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.
Yay! You are inspiring me to blog. I'm going to do it. Right now. Maybe.
ReplyDeletebeautifully written. these are so close to the thoughts i've been struggling with the past few months.
ReplyDeletei, too, stopped making art. although i don't know that what i was doing would be considered art. however, i was trying to create in an effort to give myself some purpose in my day. since becoming ill, i feel like a useless slug. sketching, writing, taking pictures... it all gave me some sort of purpose. i clung to it with all my might.
and now i have no motivation to do it anymore.
i miss it but don't know how to start again.
I hope that by stepping away from it for a while, I can learn how to enjoy it again. I judge myself pretty harshly for my lack of productivity, and so anything coming out of that place is going to be way too serious and painful and heavy. I hope you can find a way back to it, if you want, and if it helps you in your day.
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Delete"I hate stopping. All I ever do is stop."
ReplyDeleteExactly. I could not have expressed it any better.
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About four years ago I had an identity death and I have been re-learning everything since then. My illness is losing its grip on me in my gratitude and adaptation, in my presence and moderation; But it left a big mark, and I am only slowly growing away from it. I have not suffered in four years (though plenty of pain); my pain has been ebbing (joint pain nearly absent) and I feel remarkably comfortable in most ways, most of the time; sometimes that comfort overriding what pain I have left, sometimes (increasingly) replacing it.
ReplyDeleteI have my misgivings about Buddhism and acupuncture (alternative health care in general), but my increasing liberation from the cores of my misery is undoubtedly of spiritual (and mystical) nature, at least in part; and it is a profanity I would not entertain to spit upon that particular element of my healing. (For what it is worth, my outlook is considerably more Taoist than Buddhist, though I strain to accommodate some Buddhism because I think it might be more accessible to and appropriate for a compassion-lacking world at large.)
Art has kept me relatively sane and focused throughout my sick childhood/adulthood (helping me overcome CFS/ME-related concentration troubles), and I've managed to continue growing as an artist; Though, somewhat as you said, at a few points I thought my mystical creativity would dissuade me from being an artist altogether (ultimately, though, it seems to have not). I've made some incredibly brave leaps, artistically, throwing away the guitar and bass I put so much work into and picking up the trumpet (flugelhorn, actually, but they're basically the same) that I abandoned when I got sick (age 12), even though it was the first instrument I ever wanted to play. I'm in love with graphic art, though don't really try to draw anything, and am instead fascinated by the act of body movement leaving a visible trail behind it.
A few years back I began writing more-than-competent and rather beautiful-and-sophisticated pieces of music for the piano. I labored at the keyboard with pencil and paper like a good composer, and began to become rather quickly accepted as a genuine composer by those who heard my work; But I became concerned by the intellectual controlling-ness of that style of composing, and by the elitist culture that spawned and still supports that modality. I became concerned about whether, in the moment, I really enjoyed that process or whether I was simply getting off/indulging myself on the control-freak-ness of it and the "professional"-style attention it got me--I became concerned that whatever I was getting out of my art was being passed on to whomever experienced it, and that I was mistreating those experiencers. I decided I was (indulging) and destroyed all the copies I had, gifting what I had already given to people as their own; I severed artistic-collaborative ties that hinged on those works. I painted the walls of my apartment with chalkboard paint so that I could draw and write on a large scale, investigating what the whole-body-in-motion looked on "paper", not just the hands and arms; seeing footsteps on the "page". I re-invested in electronic music (an older past-time of mine than pencil-paper-keyboard composition)--not as much cache as keyboard-ly composerly-ness, but more interesting sounds when you can't pull together a nice-sized wind ensemble (ugh, the logistics for a socially disinclined, energy-limited, no-income person). I started focusing on improvising (musically) more, because I really enjoy that act (not simply its consequence-artifacts), but I had to re-learn to focus on the primal act of producing sound, and to expel from my concern years of music (jazz) theory.
ReplyDeleteThere is more that is important and maybe-interesting, Lee, but I hope that this is enough to at least temper some of your possible-memories of a half-crazy teen or 20-something me; or maybe inspire you to see even those memories as being less irritating and meaningless than they might have seemed at the time. Remember, I was stir-crazy back then like you are now. Now I'm both profoundly more sane and infinitely crazier than I was back then, and I am kinder, wiser, and happier for (both sides of) it.
My email is davidevankrebs AT coastsolitude DOT com. I have a personal address (Coast Solitude is my art site), but that, surprisingly enough, at this point, might constitute "too much information" for a public post. If you click the green quotation-mark thingies in Google Plus, you should be able to start a "Hangout" session with me. Maybe you can just post a comment on my Google Plus page. I'll even post something there in case comments depend upon that. I'm just covering my bases so that if I don't hear from you, at least it won't be for lack of a conduit.
You put a lot of energy into your blog and it helped motivate me to try harder to contact you. Some of my new stamina is encouraging me to reach out a little bit, and you are someone who might have an accommodating appreciation of how important that can be when you have this particular illness.
Peace, but not the boring platitude sort.
David, I'm glad we're back in touch! You'll hear more from me later. Also, I think that anyone that reads my blog would really appreciate your experiences, too, so thanks for leaving by far the longest comment I've ever gotten on here.
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ReplyDelete