A brief trip into hell

 Perhaps the creative life is just a brief trip into hell.

The moment I write something good, I want to write another good thing. Perhaps better, even, than the last good thing, because damn it all, there are never enough good things.

A form of greed for the good develops.

What is this thing?

Is the good an open pit mine to be extracted from until the ore of goodness is exhausted?

Why do I have this desire?

Perhaps it’s like my other desires; those desires that say there is never enough, I have never gone far enough, I don't have enough, and only by getting more will I be better. Perhaps I've forgotten that maybe I can be better just being here, just as I am, without mindlessly strip mining the good in every direction in order to have more of it.

These are questions, I think, that need to be asked, because we formulate what is good in our minds mostly through the primitive urges and desires of our bodies and then we race about destroying everything in our environment in order to get that good thing. The climate is changing for the worse, for example, because we’ve burned so much fuel, mostly in order to get the good thing, to chase it down in our big, fast cars.

And if we get a little of the good thing? We must immediately have more of it. This is the way that the ultra-rich pile up their cash and the things that they literally hoard in vaults, the art and the money that they treasure so much and that no one else can have. Enough is never enough. We must have more than enough.

My precious, my precious.

Yet it's actually easier to understand that action in the context of the material, because at least the material has a logic, no matter how perverse about it, which demands hoarding. In the material world, we need to stockpile against an uncertain future, in the same way that ancient societies used to store grain against a potential bad harvest in the future. Oddly, in a world of incredible and almost—it seems—ever-increasing abundance, we become ever-more-and-more paranoid about the need to stockpile. Modernism now puts expiration dates on the good; it is only good for five minutes before something new and better is demanded.

Here in the realm of the soul, it’s different. Am I afraid that there will be a bad harvest of goodness later? That I need to pile up more of it here because it might go away? Perhaps this isn't so irrational after all; the way the world is going, it seems as though the good is leaking out of it, that all the good people are being crushed, that selfishness and greed are on the ascendant with no one to stop them. (It is not only possible, you see, but also all too easy to construct paranoid myths about the good. One can do it at the drop of a hat.)

Yet piling up the good in the here and now won't help that situation either. And in fact I set out to measure this question against the action of a single self, not the action of the whole world. The actions of the whole world grow out of single cells, single selfs, and we can't understand the world unless we understand the single self and why it does what it does.

For myself, I selfishly seem to know instinctively what is "good." This is the function of an artist, a musician, writer; of anyone in the creative field. Creative types follow what they think is good, in the hopes that others will also see the good in it. Delacroix didn’t paint his paintings thinking they were to represent the bad; Liberty Leading the People, perhaps his greatest work, is all about the good and nothing else. He wanted to paint something good about what is good. There was a definite intention in him to gather goodness around itself through the use of objects and their influence on people.

It was, in other words, a primitive act of shamanism using a totemic object to draw the good that is wished for towards it and concentrate it. All dressed up in the mythological clothing of putative liberation.

All of art is, in this sense, exactly that; and it all has its roots, more than likely, in that same act, performed in very ancient societies... animals painted on the walls of caves... for religious reasons, reasons meant to bind people together within the realm of an imagined and created good... which of itself justifies the doing of bad to get it.

Are we all like that?

To know instinctively what is good is a difficult proposition; after all, people differ in their estimation of what is good, and it is possible for bad people to think that bad things are good. Bad people, it must be said, begin with bad instincts. Instincts are powerful, but they are not reliable.

We see this all too often. It's possible to turn the good on the head and insist that goodness is selfishness and hatred.

So there needs to be a search for an objective good, one that is greater than the good of the self. By its very nature, this can't be pursued with the greedy attitude of a miner determined above all to extract all the ore from the mine. There needs, from the beginning, to be patience, restraint — a willingness to question what is good, a willingness to pursue it— but, as well, a willingness to only get just enough of what is needed of it. Not to let it become an obessession that turns on itself like a mad dog.

If the good is pursued subjectively, one ends up with what we have now — and I think everyone, paradoxically even those who think that the bad is good, believe we could do better.

Perhaps we don't appreciate the irony of the way the Delacroix painted a bunch of people doing bad things, shooting and killing, to get to the good.

And this is why I am asking whether the creative life, like most other lives, is actually a small trip into hell.

These are my thoughts for this morning.

with warm regards,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola magazine.