MemeMachineGo!

[…] There are certain tendencies in the artist — as Elisa DeCarlo put it, you have to keep your guard down internally and externally — that don’t bode well for my concept of mental health. The artist has to stay intimate with disturbing thoughts, and avoid explaining away their power.

Flea and Leonard (in “Mud”) are only two of the artists who have lamented that it’s hard to create art while content. And this reminds me of other hypotheses floating around my brain, like a similar hypothesis about the cognitive habits that make good programmers and bad friends/coworkers/citizens, or the old chestnut about the incompatibility between ambition and contentment.

Here are some more songs about contentness spoiling your art:

• Christine Lavin’s Please Don’t Make Me Too Happy
• Andrew Kerr’s Happy Life

I don’t buy this causality — this is what I think is going on that can make it look that way.

Mental, spiritual, and emotional health broadens your range, it doesn’t narrow it. What mental, spiritual, and emotional illness is is getting stuck in places and not being able to get out. Health doesn’t mean you can’t visit those places; it means you don’t get stuck there.

You can have a relationship with yourself and your art that’s given rise to a set of strategies, tactics, and habits that only work in a context of fear, or rage, or despair. If that’s the case, then happiness can make it seem like artistic urge or ability has dried up. But that’s not what’s happened; it’s just that in the new context, the old habits don’t work.

If you’re healthy enough that you don’t have to be stuck in those old habits, you can develop new ones that can leave you with even more artistic urge and ability. If nothing else, you’ll have more time and energy that you used to spend feeling bad.

It is possible to realize that your urge toward artistic accomplishment arose from feelings of worthlessness, or otherwise from a bad place, and realize you don’t actually want to pursue the same artistic endeavor in the same way. The incompatibility between ambition and contentment speaks to this, but there’s such a thing as healthy ambition and unhealthy ambition. Contentment isn’t incompatible with the former.

Fear, and rage, and despair are roads. You can bring back interesting and valuable things from your journeys on them. But they’re not the only roads through the territory; other roads not only go through that territory, but also through broader and more varied territories.

My thinking on these topics has been greatly influenced by Steve Barnes. See here, and here,
and here.

(This is a revised version of a reply I made to Sumana by email; she suggested I post it.)