The opening paragraph of "The Silver Key" is one of the most poetic things Lovecraft ever wrote. He seemed to speaking not only of himself, but everyone who tries to create dreams in fiction for a living.
Recurring angst around artistic practice is difficult, sometimes excruciating, in no small part because naming it and seeing it clearly can feel elusive, if not downright impossible. Our experiences are different, but I know what it's like to anxiously stab around in the dark in an attempt to make peace with the Art Process. It's confusing as all hell, and can be excruciating. Years ago, as a young jazz musician, I went through the gauntlet in my own way. I've come out the other side, and can attest that these slippery, inscrutable tensions and cycles DO have an end point. You've taken a chance on publishing an essay that just "wrote itself," so I'll bet you're in the process of coming to your own.
With that said, I'd offer a few things (impersonally and inevitably). This comment also wrote itself. Take what's useful, leave the rest. Delete away as you see fit. Things playing out.
There's no wall between your imagination and the material world; if there is, it's a figment of your imagination. If your inner nihilist's made a habit of tearing your imagination down, it should also do that here. Only, I bet it won't. If it's so insufferably rational, press it for information about this glaring contradiction.
The split between "art dreams" and "hard reality" is arbitrary, destructive, and optional. "Real life" will seem meaningless as long as you keep feeding this belief. That being said, nihilism plays its own key role in this scenario. This whole conceptual setup is probably protective for you. But you deserve better than living in a bunker in your own mind.
Shot through your essay is a panicked need to hedge against the worst (whatever that is). Your relationship with artistic process seems hobbled, if not paralyzed, by a stubborn, longstanding self-protective reflex. Rationally and pragmatically, cynicism provides a fine cover for panic and grief. (I'm sure that's no news to you.) A sizeable part of this artist's angst is likely rooted in your body, not your mind. I can't imagine these thoughts not being the direct product of wounding (i.e., sticks and stones can break our bones, but words do also hurt us).
Last but not least, this was one of only a few key insights that helped me find peace: Even and perhaps especially if it's the very last thing you want to do, make it a duty and mission to love your inner nihilist. With care and commitment. See what happens.
Thank you for your large-hearted comment, Ananda, which I find quite insightful. Full disclosure: My essay is something of a retrospective thing. The state of mind it describes or embodies is something that was intensely vivid and active within me for many years, and that has delivered what feels like valid wisdom (at least for myself), which is why I give it free rein whenever thoughts or emotional intimations of it resurface from time to time. As indicated by the last and relatively recent journal entry that I quoted, this can and does happen. For me, the act of assenting to such thoughts and mind states and becoming the space for them to articulate themselves has been invaluable. Watching what they say, and how they say it with different emphases during different life passages, with greater clarity perhaps becoming evident over time, is something of a fascination for me. And from what you say, it's clear that you and I have traveled creative/artistic and philosophical/spiritual paths that share deep resonances with each other.
You said, "Even and perhaps especially if it's the very last thing you want to do, make it a duty and mission to love your inner nihilist." You get a deep bow and a hearty assent from me. I couldn't have said it better myself, and I will gladly take your saying of it as a mirror of myself reflecting it back to me. Loving my inner nihilist has become one strand of the golden thread leading me through the projected experience of being this person. It has worked itself into my stories and essays and served as one of the spiritual sensors guiding me to the people, books, movies, music, scenes, circumstances, and ideas that are part of my daimonic blueprint. "Love your inner nihilist." I love the sentence itself. 🙏
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I'm very glad to hear things have gotten easier/more workable for you over time; and that the world gets to read your wonderful essays as a result. I'm also very grateful that you read my comment exactly as intended. Phew! (You might otherwise have read it as “cheap analysis from an arrogant, intrusive internet stranger,” which would've been unfortunate... and quite understandable.) :)
To me, the possibility of dropping these insights on someone at a critical time (because I wouldn't wish these heavy, elusive and isolating struggles on anyone) warrants the ever-present risk of being misconstrued. “Love your inner nihilist,” and its variations, is a deeply counterintuitive nugget that's often had people I personally know and care about recoiling in fear and disgust.
Indeed, I hadn't fully grasped that you're mostly out of the weeds at this point... It's good to hear. Best!
It’s extremely satisfying to see you inspired to write so much about your personal views and conflicts, Matt—how they were back then and how they still linger with you even now.
Perhaps *The Living Dark* is about recognizing the darkness that exists in this world, the mundaneness of work life, and the fact that we can do little in the grand scheme of things. It is about accepting this reality and choosing to change, little by little, the ones who come into contact with us.
By using our darkness to protect the light of this world and to share more of it, we create a world that isn’t quite like we wanted it to be, but can be.
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” —Abraham Lincoln
The hermeneutical circle is constituted by the fact that it is only within the presuppositions of a meaningful framework that we can make sense of a given text and it is only by its applicability to the text in question that we can justify the choice of a particular framework.
From this circle there is no escape.
Charles H. Kahn. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus
Aptly quoted! Thank you, Daniel. This tail-chasing Ouroboros is a fact of life, and something not to be solved on its own level but appreciated for what it is and, in the end, transcended and viewed from a higher/deeper level.
I concur. Life is process and pattern and in my opinion there is no difference between the physical and the spiritual. Truth lies in paradox and consciousness is that which plays hide and seek with itself. Thank you for a stimulating read!
I once got lost in the world of Fiction.. I would tell stories and write and read as a young girl i delved into those worlds with abandon and built a world there which was beautiful but wasn’t real. Trauma further aggravated this. this world was my safe place.
30 years plus later; I don’t want anything to do with fiction, I am still trying to find my place in reality but using the arts now ( the forms that call now)as movement for my soul. I realize now that the forms were never the end in itself but vehicles for transcendence ;anytime I tried to hold onto any form,I got lost not knowing where to draw the line so I simply move through them now.
Examine the metaphors behind a vehicle that spring to mind. I personally look beyond what is presented physically to go within; i let the vehicle carry me.I’m still moving towards that which calls ultimately;I no longer fear it. I might still be trapped but my soul thriving is enough at least for now;it is my hope that my body will follow. Thank you for this piece. It was moving.
I appreciate your candidness and vulnerability, and I'm glad my essay connected with you. You say, "I might still be trapped but my soul thriving is enough at least for now; it is my hope that my body will follow." Sounds like a healing outlook to me. I wish you much continued movement in that direction.
I can't thank you enough for this. I think of all those who draw hidden strength from a Beethoven symphony, a Cormac McCarthy novel, a Pink Floyd album or a narrative by Thomas Ligotti, and are then able time and time again to go back to their prosaic existence instead of surrendering to despair, even though to a cynical eye these and countless other artists have thrown away their lives. More than this, the concrete world in which we live and suffer is as much the product of musicians, poets and novelists as it is of scientists, teachers and engineers, it is first of all the indirect creation of the metaphysical artists who have shaped our ways of perceiving and living in it. The possibilities evoked in a fiction can have an unthinkable actual transformative power in our life and vision, making us perceive new horizons beyond the trap and vapid repetitions of daily realities. If nothing else, art can make "reality" more real, divesting it of the veil of false familiarity, opening our eyes to the disquieting ungroundedness of it all.
And the artist? I am convinced that in the moment of creation, when the muse takes over, what he or she experiences is no extinction or loss, but rather an alchemy, a transfiguration of life, and at privileged instants even an absorbing communion of infinite glory, might the poet at the same time be lamenting the passing of all glory and beauty from the world.
And the feelings, thoughts and experiences you share with us here and in your journals resonate so deeply with readers because you've "recollected them in tranquility" and couched them in artistic form. This endows them with an aura that strangely inspires the creative quest even when they are ostensibly undermining it in the most radical ways, thus realizing C.S. Lewis's words where he speaks of him who "... cries out for his lost youth of soul at the very moment in which he is being rejuvenated". Matt the Artist trumps Matt the Disillusioned.
As usual, Gabriele, your lucid, sensitive grasp and lush, poetic articulation of such matters is quite moving.
What you say about the likes of Beethoven, McCarthy, Pink Floyd, and Ligotti, and the way their work provides strength and solace for people who "are then able time and time again to go back to their prosaic existence instead of surrendering to despair," puts me in mind of one of my favorite things anybody ever said about the call to write and the challenge of doing so from a state of inner darkness and depression. I think I may have quoted it her at TLD in the past. I know I referred to it in my interview with Ligotti at The Teeming Brain. It's from the poet Michael Van Walleghen, as quoted or paraphrased in Andre Dubus's contribution to editor Frederick Busch's really fine essay anthology LETTERS TO A FICTION WRITER. Dubus said Walleghan identified Kafka and Kierkegaard as his heroes because they managed to keep writing even though they were mired in a perception and state of darkness that would have overwhelmed anyone else and made them go silent. Or actually, Walleghan said it much better than that: He said the two K's were his heroes “because they lived in the abyss, and kept throwing books out of it.”
I know that feeling, Harley. The feeling when someone else says something that strikes home so deeply that it makes you uncomfortable. It also inevitably brings comfort, right alongside the uneasiness. As Thomas Ligotti said in his essay "The Consolations of Horror," in the end the only real consolation of horror literature or art—and, by extension, of any other type or art or writing—is not that it's entertaining or cathartic or anything like that, but "simply that someone shares some of your own feelings and has made of these a work of art which you have the insight, sensitivity, and—like it or not—peculiar set of experiences to appreciate." I hope my essay may have provided you with some of that same solace.
Brilliant and brave writing, thank you Matt! I’m glad to hear you so elegantly articulate this dichotomy. I had a similarly paralysing experience when I first encountered both Christopher Small’s ‘Musicking’ and Eddie Prévost’s ‘No Sound Is Innocent’. My conviction in the transformative potential of my musical practice and profession was thrown into agonising doubt. I’ve since softened my position, adopting more of a ‘both/and’ attitude, as described in your journal entry from May 2011. Music can be escapism (and oftentimes complicit in maintaining systems of inequality), but it can also be profoundly grounded in the here and now, and therefore rich in transgressive and liberatory potential. Art can both create new worlds and change the world in which we live. There is a time and place for both ways, I would venture.
So glad my essay resonated with you, John. It sounds like our respective experiences have overlapped in significant ways. Your description of the dual potential of art and music as either/both pure escapism or something "profoundly grounded in the here and now, and therefore rich in transgressive and liberatory potential" is lovely. And resonant. And true.
I have always considered the creative urge to be a gift. Reading your essay I was reminded of how much pain it has caused me, perhaps more than anything else. And then, ironically, the pain would always find its valve in creative expression. Thank you for your work, Matt!
Thank you, Luka! You describe the paradox well. Feels like those of us who are personally and intimately familiar with this dynamic form a kind of hidden fraternity.
The opening paragraph of "The Silver Key" is one of the most poetic things Lovecraft ever wrote. He seemed to speaking not only of himself, but everyone who tries to create dreams in fiction for a living.
I wholeheartedly agree.
Recurring angst around artistic practice is difficult, sometimes excruciating, in no small part because naming it and seeing it clearly can feel elusive, if not downright impossible. Our experiences are different, but I know what it's like to anxiously stab around in the dark in an attempt to make peace with the Art Process. It's confusing as all hell, and can be excruciating. Years ago, as a young jazz musician, I went through the gauntlet in my own way. I've come out the other side, and can attest that these slippery, inscrutable tensions and cycles DO have an end point. You've taken a chance on publishing an essay that just "wrote itself," so I'll bet you're in the process of coming to your own.
With that said, I'd offer a few things (impersonally and inevitably). This comment also wrote itself. Take what's useful, leave the rest. Delete away as you see fit. Things playing out.
There's no wall between your imagination and the material world; if there is, it's a figment of your imagination. If your inner nihilist's made a habit of tearing your imagination down, it should also do that here. Only, I bet it won't. If it's so insufferably rational, press it for information about this glaring contradiction.
The split between "art dreams" and "hard reality" is arbitrary, destructive, and optional. "Real life" will seem meaningless as long as you keep feeding this belief. That being said, nihilism plays its own key role in this scenario. This whole conceptual setup is probably protective for you. But you deserve better than living in a bunker in your own mind.
Shot through your essay is a panicked need to hedge against the worst (whatever that is). Your relationship with artistic process seems hobbled, if not paralyzed, by a stubborn, longstanding self-protective reflex. Rationally and pragmatically, cynicism provides a fine cover for panic and grief. (I'm sure that's no news to you.) A sizeable part of this artist's angst is likely rooted in your body, not your mind. I can't imagine these thoughts not being the direct product of wounding (i.e., sticks and stones can break our bones, but words do also hurt us).
Last but not least, this was one of only a few key insights that helped me find peace: Even and perhaps especially if it's the very last thing you want to do, make it a duty and mission to love your inner nihilist. With care and commitment. See what happens.
Be free.
Thank you for your large-hearted comment, Ananda, which I find quite insightful. Full disclosure: My essay is something of a retrospective thing. The state of mind it describes or embodies is something that was intensely vivid and active within me for many years, and that has delivered what feels like valid wisdom (at least for myself), which is why I give it free rein whenever thoughts or emotional intimations of it resurface from time to time. As indicated by the last and relatively recent journal entry that I quoted, this can and does happen. For me, the act of assenting to such thoughts and mind states and becoming the space for them to articulate themselves has been invaluable. Watching what they say, and how they say it with different emphases during different life passages, with greater clarity perhaps becoming evident over time, is something of a fascination for me. And from what you say, it's clear that you and I have traveled creative/artistic and philosophical/spiritual paths that share deep resonances with each other.
You said, "Even and perhaps especially if it's the very last thing you want to do, make it a duty and mission to love your inner nihilist." You get a deep bow and a hearty assent from me. I couldn't have said it better myself, and I will gladly take your saying of it as a mirror of myself reflecting it back to me. Loving my inner nihilist has become one strand of the golden thread leading me through the projected experience of being this person. It has worked itself into my stories and essays and served as one of the spiritual sensors guiding me to the people, books, movies, music, scenes, circumstances, and ideas that are part of my daimonic blueprint. "Love your inner nihilist." I love the sentence itself. 🙏
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I'm very glad to hear things have gotten easier/more workable for you over time; and that the world gets to read your wonderful essays as a result. I'm also very grateful that you read my comment exactly as intended. Phew! (You might otherwise have read it as “cheap analysis from an arrogant, intrusive internet stranger,” which would've been unfortunate... and quite understandable.) :)
To me, the possibility of dropping these insights on someone at a critical time (because I wouldn't wish these heavy, elusive and isolating struggles on anyone) warrants the ever-present risk of being misconstrued. “Love your inner nihilist,” and its variations, is a deeply counterintuitive nugget that's often had people I personally know and care about recoiling in fear and disgust.
Indeed, I hadn't fully grasped that you're mostly out of the weeds at this point... It's good to hear. Best!
It’s extremely satisfying to see you inspired to write so much about your personal views and conflicts, Matt—how they were back then and how they still linger with you even now.
Perhaps *The Living Dark* is about recognizing the darkness that exists in this world, the mundaneness of work life, and the fact that we can do little in the grand scheme of things. It is about accepting this reality and choosing to change, little by little, the ones who come into contact with us.
By using our darkness to protect the light of this world and to share more of it, we create a world that isn’t quite like we wanted it to be, but can be.
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” —Abraham Lincoln
I'm loving your framing of this, my friend. And I'm glad my essay connected with you.
The hermeneutical circle is constituted by the fact that it is only within the presuppositions of a meaningful framework that we can make sense of a given text and it is only by its applicability to the text in question that we can justify the choice of a particular framework.
From this circle there is no escape.
Charles H. Kahn. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus
Aptly quoted! Thank you, Daniel. This tail-chasing Ouroboros is a fact of life, and something not to be solved on its own level but appreciated for what it is and, in the end, transcended and viewed from a higher/deeper level.
I concur. Life is process and pattern and in my opinion there is no difference between the physical and the spiritual. Truth lies in paradox and consciousness is that which plays hide and seek with itself. Thank you for a stimulating read!
I once got lost in the world of Fiction.. I would tell stories and write and read as a young girl i delved into those worlds with abandon and built a world there which was beautiful but wasn’t real. Trauma further aggravated this. this world was my safe place.
30 years plus later; I don’t want anything to do with fiction, I am still trying to find my place in reality but using the arts now ( the forms that call now)as movement for my soul. I realize now that the forms were never the end in itself but vehicles for transcendence ;anytime I tried to hold onto any form,I got lost not knowing where to draw the line so I simply move through them now.
Examine the metaphors behind a vehicle that spring to mind. I personally look beyond what is presented physically to go within; i let the vehicle carry me.I’m still moving towards that which calls ultimately;I no longer fear it. I might still be trapped but my soul thriving is enough at least for now;it is my hope that my body will follow. Thank you for this piece. It was moving.
I appreciate your candidness and vulnerability, and I'm glad my essay connected with you. You say, "I might still be trapped but my soul thriving is enough at least for now; it is my hope that my body will follow." Sounds like a healing outlook to me. I wish you much continued movement in that direction.
I can't thank you enough for this. I think of all those who draw hidden strength from a Beethoven symphony, a Cormac McCarthy novel, a Pink Floyd album or a narrative by Thomas Ligotti, and are then able time and time again to go back to their prosaic existence instead of surrendering to despair, even though to a cynical eye these and countless other artists have thrown away their lives. More than this, the concrete world in which we live and suffer is as much the product of musicians, poets and novelists as it is of scientists, teachers and engineers, it is first of all the indirect creation of the metaphysical artists who have shaped our ways of perceiving and living in it. The possibilities evoked in a fiction can have an unthinkable actual transformative power in our life and vision, making us perceive new horizons beyond the trap and vapid repetitions of daily realities. If nothing else, art can make "reality" more real, divesting it of the veil of false familiarity, opening our eyes to the disquieting ungroundedness of it all.
And the artist? I am convinced that in the moment of creation, when the muse takes over, what he or she experiences is no extinction or loss, but rather an alchemy, a transfiguration of life, and at privileged instants even an absorbing communion of infinite glory, might the poet at the same time be lamenting the passing of all glory and beauty from the world.
And the feelings, thoughts and experiences you share with us here and in your journals resonate so deeply with readers because you've "recollected them in tranquility" and couched them in artistic form. This endows them with an aura that strangely inspires the creative quest even when they are ostensibly undermining it in the most radical ways, thus realizing C.S. Lewis's words where he speaks of him who "... cries out for his lost youth of soul at the very moment in which he is being rejuvenated". Matt the Artist trumps Matt the Disillusioned.
This is a very comforting perspective to have. I will keep this close to my heart.
As usual, Gabriele, your lucid, sensitive grasp and lush, poetic articulation of such matters is quite moving.
What you say about the likes of Beethoven, McCarthy, Pink Floyd, and Ligotti, and the way their work provides strength and solace for people who "are then able time and time again to go back to their prosaic existence instead of surrendering to despair," puts me in mind of one of my favorite things anybody ever said about the call to write and the challenge of doing so from a state of inner darkness and depression. I think I may have quoted it her at TLD in the past. I know I referred to it in my interview with Ligotti at The Teeming Brain. It's from the poet Michael Van Walleghen, as quoted or paraphrased in Andre Dubus's contribution to editor Frederick Busch's really fine essay anthology LETTERS TO A FICTION WRITER. Dubus said Walleghan identified Kafka and Kierkegaard as his heroes because they managed to keep writing even though they were mired in a perception and state of darkness that would have overwhelmed anyone else and made them go silent. Or actually, Walleghan said it much better than that: He said the two K's were his heroes “because they lived in the abyss, and kept throwing books out of it.”
Wow. This hits a little too close to home. I often fear that I am neglecting real life for my addiction to creative invention.
I know that feeling, Harley. The feeling when someone else says something that strikes home so deeply that it makes you uncomfortable. It also inevitably brings comfort, right alongside the uneasiness. As Thomas Ligotti said in his essay "The Consolations of Horror," in the end the only real consolation of horror literature or art—and, by extension, of any other type or art or writing—is not that it's entertaining or cathartic or anything like that, but "simply that someone shares some of your own feelings and has made of these a work of art which you have the insight, sensitivity, and—like it or not—peculiar set of experiences to appreciate." I hope my essay may have provided you with some of that same solace.
Brilliant and brave writing, thank you Matt! I’m glad to hear you so elegantly articulate this dichotomy. I had a similarly paralysing experience when I first encountered both Christopher Small’s ‘Musicking’ and Eddie Prévost’s ‘No Sound Is Innocent’. My conviction in the transformative potential of my musical practice and profession was thrown into agonising doubt. I’ve since softened my position, adopting more of a ‘both/and’ attitude, as described in your journal entry from May 2011. Music can be escapism (and oftentimes complicit in maintaining systems of inequality), but it can also be profoundly grounded in the here and now, and therefore rich in transgressive and liberatory potential. Art can both create new worlds and change the world in which we live. There is a time and place for both ways, I would venture.
So glad my essay resonated with you, John. It sounds like our respective experiences have overlapped in significant ways. Your description of the dual potential of art and music as either/both pure escapism or something "profoundly grounded in the here and now, and therefore rich in transgressive and liberatory potential" is lovely. And resonant. And true.
Thank you Matt!
I have always considered the creative urge to be a gift. Reading your essay I was reminded of how much pain it has caused me, perhaps more than anything else. And then, ironically, the pain would always find its valve in creative expression. Thank you for your work, Matt!
Thank you, Luka! You describe the paradox well. Feels like those of us who are personally and intimately familiar with this dynamic form a kind of hidden fraternity.