In the healing of that wound, which never closes, lies the invented, strange qualities of a man’s work.
- Lorca

In the wound that never closes
In the search that never ends
In the song over too soon
In the love out of control
In the glimpse of truth gone before knowing
Lies the deepness of the work.

The wise man, having come to terms with all such things
Doesn’t produce much.
At peace, the search over
The wounds all healed.

Artists, funky artists
Sensitive, passionate
Live deep in imaginary worlds
Unable to tell the difference (sometimes)
Between fact and fantasy,
Real and make-believe
Unless we try really hard
Which is absolutely no fun at all.

Artists, funking artists
Make great girlfriends
Until they disappear
On the way to the grocery store
To pick up some milk.
(That’s a true story)

Artists, funky artists
Fun to be around (sometimes)
If you’ve got a thick hide
You can feed off their energy.
- from my journal.

. . .

Happiness is not on my list of priorities. For some reason, I am attracted to self-destruction.
- Bob Dylan, Playboy interview.

In the history of literature, some of the most beautiful, most profound works have been composed by the most wretched of souls; there is no necessary equivalence between the aesthetic and moral achievement of a novel and the confused, drunken, tormented, or immoral package of humanity who has produced it.  Whatever sublimity inheres in the work does not necessarily exhibit itself in the author. 
- E. L.  Doctorow, Creationists

The qualities Doctorow refers to   — confused, drunken, tormented, or immoral — seem common among rock musicians, artists, novelists, poets, etc.  They are qualities to be aware of, to avoid.  They don’t lead to happiness.  Out of disharmony in the life of an artist can come beautiful, harmonious work.  Out of a life in balance can come weak, insipid work.  That is something to be aware of and avoid too.  The goal is a good life, a life of meaning and powerful work.  It is all art, it is all a delicate balance. 

How can you use your art to achieve a greater harmony with your interior world, and with your life in general?

The artist must always be somewhat opposed to society--against received knowledge.  He must be prepared to explore strange alleyways, to rebuke accepted wisdom, to confuse and challenge and reconstruct new patterns.  The artist is by nature a semi-outlaw.  Van Gogh assaults our sense of color, Wagner our inherited ideas about what acceptable sound is.  Those young men of Cambridge were artists in their lives, none better, and they cut right across the heartland of life.

 Karl, the life of the artist is invariably "us against them."  People at large don't want artists, don't understand them, never find them totally acceptable till they're dead.  The novelists you've thought about so deeply, all of them, they were athwart the grain, and the moment they tried to conform to the grain, they lost their forward thrust — they were doomed to mediocrity. 

 An artist is a creative man who cannot and indeed should not lead a normal life.  He should find sustenance from trusted friends like himself.  His task is to provide society with a fresh and sometimes necessarily acid portrait of itself.  And the highest good in this world, the behavior by which a man is judged, is that he be loyal to his friends, no matter what the consequences. 
- James A. Michener, The Novel

What is it about artists? Why are we so cantankerous? And the better the artist, the more innovative, the closer to the edge that he or she skates, the more “difficult,” the more obnoxious. A friend once asked me why Jackson Pollock would walk through a party of his patrons -- the rich, the trust funders -- naked and pee in the fireplace. “Didn’t he understand that he was limiting his market, reducing his prospects for financial success?” Well, if Pollock cared what people thought he could have never done the revolutionary work he did. It was ridiculed far and wide. So was Picasso’s work, Matisse’s, Cézanne’s, Rodin’s, Henry Miller’s. Bob Dylan was booed repeatedly when his work evolved.

The Rolling Stones, guests on the Dean Martin show and the butt of his jokes -- I forget what he said but something about the Stones being animals, and they smell bad to boot, or something like that. The Rolling Stones didn’t really care what he thought. Or said. In fact, they got energy from it. It made them stronger. The Monkees, not real, but better-behaved, are barely a footnote to rock ‘n roll. They lacked inner momentum, they lacked a commitment to their art. They played to make comfortable teenagers feel comfortable about their comfortable lives.

Hemingway, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Miles Davis, Hunter Thompson, Jimi Hendrix, van Gogh, Van Morrison, obnoxious sons of bitches one and all. But without them, our culture would be lesser, hollower. More self-proud, more comfortable, more self-satisfied. But narrower. In lots of ways. Including what it means to be alive, how we understand the potential of a human life.

Show me a good Buddhist novelist.

I use meditation to get material for writing. I am not concerned with some abstract nirvana. It is exactly the visions and fireworks that are useful to me, exactly what all the masters tell us we should pay as little attention to as possible. Telepathy, journey out of the body -- these manifestations, according to Trungpa, are mere distractions. Exactly. Distractions: fun, like hang-gliding or surfboarding or skin diving. So why not have fun? I sense an underlying sense of dogma here to which I am not willing to submit. The purpose of the bodhisattva and an artist are different and perhaps not reconcilable. Show me a good Buddhist novelist.
- William S. Burroughs, after a two-week meditation retreat with Tibetan lama Chogyam Trungpa in 1976. I’ve had some contact with prominent novelists and poets who consider themselves Buddhists, and I can say that the ones I’ve known are self-absorbed ego-maniacs. But they are good writers.

. . .

There are many stories about crazy artists, and the stories may be true, but they lead to a kind of indulgence. People say, "Well, Picasso was an outrageous character and he was a great painter," and they use that to justify their behavior.

But that's pretty lame, isn't it? I don't think we have to link psychological or emotional anxiety with creativity. That's a Freudian idea, the whole idea of sublimation of our problems in art. That's a particularly Western and modern idea and I don't know whether it's true. If you look at Bach's life, he didn't seem to be crazy, yet I can't think of anyone who was more creative. We have many examples of very creative people who lived in an emotionally wholesome way. The idea that creativity has to be linked with a negative personality structure is a bunch of baloney.

The creative process is a current of thought that seems to inform and activate the work that we do, but it's very hard to find the source of that current, very hard to monitor it, very hard to control it. My own experience is that it seems to be totally independent of whatever I might do or be experiencing. People ask how Mozart could write such happy music at a time he was so miserable.

I think it's because the current of creativity operates on a level that is quite different from personality. It's almost an organic mechanism that is beyond conscious reach. For example, I've noticed that my physical fatigue has very little effect on the quality of the work that I do. Let's say I don't sleep much one night and I have to get up and work all day. The quality of the work will be the same, it's just that I'm kind of miserable.
- Philip Glass interviewed by Dimitri Ehrlich, in the book Inside the Music, Conversations with Contemporary Musicians about Spirituality, Creativity and Consciousness. Phillip Glass was apparently admitted to the University of Chicago at the age of fifteen where he majored in mathematics and philosophy. After that, he attended Juilliard.

I know stable, balanced artists too. Not many of them, but they are out there.  

Maybe it's like a bell-shaped curve. With the population as a whole, there are extremes at either end of the curve of both extremely balanced, stable people and extremely unbalanced. Both extremes represent small portions of the population with the great bulk of people in the middle, neither particularly balanced nor unbalanced. With creative individuals, the curve is different. Yes, you have extremely balanced creative individuals, it is just that there are fewer of them, and the bulk of the population lies a little more to the unbalanced part of the graph. And then, at the other extreme, crazy artists, self-destructive artists.

It doesn't fit neat, black and white pronouncements. It defies definition.

But the thing that really interests me is Glass's statement that "the current of creativity operates on a level that is quite different from personality." A spiritual level? On one level you have a human being doing whatever he or she thinks needs to be done to function in the world. On another, you have a human soul seeking to link up with, to honor, to serve, the mysterious forces of life and the universe.

No Dinners With Models (They’re Nothing But Trouble)

So Matisse had been right! I could sense the distress this lonely man (Pierre Bonnard) was feeling. Marthe, the young model he had met in 1893 and who became his wife, had left him forever four years earlier, after forty-nine years of life together, on the eve of their golden wedding anniversary. With her slender, graceful body, her luxuriant mass of hair, her periwinkle-blue eyes, her high firm breasts, and her long legs, she had been his favorite model all her life. This febrile woman with her delicate health, who spent her time indoors, who was fond of water and the warmth of the bathroom and bed sheets, was the embodiment of all those sensual women in Bonnard’s paintings who dream, do their hair, dress, or gaze at themselves in their mirrors, who lie back on their unmade beds, sew by lamplight, and lay or clear the table.
-Brassai, The Artists Of My Life

Bonnard’s model somehow reminds me of a model I worked with many years ago. She was a wild, free spirit who blew into my life like a wild wind, lit up my art and my imagination. She laughed, cried, filled my life with joy and then sadness. She bit me. It left marks; it hurt like hell. Then she disappeared. Two years later she came back and we did it all over again. More art, more joy, more suffering. Madness.

But three times is too many for one life. Two too many, in fact. Probably. I started to develop a nervous twitch. But I wouldn’t have traded that first wild ride for anything. That first one was fun. It showed me a slant on life I had never experienced before.

I remember a quote from a book on Rodin -- I can’t remember which one -- for some reason I keep losing track of my Rodin quotes. He has fascinated me for years and I’ve read many books about him -- but anyway, an apprentice in his studio became enchanted with one of Rodin’s many nude models and began chatting her up. She seemed receptive. The apprentice asked her out for dinner. The invitation, initially rejected, was finally accepted. The apprentice waited that evening at length, in vain. No model, no dinner date.

 The next morning, Rodin wagged his finger at him. “No dinners with models. I’ve learned that the hard way,” said Rodin.  

That particular piece of advice is one that Rodin himself seemed to have trouble following. . .  

The grinding of light and dark throws off big sparks. Artists explore the territory where light and dark meet, where gods and demons dance. If they report back in a profound way, we (sometimes) pay them big bucks and, by and large, forgive them their trespasses. Hence Picasso, Miles Davis, Keith Richards, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, etc. Misfits one and all. Headstrong, ornery bastards. Tough-minded but highly sensitive. To break the kind of ground they broke, you need to live deep inside your own psyche and not care much what other people think. They change culture. Some self-destruct. Many great artists are profoundly troubled. But out of that disequilibrium can emerge new insights, new ways of seeing. Sometimes new beauty emerges out of the destructive darkness.

I once heard a biographer of Miles Davis interviewed on the radio, and he was asked something like:  “How could a guy who was apparently so selfish and unkind to so many people, who could be such a son of a bitch to 99 percent of the people he had contact with, play such soft and beautiful music?” 

The biographer answered,  “He played music like the person he wanted to be.”

Here’s an excerpt from Jack Chambers’s introduction to his book Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis:

It was as though, when he emerged into the daylight after those years behind drawn shades, he had lost track of who he used to be. Five or six years of cocaine at $500 a day, along with an uninterrupted routine of what he called  kinky sex and other weird shit,  might have killed enough brain cells for that loss of identity — as his son Gregory charged in his lawsuit. It might even have turned the Prince of Darkness into  Duffy Davis.  That was what he told Eric Nisenson he wanted to be called. . . . Nisenson met Davis in his retirement years and, to his surprise, found himself admitted into Davis’s darkened brownstone, where used syringes crackled underfoot and television sets flickered in the corners. Davis vaguely promised Nisenson that he would collaborate with him on his biography. The price Nisenson paid was exacted in whispered phone calls at all hours of the night or day telling himto deliver six-packs of Heineken, groceries, Band-Aids, cough drops and, before long, plain brown envelopes from coke dealers. Nisenson came to think of his role as indentured servitude.  He hated it and eventually cooled on the friendship, but not before becoming privy to Davis’s bouts of shadow-skulking paranoia, some ferocious beatings of his young girlfriend, and his pathetic pleas for late-nigh succor. . . . The Autobiography of Miles Davis is a self-portrait of a sleaze ball.  

The most original parts of the Autobiography are the wacky, outrageously frank anecdotes. Davis always claimed he was brutally honest. In the Autobiography the emphasis is on brutality. Davis ponders the sexual proclivities of his high school sweetheart and the paternity of two of his three children by her, eventually disowning one and keeping the others. He calmly recounts how he destroyed the dancing career of his first wife, Frances, when his fits of jealousy and suspicion confined her to the kitchen while he was out romping. He calls his second wife, Betty Mabry,  a high-class groupie,  and boasts about committing adultery on his third wife, Cicely Tyson, five days after their wedding. He harps about his dissolute eldest sons, who lived with him through his own most dissolute years. He reminisces about extorting money from the French actress Juliette Greco, pawning Clark Terry’s trumpet and clothes to buy heroin, firing Vincent Wilburn (who felt . . . like he was my own son) immediately before the concert in Wilburn’s home city, and vomiting on the ambassador in the reception line on his first visit to Japan. He talks matter-of-factly about beating all his wives and several girlfriends.  “I just slapped the shit out of her,”  he says of Tyson. Oddly enough, his boasts about slapping women around overlook two women who had the nerve to press charges: Lita Merker, who charged him with unlawful imprisonment in 1972 and Aida Chapman, who charged him with assault in 1984. He indulges in diatribes on classical music (robot shit  in his view), race, sex objects, police, and orgasm.

I’m not that bad a driver, and I get in a wreck almost every day.
- Kurt Cobain, lead singer and guitarist of Nirvana

Today I was expelled from the maths class because Mr Palafox said that I was too much of a troublemaker, and although they may tell you things about me, they are not true; that old man is very mean and it is true that I am a troublemaker, but not to the extent that I need to be expelled from class. Toledano will send you a letter at noon with my father, but do not pay attention to anything he tells you, because they are a bunch of lies.
- Frida Kahlo, aged 16, in a letter to her mother, 15th September 1923, with thanks to Letters Of Note.

If art is ever given the keys to the city, it will be because it’s been so watered down, rendered so impotent, that it’s not worth fighting for... every poet, every artist is an anti­social human being. He’s not that way because he wants to be; he can’t be any other way. Of course the state has the right to chase him away...and if he is really an artist it is in his nature not to want to be admitted, because if he is admitted it can only mean he is doing something which is understood, approved, and therefore old hat—worthless. Anything new, anything worth doing, can’t be recognized. People just don’t have that much vision. So this business about defending and freeing culture is absurd. . . the right to free expression is some­thing that one seizes, not something one is given. There is absolute opposition between the creator and the state. If the idea of society is to dominate the individual, the individual must perish. Furthermore, there wouldn’t be such a thing as a seer if there weren’t a state trying to suppress him. People reach the status of artist only after crossing the maximum number of barriers. So the arts should be discouraged, not encouraged.

There has to be a rule even if it’s a bad one because the evidence of art’s power is in breaking down the barriers. But to do away with the obstacles—that serves no purpose other than to make things completely wishy-washy, spineless, shape­less, meaningless—zero.
- Pablo Picasso

The artist is always at the margin. Nothing creative ever happens at the center. The artist revels in the disequilibrium of things; art emerges out of a disequilibrium in search of a new equilibrium. . . Artists have something in them that is wild, something that is guided and inspired ultimately by imagination.
            - Thomas Berry, author, historian, Roman Catholic Priest (Issue 21, June 1999, Heron Dance interview)

The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much that he can’t get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the  Ode on a Grecian Urn  is worth any number of old ladies.
- William Faulkner, Paris Review interview (1958)

 

I went off with fists in my torn pockets;
My coat was completely threadbare.
I followed you, Muse, where you led me,
Dreamed of loves — ah — so fine and so rare.
- Rimbaud, Ma Bohème

 

Rimbaud has been an inspirational figure to many artists, and at least one politician. I first became aware of the quote above via the then Prime Minister of Canada, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, who offered it in his retirement speech at the Liberal Party Leadership Convention in 1984. You don’t hear many U.S. politicians quoting Rimbaud (he was gay, and kind of unruly, undependable and self-obsessed from all accounts), although his work inspired a huge range of artists from Picasso to Jim Morrison. Henry Miller wrote a book about Rimbaud’s influence on his life and work, The Time of the Assassins.

Here’s a quote from a letter Rimbaud wrote to his friend Izambard:

Now I am going in for debauch. Why? I want to be a poet, and I am working to make myself a visionary: you won’t possibly understand, and I don’t know how to explain it to you. To arrive at the unknown through the disordering of all the senses, that’s the point. The sufferings will be tremendous, but one must be strong, be born a poet: it is in no way my fault. It is wrong to say: I think. One should say: I am thought. Pardon the pun.

I is some one else. So much the worse for the wood that discovers it’s a violin, and to hell with the heedless who cavil about something they know nothing about!

The young Rimbaud signed his letters  The Heartless Rimbaud. 

John Lennon, the Beatle who wrote “Give Peace a Chance” and “Imagine” beat his wives and girlfriends. David Comfort in his book about the lives of prominent rock stars (The Rock and Roll Book of the Dead) talks about his dark side:

“I was just a weird, psychotic kid covering up my insecurity with a macho façade,” Lennon confessed. But even as an adult, the psycho kid inside often got the best of the Clever One, especially when he was under the influence of the devil’s dandruff and brandy Alexanders. During his “lost weekend” in LA, he heckled the Smothers Brothers onstage, crowing “Fuck a cow!” He called Yoko “a slant-eyed bitch,” and his in-laws “gooks.” When performing in Hamburg, wearing a toilet seat around his neck, he cackled, “Hey remember the war? We fuckin’ won!” then grabbed his crotch and goose-stepped the stage, crowing ‘Sieg Heil THIS!”

 Here’s another excerpt from the same book:

In addition to all the guitars and hotel suites he smashed up, Hendrix totaled six Corvettes in two years. . . . Janis’s Porsche Cabriolet Super C with its psychedelic painting job was her pride and joy, remembered her producer, Paul Rothschild.  “We both had Porches. We’d race along Sunset Boulevard and Laurel Canyon. She was a lot crazier than I was, and I was nuts. She’d go against traffic on blind curves, with the top down, laughing,  Nothing can knock me down.”

Keith Richards said, when asked about the widely-reported near-death experiences he’s had from drug abuse, 

“I’ve lived my life my own way, and I’m here today because I’ve taken the trouble to find out who I am.”

Watching his interviews on YouTube, you get the impression that he’s right. He’s sitting there at 9 in the morning chain-smoking, obviously inebriated, and he’s in harmony with himself, relaxed with himself, happy with himself. There’s something life-sustaining about that.

I look back at the deep, dark days of Wall Street, prior to cancer, and realize that I wasn’t in harmony with myself, wasn’t happy with myself. I had fantasies about death -- happy fantasies.

True poetry is what does not pretend to be poetry. It is in the dogged drafts of a few maniacs seeking the new encounter.
                                                            - Beth Archer, The Voice of Things.

Maniacs seeking the new encounter -- an interesting description of artists. True poetry is the rough notes of a few maniacs, not the refined work of the comfortable and settled.

In short, all good things are wild and free.
- Henry David Thoreau, in his journal. Thoreau And The Art Of Life.