I want to write. Ideas for stories’ hammer at me all day long. When I finally get to my two hours a day of writing its like all the inspiration got left behind. Where does my time go or rather where does the inspiration get left?
Is it in the car driving across LA to run another errand, preparing my dog’s arthritis medication, washing dishes, grocery shopping for me and my fiancé Jeff - yet again? I am convinced that the necessities of my daily life are what dominates, or better yet – describes my time. But other writers have families and publish books. Some are even prolific and they have more than a dog, they have kids. Sometimes more than one. Do they just have good help? Is that it? Or am I a distraction whore and they have a steely focus?
When I sit down to write for my daily two hours I need at least twenty minutes to browse the web, get through emails and then my mind feels unwound enough to begin. But then Jeff comes in the room, the phone rings, “This one’s important, I have to take it”, the dog needs to be walked, et al. It goes on like this for my two hours and the whole day if I let it.
So I think back to a time when I was totally obsessed and nothing was more important than my work. I was a painting major in college. At the time, I thought I was suffering from a nervous breakdown or maybe just a meltdown, needless to say it completed my artist’s mystique. The upside of it was that my acute anxiety drove me into the painting studio. Without even trying I went from being a D student to an A student. All the little things like food, housing, car maintenance and overall hygiene were best forgotten if an adult didn’t take care of them for me. There was little standing between me and my time to make something. College was wonderful.
Twenty plus years later and a couple of careers as a teacher and an arts writer and curator I have finally settled down into the gift that God gave me as a storywriter. With a sigh of relief I resign willingly to my post. But as I drive around Los Angeles everyday doing my due diligence of errands, I am only ever thinking of what needs to be written. This isnt like college. Now I am the adult who I once took for granted, solely responsible for my car maintenance, visits to the dentist, exercise and groceries. To top it off, living life with someone else is a maze of new challenges for the things you normally take for granted. Like finding a solitary, quiet place to work.
I worry that I am not obsessed, devoted and captivated wholly by my work. How could I let inconsequential errands, chores and phone calls drag me away from my writing? They didn’t twenty years ago in college. After my painting teacher in art school told me that being a good artist was comparable to becoming a Bride of Christ I became obsessed with the lives of artists. My parents had a small swoon when their Jewish American Princess came home on winter break with that one…
I found out more often than not that the myth of the artist is an unfortunate one. Many books told me that when the artist is not working, he or she is drunk or stoned or under the influence of something except their given families, friends and basic day to day responsibilities. In fact, many of them created their work while abusing substances. It was exciting to me as a nineteen year old that I could potentially get a better grade if I took substances too.
Artists sacrifice everything to their calling sometimes with a religious zeal. Although many artists are not religious, myself included, they possess the same kind of focus as the zealots and holy men who through the centuries created the institution of religion. These were people fanatical in their focus, and if they weren’t fanatical, I think it is safe to say they were obsessed. I don’t have to describe how successful they have been. Raising the question, is it possible to be obsessed with your work and also have a life where you like yourself? So I proceeded to find out how other artists maintained their “holy” marriages.
The painter Phillp Guston sacrificed his reputation resulting in a paranoic loss of confidence. I have never forgotten the touching story while he was creating his final and most powerful works. He woke up every morning pleading with his longtime wife Musa McKim to assure him that he was a good artist so he could get out of bed. His paintings were under scrutiny from the nineteen-seventies New York art world. Many longtime colleagues, critics, dealers and artists turned on him as firmly as he had laid down his beacon of Abstract Expressionism. Overnight Guston went from being a respected painter to a crackpot. And as it typically goes with an artist, he had to die and time had to pass before anyone could appreciate how timely and innovative were his paintings. The Renaissance artist Fra Angelico’s greatest achievement was the the sublime San Marco Monastery where he lived. He was a monk following a bidding as an artist on a request from God. He was a lucky one where his “marriage” and his work dovetailed neatly into each other. What about Michelangelo whose personal life is a basic no mention. He might have been gay, he might have had a son. I don’t recall, it is not what I found interesting when I read Vasari’s diaries all those years ago and it is not really how history wants to describe him.
Substance abuse is the true religion of creative people. It moves them anyway they want to go, deeper into depression, immersion into their work, immersion away from their work, from the world, all at a price to pay. Jackson Pollock was a monster of alcohol abuse and every household who knows his name fifty years later usually knows that part of the story too. I think Pollock felt really lonely and had no clue how to reach out to people, just him and his work against the world.
Writers Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and painter Willem de Kooning were all notorious alcoholics among their colleagues also known for their excessive use of the sauce. Writer and artist William Burroughs had the self-control to mete his heroin out parsimoniously until he died at the ripe old age of 83. Hunter S.Thompson, like Burroughs, used drug taking as fuel for his bizarre memoirs. In some strange way it has the same convenient dovetail as Fra Angelico who used God to fuel his exquisite paintings.
I need to mention that it was conspicouos in my research for this article that all I could find in the general lore and literature about women artists was their issues with clinical depression and bipolar disorders. Female rockstars are candidly, even proudly presented with substance issues while alcoholism or drug issues are politely overlooked among the fairer sex of intelligentsia and artists. Maybe it is just easier to feel sorry for the suicidal Sylvia Plath with her head in the oven than for an aggressive, loud or neurotic female drunk or drug addict writer.
In the stories these peoples lives have been reduced to it is difficult to imagine any of them loading a dishwasher, fawning over their dogs with Pill Pockets and anti-arthritis pills, grocery shopping for their sick loved ones or separating the colors from the whites for the laundry. I can maybe see Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton with the kids, but barely. I do see them meticulously organizing the surface of their desk cleaning their keyboards or typewriters with a Q-tip and a bottle of rubbing alcohol or sitting down to the new mural, story or the daily dose of heroin.
If I did drugs and drank too much alcohol when I was younger does it count for my drug and drinking quota to become an interesting writer in my forties? Does my quest for a healthy lifestyle and Yoga preclude me from writing about dark and complex humanity? Or am I sequestered to write about Yoga and food alternatives? Doesn’t my dirty mind which is ineradicable 24/7 qualify me to be a writer?
What is obsession exactly? And how much of my life do I need to let it eat up before my book gets written? Will two to three hours a day do the trick, does one day off for errands and emergencies disqualify me? Does it lessen the quality of my commitment?
I still don’t know how to balance my creative process with my life. My
friend wisely told me that its about handling the imbalance gracefully. It is past 4 pm, maybe Ill go get a glass of wine and think it over.
Lara Taubman
Lara Taubman Copyright 2010
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