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Art and the Human Spirit: Olivia Laing on What the Lives of Great Artists Reveal About Vulnerability, Love, Loneliness, Resistance, and Our Search for Meaning

“We’re so often told that art can’t really change anything. But… it shapes our ethical landscapes; it opens us to the interior lives of others. It is a training ground for possibility. It makes plain inequalities, and it offers other ways of living.”

The composite creation of a doctor, a philosopher, a poet, and a sculptor, the word empathy in the modern sense only came into use at the dawn of the twentieth century as a term for the imaginative act of projecting yourself into a work of art, into a world of feeling and experience other than your own. It vesselled in language that peculiar, ineffable way art has of bringing you closer to yourself by taking you out of yourself — its singular power to furnish, Iris Murdoch’s exquisite phrasing, “an occasion for unselfing.” And yet this notion cinches the central paradox of art: Every artist makes what they make with the whole of who they are — with the totality of experiences, beliefs, impressions, obsessions, childhood confusions, heartbreaks, inner conflicts, and contradictions that constellate a self. To be an artist is to put this combinatorial self in the service of furnishing occasions for unselfing in others.

That may be why the lives of artists have such singular allure as case studies and models of turning the confusion, complexity, and uncertainty of life into something beautiful and lasting — something that harmonises the disquietude and dissonance of living.

In Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency (public library), Olivia Laing — one of the handful of living writers whose mind and prose I enjoy commensurately with the Whitmans and the Woolfs of yore — occasions a rare gift of unselfing through the lives and worlds of painters, poets, filmmakers, novelists, and musicians who have imprinted culture in a profound way while living largely outside the standards and stabilities of society, embodying of James Baldwin’s piecing insight that “a society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.”

Punctuating these biographical sketches laced with larger questions about art and the human spirit are Laing’s personal essays reflecting, through the lens of her own lived experience, on existential questions of freedom, desire, loneliness, queerness, democracy, rebellion, abandonment, and the myriad vulnerable tendrils of aliveness that make life worth living.

What emerges is a case for art as a truly human endeavour, made by human beings with bodies and identities and beliefs often at odds with the collective imperative; art as “a zone of both enchantment and resistance,” art as sentinel and witness of “how truth is made, diagramming the stages of its construction, or as it may be dissolution,” art as “a direct response to the paucity and hostility of the culture at large,” art as a buoy for loneliness and a fulcrum for empathy.

Laing writes:

“Empathy is not something that happens to us when we read Dickens. It’s work. What art does is provide material with which to think: new registers, new spaces. After that, friend, it’s up to you.

I don’t think art has a duty to be beautiful or uplifting, and some of the work I’m most drawn to refuses to traffic in either of those qualities. What I care about more… are the ways in which it’s concerned with resistance and repair.”

A writer — a good writer — cannot write about art without writing about those who make it, about the lives of artists as the crucible of their creative contribution, about the delicate, triumphant art of living as a body in the world and a soul outside standard society. Olivia Laing is an excellent writer. Out of lives as varied as those of Basquiat and Agnes Martin, Derek Jarman and Georgia O’Keeffe, David Bowie and Joseph Cornell, she constructs an orrery of art as a cosmos of human connection and a sensemaking mechanism for living.

In a sentiment to which I relate in my own approach to historical lives, Laing frames her method of inquiry:

“I’m going as a scout, hunting for resources and ideas that might be liberating or sustaining now, and in the future. What drives all these essays is a long-standing interest in how a person can be free, and especially in how to find a freedom that is shareable, and not dependent upon the oppression or exclusion of other people.

[…]

We’re so often told that art can’t really change anything. But I think it can. It shapes our ethical landscapes; it opens us to the interior lives of others. It is a training ground for possibility. It makes plain inequalities, and it offers other ways of living.”

Throughout these short, scrumptiously insightful and sensitive essays, Laing draws on the lives of artists — the wildly uneven topographies of wildly diverse interior worlds — to contour new landscapes of possibility for life itself, as we each live it, around and through and with art. In the essay about Georgia O’Keeffe — who revolutionised modern art while living alone and impoverished in the middle of the desert, in the middle of the world’s first global war — Laing observes:

“How do you make the most of what’s inside you, your talents and desires, when they slam you up against a wall of prejudice, of limiting beliefs about what a woman must be and an artist can do?

[…]

From the beginning, New Mexico represented salvation, though not in the wooden sense of the hill-dominating crosses she so often painted. O’Keeffe’s salvation was earthy, even pagan, comprised of the cold-water pleasure of working unceasingly at what you love, burning anxiety away beneath the desert sun.”

In an essay about another artist — the painter Chantal Joffe, for whom Laing sat — she echoes Jackson Pollock’s’s observation that “every good artist paints what he is,” and writes:

“You can’t paint reality: you can only paint your own place in it, the view from your eyes, as manifested by your own hands.

A painting betrays fantasies and feelings, it bestows beauty or takes it away; eventually, it supplants the body in history. A painting is full of desire and love, or greed, or hate. It radiates moods, just like people.

[…]

Paint as fur, as velvet, as brocade, as hair. Paint as a way of entering and becoming someone else. Paint as a device for stopping time.”

In another essay, Laing offers an exquisite counterpoint to the barbed-wire fencing off of identities that has increasingly made the free reach of human connection — that raw material and final product of all art — dangerous and damnable in a culture bristling with ready indignations and antagonisms:

“A writer I was on a panel with said, and I’m paraphrasing here, that it is no longer desirable to write about the lives of other people or experiences one hasn’t had. I didn’t agree. I think writing about other people, making art about other people, is both dangerous and necessary. There are moral lines. There are limits to the known. But there’s a difference between respecting people’s right to tell or not tell their own stories and refusing to look at all.

[…]

It depends whether you believe that we exist primarily as categories of people, who cannot communicate across our differences, or whether you think we have a common life, an obligation to regard and learn about each other.”

In a sense, the entire book is a quiet manifesto for unselfing through the art we make and the art we cherish — a subtle and steadfast act of resistance to the attrition of human connection under the cultural forces of self-righteousness and sanctimonious othering, a stance against those fashionable and corrosive forces that so often indict as appropriation the mere act of learning beautiful things from each other.

In another essay — about Ali Smith, the subject to whom Laing feels, or at least reads, the closest — she quotes a kindred sentiment of Smith’s:

“Art is one of the prime ways we have of opening ourselves and going beyond ourselves. That’s what art is, it’s the product of the human being in the world and imagination, all coming together. The irrepressibility of the life in the works, regardless of the times, the histories, the life stories, it’s like being given the world, its darks and lights. At which point we can go about the darks and lights with our imagination energised.”

Among the subjects of a subset of essays Laing aptly categorises as “love letters” is John Berger, whose lovely notion of “hospitality” radiates from Laing’s own work — a notion she defines as “a capacity to enlarge and open, a corrective to the overwhelming political imperative, in ascendance once again this decade, to wall off, separate and reject.” She reflects on being stopped up short by Berger’s embodiment of such hospitality when she saw him speak at the British Library at the end of his long, intellectually generous life:

“It struck me then how rare it is to see a writer on stage actually thinking, and how glib and polished most speakers are. For Berger, thought was work, as taxing and rewarding as physical labour, a bringing of something real into the world. You have to strive and sweat; the act is urgent but might also fail.

He talked that evening about hospitality. It was such a Bergerish notion. Hospitality: the friendly and generous reception and entertainment of guests, visitors or strangers, a word that shares its origin with hospital, a place to treat sick or injured people. This impetus towards kindness and care for the sick and strange, the vulnerable and dispossessed is everywhere in Berger’s work, the sprawling orchard of words he planted and tended over the decades.

[…]

Art he saw as a communal and vital possession, to be written about with sensual exactness… Capitalism, he wrote in Ways of Seeing, survives by forcing the majority to define their own interests as narrowly as possible. It was narrowness he set himself against, the toxic impulse to wall in or wall off. Be generous to the strange, be open to difference, cross-pollinate freely. He put his faith in the people, the whole host of us.”

In a superb 2015 essay titled “The Future of Loneliness” — an essay that bloomed into a book a year later, the splendid and unclassifiable book that first enchanted me with Laing’s writing and the mind from which it springs — she considers how technology is mediating our already uneasy relationship to loneliness, and how art redeems the simulacra of belonging with which social media entrap us in this Stockholm syndrome of self-regard. In a passage of chillingly intimate resonance to all of us alive in the age of screens and selfies and the vacant, addictive affirmation of people we have never dined with tapping heart- and thumb-shaped icons on cold LED screens, she writes:

“Loneliness centres around the act of being seen. When a person is lonely, they long to be witnessed, accepted, desired, at the same time as becoming intensely wary of exposure. According to research carried out over the past decade at the University of Chicago, the feeling of loneliness triggers what psychologists term hypervigilance for social threat. In this state, which is entered into unknowingly, the individual becomes hyperalert to rejection, becoming inclined to perceive their social interactions as tinged with hostility or scorn. The result of this shift in perception is a vicious circle of withdrawal, in which the lonely person becomes increasingly suspicious, intensifying their sense of isolation.

This is where online engagement seems to exercise its special charm. Hidden behind a computer screen, the lonely person has control. They can search for company without the danger of being revealed or found wanting. They can reach out or they can hide; they can lurk and they can show themselves, safe from the humiliation of face-to-face rejection. The screen acts as a kind of protective membrane, a scrim that permits invisibility and also transformation. You can filter your image, concealing unattractive elements, and you can emerge enhanced: an online avatar designed to attract likes. But now a problem arises, for the contact this produces is not quite the same thing as intimacy. Curating a perfected self might win followers or Facebook friends, but it will not necessarily cure loneliness, since the cure for loneliness is not being looked at, but being seen and accepted as a whole person: ugly, unhappy and awkward as well as radiant and selfie-ready.”

Having met with Ryan Trecartin — “a baby-faced thirty-four-year-old” of whom I had never heard (saying more about my odd nineteenth-century life than about his art) but whose early-twenty-first-century films about the lurid and discomposing thrill of digital culture prompted The New Yorker to describe him as “the most consequential artist to have emerged since the nineteen-eighties” — Laing reflects:

“My own understanding of loneliness relied on a belief in solid, separate selves that he saw as hopelessly outmoded. In his world view, everyone was perpetually slipping into each other, passing through perpetual cycles of transformation; no longer separate, but interspersed. Perhaps he was right. We aren’t as solid as we once thought. We’re embodied but we’re also networks, expanding out into empty space, living on inside machines and in other people’s heads, memories and data streams as well as flesh. We’re being watched and we do not have control. We long for contact and it makes us afraid. But as long as we’re still capable of feeling and expressing vulnerability, intimacy stands a chance.”

Vulnerability — which Laing unfussily terms “the necessary condition of love” — is indeed the bellowing undertone of these essays: vulnerability as frisson and function of art, of life itself, of the atavistic impulse for transmuting living into meaning that we call art.

Complement the thoroughly symphonic Funny Weather with Paul Klee on creativity and why an artist is like a tree, Kafka on why we make art, Egon Schiele on why visionary artists tend to come from the minority, and Virginia Woolf’s garden epiphany about what it means to be an artist — which remains, for me, the single most beautiful and penetrating thing ever written on the subject — then revisit Laing on life, loss, and the wisdom of rivers.

Source: Maria Popova, brainpickings.org (25th February 2021)

True happiness is uncaused. You are happy for no reason at all.  And true happiness cannot be experienced. It is not within the realm of consciousness. So it is with holiness. Holiness is unself-consciousness. The moment you are aware of your holiness it goes sour and becomes self-righteousness. A good deed is never so good as when you have no consciousness that it is good - you are so much in love with the action that you are quite unselfconscious about your goodness and virtue. Your left hand has no idea that your right hand is doing something good or meritorious. You simply do it because it seems the natural, spontaneous thing to do. If it is real virtue, it would feel so natural that it wouldn't occur to you to think of it as a virtue. Secondly, Holiness is effortlessness. Effort can change behavior, it cannot change you. Think of this: Effort can put food into your mouth, it cannot produce an appetite; it can keep you in bed, it cannot produce sleep; it can make you reveal a secret to another but it cannot produce trust; it can force you to pay a compliment, it cannot produce genuine admiration. Love and freedom and happiness are not things that you can cultivate and produce. You cannot even know what they are. All you can do is observe their opposites and, through your observation, cause these opposites to die. Understand your pride and it will drop -- what results will be humility. Understand your unhappiness, and it will disappear -- what results is the state of happiness. Understand your fears and they will melt -- the resultant state is love. Understand your attachments and they will vanish -- the consequence is freedom. Thirdly, holiness cannot be desired. If you desire happiness you will be anxious lest you do not attain it. You will be constantly in a state of dissatisfaction; and dissatisfaction and anxiety kill the very happiness that you set out to gain. When you desire holiness for yourself you feed the very greed and ambition that make you so selfish and vain and unholy. There are two sources for change within you.  One is the cunningness of your ego that pushes you into making efforts to become something other than you are meant to be so that it can give itself a boost, so that it can glorify itself. The other is the wisdom of Nature. Thanks to this wisdom you become aware, you understand it. That is all you do, leaving the change -- the type, the manner, the speed, the time of change -- to Reality and to Nature. The changes that follow are not the result of your blueprints and efforts but the product of Nature that spurns your plans and will, thereby leaving no room for a sense of merit or achievement, or even any consciousness on the part of your left hand of what Reality is doing by means of your right.

Anthony De Mello

Can You Tell Your Spouse The Truth?

If you can't tell your spouse the truth, you have a problem. It may not cause divorce. It doesn't guarantee your relationship is bad. You may not even be able to feel the negative effects on your marriage. But it is a problem.

Marriage should be a place where the truth flourishes. Because the two people are completely committed to one another. Because they have promised to love one another in every circumstance. Because they are FOR one another in very tangible ways. Because they are willing to sacrifice their own desires in order to assist one another.

The truth should be a defining characteristic of the relationship.

But often it is not. In many relationships, the truth, not only doesn't define the relationship, but actually is rarely present. The marriage is built on deception, silence, implications, and lies. These are symptoms of an illness. And they should be quickly treated before the sickness grows and infects an expanding aspect of the relationship. By nature, humans lie. It's not a learned behavior. It just happens. From an early age, we believe deception is better than truth. While it can be cute when a two-year-old says they haven't eaten anything even as remnants of an Oreo cookie is all over their face, it's not as cute when a husband conceals his whereabouts or a wife says she is "fine" even when she is not.

Spouses lie for several reasons: 1. We have something to hide. Some lies are byproducts of other bad choices. I'm yet to meet a spouse who fully told the truth even when they have been caught in an affair. At first, they try to cover-up or downplay the activity. One reason people lie is because of not wanting to get caught in their bad choices.

2. We don't feel safe. Some lies aren't byproducts of our actions but are a sign we do not feel safe to tell the truth. We may fear rejection or shame. Maybe our spouse has not handled the truth well in the past or we project on our spouse the actions of some other authority figure in our lives. In these cases, the truth is something we could say, but we don't feel the ability to say it.

3. We think our spouse isn't worth it. The truth can hurt. It can cause tension and reveal problems. If we do not value our marriage or our spouse, it can be easier to lie. Why have the serious discussion when a lie can avoid it? Why reveal your true heart if you don't truly love your wife? When I value my spouse, the difficult conversation is always worth it because I'm in it for the long-haul. But when I don't value my spouse, I might be more worried with how I feel today rather than what happens tomorrow.

4. We think that we aren't worth it. Many lies are a form of self-protection. We believe if our spouse sees who we truly are, they will not (and even cannot) love us. We think this because we do not believe we are valuable. The sadness of this type of lie is it robs our spouse of the opportunity of giving us grace and true love. Over time, we can actually begin to believe they are not loving us well, never realizing we have taken from them any opportunity to express their love.

5. We think we need to control our spouse. Many lies are not attempts to protect ourselves, but are an attempt to control others. We tell people what we want to tell them expecting them to react the way we think they should. In a healthy marriage, one spouse doesn't try to control the others as both individuals are free to be themselves. In an unhealthy marriage, manipulation and control are common place.

6. We know no difference. Some people are taught from a very early age to lie and they know of no other way to be in a relationship. Because it is all they have seen, it is all they know, so it is all they do. Unfortunately, their lying prevents them from ever having a true relationship. Anything built on a lie is a pretend world which does not truly exist. Until the lies stop, a healthy relationship cannot grow.

Truth Is A Learned Skill Spouses must learn to handle the truth. We must build a pattern of truth-telling so that a deep level of trust is created. As we repeatedly tell the truth, we see how truth-telling liberates the relationship and frees us from many other bad behaviors-lying, manipulation, masking feelings, hypocrisy, etc.

As we honestly tell the truth and humbly hear the truth, we can create a climate where the truth defines who we are.

Consider this quote by Timothy Keller in his book The Meaning of Marriage: "One of the most basic skills in marriage is the ability to tell the straight, unvarinshed truth about what your spouse has done-and then, completely, unself-righteously, and joyously express forgiveness without a shred of superiority, without making the other person feel small." (page 165)

Keller's words show a clear pattern for truth telling. A marriage in which the truth is regularly told, requires: Humility. Both spouses must realize their imperfections and expect them from themselves and their spouse. They may never overestimate their ability or consider themselves better than the other. Mercy. Marriage demands we give and receive mercy. Without it, the difficulties of marriage will create too much tension for any relationship to survive. Shared Purpose. Unless the marriage is about more than just personal pleasure, truth has very little chance of being a defining characteristic. When a couple sees their relationship as having a higher purpose (contributing to the communal good, impacting children, influencing society, bringing glory to God) then a couple is more likely to do the hard work of learning to tell the truth. A Simple Question It's an easy question, but one with great ramifications. Can you tell your spouse the truth? If the answer is no, there is a problem. It doesn't mean your relationship is bad, but it does reveal an opportunity for growth. We are praying today that these little nuggets of "shared" truth will set your marriage free, freedom to share, freedom to communicate, freedom to forgive, freedom to love, freedom to be YOU. See you in Church Mark & Deb Heavenly Father, help us to be "honest" help us accept our differences. Help us to see the unique way that You formed us, and to understand that we were both created according to plan. Please help us to nurture the gifts we see in each other. And may those gifts be sharpened and strengthened and used for Your glory. Neither of us are perfect, which is why we need your strength in our lives. Our personalities are different, and sometimes those differences bring hurt and confusion. So we ask that you teach us to love as You love, with patience and grace. Grant us the humility, and the honesty to see what we need to improve, and wisdom to make those changes. In the name of Jesus we pray. Amen.