April's Artistic Challenge Day 12: By Jove, I Think I've Got It!

I hit the revelatory jackpot today. I mean, I really struck gold in terms of personal insight. It happened to me while I was walking out of the house I have been building with Dan. As we were heading out to the garage to cut some backer-board for the walk-in shower I was listening to Dan talk about how he ‘felt sick' and was ‘just not into working.' He said he ‘didn't feel like being productive.' And that is when it hit me. Wham! That Aha! moment. That lightbulb appeared over my head in the cartoon that is my life and I knew why... immediately... non-conceptually.... like a flash.

Arising in awareness was the realization why I so enjoy being an artist. This is it. The big Aha! No matter how you feel, as an artist, you can be productive, i.e., you can create... make art... be artistic. You can, in short, still work and work just as good as you ever have. Sometimes you can work even better when you are feeling down... blue... confused... or out of sorts.

Whether you are feeling happy or sad, sailing on top of 'cloud nine' or 'down in the dumps'... no matter what 'state' you are in psychologically you can create out of that complex of emotions.

This is a fact of life for the artist that is just not so for most other jobs/professions (with a few exceptions). For instance, in building a house you can't be productive and draw upon a depressed emotional palette in order to do good work. You end up with a severely depressed house if you do... and that's not good! Neither can you engage yourself emotionally-in all the varitieties of states that we traverse as human-beings-while doing the same thing day-after-day on an assembly line.

A prime example of what I mean to indicate is that of the perpetually peppy salesperson. To have to be on such an ‘upbeat' all of the time has to be brutal-not to mention annoying for most of the rest of us. Yet isn't that what is required of the salesperson, i.e., you have to act happy? Even if you don't feel ‘on top of your game' you have to ‘put on the face' and suck it up like a real pro.

Problem though. You can see this coming, right? The fact that artificial regeneration of a limited range of emotional states is hazardous to one's psychological health and well-being. It may be why people become addicted to various substances ranging from coffee and lattes to meth and coke. Because the body-mind (psyche) is not producing, in a natural way, the job-specific mood or emotional state, it then becomes a daily requirement that one ingest the proper substance that will mock-in an artificially induced way-the corresponding psychological state needed to perform the job in an effective manner (or as effective as is possible under the given circumstances).

I suspect that is one of the dangers inherent in most of our careers and professions: the narrow, overly limited, range of psychological states deemed acceptable for that job.

Fortunately the artist does not have this problem (though he or she may have others). For the artist there is a much wider psychological palette that one can draw from in terms of work. You can be depressed and touch something deep in depressed people that will help them know they are not alone. The next day you can offer up a vision of something beatific and glorious. There are no limits to the job-specific psychological terrain that the artist calls home. That's why I so love being an artist. I can wake up everyday and know-beyond a shadow of a doubt-that whatever I am awakening in the midst of is perfectly acceptable... and above all .... workable.

Whether I am writing songs to be sung or I am writing essays, or I am writing an e-book, or a traditional book there is an open invitation to bring to the table whatever one is at that moment and have it be transformed into something beautiful, truthful, revealing, sympathetic, touching, or resonant.

As an artist, you can wake up in any mood and know that the table will welcome you-that you will not be sent home. The easel, the canvas, the lens, the piano-they are all openly receptive to what you have to bring. They work with you. And that is an awesome thing to know. It is so awesome... to me at least... because it is so rare. In what other profession are you allowed to be depressed to the point that you can transform those feelings into pure beauty? In what other profession can you be pissed off at the world and thereby reflect everyone's potential for anger, also giving them release and comfort in the fact that you are expressing and giving body, shape, and rhythm to truths that they may find hard to express. So you do it for them. You let them know you are with them. That there is community not just in the heights of heaven but in the depths of samsaric hell too.

So all it boils down to is this: that an artist is able to be more psychologically authentic... more emotionally whole and complete... more honest and self-reflective... more true... than others are-just because of the vocation they happen to have.

Of course, it doesn't mean that all artists are this way-just that all artists have that potential available to them more than say, a salesman who has a vested interest in getting you to believe something he may not totally be buying himself.