Book List, Ongoing

1. The Complete Poems, Anne Sexton
2. The Sonnets, William Shakespeare
3. On the Road, Jack Kerouac

Huzzah, first book of the year down. I'd never read Anne Sexton until Stef gave me a book of hers for Christmas, Transformations, which I thoroughly enjoyed and so she lent me her copy of the complete poem collection. Brilliant and terrifying, terrifying in its honesty and brilliance. Also sad to know that she committed suicide.

What is it about brilliant artists committing suicide? Or does it just seem like lots of artists do when, in fact, thousands of people (or however many it is) every day take their lives, and artists are just more noticed?

I think there are some people who are so driven, so tortured by what they're trying to express that they see no way out other than taking their lives. I also think that aspect of art is somewhat overly tolerated. I'm stealing this rather liberally from Stephen King, who mentions (as a former alcoholic himself) that there's this existential dilemma for male writers, that I think he might have attributed to Hemingway: writers are sensitive people, but men aren't supposed to be sensitive, so male writers drink to drive away the horror of it all. He replies that writers are writers and potential alcoholics are potential alcoholics and there might happen to be some sort of correlation between the two groups, but there isn't and shouldn't be a causal relationship.

I think all artists have an instinctive desire to make their art painful, to show that it does cost something to make it as if that somehow validates it, as if the act of creation is only truly acceptable when it's born out of some horrible anguish. I remember an acting teacher once said that sometimes acting in a scene feels easy; it feels like you're doing nothing, so you panic, thinking art has to be so much more difficult when really all it has to be is what you are honestly bringing to the script, character and moment. And why can't art be joyous? Was Michelangelo responding to some deep seated pain when he carved his Pieta, or David? Perhaps sculpture is a bad example, because so many of the more classical sculptors I've read about believed in sculpture as a more organic process, that each block had a sculpture ready inside of it, and their job was simply to coax it out.

Oddly enough (and this has brought me full circle), that's how Stephen King describes writing a story: it's a fossil in your mind that you slowly excavate using words, sentences and paragraphs, and when you're done writing, you see how much of it you managed to get out without breaking it. I've always liked that image.