How to be an artist/writer

What does it mean to create Art, or literature? One answer can be found in Borges’ reflections on what it means to be a writer. He suggests that to be a writer, means to feel like in some sense everything happens for a reason. Everything one experiences can therefore make its way into one’s work. As he puts it:

“A writer – and, I believe, generally all persons – must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”

It’s a profoundly hopeful notion, that all of our lived experiences can be transformed into art. To be a writer or an artist is therefore not simply to ‘express’ oneself, but rather to practice what might be called the art of sublimation, taking one thing and turning it into something else.

Notice also how Borges stresses that it’s not just something that holds true for writers, but for everyone. We can all benefit from turning our lived existence into something purposeful, be it vocational or artistic. And when we find a cause, something that allows us to keep on living, then it can paradoxically appear like everything happens for a reason. As Mallarmé once wrote, “everything in the world exists in order to end up in a book.”

This means that even our most painful experiences can be turned into something beautiful.The tacitly spiritual suggestion is that our pain (inasmuch as the art we create with it) can therefore serve as a tacit way of bringing us together, and reminding us that we are not alone. Through art and writing we not only create a new language through which to express the inexpressible, we also find a reason to keep on living. Writing, like art, is therefore a way of staging an encounter with oneself, inasmuch as it encourages us to stay involved and interested in the world.

As Kafka put it, “Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing.”

Thank you for reading my newsletter. Hopefully these posts are helpful to you in your own creative and intellectual processes, Julian