Creators have trouble maintaining meaning. …
A creative person is vulnerable to meaning crises, and hence depression, by virtue of our relationship to meaning.
Eric Maisel, PhD, in the introduction of his book, the VAN GOGH BLUES, The Creative Person’s Path Through Depression
Three chapters later Maisel expounds of the artist, “…it is not enough to ward off meaning crises and bouts of depression. [The artist] must also acquire the habit of forcing the seconds, minutes, hours, days, week sand month of [their] life to mean. [Less we] experience a confounding emptiness that no amount of righteous living or creative accomplishment can counteract.
Maisel quotes painter, Jackson Pollack, on this dilemma, “Painting is no problem. The problem is what to do when you’re not painting,” and then Tennessee Williams, “Once I finish writing, the rest of the day is posthumous.” Maisel adds, “A creator’s time not creating can feel like a living death if he hasn’t figured out how to make his other time mean to.”
We all know about or acquainting with those persons who identify as writers, but never get around to sitting down and writing.
And then there are those who seem unable to let go of their writing. On those few occasions when away from their computer or writing pad, their eyes hold that faraway look reflections of the wheels of thoughts ruminating on that storyline as they craft the next scene in their novel, or screenplay.
For sure these people are devoted to their work. And we laud them. Often we are encouraged to follow their example.
Refining one’s work towards the goal of attaining acceptance for publication in a journal can be come an all consuming experience, never mind getting a collection of short stories or novel into print.
Choosing the route of self-publication proves no less daunting. The writer must double as artist and businessperson.
What are we searching for? Or rather, as Maisel addresses in the VAN GOGH BLUES, Coaching the Artist Within, can our artistry and the endeavors related to our craft endow or lives with substantive meaning?
I had concluded before reading the book that writing alone, as much as it is truly my passion, cannot fill the empty spaces that arise when I undergo crises of meaning. Writing brings me much joy, and the thought of living without books to read and recording my stories spells mental death.
After spending fifteen years endeavoring to learn and refine my craft of weaving stories onto the page, I have come to see there are places that neither my words, nor those of other authors, can fill and heal.
Certain of those places require the images I create on canvas for solace. And then others only come alive in the midst of relationship with my husband, children, and close friends–people who know aside from my writing, and who at the same time respect my work as an author. One friend particular stands out in this respect.
As both an author and psychotherapist there are very few experiences and people with whom you can simply be, and in being forget about your work and all the questions concerning life and its meaning that swirl about your head, and that provoke you to search, write and paint, to create.
It’s nice when you don’t have to think. It’s even nicer when there are those with whom you can interact and who assist in taking you away from yourself. More and more I sense that very few artists of any kind possess relationships of that quality.
And yet it is the people who provide this gift, a rest from one’s self, who sustain us, bring definition to our life and living.
We need them, perhaps more than they need us.
I thank God for those people in my life.
Who are the people who allow you to escape yourself, and the demands to create, if only for a few hours?
the VAN GOGH BLUES, The Creative Person’s Path Through Depression
pp. 5, 21, 57-58