Art and Artists
September 12, 2023

One of the tropes of the great artist/writer is that they are consumed by their 
art. They never marry (or marry unhappily), ignore their children, work from 
sunrise to sunset (or sunset to sunrise), drink, take drugs, suffer tempestuous 
passions and fits of mania bordering--and sometimes crossing over into--madness. 
All this, and more, they do for the sake of their art. They die young, reduced 
to dried husks; or die old, reduced mentally and spiritually to the same state.

These are the sorts of artists that people admire for their works, but never 
for their lives. The Flauberts, the Van Goghs, the Mozarts, the Hemingways, 
the Plaths. We all want their success in art; never their failure in the 
other aspects of their lives.

One might argue that such troubles and tempests are necessary to make great 
art; that it requires sacrifice to a level that only a few are willing to 
make; thus the few-but-famous. To which I reply that it might be that there 
would have been *more* great writers, musicians, painters, poets--many of them 
just as great as those luminaries we know--if only they'd survived the laudanum 
and the pox and the despair.

Good writing, in my opinion, requires a person to be a driven--but not 
obsessed--individual. You have to be driven to sit down to write every day; 
you have to be driven to be willing to put in the years it takes to write and 
edit a novel; you have to be driven to brush off the dozens, sometimes 
hundreds, of rejections that come with publishing a single short story. But you 
don't have to be obsessive. Not to the point of losing a sense of balance, of 
perspective, of proportion. Yes, you are a writer. But you're also a human 
being, with a body that needs to be fed properly, exercised, taken to the 
doctor; a node in a web of the complex social relations that define all 
humans--child, parent, friend, lover, a member of a community--all of which 
require maintenance if the bonds that join us all are not to fray; and a 
creature with mental/spiritual/religious needs that need to be fulfilled 
through all the things that lift us beyond the day-to-day, material realm--be 
they the inspiring Beauty of Plato or the love of the God of your faith.

So be sure, as a writer, to take time for these other aspects of yourself. For 
without them, you may become both admired for your work and looked on as a 
warning for your life. You are a writer and that defines a part of you, but it 
is not the sum total of what you are. 

The singer Nick Cave wrote that he felt he was not so much an artist as a 
conduit of art that wanted to come into the world. Here is where I think many 
of the famous-but-infamous writers went astray: they felt the art was entirely 
the result of their own hard work, and that the more they worked, the better 
their art would be. This might have been true up to a point, but there's a 
certain portion of any art--writing, painting, music--that's not under our 
control. If Nick Cave is right, it's more important that we become (and remain) 
fit conduits for the art coming into the world through us. And this *mens sana 
in corpore sano* is the better way to achieve art that will be admired. (And 
it's certainly a way to be achieve a longer life and be considered a nice 
person by everyone you know.) 

(c) 2023 Andrew Gudgel
email: contact [at] andrewgudgel [dot] com