to absorb sentences like “We’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we’ve never even met?”1 and “I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.”2 I need walkingaround-the-room-breaks for when “The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.”3 I even bought a pack of cigarettes because some sentences just deserve a cigarette. Sentences like “There’s good selfconsciousness, and then there’s toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness.” 4 Other sentences merit a glass of wine “Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.”5 There are some crafted specifically for chocolate “The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.“6 and “You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking.”7 And then there are sentences for tears: “The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die”8; “And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter — they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long”9 and “I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.”10 It occurs to me that I am invariably attracted to broken artists and conversely, broken art. My favourite writers include the likes of Leonard Cohen, whose cracks in everything exclusively cultivate art out of wreckage and its varying
remnants. Then there is Borges whose mammoth intellect still cannot help but swim in the depths of his dark despair. Some of them survived their art, others didn’t, but overwhelmingly I am attracted to artists whose art cripples their person. These are the books I come back to — ‘Labyrinths’, ‘Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man’, ‘Notes from the Underground’, ‘Beautiful Losers’ — broken books by broken people, followed by broken songs and broken paintings. All of them dangerously maladjusted beings that thrive in their broken-ness, while being broken. Almost as if the process that shatters their person simultaneously feeds their art. Rosamond Lehmann in her essay ‘For Virginia Woolf’ puts it perfectly when she sums the latter up by saying “Everything one can say about her at this moment seems too soon or too late; and to try to tell the truth about a person so unusual and of such integrity is so important one scarcely dares to make the attempt. One fears to plant lilies: she would have disliked that. Even to write poems about her — in a sense the most suitable kind of elegy for her — seems too much like wrapping her in a lullaby and singing her to rest.” The ideology behind what makes a “true artist” is a contaminated one. It is inherently polluted by the emotions of consumers and audiences. Truth in art has little value in production and is given far too much value post-production. Or is it the other way around? Does the purpose of art trump the pedestals it is placed on later in its shelf life? Besides, even the term “art” is conceptually different for its creator and audience. This is where sub-textual swamps crop up. The term “genius” in art is almost synonymous with the term “tortured” but no one
Truth in art has little value in production and is given far too much value post-production. Or is it the other way around? Does the purpose of art trump the pedestals it is placed on later in its shelf life?
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