Art & Creativity - The Dangers Thereof

 I am drawing on two sources for this post. The first I had to wrestle with, and the second was too strange to expect to be learning anything. Then, too, I could also just be goofy.

 Recreating the Creative Act: Why is anyone watching Peter Hujar's Day? (Patrick Nathan, Entertainment, Weakly) 

It’s this unasked but extant question that excuses, in some sense, having paid to see a dramatized version of an interview I could have otherwise read on my own time — an interview I’d have underlined and annotated and filed away in my greedy little archive of lives2. Almost every artist or writer has an archive like this, even if it’s only in their minds. We go to letters and journals and interviews and biographies not to spend time with the artist, per se, nor the artist’s work (else we’d just go back to the work), but to simulate a kind of being-in-the-presence of the work’s creation. As if to validate that such things are still possible, we want a glimpse at the creative act itself, and this act almost always has an ugly or unrefined or embarrassing aspect. If art is superhuman or divine, these rough or raw documentations show us the human dimension behind or beneath the divine; they show us that being human is a precursor to creating the divine. This invites us, I suppose, to forgive ourselves our humanity in our attempts to surpass it.

 “Draw Me Back Again, a porn elegy” by James Allen Hall (Another Chicago Magazine) came to me through an email newsletter; I almost deleted it. The subject is complicated enough by my past. But the use of elegy got to me. The subject is one I really know nothing about, have no interest in, and showed me a way of life I had no idea existed. But then I saw this line:

Art keeps our bodies in danger. Porn keeps our bodies safe. 

That may be the best line in the whole work. Certainly, it was the only one that made me stop and think (instead of going, Are you serious?) 

That line may explain to me the attraction porn has for people younger than me. My peers thought it was kind of silly. 

I think it has been a long, long time (50 years?) since porn aspired to artistry. At least, since it has been political by aspiring to upset the status quo.

I did not think it kept people safe, but as I thought about it is a formula without emotional content. This is not what made Ulysses condemned as obscene. (My recollection of Molly Bloom is she was neither formulaic nor without emotion.) Yes, there is it safety in being anodyne. The same complaint can be too lodged against our modern literature. Art has to be dangerous. Calling Potter Stewart, I think we have a way to divide the pornographic from the merely upsetting to the bluestockings.

(Even stranger may be this bit from Walker Rutter-Bowman's review, Muriel Spark and the Doppelgänger That Wasn’t (The New Republic)

 From childhood Spark had a doppelgänger named Nita McEwen, a girl from the same Edinburgh neighborhood who, by coincidence, happened to be in colonial Africa at the same time—and who later, by another strange coincidence, happened to be staying with her husband at the same Victoria Falls boardinghouse as Spark and her husband. Like Ossie, Nita’s husband was mentally unwell, and in Victoria Falls he murdered her and killed himself—a traumatic event Spark wrote about in Curriculum Vitae.

The bombshell of Wilson’s research is that Spark seems to have invented her. There is no record of the crime or of a Scottish woman named Nita McEwen. Wilson notes that the name is an anagram of Twin Menace, suggesting something Spark both feared and coveted. Wilson writes, “Doppelgangers are dangerous, she knew from the Border ballads, because one of them has to die,” and Wilson argues that the invention and destruction of Spark’s dark double was an important step in her own artistic self-actualization. Perhaps Spark quietly wanted Stannard to discover the secret at the heart of her origin story. Wilson’s discovery is worth the price of admission.

What little I have read of Sparks, there is nothing anodyne in her writing. There is much danger. There is humanity in her that aspired for a higher level. We should not balk at doing the same.)

sch 11/4