no suffering like boredom & no boredom like suffering
no suffering like boredom & no boredom like suffering
notes on getting one's shit together
I was raised by artists.
Years after my older brother died, his ex-girlfriend wrote to me and told me how my parents looked from the outside: my tall father with his long native hair, my mother wrapped in the bright textiles she brought back from her pilgrimages to India, long skirts and jackets and pashminas, both of them so beautiful and so different, shrieking with laughter at the grocery store like buying food was the most exciting thing in the world.
My father told me early that there was a myth that might destroy me, if I let it: the idea that an artist has to suffer to be good.
An artist has to work to be good, he told me. Work is hard when you’re suffering.
David Lynch, indisputable genius: “You don’t have to suffer to show suffering. You don’t have to be filled with turmoil to show turmoil. Have it in the story. I don’t know what goes on in artists’ heads, but I think all the great artists loved working. A lot of people say, Well, suffering is good for art. Look at Van Gogh, they say. And I say, Let’s take a look at Van Gogh. Van Gogh didn’t go out painting because he hated it. The only time he was happy, probably, was when he was painting. He painted because he loved to paint, and the rest of his life was pretty miserable. He didn’t sell anything, he was broke, a lot of times he was probably really hungry. It’s just common sense: suffering reduces. It’s the enemy. Negativity is the enemy of creativity. It’s common sense. If someone is depressed, they say they don’t even feel like getting out of bed, let alone working.”
Work is, therefore, something that transmutes suffering when suffering is unavoidable, but suffering is not a goal to pursue for itself as some kind of guaranteed path to greatness.
I would be less worried about the myth of the suffering artist if I didn’t meet young artists, all the time, who pursue completely optional suffering as if that’s the work.
Art and real life are parallel realities, ones that converse with each other, and where things can pass through the veil. A physicist on television tells me he believes that anti-matter is the weight of objects in other universes — something he is quick to say is tantamount to a religious belief, fundamentally untestable, a story he tells himself about the world because it is enchanting and fun.
My craft is given contours by the weight of my suffering in this reality. Also my joy, which is much heavier. Also the way I like to work.
Something else: I submitted several poems that were happy, or political, or smart, or neutral, before I got published for a poem that was very sad.
I felt weird about this — like I was manipulating a response, like the people publishing me might just feel too guilty, like they didn’t know what it said about themselves if they passed it over, like my poem was the weird kid getting invited to a birthday party because it would be too cruel not to have her.
I worry that when I write things that are incredibly sad, or personal, the response I’m getting is more about a reflexive empathy response on the part of the reader than it is about how good it is.
I haven’t wanted to take sexy photographs lately and my instagram engagement is way down.
I get the most attention for my work when I’m naked or suffering and I wonder if this is simply the easiest way for people to understand women who make things.
I don’t know if I ever actually drank enough to blame it, alone, on making me miserable.
I know I drank enough for drinking to be an important fixture in the Suffering.
Another thing my parents used to tell me: you’re not bored. The house is full of books and art supplies and musical instruments. Make something. Do something. If you’re bored, you’re boring.
I appreciate this now and know that they were right, even though I cried a lot about it at the time.
Being bored has always been the most unbearable suffering, to me.
I was worried that if I stopped drinking or using drugs, I would stop being interesting.
This wasn’t true, but that’s not the point.
In the opening poem to my second book, I wrote about how sobriety and “relapse,” if that’s even an accurate thing to call what I was doing, were both, at least for a while, things I did to try to stave off boredom.
In sobriety talk there is a “rock bottom,” a place at which it is not possible to go any lower, which I did not hit. I identify more with the concept of “rock boredom,” a place at which it is not possible for one’s life to get any more boring.
I would be less worried about the myth of the suffering artist if I didn’t find suffering so unforgivably boring.
What I do appreciate about sobriety is that alcohol, especially, has always worked very well for me to quiet the very low-grade, gnawing sense of doom I get when Things are Not Happening, and when I don’t quiet it, I tend to make things.
I haven’t experienced any serious trouble since I started drinking again, in February, after four years of sobriety. I’ve been drinking moderately, like a normal person. No binges. No blackouts. I haven’t even said anything I regret. Still: I feel like the wind is out of my sails, and the money is gone, and that’s what it was like when I quit, and I wonder if that’s a pattern I should notice (twice is not a pattern) or a punishment from God (religion is so liberating until I let it make me feel things like that.)
I’m not worried about my engagement being down since I’ve been less interested in taking my clothes off, because being sexy or sad or deep in suffering doesn’t make me good, the work does, and if there’s a choice between making things I’m proud of and making things that get attention for reasons I can’t live with, I’ll take the first and stock shelves at the grocery store.
I’ve been handing out resumés. The money’s all gone.
I’m not afraid when the money’s gone.
I was raised by artists.
