The broken artist

Novelist Jeanette Winterson recently had an essay in the Wall Street Journal titled "In Praise of the Crack-up" where she wrote about the link between mental illness and despair and creative artistic people.

I haven't had the burden of struggling with true mental illness the way so many artists have, (including some friends and members of my own family). Not that I can't do a mood pretty darn well---but I can only blame my moods on my own brattiness--

That said, I know mental illness is a true issue for many people and many artists--and even without the highs and lows of the bipolar brain, many of us artists still seem to find ourselves broken in just the places where we also find our greatest moments of transcendence. In this light, the last few paragraphs were just so resonate for me--they seemed hauntingly true. I wanted to record them here.

"Art isn't a surface activity. It comes from a deep place and it meets the wound we each carry.

Even when our lives are going well, there is something that prowls the borders, unseen, unfelt. The existential depression that is becoming a condition of humankind, experienced as loss of meaning, a kind of empty bafflement....

Longing is painful. Every work of art is an attempt to bring into being the object of loss. The pictures, the music, the peoems and the performances are an intense engagement with loss. While one is in the act of making, one is not in loss, and one has meaning. The fierce crashes that happen to many creative people when a piece of work is done...come out of the sense that however good the work, it has not answered the loss.

The strange thing about creative work is that it can have enormous value for others while its maker is left ravaged. The ancient Greeks understood this as the price of an encounter with a god--the divine forces enter the human and use him or her as an instrument, only to be ultimately destroyed. But I do not believe that creativity is destructive or divine. I believe it is the part of us that gives shape and voice to our innermost reality.

This is frightening. Encounters with the real, in particular, what we really feel, are something we generally try to avoid. Art mediates the encounter, allowing us to get nearer to our longing and our loss, to risk more, to dare more. Yet for the maker, the exposure is not mediated; it is total and terrifying. That is why so many creative people cut themselves off from their own experience, using drugs or drink or sex or shipwreck to avoid absolute exposure to the pain of creativity...."

Earlier in the article, Winterson compares this artistic struggle with the wounding blessing that Jacob received as he wrestled with God.

I believe she is on to something--when we make art we are in the midst of the real-- the real longing and loneliness and loss of every heart, the terrifying wonder of our existence-- and it's pretty terrible at times, isn't it-

and yet, the artist is the person who can't stay away from the real--even if they drug themselves so as to avoid dealing with it--still, all that brokeness must not be the only option for the artist--

I hope we can learn--I hope I can learn --God's redemption in this--and in the meantime, I hope I learn to want to be broken by truth more than live comfortably with falseness. The final story of blessing I hope is not only wounding but a larger story of encounter. Encounter that is not only worth the violence it incurs but also redeems it.