Suffering for Art

Show Notes

Summary

Alex challenges the dangerous myth that suffering is essential for artistic creation, emphasizing that while art can reflect personal pain, it should not be a cause of suffering. Drawing on examples from Van Gogh to Kurt Cobain, he passionately argues against expecting artists to endure pain for art’s sake, advocating instead for recognizing art as a means of healing and self-regulation.

Notes

The History of Rock Music in 500 Songs
Nirvana’s I Hate Myself and I Wanna Die
Soundgarden’s Like Suicide
Ozzy Osbourne taken to court after fan suicide
An excellent, detailed breakdown of Kendrick Lamar’s lyrics
Backxwash
Alice in Chains Dirt
Nine Inch Nails The Downward Spiral
Amy Winehouse Back to Black

Support this podcast and my various artistic enterprises at my Patreon.

Transcript

This is getting easier. Making this podcast I mean. I’m not sure that means that I’m making better, or even vaguely decent podcasts, I’ll leave that judgement up to you. But making this is easier than it was a couple of months ago when I started making this, which was done largely on a whim. I had to figure out how to do this mostly from scratch. I mean, I have some of the base requisites - tech skills, ability to articulate myself, a bit of money, residing at a point in time where doing such things is not only possible but fairly easy, and in a country with enough freedom and prosperity to allow me to do so. But even so, I’ve found it somewhat challenging. Just figuring it all out was a bit of a brain bender. As I’ve stated before, I find reading and talking somewhat challenging, to the point that via this process I’ve discovered that I’m probably also dyslexic, to add to my growing list of neurological peculiarities. I find self-promotion particularly challenging. And thanks to my ever-assertive ADHD, the fact that I’ve managed to follow through to this point is something approaching a miracle. But here we are. Assuming there’s a “you” out there. Maybe I’m talking to myself. Nothing unusual there.

But I’ve overcome most of this. I’m even getting better at the reading and talking thing. The last recording I did took considerably less time than any of the previous ones did, by merit of not needing to record every line several times, just most of them.

I expect it will get easier too, to a point at least. Despite my apparent Noel Coward-esque eloquence, this doesn’t come natural to me and I doubt it ever will. Getting these edited, distributed and promoted will likely continue to be a chore until such a theoretical time when I can pay someone else to do it. But on the whole I find it, if not an enjoyable process, a rewarding one. This is why we do things, because they are worth it, either through necessity or desire to achieve something.

This is an elective process. I choose to do it, replete with all the challenges. The pain vs reward trade-off is worth it.

So thank you for listening. Bye.

Only joking!

You have to stay with me for the rest of this episode. I demand it. You must put up with whatever insipid drivel I decide to I inflict on you.

Don’t fancy it? Can’t take the pain? Ok then, feel free to bugger off. I can’t keep you here. You have the right to go listen to Joe Rogan instead. Actually don’t. Listen to literally anything else. I can recommend The History of Rock in 500 songs.

Right.

Anyone left?

Look at you!

What a brave little poppet you are. Really though, this is going to get dark in places. Seriously dark. Consider this a content warning. I’ll be touching on self harm, suicide, depression, grief and various other issues. Honestly feel free to skip this one if that stuff might cause you distress, I won’t be offended.

Anyone still there?

Ok, so what if instead of telling you I basically enjoy making this, I told you that it causes me immense amounts of physical and psychological pain to make this podcast? What if I dedicated that suffering to the very medium of podcasting itself and to you, my listeners.

Would you continue listening? Knowing that this would result in my inflicting more pain to myself? Still comfortable?

How does Vincent van Gough’s Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear make you feel? How about the track I Hate Myself and I Wanna Die from Nirvana’s final album, written by Kurt Cobain just months before he took his own life? Here’s some lyrics from that:

Runny nose and runny yolk
Even if you have a cold still
You can cough on me again
I still haven’t had my full fill

Maybe, like me, you like to immerse yourself in the poetry of Sylvia Plath? She took her own life too. One of her final poems, titled Edge, contains the line “Feet seem to be saying: We have come so far, it is over.”

Why am drawing your attention to these isolated, tragic examples? Because I want you to think about the relationship between art and suffering. I specifically want to do my bit to relegate the notion that one must suffer for their art to where or belongs: the bin. A bin that is buried under 7 miles of concrete that is subsequently blasted into the infinity of space, or even better, to oblivion in the heart of a star. Ideas can be dangerous. And few are more dangerous than this one.

Let me make myself perfectly clear: humans suffer. Humans make art. Some humans use the creative process to relieve some of their suffering. That is where the relationship ends. Except for occasions such as stubbing your toe on a painting that you forgot to move. Art no more requires suffering than you require that pot of Ben and Jerry’s in your freezer. Sometimes your freezer contains Cherry Garcia. Sometimes it contains frozen peas. Hopefully it never contains frozen body parts.

Yet, like the brief moments that your freezer contains Cookie Dough Ice cream, art sometimes contains, or perhaps reflects, suffering. Sometimes you eat the ice cream, sometimes you listen to a sad song. Both things fulfil a need. Maybe someone suffered to make the ice cream. Someone almost certainly suffered in such a way that resulted in the sad song.

This is all just fine. I love sad music, more than all the other types. One of my favourite songs is Like Suicide, by Soundgarden. Its writer and singer, Chris Cornell, would also, much later, take his own life. I still love that song. But Chris was not a happy guy. When I listen to his music I am moved. I feel empathy. I feel seen. Chris was an incredible musician and was blessed with what many would consider one of the best and most powerful signing voices the world has ever seen. He was a millionaire with a family and legions of fans. He was also miserable. He was mentally ill. So much so, it was terminal. I’m not going to pontificate here on why this might have been, what caused such a seemingly enviable gut to take his own life. It’s really none of my business. Also, for better or for worse, many others have written about this who know much more than me. Its just a fact that I, and others, have observed, mostly via the consumption of the sad, beautiful songs that be delivered to the world.

As you might have guessed from my words on this podcast, I have been, and continue to be, inflicted with mental illness. When I listen to Chris’s songs I hear his pain, and I empathize. I feel the pain, but I also feel pleasure or sorts. I feel relief. I feel identification. I feel lots of things, but what I don’t feel is worse. Listening to sad songs makes me feel better. Not just via Cornell and Soundgarden, but their brothers in grunge, Nirvana and Alice in Chains, who both lost their singers through mental illness. The early 90s was a golden age for musicians channeling their pain into their music, but you can still find plenty of out around today, from Kendrick Lamar’s guilt-ridden confessionals to the furious bile of trans trap metal artist Baxxwash to pretty much the whole country music genre.

Across the arts we see the baring of souls and the airing of suffering. You’d be forgiven for thinking that this is why the arts exist.

There are plenty of legitimate reasons why suffering might be encoded in an artistic work. Processing grief, release of anger, unburdening of guilt, relief from trauma. But one thing binds all of these motivations together: they relate to things that happened in the past, or perhaps are in the process of happening. These creators did not think to themselves “I need to get me some of that trauma so I can make me some art”. Whether an artist was destined to be an artist regardless of the infliction of trauma, or whether the trauma itself motivated the decisions to take up an art form, the process is always, and I mean always, reactive.

Art has always been a refuge to me. I took it up again seriously 6 years ago as a means to process and treat trauma, which makes a frequent appearance in my work. As a teen, my art helped me to escape a society that sought to bully and minimize me because, although I didn’t realise it at the time, I was different. It’s still a refuge, but now it is both therapy and a podium for me to share my pain as well as my healing. I’m not motivated by a need to burden others with my trauma. I would produce art whether anyone saw it or not. But I put it out there is the hopes that it might benefit others in some way, much as the other creators mentioned here have benefited me. Making art does not cause me suffering. Not making art causes me suffering.

More generally, this is how we, humans, process grief, sadness and trauma. We share. I find it hard to connect with people on an interpersonal level, despite my habitual, brutal openness. So I share in a way that feels comfortable and appropriate for me. There are many others like me.

I’m speaking about grief, sadness and despair as if they’re the only negative mental states that emerge via art. But this is a podcast about mental illness, and these emotional states are not mental illnesses. Sadness does not lead to depression, although sustained sadness can. Depression does not require or imply sadness. It’s just as likely to be brought on by sustained stress and or anxiety. Having suffered through frequent bouts of depression my whole life its a theme that pervades much of my work, whether it’s explicit or not. I can see it. My depressions were rarely related to sadness or loss, but usually from burning out due to the constant need to mask neurodiversity. So although depression played a role in these episodes, I now recognize them as being, in most cases, autistic burnout.

Addiction is an illness that often manifests via art, listen to Alice in Chains album Dirt, The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails, Amy Winehouse Back to Black. Of the singers on those 3 albums, only Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor survives, and thanks God he does. Whole swathes of Stephen King’s work is about alcoholism and recovery, particularly The Shining. He’s clean and sober now, and writing SO MANY books.

But is it possible that consuming all this sombre art actually causes, or at least contributes to negative states of mind? I would argue not. In the 80s, perhaps well meaning but ultimately malignant figures from the political right in the US took legal action against various heavy metal acts alleging that they were responsible, perhaps consciously so, for the tragic acts of suicide and self harm by several fans. One track identified as promoting suicide was Ozzy Osbourne’s Suicide Solution. Had they spent more time listening and less time blindly judging, the might have noted that the track is actually a cautionary polemic about the perils of alcoholism. Note the opening lyrics: “Wine is fine but whiskey’s quicker/Suicide is slow with liqueur”. Not a whole bunch of ambiguity there. All those cases were rightly thrown out. The whole affair illustrates the mountain of stigma, misconceptions and prejudices that existed, and continue to exist, around mental illness, as well as art.

Experiencing art born of mental illness does not make me mentally ill, it validates my experience, making the healing process easier.

From the point of view of the creator, the process of creation is often one of healing. Making art, for me, is a form of regulation. If I am suffering, the time spent creating gives me relief from that suffering. The suffering will perhaps return, but where longer term illness is a feature of my existence, this relief makes recovery more likely, and healing quicker.

So let me repeat: art does not cause suffering, it relieves it. Well, good art does.

It’s possible of course that art can cause the suffering, and some would argue this is exactly what caused Cobain to take the devastating action that he did. Indirectly at least. Its a complex issue and one best left to those who properly understand it.

If a work of art is causing you some level of suffering, then you should cease to be party to it. Most people have that ability, although my heart goes out shop staff at Christmas time.

If you are suffering due to some creative activity that you are partaking in, then you should consider stopping it. Yes, there are hardships from time to time especially when you first start such a journey. I think most of us are capable of recognizing such episodes for what they are. But if something is causing you sustained misery, it might be time to try something else. You certainly don’t owe it to anyone else to be miserable.

And this is where this journey was leading to. Cobain, Cornell, Plath, van Gough, Whitehouse, and countless others - none of them owed me, you or anyone else their pain, and certainly not their life. For you and I to experience their pain, for it to feel authentic, these artists must experience that pain. But let us be specific here: depression can be fatal. It kills via suicide. Shunning or criticising an artist for seeming more cheerful or positive or, dare I say it, happy, is, in a sense, equivalent to expecting a cancer sufferer to stop treating their cancer so that you can continue to empathise in their struggle.

We don’t need artists to suffer to gratify our need for catharsis. Suffering happens, that’s a fact of life. But It is never necessary, NEVER. NEVER! It is ALWAYS wrong to wish or otherwise expect someone else to experience pain for our own gratification. These people were not martyrs to their art or their fans. They were humans experiencing intolerable levels of illness and misery. They used art, creativity, performance as a release and a relief, and we should be thankful and feel blessed that they did. But they didn’t suffer because of their art, they suffered despite their art.

Since you’re listening to this podcast, I hope you had some sense of this anyway. Of all the issues I touch up on, this is perhaps the one I’m the most vehement and emotive about. It troubles me deeply that suffering is seen as a necessary form of self-flagellant entertainment. We’re not the bloody Romans. Beauty may emerge from suffering, but this should and must be seen as a bridge to relieve the suffering of others. Not a form of vicarious titillation. If you need the latter I can point you towards various reality TV shows and/or soap operas.

I’ll climb down from my soap box now. The beautiful humans mentioned in this episode were more valuable to the world alive, but their memory and legacy brings so much healing and hope.

If you someone you know if expressing their distress via some form of art, then maybe they’re in an process of healing or regulating. Let them be. If you suspect they are processing trauma, grief or mental illness in real time, then don’t just passively revel in it, check in on them if you’re in any position to do so. Ask them what they need. Listen with an open mind. The world doesn’t need another tragic creative and no artist owes the world their life.