The Tortured Artist

from www.deviantart.com

I'm quite intrigued and affected by the idea of the tortured artist. We've heard it so many times it's almost become a cliché by now, an iconic stereotype, a myth. But what exactly constitutes a tortured artist? And why are they so tortured? Is it a hyped myth or a  cut-to-the-bone reality?

Well, let's just begin with a defintion. Here's Wikipedia's not-too-far-off-the-mark one:

The tortured artist is a stock character and real-life stereotype who is in constant torment due to frustrations with art and other people. Tortured artists feel alienated and misunderstood due to the perceived ignorance or neglect of others who do not understand them and the things they feel are important.

Adding to that, they're usually associated with a string of accompanying vices: drink, drugs, (opium back in the day) gambling, sex and the like. They're also prone to emotional highs, heartbreak, depression, solitude and in some cases, self-harm and suicide.  

And there's the lesser torture too: torture in terms of sweating blood and tears when the creative process isn't going well. The double-edged sword of pain and pleasure. When it's going good, it's really good - but when it isn't....  Personally, when I'm not writing, I'm a complete crank. The world loses its colour. I can't sleep. Or if I do I wake up filled with dread. Everything else fades to lacklustre. This is torture of a kind. But one that can be remedied.

The 'tortured artist' is a more gritty term - one that refers to the real heart-wrenching struggle that artists go through with the world and its shackles. The trying to come to terms with existence, expression, the search for meaning, emotional pain, isolation, inner demons, a scarred psyche, the desire to be understood, to understand, to fit in, to manifest the dream world into the real one, or vice versa. Essentially, what it means to be human. Artists are the people who stand up and engage with this proposition head-on (heart-on), and tortured artists, are the ones who get badly wounded in the process.

Did you know that if you  google the term 'tortured artist' you even get a top ten list! Top Ten Tortured Artists includes the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Orwell, Sylvia Plath, Van Gogh and even Kurt Cobain. But why stop there? The list is endless. Emily Dickinson, who at the rejection from her lover, resolved to settle for the only thing better - 'the whole world in its Divine aspect' - poetry - and thus embarked on a tortured reclusive life.

The ones that have made it onto the top ten lists are merely the tip of the iceberg.  For aren't all artists tortured in some way? All to different extents, but all affected in some way. They don't have to go  to the extremes of self-mutilation, suicide, or alcoholism and drugs to be classified as 'tortured.' Some live with it, some overcome it and some successfully use it to fuel their work. What can't be denied is that it is a very real feature of being a creative.

(Vincent Van Gogh pict. The famous tortured artist who suffered from depression and eventually killed himself.)

Take the iconic image of the writer in the garret scribbling feverishly into the wee small hours of the morning to reclaim his sanity from the devil of writing. Indeed George Orwell knew all about it: 'Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.  One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.' A demon, whom one can neither resist or understand. This impulse to write, make art or music is a compulsion, an obsession and obsessions always result in some kind of torture, do they not?  

Franz Kafka remarked that 'Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.'  Well, if this is so, it's only to be expected that the writer, the human being,  will emerge changed from the experience. Prolific novelist Margaret Atwood has noted many times that writing is a descent of sorts into the dark. You have to be prepared for the  psychological trauma of it that will at some level, impact on you.

I think the most important part of the tortured artist definition is the misunderstood and alienated part. This afflicted persona stems greatly from lack of understanding of the things that are important to them. All artists are sensitive to the point of fragile; keen observers of the world around them, some albeit critical, satirical, sarcastic - are at their core sensitive beyond anything else. All artists possess a heightened sensitivity that absorbs all experience and transmutes it into art. Artists feel things more than others. They have to. It's in their job requirements. If they didn't, they wouldn't be able to respond to the world with such acute awareness. To feel tortured is just a by-product of this, an occupational hazard. It comes with the territory. And some deal with it in different ways to others. (Kurt Cobain pict, acclaimed lead singer/songwriter of 90s grunge rock group Nirvana, who is now infamous for having committed suicide)

The vices mentioned above may be stimulants, props or inspiration to some, but to most, they're crutches. It's a lot to deal with - going about this world with an open mind, an open heart, an open soul, exposed to good and bad. Just as it's been said you must metaphorically 'open a vein and drip blood onto the page' to write, so too must you do the same with your soul to create any kind of art. You're vulnerable sure. But you really wouldn't have it any other way. Any other way, you'd be closed off, and unable to create.

Gertrude Stein once said the the purpose of the artist was to find 'an anti-dote to the emptiness of existence.' And this I think, is wherein all the torture emanates from. This is the grand purpose of art, its high quest, its motivating reason. And artists either consciously or mostly subconsciously take it on, carry the weight and pride and responsibility of it.  That struggle for meaning, for beauty, for something else more vital, more powerful than reality. Transcendence and belonging. Truth and dream. To strike at the heart of our existence and make it their life's priority to pursue it of course can lead to an overwhelming, a despair, an internal turmoil that characterises all artists. 

('Starry Starry Night' - Van Gogh. Van Gogh's pictures are noted for how visible his pain appears in the terse brush strokes.)

Unfortunately, there are artists who are wounded so much by the emptiness and the big black void that they give in to it. It's a difficult challenge, to say the least. Nigh-impossible, some would say, but artists thrive on impossible, namely -in making the impossible possible. And  some have flung their arms wide open to its embrace and in the process astonished us with their works of affirmation and wonder and zeal. All great artists it seems, are marked by pain, but it is the transposing of this pain into their art that produces outstanding vision, truth and beauty, ultimately releasing and overcoming it. 

Almost makes you wish you'd signed up for a 9 to 5 easy day job doesn't it?? - No existential hang-ups, curious contemplating of the meaning of life and the self's suffering position in this 'tale of sound and fury'. Never. And besides - you don't really get a choice in it anyway. You may not be tortured to the point of cutting an ear off, but you've probably experienced a small degree of it or more. Not to fear. I see it as an essential litmus test; just a check to see if you're still in 'feeling' order and a push forward in your quest.

I regret that the term 'tortured artist' has become such a stereotypical and throwaway derogatory label nowadays and even necessary somehow to obtain the status of a 'great' artist. (It's not. There are plenty of great artists whose main ingredient is joy and produce amazing work.) But the suffering does exist, it is a true concept. *

And the upside? - Just look what these truly tortured people achieved; look how their work is revered and respected. Look what it has given us. They really did fly the flag for the greatness humanity is capable of under the weight of darkness. Their legacy, and that of all artists, is a gift to us, a gift that if appreciated, will steer us towards the stars and let us glimpse what they did. Realise that there is so much more to this thing we call 'life' than will ever meet the eye. How much of it depends on us and our way of seeing. And great art, it helps us see - it helps us feel.

Well, I didn't mean to patter on so long...! But this is a topic very dear to my heart.  And one that will continue to be such an important discourse in life and in art for a long time to come I'm sure.

Saluting all artists! -

~ Siobhán.  


*Addendum -  In no way am I glorifying the 'tortured artist' as an ideal or idea or cult status, but rather just acknowledging that it is real, despite how it has evolved into a contrived myth nowadays. And may I also say that today's pretentious suffering artist/emo/goth routine only serves to belittle the real mental anguish and emotional turmoil experienced by some artists, especially those noted authentic (and famous) cases.

A Romantic's Creed

'We are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.' - Oscar Wilde

'The only things you ever really have are the ones you hold inside your heart.' 

As Valentine's day approaches, I'm beginning to wonder what exactly it means to be a romantic  - or Romantic, should I say.

I'm a romantic by nature, by default. Always have been, always will be. And I'm not just talking about romance. I'm talking about being a Romantic, a believer in beauty, dreams and ideals as well as just love. A believer in being devoted to that what moves us, discovering the extraordinary in the ordinary, seeking the best possible versions of ourselves and our world and of following the heart first and foremost in all endeavours of life. It's an entire way of life, a way of thinking and acting, feeling and appreciating, not some misused lovelorn label. 

The dictionary defines a 'Romantic' as being one who is 'marked by the imaginative or emotional appeal of what is heroic, adventurous, remote, mysterious or idealized.'  Also as 'imbued with or dominated by idealism, characterized by a preoccupation with love, a quality or spirit in thought, expression or action, and above all, an emphasis on the imagination and emotions.' It's all about the imagination and emotions, their power, their importance in creating and marking our lives.


How typical and trivial of the realists to belittle us as 'hopeless romantics,' soft-hearted saccharine suckers who live for candlelit dinners and flowers! Rather, being a 'Romantic' is about having a view of and whole-hearted approach to life that is not cynical, not hardened, not resigned to reality. It's about being committed to the highest pursuits of the heart: beauty, truth and goodness, in all aspects of life, not just love. As Romantic poet Keats remarked: 'beauty is truth, truth beauty; that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.' 

But in today's world, Romantics are dismissed as naive, babbling, sentimental fools.  A world where materialism, cynicism and oh-so-boring practicality reigns, where it's deemed 'foolish' to pursue the heart's prerogatives over the head's. I've had a lot of unpleasant run-ins with realists in which I try to defend my passionate principles against their steam-roller sense of reason. It really gets me down how they dismiss anything other than what 'makes sense', what logically adds up. What does their life add up to then? Numbers and rules and routines and dreams quarantined to the realm of ridiculous, locked and shut away. Where's the fun in that!

Life is for dreaming and imagining and creating and ultimately living; for experiencing not tut-tutting. We only get to live once, why shouldn't we get carried away with it all? we Romantics sing, swirling notions like ribbons around our world, decorating days with dreams and ordinary with a tapestry of wonder and meaning. The realist's creed goes something along the lines of: savings - check, routine - check, work, work, work - check, mortgage - check, marriage (or attainment of suitable partner for society's sake) - check, duties completed - check, checklists - check, staying within the box - check. It's all have tos and shoulds, nos and nots; not curious maybes and wishes and whimsy, no dreaming, indulging, affirming, no passionate displays of anything,  no smelling the roses, no even noticing the roses, well, because face it - what's the point of that? (Readers, here's where I throw my arms up in protest - ahhhhh!)  

Instead of looking at the stars, their eyes are on the ground and they expect everyone, including Romantic souls to be the same, to give in to this drab version living. To give up our swooning souls for a luke-warm lacklustre existence. Well, never! 

We won't give up.  Romantics are tough, not stereotyped softies. Just look  at the Romantic movement in literature, music and art in the late C18th century. Romanticism, as it was known,  was characterized by a heightened interest in nature,  an emphasis on the individual's expression of emotion and imagination. It was a marked departure from the strict and confining attitudes and forms of classicism, and most of all, it represented rebellion against established social rules and conventions.   This can be seen most vehemently in French Romantic painter Delacroix's famous painting Liberty Leading the People. This painting was more to do with the spirit of rebellion and freedom of ideals than head-in-the-clouds daydreaming.  Vive la liberté is definitely a slogan of a Romantic if you ask me! (As is an affinity with the arts, needless to say.)

The Romantics held the imagination in the highest regard, and with it, emotions and the Self as a whole. It was the first time in literature that the individual began to take central focus and the imagination was revered. The literary Romantic movement began with the great Wordsworth, Coleridge, visionary metaphysical poet Blake and then bad-boy rebel Byron. Their poetry focused on nature and the great powerful spectrum of the imagination. Wordsworth encouraged us to 'fill our paper with the breathing of our hearts' and learn from nature, not the materialistic world which 'laid waste to our powers.' A new climate in the arts was engendered by Romanticism, one which led to avant-garde and bohemia and art for art's sake and being different and revelling in that difference and freedom of expression and living for the moment and smelling the roses, phew!

A Romantic Enters the World

But in this world, Romantics are backbitten at every corner by the snarling hordes of cynics and realists. (Like in the picture here, a classic by Richard Stine) Why do these people feel that they're always right and their opinions the right ones, the only ones? Who bare their teeth 'all the better to eat you with my dear' at every turn, huffing and puffing and trying to blow our big beautiful house down with all their cribbing and sniping. I've been looked over caustically by cynical peering eyes, my dreams dashed by their dismissiveness and irate sense of reality - but, oh no, in the real world, that would never happen! But I know better. Because I believe in better.

See, what exactly constitutes the real world? Is the real world not as how each individual sees it, 'if you can, you can and if you can't, you can't'? One of my favourite quotes is from Ayn Rand's novel 'Atlas Shrugged' which talks about this illusion of the real world: 'The world you desire can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.' The real world is what we see as real. Einsten once said that reality is an illusion, and Picasso that 'everything you can imagine is real,' so it figures that we create our own realities. Life is a blank slate and it's up to us to fill it. If it's black-and-white or grey, linear and logical, so be it. But if it's multi-coloured and shining and flowery and starry, then even better. How dare others criticise it? It is as much as real to us as theirs is to them. But more than that, it's better. Maybe they're just jealous.

Romantics don't give in to these cynical predispositions though. We keep smiling, keep smelling the roses. It's not that we're ignorant of the rain and the practical must-dos and all the bad stuff that goes on, but rather, we choose to rise above it, to assign more importance and energy to the good things in life, to the wide open world of dreams and imagination and all the possibilities it offers, over the boundaries and restrictions of reality's iron fist, to what really makes life worthwhile. We live by possibilities, not restrictions; hope, not doubt; faith not fear. We don't settle for indifference, because we know there's real treasure out there to be found. We push the boundaries; we know rules and routines are not the be all and end all, that there is something beyond. We choose to believe in this great big beautiful beyond and navigate towards it, pinning our hearts to our sleeves and setting sail on a wish and dream, a wink and a smile ;)

Granted, maybe it's a bad thing to be a romantic,  a starry-eyed sentimental focused solely on love and its ideal. But to be a Romantic -  is quite an accomplishment. How lucky to be endowed with a love and appreciation of all the wonderful things the world has to offer (love included) and  having the dedication to honour and pursue them and the freedom of mind and heart to unabashedly express and embrace them.

I'm proud to be a Romantic. And I'll defend my grounds - whimsical or no - passionately, courageously, infinitely.


with my heart still furiously beating, 


~ Siobhán.


'Late Fragment' - Raymond Carver

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

'Gray Room' ~ Wallace Stevens 

Although you sit in a room that is gray,
Except for the silver
Of the straw-paper,
And pick
At your pale white gown;
Or lift one of the green beads
Of your necklace,
To let it fall;
Or gaze at your green fan
Printed with the red branches of a red willow;
Or, with one finger,
Move the leaf in the bowl--
The leaf that has fallen from the branches of the forsythia
Beside you...
What is all this?
I know how furiously your heart is beating.

Imagination Vs Reality: Feathers & Bricks

'They say that most of what happens to a writer happens only in their head.'

There's one occupational hazard about writing that affects me majorly in real life and that's imagination. 

Specifically, over-use of imagination, over-reliance on imagination. Which translates to unintentional illusions and alternative realities made of the fine fragility of feathers that collaspe under the weight of reality's bricks eventually, leaving me in a heap of broken-dream rubble.

See to create fiction requires a lot of imagining. Lots of wondering and pondering, fantasising and make-believing, using and over-using of this power. To live in the real world requires....a blocking out of that power? My real world, and probably that of many other creatives, is more than scaffolded with imagination. I imagine things better than they are at times. I add and embellish and decorate the bones of day-to-day life with ideas, visions,  reinvention of what-ifs and what could bes. I refuse the black and white platter we're offered and choose instead to paint scenes with the coloured palette of possibilities. I see things as I'd like to see them; I see things as they settle into mutable shapes in my mind, not as the sharp lines they actually are in reality.

I first became aware of this at a creative writing group once when a participant remarked to me after I'd read out some work 'how she'd love to live where I lived, with all the magical surroundings and people' - she was referring to all the moonlight vistas, emerald-green wonder and blue-eyed muses I'd charted in my writing. It occured to me then that this must be how I see the world; not how others see it, not how it actually is. I was telling stories to myself I realised. That's how I lived, through stories. Through stories I'd read, watched, and created myself. The fabric of my life was a narrative I was continually creating and re-creating.

So I've come to realise that I have the power to create my reality somewhat. Mythologize things  into magic. Like an alchemist, turn the cold metal of mundanity to shimmering warm gold, ordinary to extraordinary. It's like I'm pre-programmed; if I didn't do this, then the world would seem a very plain place to me. That's why I believe stories are so important to us. They have been since the beginning of time, since narrative first began with a few scratches on cave walls.  

We need stories. They are our way of making sense and meaning of this sometimes blank of existence. No one likes to be faced with a blank page after all, our instinct is to fill it. So we tell stories - to each other, to ourselves, to understand our world, but more so, to know that we matter, that things we hold dear matter, that everything has meaning beyond this sometimes bottomless insignificance that confronts us from time-to-time in the form of ennui and emptiness. 

One of my favourite books is Life of Pi by Yann Martel. In it the author chronicles a young boy's experience lost at sea, alone on a lifeboat, with only a tiger for company. (Yes, a tiger. Read it to believe...) Without giving the story away, the book highlights the importance of fiction in our lives, the vital necessity of it for our sanity, our survival, our sense of self.

So being able to tell stories is good, right?  In certain situations yes. In others,...  I don't know. I've gotten myself into tricky situations due to an over-active imaginative impulse... When it comes to matters of the heart for instance, how to know what's real and what's imaginary? How in the heck do you decipher reality when you spend all of your time creating an alternative one while in writer-mode??! You see my dilemma. Most people have 'common sense', a gut reaction, which is their foolproof guide. I do too, but it's just that imagination interferes, and I don't know which to trust, as it's usually imagination  most of my waking life.

And now I'm wondering if I'm destined to make the same mistakes over and over again when it comes to figuring out what's real and what's imaginary in that airy-fairy vague realm of love. Is the proof in the actions, the words, or how I interpret them? Is the truth in my head the pure unaltered version or has imagination enveloped it in a misty aura, tinting  it opaque? I can't decipher reality from imagination at times; and without that gift I wouldn't be able to sit down and write and create worlds out of my head and see life as great big coloured Wonderland full of possibilities and surprises.  But with it, my vision is obscured when it comes to calling it as it is. (Added to this I'm also a diehard Romantic; which results in a highly potent mix of misguided idealism, unyielding optimism and mighty misunderstanding!)

Like right now. Right now I feel stupid for having read signs wrong; putting two and two together and getting five; believing in a rainbow instead of a black and white reality. A Sylvia Plath poem is going round and round in my head which explains my state exactly, because yeah, it is enough to drive you mad! And the repetive haunting echo of the villainelle structure just goes straight for that silly soft part that actually was stupid enough to drop all defences and believe. Here:

Mad Girl's Love Song - Sylvia Plath        
         
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; 

I lift my lids and all is born again. 

(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red, 
And arbitrary blackness gallops in: 
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed 
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. 
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade: 
Exit seraphim and Satan's men: 
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said, 
But I grow old and I forget your name. 
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead; 
At least when spring comes they roar back again. 
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. 
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

They say that most of what happens to a writer, happens mostly in their heads.... Yes, I think I made you up inside my head. And that makes me wonder now -  what else did I make up? 

George Bernard Shaw once said: 'Only in books has mankind known perfect truth, love and beauty.' And I'm starting to really believe that. That only in the hold of the imagination does perfection exist, in love, truth and beauty, the great grail trinity. Seems reality comes up second-best every time.

So I turn to the page, where it's perfectly acceptable to imagine, and be rewarded with the contentment of creation. The permanence and importance of it. Instead of self-doubt and recrimination.

The sobering thought of facing reality is a thorny one. But facing reality without the cushion of imagination, definitely worse.  In the coming barren days, it'll be imagination that tends to these raw wounds reality has inflicted. I need this trait to create. Without it, I wouldn't have  a hope in hell of ever filling a page. 

There you have it, another writer's dilemma. Has anyone experienced this occupational hazard? How do you deal with it? Is there a chance of reconciling the two? I'd love to know....!

 

But for now I suppose, if it came down to it, I'd rather be buried by feathers than a tonne of bricks. 

~ Siobhán. 

(And another poem, the medium where reality is tilted until truth glints off it. And apologies to Sylvia Plath for showing her gloomy side once again here, there is more to her than deadpan despair, will include more of her neutral poems in future..) But for now, here's an achingly accurate picture of regret:

Jilted - Sylvia Plath 

My thoughts are crabbed and sallow,

My tears like vinegar, 
Or the bitter blinking yellow 
Of an acetic star.

Tonight the caustic wind, love, 
Gossips late and soon, 
And I wear the wry-faced pucker of 
The sour lemon moon.

While like an early summer plum, 
Puny, green, and tart, 
Droops upon its wizened stem 
My lean, unripened heart.

This blog was soundtracked by the magnificently morose, The National. A perfect pitch to match the notes of disappointment and disillusionment, for when the castles come crashing down: Fake Empire -The National

*images taken from weheartit