5. I, DEMON, WANT YOUR HE(ART)

On Suffering for One's Art

There’s that saying, perhaps not even a saying, some sly, omnipresent whisper, words which snake around dialogue, always left of centre, always in the side-eye, the demon in the closet that vanishes when you look, but nonetheless still something people just say, off-hand and in-between and without thinking, which we know as “to suffer for one’s art”. All good artists must suffer to create, it’s said. Look at Kafka, who doubted himself so much that he burned all his work. Look at Hemingway’s gun. Look at the many deaths of Plath and the bloody severed ear of Van Gogh. Raymond Chandler, lost to suicide. Anne Sexton, to suicide. Hunter S. Thompson and Stefan Zweig and Yukio Mishima and David Foster Wallace, all suicide. Virginia Woolf, who stuffed her pockets with stones.

“Without fear and illness, I could never have accomplished all I have,” Edvard Munch said. As it was for Francisco Goya, who, struck down by illness, haunted by panic and fear, and surrounded by the bleak images of war, painted the most terrific and horrific pieces of his career, which we know as the Black Paintings:

Saturn Devouring his Son, Francisco Goya (c.1819-23)

Witches’ Sabbath, Francisco Goya (c.1819-23)

We are together in a car. Outside, night presses the sea into the sky until one can’t be sure where the world ends and infinity begins. There is something terrible about this melding of worlds, this slow slippage into an eternity I didn’t ask for and didn’t want. We could have stayed home, I think. But there is something poetic about taking your endings outside, where they can leave you, and you them.

After a lot of impassioned words, words wrapped in pain, I calm enough to tell him that I fear for my future, with or without him. I am a rational person. I was born with a brain for mathematics and science. It was my childhood of solitude that taught me art, taught me creativity. A girl alone in a room will make do — and thus all my stories were born. I was built for numbers and cold reason and then, early-on, life missed a beat, fate tripped up, and I found myself elsewhere. An artist born of a family without affinity for art. A writer who finds comfort in numbers as much as words. A mind split down the middle.

I don’t believe in a divine power, I say. Existence doesn’t have purpose. Ghosts aren’t real. Astrology is a pseudoscience fuelled by confirmation bias. There’s no life after death, no psychics, no karma, no miracles. If one is lead to believe, as we often are, that there are mysterious forces at work, it is only because the universe itself is mysterious and our brains aren’t equipped to understand it.

And yet, despite all that, I am superstitious. I see signs everywhere. Everything is part of a pattern. Everything is connected. I am haunted by the conviction that, were one to think on the constituents of reality for long enough, they could reveal the web, they could see how everything is tangled up. I am constantly trying to crack open existence, I tell him, to think something no one else has thought. I push my mind to unnatural limits. I attempt to solve reality in my daily commute. And it’s for this reason I’m afraid that one day, when I’m old, or even just older, I will lose my mind.

The night before the end, I dream of the ending, like some kind of clairvoyant. I understand it as intuition, the subconscious processing information faster than my conscious mind. But I am nonetheless haunted by its images as they repeat before my eyes, this time in the waking world, as though the universe is sending me a message. I feel, despite everything, despite the conviction in my bones that this is wrong, all wrong, that I have found my fate. That, perhaps, in choosing to be a writer, I am destined to be alone.

It all comes back to that idea, that instinct we bear of balance. Winning streaks come to an end. Highs are followed by lows. You rise for a period only to be shoved rudely back down to centre. You feel life couldn’t get any worse and then someone lifts you up to neutral. The scales always even out, the numbers return to the mean. Individual constituents may rise and fall but the universe never changes.

Thus we feel a certain superstition around happy events. It is atavistic, instinctive. Too lucky, we say. Too good to be true. Shaking our heads. Nothing comes free in this world. Produce a work of art and life will hit you somewhere else. Is it realism or pessimism? Are we thrown about by life, or do we, in believing that good must come of bad and bad of good, alter our destiny ourselves?

All I know is that if I put my heart into my art, I cannot then take it back out and give it to the ones I love. If I give it to my family, my friends, my art shrivels on the page. Naturally, wanting both, I grab a knife and split my heart in two. Here, I say, handing one half to my lover — while, with the other hand, I slyly store the second in my words. As a result I condemn myself to a sort of half-life, wherein I am always half-elsewhere, half-empty, loving and living at a distance, sometimes writing, sometimes staring blankly at the page.

Life never gives with both hands and neither do I. There is an art to this. You must keep your heart-halves equal or else you will lose one of your worlds. The problem, however, is that art is a greedy bastard. Art is a demon. Art wants more, demands more, screams for more. Art claws through your dreams. Art eats all your thoughts. Unlike a person, it is with you always — because it is you. And if you aren’t careful, if you don’t daily measure out your halves of heart, your demon will take the lot.

As the moon lifts into the sky, splitting apart a night which had previously felt infinite, I drive away from love. I feel dangerous. There is a recklessness inside of me. A desire to fuck things up. To ram knives into everything soft and wonderful and call it creative spirit, the refusal to submit to the world. I bleed words, awful words, beautiful words, that dissolve in the air around me. I refuse to write anything down, harbouring the hope that if I get them all out of me, if I throw them at the night, squander them, offer them up as sacrifices to a god I don’t believe in, I might find my way back to happiness.

The next morning I wake heavy. I drag myself into a world that has kept on without me. Silently I cry on the street, at the station, on the train, even as I walk through the doors at work, and in doing so I realise how little people actually look at one another. Or perhaps, I think, recalling the neighbour baffled by my tears when I came home — who mistook them first for a reaction to the cold, then for the symptom of some illness, and finally, upon my telling him I was upset, frowned and softly said, Oh—it is the refusal to see. A fear of pain so consuming that in order to be happy we have to rationalise it as something else: the girl on the street isn’t crying, her eyes are just watering in the winter air.

After work, the teary ride home. The world at twilight, orange and pink peeling back over the clouds, the lights of the city blinking awake and pushing out bravely into the gathering dark. I think of how together we are in this city of millions, our comings and goings perfectly matched, like so many blood cells which pulse in concert in and out of the heart. And how isolated we are when we sit side-by-side.

In the car, by the sea, on the night that witnessed the end of love, there is a silence between us that I’m not accustomed to. A new tension, a painful distance. In order to alleviate it, we take a break from our agony to talk about ourselves and our lives, and as we do a fox darts out from across the road. We watch, silent, frozen, as it pads in front of the car and then wraps around the side. It pauses right outside my window, seems to contemplate me in all my sadness, and runs off into the night. And I can’t help myself — the tears burst onto my cheeks: I had seen the very same fox in a dream. It is a message, if not from the universe then from the back of my own mind. You are not alone, it seems to say, because you are here.

Later, days later, I finally wake on a morning that doesn’t hate me. I step with light feet, buoyed by a sense of self-worth. I remember the balance of the universe. I glue back together the halves of my heart. I have lost the thing I thought I couldn’t live without and yet here I am. And because I have lost it, because I have suffered and suffer still, I tell myself that soon, very soon, joy will find me in other arenas. I turn the sadness into a sign, news from the universe: Soon your art will flourish!

I have friends who have been in happy relationships for several years. I know others whose careers are taking off, whose lives are filled with family, who eat at a different restaurant every night and go drinking after work and go on holidays and take up pilates and spend their spare time, as much of it as they can, with the people they love.

Meanwhile I sit at a desk and try to create wonders, through love and happiness and in the absence of both. I pull down my world for my art, and I think to myself, alone, unloved, I might make it one day. And perhaps, I wonder, that’s what great art takes: the willingness to sacrifice your whole life, your one life, all your chances at happiness and all your dreams of love, and lose yourself to words which will push humanity a little further down the path. Is that selfish? Melodramatic? Insane? Maybe so. But then, think of all the great art we wouldn’t have if only the artists were happy.