MUST EXCESS BE WRETCHED?

This is a strange moment locally because we are both exhausted by coping with this storm (We set three days of records for snowfall height!) and pent-up because of not being able to do our regular stuff. Our balance of achievement, small and daily as it might be, is thrown off by the need for recovery, the sense of having survived, and the fumbling of trying to remember where we were when this interruption literally fell on us.

It has me thinking about this writing collaboration with Tim and the whole process of writing. My movie last night was “Modigliani,” another of the movies about artists that I stockpile. This one goes way over on one side of the crucial tension between being a “narcissist” who insists on his work as a unified world-view worth expressing versus accommodating the need to survive economically and within a context of artists. (Tag from the movie: “His passion was life. His obsession was art.”) In this film the plot works out in terms of “bitter rivalry with Pablo Picasso, and his tragic romance with Jeanne Hebuterne.” The imdb.com comments are right: this movie is an eloquent exploration of the excesses of the genius notion of artists, which always run to ecstatics, when in truth to be a good painter or writer or whatever else actually means being aware, in control, and willing to do the drudgery of acquiring skills. The “obsession” part is that actual painting and painting and painting that goes on. There was a little of that, but evidently not everyone is as interested in watching paint going onto canvas as I am. Maybe we need a stream of consciousness: “If I put a single stroke of blue here, then balance it by lightening this patch of pale yellow and blur the meeting of the pale yellow with lavender next to it, then the eye will travel to THIS point of focus.”

A writer who does nothing but lie around taking drugs and having sex will have boring stories to tell. (“You had to be there.”) Which is a lesson to us all. Some art and writing is about equivalent to one’s neighbor’s off-kilter slides of their trip to Mt. Rushmore that year the smoke from forest fires obliterated everything. Nothing to see and no interesting way of not-seeing it.

Art/writing is so much about being like a whore or a cook or a counselor. Someone comes to ask for an experience, because they themselves have no ability to create it for themselves, so it is the provider who must take hold of the experience. The incendiary synthesis happens when the provider uses the occasion to express true heartfelt meaning of the provider’s own and yet the asker is able to share that. It is a kind of empathic kindling. This comes about when the provider is extremely sensitive to the asker’s expectations and capacity to respond.

A peculiar quirk of our current consumer culture is to ask people all the time what they want. This appears to be an attempt to guarantee satisfaction or else to blame the consumer if they turn out not to want “that” after all. So men who read an article on love-making that advises asking women what they “like” can become pretty tiresome. What answer can there be except “surprise me,” unless it’s scolding Mr. Interrogater for not being observant and creative? Why isn’t he trying stuff? (You can reverse the genders, if it makes you happy. The point is the same.)

Even so are publishers and galleries trying to cash in on “what do you want?” and missing out on the chance to WOW the customer with new ideas or at the very least a new slant on old ideas.

C.S. Lewis said once that the best friends are ones who differ from you in their opinions but loves the same categories. Or maybe that’s like the prescription for a good marriage: someone familiar enough to understand but different enough to be interesting. Both of these prescriptions will break down if there is not enough insight into the reality of the situation to accurately perceive what is happening. Marriages or friendships in which one party is secretly discontented for longer than they are willing to tolerate in the interest of gathering information without the other party finding out will soon find themselves withdrawing.

An artful person is capable of holding attention without simply escalating what they were doing earlier. The interesting thing about “Modigliani” was that it attempted to at least sketch the whole community that had temporarily formed around new ideas in early 20th century Paris. The mutual criticism and rivalry naturally spurred people on to high achievement, but we’re not given any specifics except that “Modi” and Picasso are locked into jealousy. (Renoir is seen as the sane example of achievement.) This plot motor is not helped by Picasso’s portrayal being clumsy and stereotypical -- I suspect not so much the fault of the actor as of the writer and director. The “weighting” of the ideas is against Picasso as an irredeemably business-like and therefore bourgeois promoter of his own art compared to the ecstatically uncaring “Modi” (which means “cursed” but clearly here as an upsidedown saintedness). For almost his entire life he lived with TB which was the version of AIDS in his time, picking off many fine thinkers and artists including Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott’s sister, and Emerson’s wife. Because of the pervasiveness and finality of the disease, it acquired an aura of tragedy and drama.

Modigliani had the parental precursors of narcissism (doting, almost controlling mother who believed in his brilliance; absent father) which enables the conversion of suffering into privilege. The movie entirely ignores the fact that his lover was also an artist. For her part, she is so emotionally merged with him that she commits suicide after his death, though she is carrying their second child who is nearly to term. These actors are so beautiful and intense that one would feel very petty to stand back and cluck, saying, “What a waste.”

Contrast this approach with the movie about “Pollock” which does not shirk away from his impossibility, his inability to connect, his real self-destruction, and what one might call the “anti-narcissism” that meant no amount of success could save him from the self-hatred instilled by his mother. His community of artists was not fond of him. His wife is sometimes hailed as a better artist than he was. But he is no less fascinating an example of human “passion,” “obsession,” and sheer excess.