The artist as dirtbag

In the comboxes on the Gibson thread below, Michael of 2Blowhards links to his long, excellent reflection on the celebrated Texas songwriter Townes Van Zandt, who lived hard -- real hard -- and died early. His work is transcendently beautiful. He was not a good man. In fact, he was an abusive drunkard and doper who neglected his kids, used his friends, you name it. Here's the question raised by his life, and the lives of Shane MacGowan, Chet Baker and any number of artists:

Is it possible to be an arts person without being ... well, a little demented? In what way does an involvement with the arts really benefit a person? It seems to me that you fall for the arts mainly because they move you. They infect and reflect your daydreams and your dreams. They give you feelings and experiences the likes of which you otherwise run across only in church or in bed. Your vulnerabilities, your sensitivities, your fantasies -- all are stimulated and engaged. FWIW, and IMHO: the best film evocation of the kind of seductive, crazy-making dream-state that a life in the arts can be like is Julian Schnabel's "Basquiat."

If the arts don't hit you in this way, then why would you bother with them at all? God knows they can be a lot of trouble -- why not lead a sensible, prosaic life instead? On the other hand, if you go too far into headlong intoxication, you can wind up self-destructing. So: How to respect the real-life-practicality we all need to survive while maintaining the openness and receptivity -- and the imaginative/emotional engagement -- that an involvement with the arts requires? Is it possible to keep your head while losing it? Most of us find some kind of bearable balance, however haphazard.

Townes Van Zandt didn't even try. Once he walked off the cliff he just kept right on falling.

I asked a Christian friend of mine who works in the film industry what she made of the Gibson fiasco. She wasn't sure what to make of it, but she did say that anybody who saw "The Passion of the Christ" could tell that it was a work that came from the soul of an artist struggling in darkness. I couldn't agree more -- which is what helped make it such a profoundly moving film. I've seen it three or four times, and it never fails to shatter me. I doubt I would feel that way if I were not a believing Christian, but I am, and as someone who has watched every Jesus film committed to celluloid (had to, for a Weekly Standard piece I did a few years ago), I can say that nothing cracked me open and ripped me apart spiritually like the Gibson version did. Nothing made me feel the enormity of what Christ suffered, and of how God Almighty permitted himself to endure unbearable pain and humiliation ... because of me and for me. No work of Christian art ever made the Incarnation as real to me. The final line of Rilke's poem "Archaic Torso of Apollo" directly describes the power of mere material artistically arranged to affect the human will: You must change your life.

If Mel Gibson's intent in "The Passion of the Christ" was to turn the Christian masses against the Jews, he plainly failed. In fact, the impression I got from the film was of the tragic circumstances that the Sanhedrin and Pontius Pilate found themselves in: both of them truly thought they were doing the right thing. That's the human condition. Gibson made those old Sunday school stories come alive again. He made those exhausted narratives bleed fresh. He created a work of art.

I do wonder, along with my film industry friend, if the artist who made "The Passion of the Christ" could have done it were he not tormented by his own demons. Being a gifted artist does not give you license to be a dirtbag, or relieve you from your obligation to be moral and decent. But I think being mature means coming to understand tha t those who are creative often face struggles that the rest of us don't -- and that those struggles are directly tied to what makes them so creative. That's their tragedy. In the world of art, goodness and greatness don't often have a lot to do with each other.