JENS WILL SEE YOU NOW # 12
Hi Jens,
I'm writing you again, this time to have more of a
discussion (hopefully, anyway).
Basically, like many of us, my life in quarantine hasn't
gone swimmingly. I won't get into things too much, but the
short of it is that the life I had planned on living after
graduating college last May has been looking ever out of
reach - I wanted to get out of my shell after a few years of
living like a recluse, and also to gain some concrete
direction in my professional life. As a result of the
pandemic, however, I've been mostly living at home, rarely
interacting with others in person besides my immediate
family, and it looks pretty unlikely that I'll actually get
admitted to any graduate school I submitted applications to,
due to applying in the most competitive apps cycle in
history. I feel lost at sea, yet without any concrete actor
(even myself) to assign much blame to about my misfortune.
I feel that so much of art is giving attention to where
attention is due, whether that's romanticizing the big and
small meaningful moments in life or lamenting terrible pains
you've experienced. Either way, though, these situations
have generally been caused by someone; you have a
person, real or fictional, to associate the given feelings
with. With your music, for example, even though you
have songs with themes and ideas that are off the beaten
path, so much of your catalog is about the clearly and
obviously emotional - being in love, being heartbroken,
supporting/being supported by a friend, etc. It's been a
great soundtrack for when I've either experienced those
things or wanted to explore those situations vicariously.
But a lot of what actually affects us in life isn't so
tangible or obviously personal, right? For me, this pandemic
has been one of the most significant events I've
experienced, changing my life's direction for the worse,
even though I don't really feel I have the grounds or makeup
as a person to feel anything other than a general sense of
dismay about it. The whole thing reminds me of Ursula Le
Guin's quote about how artists refuse "to admit the
banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain."
My question - do you yourself ever feel like art is
insufficient for situations like these? If so, how do you
deal with it? Either as an artist or as an art appreciator.
Thanks for listening,
John
Nighthawks by Edward Hopper
Dear John
Sorry to hear that your life has been so hard lately. Your
story reminds me of how much harder it must be for a young
person to deal with the effects of the pandemic. Your whole
life has been paused just when it was about to start.
As you say, music and art often focus on the events that
involve another person, love and loss, while the more
difficult and abstract feelings and events remain unsung. I
can't stop thinking about the interview I read last year
with a guy who had defined himself as an incel but didn't
anymore because he had met someone. "How long have you been
together?" asked the interviewer and the guy replied
"Actually she broke up with me after two months". But it was
being dumped that made him stop being an incel because it
was an experience that brought him from the abstract pain
that turned him into a bitter incel into the more concrete
pain of being dumped. Having lost someone, either in love or
in life, is a pain that's sanctioned. It's a pain we sing
songs about. The dull pain, the pain that seems to have
fallen on us, that makes us feel worthless, give up on hope,
retreat into ourselves, that prohibits us from reaching out,
is often met with indifference at best.
Olivia Laing searches for this pain in her book The Lonely
City. After experiencing the kind of loneliness that you can
only experience in New York City - the kind of loneliness
that seems to make no sense when you're surrounded by 18
million people - she turned to art for consolation and
company. She found it in Edward Hopper who in his classic
painting Nighthawks saw the big city loneliness like she saw
it. She found it in Henry Darger, whose life illuminates the
forces that create isolation and loneliness but also the way
the imagination works to survive. And in the work of artists
who took up arms against isolation, like David Wojnarowicz
who fought against the stigmatization of people with Aids in
the 1980's. In an article in The Guardian she wrote "There
is a gentrification that’s happening to cities, and there’s
a gentrification that’s happening to the emotions too, with
a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amid
the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion
that all difficult feelings – depression, anxiety,
loneliness, rage – are simply a consequence of unsettled
chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to
structural injustice."
I had to look up that Ursula Le Guin quote you mentioned and
found it in it's whole to be about the myth of the tortured
artist.
“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by
pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as
something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only
evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a
refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible
boredom of pain.”
I think this is from a fictional work so I'm not sure if I'm
to attribute it to her or a character in a book, either way
I agree to a certain extent. As we hide away the difficult,
abstract feelings we simultaneously seem to be obsessed with
the recognizable, tangible kind of pain and we are required
to always have a good old trauma story in our back pocket to
show that we have worked our way up and deserve to be where
we are in life. I've experienced this first hand as
journalists have tried to squeeze the trauma out of me,
because without it - how do you build a story? All stories
these days are like this - "something awful happened to me
but I made it through and now I'm stronger than before". I
did a project called Ghostwriting in 2015 where I asked
people to send me stories from their life that I could turn
into songs and most of the stories, about 300 in total were
like this. Especially the ones from the US. I think it's a
way to make sense of the injustice and inequality of our
society. To not have suffered raises suspicion. Do you
actually deserve to be where you are? Is your story even
worth telling? After a while it becomes self fulfilling. The
trauma becomes the purpose, not the healing.
I know you didn't write to criticize me, John, but I feel an
obligation to think more about these things after reading
your mail. You and Ursula are right, us artists need to lift
the difficult feelings to the surface and not get stuck
writing the same sad love songs and underdog trauma stories.
I've often felt like these feelings are hard to go into.
I've often said that I feel a responsibility to not leave
the listener in the darkness. But what I've forgotten is
that when you take a listener into the darkness you don't
leave them there, because you're there with them.
I hope that things work out for you.
J
x
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