Fear and courage: We teeter between them every day now. Fear goads us, courage motivates us, and between the two, we are running, panting, exhausted and exhilarated in equal measure.
And what becomes of the creative soul in tumultuous times?
Creativity often thrives when chaos rules. Stephen Crane, Hemingway, Vera Brittain, Virginia Woolf, and many more wrote brilliant books during, after, and between major wars—wars some of them witnessed up close (Hemingway drove an ambulance, Brittain was a military nurse).
But that was then and this is now. Our domestic peace time can feel like a war zone on a 24/7 basis. While not all of us are physically threatened (though some surely are), we are all exposed to psychological warfare in the form of loud and almost inescapable vitriol and verbal combat, which occasionally morphs into actual violence.
It is much harder than in earlier eras to escape the constant clamor of voices and headlines. It’s harder to carve out quiet times and spaces; we have to work at this quite deliberately or it doesn’t happen.
(See my How to Embark on a News Fast, published on Medium a few days ago.)
How are we supposed to concentrate on interior matters when the exterior world competes so insistently for our attention?
It’s not easy.
Then again, I came across a few references in recent days that remind me that making art in any form is not supposed to be easy—and that it should bring a whiff of its own special dangers.
We don’t make art to retreat from the world, we make art to engage with it.
I watched a harrowing documentary, Skywalkers: A Love Story, about a young Russian couple who scale the tallest buildings in the world and then strike acrobatic poses that seem to defy gravity. My stomach lurched, watching them reach the dizzying spire on Kuala Lumpur’s Merdeka building, one of the tallest in the world.
The woman in the couple, Angela Nikolau, is the daughter of circus performers. In the film, she quotes an old circus saying handed down to her: “Our full potential is on the other side of fear.”
What a wonderful reminder that making art (Nikolau and her partner Ivan Beerkus consider themselves artists) can be fear-inducing on its own terms, no matter what’s going on in the world around us. If our full potential waits for us on the other side of fear, then we need to clamber over the walls holding us back and get there.
The same week I watched this film, I also watched a trailer for a forthcoming biopic about Samuel Beckett, Dance First. (The title is taken from a line in Waiting for Godot: “Dance first. Think later. It’s the natural order.”)
In the trailer, a young Beckett approaches James Joyce for advice and perhaps mentorship. Joyce tells him: “The important thing is not why we write, but how we write. We must write dangerously.”
What I glean from all this is that even when the world around us feels dangerous, and we feel as though we are under assault (if not outright attack), as creators we must nevertheless position our imaginations to remain on the razor’s edge of fear and danger, where our truest work is made.
The rewards are worth the risks.
That said, I’d be thrilled if the “real” world should one day choose peace over war, love over hate, and empathy over judgment.
Then, the only thing I’d have to fear, is fear itself. And hopefully, that will feed my art.
Thoughtfully writtwn. I think the purpose of my entire life is to overcome fear in all its shapes and disguises.
This article reminds me of a quote I just recently read by Alina Nedulcu, "If you knew who you really are, you would never be afraid again."