14
Scott Writes Regarding The Cellist
A comment on The Cellist Series
This comment on “The Cellist” post was sent to me privately by my oldest friend, Scott. Scott is a pianist I met when I was 15. He was 18. Instantly attracted, we fell into a relationship that has endured in one form or the other, for almost 30 years.
By that, I mean we could never maintain a romantic relationship for more than a few weeks at a time, but this did not stop us from going on and off like that for 17 years!! But now we’re just friends. More like family, actually. We are deeply bonded and his being a Cancer against all my Capricorn, there has always been a “family” type connection between us anyway.
So I thought of him when I wrote for the cellist, because I felt these two men has similar energy. Scott is also biracial, and outside of this, he can speak for himself. I am posting this excerpt of his email with his permission.
~~
Scott writes:
I was going to comment on this post when it first was published a few days ago…but, alas, I’m not as young and agile as I once was and needed the requisite time to gather my thoughts in my old (or at least, “older”) age.
Like your poster and even more so, like your description of his inner life, I was once young, impetuous and severely frustrated. When I was young I was a simmering repository of frustrated sexuality, just boiling-below-the surface rage and more talent than I knew what to do with. I was extremely accomplished in my field and on the way to, if not the very top, at least close to it. I also had both real arrogance about myself in relation to the world mixed with a good measure of false bravado. I barely suffered fools and thought everybody was dumber than I was; or, at least that no one was really any smarter or really much more gifted in my chosen field. (Actually, the field was chosen for me, but that’s another story).
This exchange makes me wonder: does repressed sexuality breed anger or does repressed anger breed simmering sexuality? Or are they a 2-way symbiotic street? It’s one question I never did figure out though I have come to peace with myself in my old (er at least, “older”) age. The tremendous anger along with the almost pathologically strong sexual drive I had when young frustrated me to an incredible extent back then and caused me enormous pain.
I’m not sure I honestly believe when you try to relieve the pressure valves of enormous anger and repression you don’t lose something artistically. There is an inherent relationship between suffering and artistic creation and integrity. I know I’ve said that perfectly well-adjusted artists have produced great art as well as tormented ones, but at 1:42am in the morning, listening to Beethoven, and thinking about all this, I’m not so sure.
Scott Leather
~~
So what do you think? Does angst fuel art?
13 Responses to “Scott Writes Regarding The Cellist”
Leave a Comment
Get A Consultation
I'm available for consultations! You can schedule a consultation by phone or a consultation by email. You can also read what clients have to say about my consultations. Thanks, I look forward to working with you. :) - Elsa P
Recent Comments
- skye: Aww wow this is so cool. I really like it. This would probab...
- skye: I like it when you talk about this phenomenon having Neptune...
- Charlotte: I'm not too familiar with the significance of progressions. ...
- casseia: Gloria -- if you go to astro.com and click on "free horoscop...
- gloria: i love your stories Elsa....
- gloria: how do you find your progressed moon? or rather, what is it?...
- althera: I can relate to working hours like that with few breaks. You...
More
I see it as:
You experience the world, you feel, then you confide in art.
This post made me want to start welcoming the pain in my life, because I agree without pain there isn’t much point to creating art and going inside yourself to figure out what this is all about, you are too busy partying. And creating art is a huge thing, it brings us closer to God, the god within. it almost makes it worth the pain of not adapting to this world.
But then again, I’m a pisces. I’ve heard Leos get inspiration to create when they are happy and not when in pain. Lucky them.
I think it’s the other way around: artists and other very talented people are angsty (and this is not a bad thing!!). It goes together, it goes with the territory. The intensity is where the art comes from, but this talent is not a fixed reserve, which is emptied into either art or sex or anything else: it’s one of those magic pots that refill immediately.
confide in art…
that’s exactly it.
Elsa - you have opened up something here - lets watch where it goes….
i constructed a successful and creative 30 year career as a luthier - a builder of acoustic guitars (my instruments have been owned and played by Dylan, Tom Petty, Bono, Neil Young, and others) - all on top of controlled rage. it wasnt repressed sexuality - it was repressed wounds around sexuality that were never addressed until a transit of pluto in sag squaring my virgo 11 house sun. the wounds and the passion surrounding them were channeled into a pursuit of perfection in my craft.
Scott is right there about about creativity being fueled by passion, suffering and - even repression - but at 56 and still practicing lutherie at a high level of execution after releasing that repression - i sure wish the wounds and suffering could have been dealt with and unraveled much earlier in my life …. but everyone has a unique process - and pace - of transforming thru their suffering and creativity.
Don
For me, pain has prevented me from feeling free enough to express myself creatively. I’ve felt very hampered in spite of people telling me that I was a talented writer even when I was very very young. I’m 36 and I keep working at it but sometimes the pain stops me from writing. So, no, I don’t believe that suffering necessarily helps creativity.
Angst MOST DEFINITELY fuels art. Example? Hemmingway. But other things fuel art too. Joy, for example. e. e. cummings wrote a lot about joy and God and love. What it comes down to is that experience fuels art and you have to be feeling SOMEthing to really have an experience.
Hmm. Angst does not fuel art, but it can. Art is a process of being honest with the self and revealing that self. (Sometimes this must take the form of an elegant and carefully crafted lie called imagination.) When there is a great deal of stress in the horoscope of an artist(who will frequently have a dynamic 5th house or ruler), that pressure must be expressed.
Peaceful people make great art because that is an honest reflection of their being. Da Vinci was not riddled with angst, he was a contemplative vegetarian. On the other hand, when Edward Munch went into therapy, his painting lost its edge. Beethoven had a Scorpio ascendant. His expression is in accord with that depth of experience. An easy going, kind and basically happy artist like Robert Rauschenberg expresses his work through Venus conjunct a Sagittarius ascendant. (He expresses his more difficult aspects through alcoholism)
Some of my favorite ‘great’ artworks are paintings by old Zen monks. Let’s assume they are expressing an artistic genius in harmony with their experience. These works are simple, beautiful and profound.
When one believes that great art must come from pain and suffering, one invites others to vicariously experience pain and suffering — to relive (not relieve) their own. It’s a form of validation.
If it’s your time to make such cathartic work, make it. If you have the capacity to evoke peace and tranquility though your work, do that. But ultimately, if the work is a manifestation of a false self it will fall flat. Bad Art.
The horoscope and its transits can be a great model for unraveling those dynamics which we are to express in our lives and points to a variety of options.
Suffering will happen. It’s a requirement of living, not art.
(biracial art historian, writer, and astrologer, with stressful Mars/Saturn/Pluto aspects)
i’m with sonia- i think EMOTION fuels art. passion fuels art. deep feelings, whatever they are, fuels art.
anger? sure, it could. art is one way to channel that force. but i don’t believe for a second that pain is the only vein you can tap to create.
Angst is only one powerful emotion among many; emotion fuels art, and that includes every emotion. But what it takes to make Great Art, that depends upon your definition of it.
If Great Art is art about suffering, and the only way to write about suffering truthfully and compellingly is to have experienced it, then the artist needs to be angsty. I think that’s the usual definition of Great Art.
I don’t quite agree with that, though. I think Great Art is about coping with and transcending pain — which means Great Art is as much about joy as it is about pain. An artist consumed by angst is incapable of writing the joy part. Therefore, an artist can only reach the level of Great Art by dealing with their pain. You don’t lose something by relieving the pain, you gain something.
I make it sound like overcoming your angst is something you only do once in your life, and then poof! you’re happy forever. I think it’s more like, you suffer, you get over it, then life throws some more suffering at you, you learn how to overcome that, over and over again until you die.
I think in my best thinking, I agree with these other brilliant posters, that great art CAN be produced from great angst, but it doesn’t necessarily HAVE to be. When I wrote that, I was in a deeply “angstful” frame of heart and mind, listening to Beethoven and up way past my usual bedtime. My emotions were bubbling to the surface at that moment so my thoughts were colored by that fact. I do, in fact, think, in the end, great art can be produced from any possible frame of mind one can think of. I don’t even necessarily believe it has to be HONESTLY rooted in one’s own experience as great works of science fiction have been produced, e.g., that create whole other worlds from the author’s imagination that have little to do with present reality (e.g. Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 A Space Odyssey as well as Kubrick’s groundbreaking film).
In the end, production of great expression is as mysterious as everything else we humans do. In spite of my momentary inspiration it’s hard to make hard and fast rules about great art production I fear.
My best writing comes when I’m on the darker side of the emotional spectrum. Be it anger, angst, depression, it seems to fuel — at least for me — something stronger. I am happier in my life now, but writer’s block is more frequent. Frustrating, because it’s not a trade-off I want.
I’ve read the work of other writers who are happier than me, and I find it lacks a certain something. Can’t quite put my finger on it, but definitely something missing in their work. Perhaps it’s my own projection of what should be. I’m willing to accept that.
Who said honesty and truth were inextricably tied to that construction called reality? ‘Reality’ is a manifestation of knowledge, thinking *and* imagination/creativity.
Perception and reality have a symbiotic relationship. Low quality perception does not produce a high grade reality. Remember, Da Vinci’s helicopter was 4 centuries ahead of its manifestation in the ‘real’.
Any sci-fi or fantasy writer knows that future worlds and fantasy worlds emerge from imagination and knowledge to become ‘truth’. Ask Jules Verne or George Orwell. Interventions by other artists and visionaries make a difference in that ‘becoming reality’.
Honesty is a very broad term in a world with room for Piscean and Neptunian truths. Depth of insight and expansiveness of *vision*, or other appropriate sense faculties, make creating and recieving Great.