If fear stops you creating, you’ll suffer for art in vain
Art, like love, is a doing word. An artist who doesn’t do — create — is, well, not an artist. A piss artist, perhaps. Art is something done, not something planned for a future that never comes.
The art word, of course, carries a lot of baggage with it. It can be used to describe work in order to make its maker or those who appreciate it feel superior and those who are uninterested in it inferior. In other words, it can be a word that separates rather than includes.
When I think of art and use the term, I think more of artefact and artisan. Craft and maker. (Full disclosure; that was not always the case. I have been as guilty in the past of artistic snobbery as the next pretentious youth rebelling against what he sees as the unrefined tastes of his parents.)
I was reading Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater. The following passage is on page 143 and describes the state of mind of the protagonist as he contemplates suicide.
He’d paid the full price for art, only he hadn’t created any. He’d suffered all the old-fashioned artistic sufferings — isolation, poverty, despair, mental and physical obstruction — and nobody knew or cared. And though nobody knowing or caring was another form of artistic suffering, in his case it had no artistic meaning. He was someone who had grown ugly, old, and embittered, one of billions.
Apart from the ‘ugly’, this hit like a freight train. It describes perfectly the decline into a futile raging — a sort of opposite approach to Dylan Thomas’s plea to his dying father to not go gentle into that good night — of someone with dreams who failed to act and so ensured the dreams remained only that.
Roth describes Sabbath as ‘one of billions’. In other words, this is not an unusual fate. It is the rarer man or woman who acts and who creates art.
There is the saying that a coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave only once. If you suffer for your dreams of art it seems madness to suffer in vain.
Take that first step. Make something. Let someone know.
