Comments on: That Corrosive Hunger

By: beth

beth — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 01:31:04 +0000

Good post, Hg. corrosive hunger is a compelling and romantic notion (perhaps a little on the perpetually-adolescent side?) but I just don’t think it’s true that all the people who have chosen passionate creativity have “lost” something else that they wanted more. I’ve known plenty of artists who have lost their marriages, lost their health, whatever…but they chose to do the art to the exclusion of other things, other responsibilities, other loves. Their families often suffered. But I don’t think the art was coming out of that pain, necessarily. In fact many of these artists seemed pretty oblivious to the pain of others, and if they were suffering themselves, it was often for other reasons. Or they learn to “wear” the suffering because it makes them feel special, and the whole dynamic becomes a vicious circle they feed off.
I think we all want to feel passion, and creative passion is a wonderful thing that I certainly go for in my own life, and that I hope will help fuel me well into my old age. It took me quite a long time to separate out the path of *doing* from the goals (the *arrival*) I had been attached to, though, nearly all of which had to do with other people’s reactions. I agree with Alistair’s conclusions.

By: Hg

Hg — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 19:42:34 +0000

Yeah, I see where you’re both coming from. I guess maybe I was being a bit narrow in my thinking and assuming that he was emphasising the mythology of those whose creativity caused them to lose everything – Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain, etc. – at the expense of the considerably greater weight of numbers of those whose creativity did not.
I can accept that creativity has its price. When I look at the contrary, non-conformist characters whose music (or art in general) gets my juices flowing, there’s usually some form of loss lurking in the background, whether trivial (e.g. caring what others think) or more significant. Creative burnout to the extent described above, however, seems thankfully rare.
I’m still trying to work out why this quote struck such a chord, even as I profess to disagree with it. The “corrosive hunger” image… I suppose it’s a neat allusion both to the stomach acid problems that bug me when life gets out of balance & my positive energies become manic and also to Blake’s “infernal method” by which the truth is revealed.

By: alistair

alistair — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 17:41:27 +0000

the quote strikes home for a different reason to me.
the idea of losing something in the world’s eyes (girlfriend, job, ‘a life’) in order to gain what you intuitive KNOW is important.
it’s a perennial struggle for me, if i’m honest, to stay put in the creative centre and not constantly dash out to please people, to entertain, to find ways to be liked.
i was just listening to the buddhist teacher, ajahn amaro talking about what the Buddha calls the 8 worldly winds – praise/blame, fame/disrepute, loss/gain, happiness/unhappiness – and how important it is to detach from these as they blow hot and cold around us.
the musician in his studio, the artist at his book, the monk in his robe can be exemplars of the people who ‘don’t care’ – because ultimately, ‘caring’ is a waste of time. someone’s ALWAYS going to like your stuff, someone’s ALWAYS going to hate it. it really has nothing to do with the stuff.
yet we believe the positive dyad completely – if we get praised then ‘what a wise, perceptive critic’… but we never believe the negative – if we get criticized, then: ‘what an arsehole he is’.
the way to be truely creative (not just in art but in life) is to not care but just to do.
within that set-up, creativity is probably inexhaustible.
dylan said it: as long as you’re on the way to becoming something, you’re probably going to be ok. stay in that phase. as soon as you get there, as soon as you’ve become it, then you’re dead.

By: Daniel Black

Daniel Black — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 15:14:53 +0000

Imperfection gives rise to anything I can think of, from the universe as we know it (broken symmetries allowed for nonuniform distributions of energy and, eventually, mass, thus dust clouds, comets, stars, galaxies, etc.), to, yes, people (artists and others alike). We learn by testing hypotheses and fixing mistakes in their formation, so it goes that the people who’ve learned the most are those willing to make the greatest mistakes. That’s precisely the person you’d want at the pen of any songwriting that’s to have more than ephemeral, poppy appeal. I think.
The imagery’s nice, yes; but it seems a severe recasting of truisms for self-aggrandizement. But, hey, man, it’s all about the music.