the same to me - and he becomes so alienated by his own impossible desire that he ends up being unmoved even by his own commission of murder. I don't think it was intended to be funny.

I do agree with bt, though, that observation is the essential characteristic of the artist. Along with an ability to universalize personal experience and observation.

Jn

[Voronwë the Faithful]

[vison]

IAWV

[Inanna]

Real art can change people's ideas through the skillful and honest portrayal of something we accept as true—something we might not have known, might not ever have noticed, might have forgotten. But it works because we move toward it in response. It's not nipping at our heels.

I think the Kandinsky has meaning for you, Mahima, because it had meaning for Kandinsky.

I agree, Prim, - oh what was it? IAWP.
ah, yes so much shorter... so I do agree with both your points. Propaganda wrought in the form of art is still propaganda and can turn one away. A person who can look at objects/art in a manner which can totally dissociate it from the context, is well, very very objective. I have often wondered if I would have looked at Van Gogh's "Wheat Field with Crows" differently if I hadn't known that it was done in the last few days before Van Gogh committed suicide. I would now, never have that painting in my home. Before I knew this - would I have? I don't know. Of course, I realise this is de-linked from the propaganda point that we were discussing - but not competely. Its basically context changing the meaning for the viewer.

And yes, I agree the Kandinsky has meaning for me - is it the same as that it had for Kandinsky? of course not. Would I have been so moved by it if Kandinsky hadn't cared for it - probably not. Assuming that great art is created when the person puts his/her whole and soul into it.

[Primula Baggins]

Yeah, I didn't mean to say that the meaning you see is what Kandinsky saw. Just that I agree that caring shows. Maybe it draws our attention and makes us give more consideration to the piece, so we end up finding meaning in it.



"IAWP" makes me

[Inanna]

bt, for you:

[axordil]

Mahima, can you shrink that a tad? It's stretching the posts off the right hand margin.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I got it.