The man who suffers and the mind
that creates

Every artist is afraid of being completely absorbed in life. He has to maintain a distance between his creativity and any choice of integration that his experience, spiritual or metaphysical, may offer to him. For the artist, life is unrest and there is no happiness for him outside his creation. He cannot afford to sacrifice any of his potentialities, because a neat, well-defined character is the enemy of that creative turbulence called the imaginative life, says Y.P. Dhawan

THE human individual may be defined as a "unification of living forces which have their focus in consciousness". (Lama Anagarika Govinda). The word "individual" means that which cannot be divided, which is a whole in itself. It is a whole in itself. It is on this basis that we recognise ourselves as ourselves and others as others.

Now the artist has a curious tendency to perpetuate a permanent division in himself, to become two persons instead of one — the artist who creates and the man who suffers. Whereas the ordinary person finds life extensive partial experience a mere succession of moments, the artist seeks a total image of life and becomes anguished as a human being.

The artist surveys the whole order of reality and finds his own position intolerable in it; he leaves all other choices behind and pursues the call of pain to the very edge of the unutterable — where man speaks and the universe listens. He questions and puts Life in jeopardy and searches ways and means of scoring a victory over the unknown. He sees exactly what others see, but he pursues it to the utter-most limit of his endurance and in taking a definite stand toward reality becomes a principle of quarrel between Life and Consciousness.

This self-division is present in varying degrees of intensity in the over-all pattern of an artist’s development. The artist cannot become his own goal of creation as he has endlessly to choose between the perfection of his life and the perfection of his work.

As consciousness is basically a phenomenon of resistance, an obstruction of the stream of being, the artist habitually prefers to dwell in differentiation than uniformity. Uniformity is the broader base of consciousness in which we all live; differentiation is the assertion of separative selfhood against the general stream of being.

The artist as a highly developed individual, has greater capacity for variation of his consciousness. That is why his quarrel with life is deeper. He cannot become his own work of art, because then the focus would shift from his relations with other human beings to a point of immanence in his own consciousness.

For the saint the intersection of time and timelessness is the moment of illumination — the artist is genetically afraid of becoming a plaything in the hands of Time. He prefers the pain of endless becoming to the tranquil stasis of being. He is fettered to the human condition; the nature of his calling is such that he dare not become tranquil to the extent that the world dissolves in his ego. .........In creating symbols of beauty or truth he makes those ultimate demands on himself which can destroy him as a man — alcoholism, suicide and madness are the occupational hazards of artistic vocation.

Only great artists are able to overcome their psychological self-division and affirm existence in its totality; lesser artists have no chance as they are firmly caught in their own destructive tendencies. The courage to create can claim a life, leaving a mere legend behind.

Every artist is afraid of being completely absorbed in life. He has to maintain a distance between his creativity and any choice of integration that his experience, spiritual or metaphysical, may offer to him. For the artist, life is unrest and there is no happiness for him outside his creation. He cannot afford to sacrifice any of his potentialities, because a neat well-defined character is the enemy of that creative turbulence called the imaginative life.

The artist, deprived of his powers of creation, refuses to sink into silence like any other human being. He cannot face the prospect of resigning himself to himself without crying out against the determinate nature of existence.

Borges has said somewhere that he has to resign himself to being Borges, because he cannot invent new plots for his stories. This is not the story of one great writer; it delineates a common dilemma and a common horror. Life is not enough for an artist.

The secret of artistic creation, Otto Rank has said, is neither to be found in Oedipus-complex, nor is any real or imagined feeling of inferiority, but in the urge to self-immortalisation in production. This urge to self-immortalization in production makes the artist a totalist and as causally conneced moments of consciousness he has to take the axiety of emptiness and meaninglessness, of quilt and condemnation upon himself. This is the crucial difference between an artist and a non-artist. The artist comes perilously close to being a neurotic, but masters his inner conflicts through his capacity to create out of personal anguish and despair.

How is the artist different from the vast majority of human beings who never experience that calamity of the spirit known as the "creative process?" We can begin by saying that the unartistic mind has no inwardness or self-centredness to relate one thing to another — its unity in experience is different in quality from that of a one point concentrated mind.

The ordinary person is also a self, but he is not engaged in organising "a raid on the inarticulate", which is the challenge posed by a silent, enigmatic universe to the human consciousness. Undirected consciousness allows itself to be driven hither and thither by whatever happens to it, but the artist continuously resists this process of dispersal and violation by his concentration and one-pointedness.

The artist’s centre of gravity is essentially in himself and as consciousness directed towards an end he is wholly bent upon fulfilling his artistic mission. Under the artistic pressure the artist becomes a certain immanent tendency in direction — a phenomenon that never takes place in the life of a common man.

The common man doesn’t live out of compelled impulsions, his goal is not the easing of pain in artistic creation — he can’t experience that state of exile, known as alienation, which is the driving force behind artistic creation. The artist alone feels denied, when life is bountiful and has enough to give to those who know how to receive it. Why?

There is a reason. Bhikku Nyanatiloka has said that "the mental feeling of pain-sorrow, grief, misery, melancholy and despair — is always bound up with an impulse of self-opposition, of resistance." Taking this profund Buddhist statement into account we see that the artist suffers, because he is not in agreement with actuality. The artist cannot be a simple, whole man — he must achieve connection between the surface and the depth, he must dive into himself and bring the treasures of the depth up to the surface. In this respect hs is like a neurotic, yet in a fundamental sense he is different.

The neurotic also seeks immortality, but in a manner which is exhausting and self-defeating. He is endlessly stuck in his symptoms and can’t avail himself of an objective ideology or symbolism to externalise his conflict. In him the urge to self-immortalisation becomes an arrest of the principle of growth, so that he can neither find himself as an artist, nor as a man. The artist can escape this fate, because he possesses the detachment (analytical faculty) to transcend his private neurosis in the objective fact of creation.

The artist has more character than the neurotic. Whereas the neurotic exhausts the effect of his unconscious — the source of all his symptoms — upon his consciousness, the artist exhausts it in a work of art.

There is another source — a very important source — of help which is not available to the neurotic. The contemplation of the beautiful takes the artist out of the realm of psychopathlogy. This is the advantage the neurotic decidedly lacks in his negative concentration on himself. Lama Anagarika Govinda has said that "the consciousness of the genesis of aesthetic pleasure is accompanied by joy"; it is a process which is entirely free from"evil root-causes and karma creating effects...." The artist exhausts his bad karma in creative activity and thus steps beyond neurosis and illness into a largeness of sympathy and feeling which must always remain an elusive goal for a confirmed neurotic.

"In the contemplation of the beautiful there are no selfish motives and man is completely free from the ego. The complete absence of the ego, if maintained is nibbana. And the man who is enabled temporarily to be freed from the ego in the contemplation of the beautiful, has thus temporarily experienced nibbana in a way which might lead him finally, to the complete, real, perfect nibbana" (Bhikku Silacara).

The neurotic cannot free himself, either temporarily or permanently, from the conflict endlessly raging in him. The artist, even though he may have neurotic tendencies, can achieve that "absence of the ego" which is the first step toward nibbana.

The point we have to consider is whether the artist can escape his destiny, as long as he conducts a microscopic examination of the passional life of man. In our strife-torn world, says Ernest Fischer, the individual "faces society alone, without an intermediary, as a stranger among strangers, as a single I opposed to the immense not — I." The artist understands the historical situation better than anyone else and in focusing attention on alienation, isolation and fragmentation he actually dreams "of a lost unity and (yearns) for a collective imaginatively projected into the past or into the fortune," (Ernest Fischer). Through the perpetual division of his self he renders a signal service in "helping men to recognise and change social reality". He acts as an "analytical agency of conscience" in the service of the ego-ideal of a group, a class or mankind as a whole. His self-appointed mission is to uncover layers and layers of sickness by expressing guilt-feelings that have a long history in the collective repression of mankind.

Every serious committed artist is interested in bringing aboout a condition of stasis, of equilibrium that "reality lacks at present". By taking the risk of self-exploration on himself he examines the major complexes of mankind and performs his social duty alongside the priest and psycho-analyst in shattering those bogies and demons that have such a hold on the contemporary mind.