What Happens When You Fail Your Artistic and Creative Desires?
The brisk anime film “Look Back” (2024) is an empathetic, moving treatise on the hard-won nature of being an artist and how every human touch can change you.
Last month, I read an interview with Charlotte Shane about the release of her new book, An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work, conducted by Sari Botton for her Substack newsletter, Memoir Land. It was Shane’s answer to the question, What frustrates you about writing?, that struck me in particular.
In the wake of one of the most difficult years of my life, I have spent a lot of time feeling like a failure creatively. Words were escaping me, providing not a lick of the catharsis and freedom I have found on the page most of my life. I was coming up against the limits of language and my approach to it.1 This called me to actually take fucking care of myself, revamp my writing process, and commit myself more consciously to the care of craft.2 But it also required me to ponder more deeply my commitment to writing. Shane’s answer, which I am including below, was a reminder of such complications,
“The longer you write, I think, the more inevitable your confrontation with the limitations of language—not just your language, but the whole enterprise. Of course my failures and struggles are at the forefront for me, but I worry I’m asking something of my writing or imagining my writing can accomplish something that no writing can achieve. This is an existential inquiry that goes well beyond style or craft, into larger questions about human behavior and communication, our responsibility to one another and so on.
There’s an essay by Judith Thurman in which she speculates that while Neanderthals were going extinct, they began to imitate the artistic expression of the Homo sapiens who supplanted them. (“The pathos of their workmanship—the attempt to copy something novel and marvelous by the dimming light of their existence—nearly makes you weep.”) That’s how I feel sometimes when I look at the gap between the finest writing and my own. But it’s either that or don't make the effort at all.”
2024 has been a year of ruptures. Health scares. Familial estrangement marked by the decision to, once again, stop speaking to my mother for an indeterminate length of time. Most impactful was the very necessary, yet still heartbreaking decision to end an almost two-year relationship through obtaining an emergency order of protection.