Traveling through Eternity  

Many years ago when I was struggling to see myself as a writer creating a significant body of work, I sometimes felt like being sucked into a vortex filled with vipers. I was silently suffocating in the false narrative of who the world expected me to be, shoved down my throat. It took me many years to realize that the only way to defeat total decimation of self, the only way to travel through eternity, to fall into a peaceful suspension of immortality, is to create. To lose my sense of identity in the pursuit of telling the truth through words that can stir and evoke. Words, that do not quietly hang around the living room, hosting an atmosphere of civility. Unpretentious, assertive, loud, and necessary words. I realized that to redeem myself from the cold bassinet of existential angst, I had to write. 

Ever since I was a child, I had a strange fascination for words and their ability to make us wonder. The transformative journeys on which stories take us are more important when told from a personal frame of reference. The author opens the doors of their unique experiences and narrates the stories which stream through their consciousness. It is like fetching a memory from a forgotten life, reawakened to reveal some repressed secrets or deeper epiphanies. Since I love reading, I have met many such writers living inside their stories, disguised and half-mad with their aspirations to inspire. In all of my encounters, I traveled through ghost towns to the riverbeds of dreams and sorrow, hosted in the vicinity of storytelling. I immediately adjusted to the worlds I visited in these stories, realizing each time I enter any such believable fiction, I could transform into whoever I wished to be. I felt absolute freedom for the first time. The strange curiosity completely engulfed my childhood. Ever since I have spent many years understanding the pursuit of creativity (writing in specific) and since the last couple of years, I have been living a writer’s life, paying all the costs that it entails. 

In this essay, on Berkana’s Rumination station, I will write from my personal experiences and the knowledge of my predecessors who pursued creative lives, to analyze the trials and tribulations of such life and the tools employed on the quest for a creatively fulfilled life. (In this essay, whenever I mention the words 'artists' or 'creator', it refers to anyone who creates a significant body of creative work and shares it with the world). 

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Fading Light and Shielded Eyes

History has witnessed several great artists being consumed by their desire to create incredible art. In pursuit of greatness, they often have altercations with sobriety and even plunge into indecency. Proof of that legacy is carefully documented in many art forms as Ginsberg wrote in his genesis poem Howl,

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked..”

Or as Bukowski said 

“If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is a gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you want to do it.”

The archetype of a suffering genius has made its way to us in many forms. Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Kafka, Thoreau, and so many others have lived their lives in perpetual poverty. All of them were creators who never lived to see their work transforming culture. We tend to believe that if these great people before us lived miserable lives doing what they love, then perhaps it is written in stone that we too shall die penniless. We as creators sometimes find solace in dreaming that perhaps posthumously we shall be influential. Such false gratification is our ego impeding us from outperforming ourselves. We get deluded by our minds which are attached to the romanticism of creativity which ultimately distracts us from creating great work. In the fog of conformity with the ideologies of the past, we tend to forget that today YouTube creators who are building creativity hacks, deriving from the life of all these dead penniless geniuses, are making more money than these great artists ever did. 

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The bottom line is that we live in a different world, a generation of hustlers and creators who define culture as they go and get rewarded for it eventually. We live in a time where gatekeepers are slowly becoming obsolete, and a creator's community is becoming an important part of their journey and growth. However, even if the world is not a bleak place anymore, where your voice and opinions are lost forever, it is still difficult for creators to make a living out of their work. It is a demanding pursuit in which success is usually always down a long toiling road. It is a foggy path on an untested fantasy land, with promises of a magical treasure chest, but with no particular map to find it. Creative people live in high risk-high reward ecosystem. There is no place for cynicism, fear, or hopelessness in a life like that. And yet those are some of their constant partners while they hide away in seclusion of their rooms, frantically tapping away at their Macbook keypad without any solace. It is a challenging pursuit because there will surely be days when one could swear that everything they do will one day fade into oblivion. The sheer meaninglessness of it all is paralyzing. It will weigh them down with countless self-doubts and anxieties. But practice, habit, rituals, and the state of flow are the pillars that hold the reality of a creator. Like an inextinguishable flame, it burns constantly and manifests through those who can defeat resistance manifested as cynicism and self-mockery. 

Forget Me Not 

Complete dissolution of the self is the cost one pays for being an artist, writer, or creator of any sort. They slowly dissolve into their work till there is no difference between the creator and their creation. And that is why I always argue that it is practically impossible to separate art from an artist because the artists leave their DNA in their work in a way that separation is almost non-existential. We might choose to study their work away from their personality because of the deeply disturbing worldview sometimes they choose to dabble in. But the fact is, it is their novel perspective that fascinates us about their work in the first place. For example, H.P. Lovecraft was a fascist, and the deeply distressing world he had built, arose from the fear and loathing of what was beyond his understanding. However, it was also his twisted genius mind that gave birth to the Myth of Cthulhu, which is one of the most foundational and original bodies of work from which most horror writers and artists still derive. There were many others like T.S. Eliot, Rudyard Kipling, and even Charles Dickens who were bigots and racists but that doesn’t make their work any less important.

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However, time is not kind to the legacy of the ones who do not create from their spiritual meridian, and embodies a universal empathy for everyone and everything that suffers. And yes the fear of dissolution that creators have is real in terms of irrelevance if one does not harness their sense of authenticity and deploy it in their work with regular practice. The fear is that of the irrelevance of their work with time. Sylvia Plath famously wrote in ‘The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath’, 

“What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.” 

Creators are haunted by the anticipation of irrelevance, because the world doesn't take long before rendering someone useless while they falter. So the fear that they might become irrelevant arises from the fear that they might not be the best individuals handling a big and complex body of work. So if they ultimately intend for time to be on their side, they should work on refining their consciousness instead of projecting their fears into their body of work.

Broken window and folded hands 

I do not know how to get past the incredulity of such life except with humility gathered from failures and gratitude for everything else. Looking through broken windows with folded hands is a metaphor that suits a creator’s life. The demands of creative pursuits are transformative. It breaks one open and makes them vulnerable in ways they never thought possible. There is no other way to dedicate your whole life to a creative pursuit other than with authenticity, humility, and all-consuming fervor. In midst of noise and distraction, one should be able to tune into their inner solitude and silence, to listen to the language of their art. They will find it flowing through their consciousness like an ancient river over smoothened boulders. Similarly, in absence of all external stimulation too, art must manifest inspired by the artist's personal experiences and stories. There are always gems hidden to be dug out from the cold and hardened depths of an artist's life. Rainer Maria Rilke says it best when he talks about the pursuit of creativity. He specifically talks in the context of a writer, but this fits any creative pursuit. Rilke says, 

“Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.

This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose...

...Describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind, and your belief in some kind of beauty - describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator, there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds – wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attention to it. Try to raise the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, and your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. - And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it”

Therefore, both in midst of distractions and in absence of stimulation, our best work waits ready to be manifested only if we strive to become masters of our everyday selves. This masterful self is accessible only through practice and humility. After all, through our creativity we are only creating more objects of bewilderment for future generations, adding to the ease of their existence. As long as the universe exists, we humans shall communicate to every generation our understanding of the collective wisdom and the ones that are unique to us. We leave behind as we go, the sparks of our experiences, left dormant to be rekindled and build upon by the next generation. We are temporary in form and personality, but our creation persists as our digital fingerprints to be found by someone who relates to our experiences. And even though we are all but a flicker in the maddening flow, let us exhaust our fuels of creativity and live to believe in our creations. 

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