our household has been watching 10 years with hayao miyazaki, an epic documentary series that follows the life and process of the legendary animator. the second episode is a flyonthewall view on his process developing ponyo, and it’s mostly shots of him wringing his hands, tearing at his hair, smashing his palms against his eyes, being irritated at everyone, and questioning whether or not life has any purpose. “that seems excruciating,” heaved nico. “this is why i’ll probably never be one of the greats.” “yeah,” i replied, enviously.
i know it’s common for people to see the work of an artist and think, i wish i could do that, but that feeling is usually reserved for the output – the film, the song, the painting. but is it only other artists who see the moments of torment, of self-doubt, of spiraling, and feel a strange desire for a dose? for as long as i can remember, i’ve associated the depth of art with pain and sorrow. after all, what’s a biopic without a rock-bottom scene?
i can think of no other kind of suffering to be jealous of, aside from that of the tortured artist. it’s why tupac, hendrix, cobain, and countless others are heralded the way they are. the same demons that made them “gone too soon” were responsible for the works that will be remembered forever. it’s as if the artist who goes through life pleasantly is the anomaly, the coward, even – the evasion of suffering the reason some never became legend.
i have my own battle scars from art – nervous breakdowns, mangled relationships, numbing self-belittlement – but it all seems so less-than when compared to how they’re conveyed in the biographies and profiles. these days, my lowest points are the last thing i want to create around, to dwell on in the limited creative capacity i have. often, it feels like a chosen survivor’s guilt – a threshold i’m unwilling to break, thus a decision to never be great.
i’ve been listening to a lot of bone thugs lately. i always seem to return to their body of work during lonely, difficult times. i remember discovering them around the time they dropped e. 1999 eternal, and how captivated i was by the sorrow in their background story – their desolate upbringing in the badlands of cleveland, the recent loss of their bandleader eazy-e to the aids epidemic, the myth that they had only reached their level of fame and fortune after making a deal with the devil and agreeing to meet their collective demise in 1999. all of that pain was pent up and concentrated in their dark, beautiful songs. to my early-teen ears, the heartbreak was sublime.
the logical antidote to all these feels is to recognize that the associations forged between greatness and sacrifice are part of the larger ploy of capitalism, that only in the schematic of human energy as commodity does one have to deplete oneself in order to thrive in legacy. i know, i know, i know. i’m learning to accept that, especially in these times of romanticized dread – the quest for joy one worth creating for.