Portrait of the Artist

I sometimes rationalize that the reason I haven’t been able to write anything worth reading is my childhood. Many artists lead tumultuous lives full of disappointment, addiction, and sadness. Many of their lives end tragically. Not so for me. I grew up fairly well off in a suburban neighborhood. None of the artist-stuff happened to me. Sometimes I used to wish that it had. If only I could’ve had bad parents, like O’Neill, or suffered from poor health, like Flaubert, or been in a war, like Hemingway. Anything at all and I could’ve used that tragedy for inspiration with my writing.

No. My life has been comfortable. In fact, the only emotional scars I carry from childhood result from things I’ve seen on television. One night my parents were watching Gone With the Wind. I was sitting on the floor, arranging my baseball cards in plastic sleeves in a brown binder. This was a full-time occupation for me. I would separate the players by team, then I’d start over and do it by position. Then by skill level. I even resorted to separating them by age, by place of birth (all this information was on the back of the card). Anything to pass the time. Sometimes, now, as a grow man, I think wistfully of those days when I could spend an afternoon pointlessly arranging baseball cards, and not have to worry about having put off something important that I was to do. Sometimes I have these thought as I type something for my blog. My desk is by the window, and I see my neighbor mowing his lawn, though it’s impossible to tell what’s just been cut because he already mowed it less than a week ago. Another neighbor is watering her plants, though it looks like it’ll rain later on. It’s not baseball cards, but it’ll do.

To get back to the movie. I remember a man in the movie was screaming loud enough to distract me from my distraction. He was the Confederate soldier with the wounded leg. The doctor was just explaining how they had no medicine and how they badly needed more supplies. He looked at this poor soldier’s leg, and announced that he had gangrene and needed the leg removed. Instantly someone appeared with a saw, and since there was no medicine, there was no prep needed for the procedure. “Noooooooooooo! Pleeeeeeeeaaaaaasssse!” the soldier bellowed, and then he was silent. I asked my mom if he had died, and she said he had only passed out from the pain.

You could pass out from pain? That was news to me. I thought that I knew pain, but I had never passed out. A few years later, when my mom took me to a different doctor (my regular doctor was on vacation) to examine a wart on the side of my head, I experienced pain. This wart was right on my temple, covered by my hair. The only reason I knew it was there was because I had scratched it while washing my hair. The doctor saw it and told my mom (he never spoke directly to me) that he would burn it off. No Novocain, though, because the needle would hurt more than the procedure. Maybe he was right. If so, the needle probably would’ve made me pass out like that Confederate soldier, because the pain was by far the worst I have ever felt. But I didn’t pass out.

Of course there are those poor people who don’t use their suffering to create good art. But “That which doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger,” goes Nietzsche’s aphorism that has long since become cliché. Nietzsche, by the way, is another example of an artist (his work seems more like poetry to me than philosophy) whose bitter life led to great art. He spent much of his life in obscurity, chronically ill, moving from place to place in Europe seeking healthier climes. His last lucid moment occurred years before he died. He saw a man beating a horse, then intervened on the horse’s behalf. He then collapsed in the street and spent the rest of his life hopelessly insane. By the time people started to take his writing seriously, he was well beyond the point where he could appreciate it. How’s that for tragedy?

So since there’s no guarantee that you’ll reap the benefits of your suffering, maybe it’s better to be comfortable and create nothing. Unless you need to rationalize why you can’t seem to write anything worthwhile.