Let us say simply that the artistic life is a difficult one in which we often find ourselves doing the destructive or malevolent for reasons we can't fully fathom. It's not that drugs or drink or bad choices make us better artists, it's that they're somehow part of us. Doing these things doesn't make you a better artist, but chances are that if you're an artist, you've done them.
Maybe the hardest part of being an artist is overcoming adversity in order to make something worthwhile. I suffer, everyone suffers, the world bends us over and turns us into little squeamish targets in the crosshares of suffering, but we go on to make something darkly incandescent, uncomfortably beautiful. Maybe in this way, art (or any work) is inherently triumphant because someone does it without crawling back to bed and giving up.
What makes you whole is this: you suffer and you go on. Suffering is one half of you, the unavoidable sticky nasty half. Going on is the other half, the luminescent part, still as a pilot light, white as first love, blue as the rarest moon.
Maybe the hardest part of being an artist is overcoming adversity in order to make something worthwhile. I suffer, everyone suffers, the world bends us over and turns us into little squeamish targets in the crosshares of suffering, but we go on to make something darkly incandescent, uncomfortably beautiful. Maybe in this way, art (or any work) is inherently triumphant because someone does it without crawling back to bed and giving up.
What makes you whole is this: you suffer and you go on. Suffering is one half of you, the unavoidable sticky nasty half. Going on is the other half, the luminescent part, still as a pilot light, white as first love, blue as the rarest moon.