Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Upon Repulsion from Art, or, The Very Meaning of Life Itself



I wish I'd spent more time on this blog ranting about how much I love Michael Nobbs. He's a Welsh artist with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and he runs a website community about CFS and art. It's convenient, since CFS and art are basically all I think about. In a stunning feat of Jungian synchronicity, he and I are doing the same thing right now. We are doing absolutely nothing. We aren't making art, because we don't feel like it. I'm glad I have company in this, because it's terrifying. 

A few weeks ago, making art suddenly stopped being fun. In the midst of my newfound discipline of daily fiction writing, the joy evaporated completely. It wasn't just writing’s periodic spiral into neurotic, self-flagellating insecurity. That's no big deal. I'm well aware of my perfectionism, judgment, and lack of patience with myself. I'm getting better about that, and usually I don't care if I'm writing crap, because it's fun to make stuff up. This was something deeper and bigger and more disturbing. When you've come to rely on that mysterious feeling of creative satisfaction, what do you do when it goes away?

Artists are supposed to be intuitive, so what if your intuition says stop making art? Do you have to obey it? Please, God, say it isn't so. Please, Mysterious Intuitive Creative Force, don't make me stop. I hate stopping. All I ever do is stop. And now, just when I've found something that I like, something that gives me hope, something that makes me feel like less of a useless lump under the covers, the one thing that I can ACTUALLY DO, the one thing that brings ONE SMALL OUNCE OF MEANING to my STUPID INVALID LIFE, you want me to stop?!? You take away all joy from it, and send me back to bed. Fuck you, intuition. But you can’t say “fuck you” to your intuition. I stopped. 

So I’ve been thinking about my life, suddenly devoid of meaning because I now hate making art, and I’ve had some ideas about it. Creativity has always been a fetish for me. I've never been more than a dilettante, but creativity has always been what I care about the most. It's what I've demanded from myself, and what I've demanded from my friends, to be worth my time. I've had wondrous, important, beautiful moments of making art, as well as horrifying and despairing moments. I've been scared of it, and scared of my desire for it, and fear and desire have inflated it to monstrous proportions. It's become something it was never meant to be.

 I've always been desperately searching everywhere for The Thing to Do with My Life. I was so excited at this latest idea, that maybe I could find it in art. Wouldn't that be comforting, if I could just think of myself as an artist, and have that be my identity, my security, my meaning in life? CFS has taken away most of my abilities, and I'd like to say it has taught me to value myself because I am a human being, not because of what I can make or do. But instead of getting off the treadmill, I have readjusted to its smaller proportions.
It's an old formula, and I think it's almost always true. Take something you love, turn it into something you need, and it becomes something you hate. Especially since becoming housebound, I've been looking to art to give my life meaning. But it doesn't, and it can't. Art, as I make it, is tiny, tentative, embryonic, inexpert, bumbling, delicate, and new. It's like a little kid barely out of diapers, and I'm asking it to support my entire life. It can make me happy sometimes, but it can't give my life meaning. It can barely feed itself. It collapses under that kind of pressure.

If I want to be an artist, or a sane human being, I’m going to have to change my entire relationship with art. I'm going to have to stop making impossible demands of it. I think I could just let art be itself, with no greater meaning than being itself. How can I learn to enjoy the abilities I still have, like imagination, without gripping them so hard I choke them to death? How do I untangle my identity from what I can make and do? What does identity even mean, to the sick or the healthy?  I thought illness would make me wise, but I really don't know. I should probably stop trying to answer impossible existential questions about the meaning of life.

In conclusion, an existentialist manifesto about the meaning of life:

Art can't give your life meaning. Writing, music, painting, theater, and dance can't give your life meaning. Friends can't give your life meaning. Jobs can't give your life meaning. Being a daughter or a wife or husband or a parent can't give your life meaning. Political allegiance can't give your life meaning. Sex can't give your life meaning. Loving someone can't give your life meaning. Hating someone can't give your life meaning. Nothing can give your life meaning. It just has meaning. Meaning is just an inborn quality of life. What is that meaning? I don't know, I think it's just meaning. So stop trying so hard to find it, and stop freaking the fuck out.