The world informs creativity. The world contains everything and each of its pieces can be metastasized into art. This can take the form of sugared violence, power dynamics and rape, existential confusion, etc. Pain taken on with consciousness, creates a story, a theme, an experience that wants to be understood. In this way, the worst thing that's happened to you can be some of the greatest artistic material to work with.
The wound, the shame, the orphaned part of you that cannot function in polite society can be used to comprehend a deeper layer of life. Art is a place to make sense of things. It’s not always beautiful, but good work has an honesty we desperately need. We’re not receiving it from the news or our colleagues at the office. This is why a well-written book hits a deeper nerve, a psychic chord; it gives voice to something true.
If art was only about the positive and the inspiring, it would be a small lens to view the world. It would isolate us in our pain. We need the people brave enough to fuck up and recount it with precision. We need the uniqueness of the individual in the universal themes we all struggle with.
Love is a common subject in art. It contains a transcendental quality, a shiny selflessness when done well. The love stories that touch me, contain this essence but are realistic in the clumsy way a character reaches for love. These stories aren’t simplistic Hollywood tales about the dizzying fall into love, but the colossal amount of messiness in loving another.
These stories contain the brutality love is often synonymous with. They involve lies and sometimes unconscious deceit. They have characters with shards of jealousy and thorny insecurities. They portray the poor ways in which we want to be good, but fail.
They bring to light the ways we demand love that actually separate us from it. This rawness in literature gives understanding because it is multifaceted and large. It’s not opinions or generalizations, but a person’s life.
We read, we watch, and we listen, to see ourselves in the other. Through art, I can feel the pain of a Russian character from the 18th century who self-medicated with morphine, even though I’m a 21st-century sober American woman. This is the purpose of creation. It’s connection.
Connection and intimacy are built on vulnerability. How can one be vulnerable if they will be labeled as wrong for it? How can one be vulnerable if they will be shamed for it?
Correctness and righteousness can be kept in the fucked up theater of politics, but it is not meant for art. Art is a moral, it has no rules or prescribed agendas. Creativity is a living intelligence that acts as a wild horse. It’s not meant to be kept in a closed wire gate but belongs to vast grassy plains. In writing, in music, in film, anything can run loose; your fears, your humiliations, your discomforts, your desires. But art is being policed.
Amid woke culture and political correctness, there is rampant censorship. This sanitization of speech, this defilement of art, is a world in which significance is lost. By avoiding controversial and difficult topics, we dumbly regurgitate common thoughts and superficialities.
Here, imagination is castrated and complexity is numbed. The nuances of life and inner contradictions all humans embody, don’t have sufficient room to express. Reality is reduced to a duller state and culture is threatened.
The words of literary geniuses shouldn’t be banned or neglected for being “too dark”, or “politically incorrect”. I want to read Nabokov and go inside the mind of a pedophile. I want Anais Nin and The House of Incest.
Even the psychologically disturbed horror stories have an ounce of humanity in them. I want the lessons of the people who’ve been muzzled and cast aside. I want to see the good guy do bad things, and the bad guy do kind things, because humans are textured. I want to have empathy for the villain's side of the story, and I want to feel the strength of the victim. I’m tired of the same group of people demanding the microphone and deploying idiotic tyranny. Give me the others being othered!
On the stage of social media self-obsession, and broadcasting sexiness, goodness, and worthiness, art shows a realer side. Art says the model with 2M Instagram followers is not just her bikini body, but a complicated person with a history. Books will give you that history. Social media will give you that surface.
Let the news and social media be a censored cesspool of trends and governed information, but let art be free. Let art be the things we can’t say at brunch with our acquaintances. Let art be the family secret put on a page. Let art be the conscience of the murderer, the inner workings of the heroin addict, and the body of the prostitute. Let art hold the narratives of people we’re afraid to speak to in the humdrum of daily living. Let art be led by curiosity instead of judgment.
Sometimes, I find myself censoring and over-editing my work because of the judgments. I am terrified to publish so much of the poetry that comes out of me. It can be indecent and perverse. It’s a cocktail of symbols from my nightmares and inner conflicts I cannot play out in waking life.
The more I suspend my judgment and morality of what I should be, or what the world should be, the more I'm involved in what is. The less judgmental I become, the more creative risk I partake in, and the more experimentation and cognitive growth arises.
Sometimes, I'm scared to be too much. I’m worried about what I’m delivering to the world, and if people can handle it. But the world has the capacity for everything, and if it exists in life, it should exist in art.
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