On Suffering ? Thoughts in Progress

Years ago, when I was completing an undergraduate degree in Boston, I fell very ill. As it was the middle of winter break, there was nobody in town. The house was empty. My housemate had gone home to be with his family. Outside, the streets were iced and the freezing air inhospitable. The nearest grocer was a long walk away. For days, my condition worsened. I had been working part time, taking a full load of classes, and writing a thesis on the topic of metaphor, which had been an obsession for several years. Suddenly, all this buzzing activity stopped. Even getting out of bed took effort. I couldn?t think straight ? I could barely eat. One day, I was certain that I was dying. I couldn?t get up. My mind spun, fevered and confused. I was out of minutes on my phone, and was unable to think of anybody who might help me even if I could afford to make a phone call. I had never felt so alone ? so human.

Strangely, in those moments of fear and uncertainty, all I could think about was writing. I felt a desperation to write stories, poems ??anything.?I did, somehow, type out a few dozen pages during that period. Most of it was nonsense ? psychotropic ramblings of a megalomaniacal invalid. Some of it, though, was very good ? perhaps the best I had accomplished so far.

I often think back to those strange, bleak moments, and wonder what drove me to attempt to create in that precise state of mind. What is it about suffering that lends itself to the arts? This afternoon I fell ill again. I was obliged to leave the venue I found myself in and walk the long length of South Parks to flop back into bed. The path home was infused with an uncanny and magical quality ? the trees swayed in a kind of lush green dance, and I must have written a dozen poems in response, ushering words up from an unconscious poetic well. When I returned home, the walls of my bedroom seemed more alive. I felt ?that same mad inclination to write.?The question of the arts and suffering returned. Why is it that suffering creates art? Why do I find it easier ? more natural, even ? to speak truth from a place of desolation? For the past few years, I have found creative writing increasingly difficult. Inexplicably, I feel this difficulty to be a result of a happier and healthier state of mind. But why?

Is it that there is something inherently unhealthy about artistic creation? Was Plato right? Maybe all those references to fevered and blistering brains in the Elizabethan poems suggest an essential sickness at the heart of artistry? We might imagine that playing God through the arts is a kind of perversion ? a defiance against the intended order of things. Here, I am reminded (counterintuitively) of Nietzsche?s criticism of Christianity; Christian belief, he argues, is a function of weakness ? a twisting of our natural evanescence?to serve a distorted will-to-power. Christianity is for the sick, he argues ????Because sickness belongs to the essence of Christianity, the typical Christian condition, ?belief,? has to be a form of sickness. Every straightforward, honest, scientific road to knowledge?has?to be repudiated by the Church as a?forbidden?road.? What Nietzsche says of Christian faith might be said of the arts ? both tend to stem from suffering, not strength.

But there are other possibilities. During that time of illness, I had been studying under a professor of literature. He was a man who believed that art was a part of life ? that living and the arts were inseparable. His work radiated truth and beauty. No subject was taboo, no hypothesis too far-flung. He approached everything with a gentle curiosity that at once awed and humbled his students. During office hours, he used to answer his phone when his wife called, no matter who he was hosting. Speaking to her in German, using low, gentle tones, he would wait patiently until the conversation had run its course. When this happened, I had the sensation that he was conducting a sacred ritual of speech. He never cut her short. What was so striking about him was that his love was not hidden; it was not politely kept in a box under his bed. Poetry was life, life poetry. He loved wisdom rather than knowledge, and as a result he never had a prominent position at the University; yet he was the best teacher I have ever had. It was his example that inspired me to write ?during those moments of sickness ??urgently?? as if it meant something to somebody somewhere.

I once asked this professor why poetry mattered. He told me that the people who read and care about poetry are the same people who listen to and care about Beethoven. What would we have done if Beethoven had despaired when he lost his hearing? ?Perhaps, I recall thinking, this was the answer to the problem of suffering and the arts. When we are broken ? when we are tired and ill ? we are given a more accurate appreciation of life, and this appreciation can appeal to anyone, however numb they might be to the subtleties of experience. Unless our realities crumble from time to time, alternative worlds will never present themselves. This is Heidegger?s reading of the arts. Heidegger would remind us that we forget ourselves in the business of healthy, self-determined activity ? we forget to look?and to?see?what is immediately in front of us. Normally, we are asleep under the hypnotic illusion that our lives belong to us ? that they are permanent and important. In our daily lives, we perpetually glaze over the fecundity and alternative possibilities of existence.

Bloated with false confidence, we forget to imagine the world as anything other than we think it is. We see the world as putty in our hands, until sickness ? a reminder of our humanity ? suddenly confronts us with the fact that it is the other way around. If we find ourselves out of control, we are forced to take stock. The world impresses us with itself again in moments of our own vulnerability, and teaches us its subtleties. When something breaks, we see our condition more clearly, and are able to imagine what else it could be. There are, in fact, artists who embrace suffering explicitly (I am reminded of Rilke and Proust).?Perhaps the suffering of the artistic process is a kind of exchange; a relinquished life ? a life?freed?from the will-to-power ? is salvific ? not only for ourselves, but for those we seek to address from across chasms of time and space. Put differently, sickness draws us away from hyperactive consciousness and places us squarely face-to-face in front of our own souls. Art itself is uncomfortable, so why would we have it spring from a situation of personal, physical, or psychological comfort?

Source: http://aprilpiercing.wordpress.com/2012/07/22/on-suffering/

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