I hate people who take too long to order coffee. I find it abhorrent that one should hold up an entire line whilst deciding between different combinations of milk, water, and coffee. It is an obscenity in the extreme to be unable to make simple decisions quickly, coffee orders being the simplest of decisions. By the age of, say, 20, one should know one's order offhand, as variations in menus from one coffee shop to the next are minimal. One should dispense with pleasantries politely yet efficiently, order, pay, and stand to one side. And the great industry of empire and thought shall continue chugging along merrily, without chink in its chain.
In a similar vein, one should interest oneself in the wellbeing of society by NOT eating on trains. It is a neurosis of mine which makes it impossible to sit comfortably in the presence of unfortunate odours, this essay now being written on a train between London and Paris while a hapless imbecile is happily devouring what I can only assume is an expired tuna melt in the seat across from mine. An olfactory offence only compounded by the heinous lack of personal hygiene and cripplingly intense body odour, I now have to concede defeat as, having purchased the cheapest tickets available, I could not have possibly hoped for a more palatable outcome. Suffice to say, I am irritable.
Hunter S. Thompson photographed while shooting his IBM typewriter in 1989.
Irritable and neurotic, as at the moment I find myself in the midst of a period of artistic and creative labour. I normally, while neurotic to a degree (a not insubstantial degree if my mother is to be believed), am not entirely encumbered by neurosis, and am usually of good humour. I am a functional adult woman, capable of having conversations with people without snapping needlessly, able to patiently wait my turn in a café, and able to ride the tube without running through blood-soaked Tarantino-esque fantasies of revenge because of odiferous commuters. This has made me ask, what, if anything, has changed in me? Is it because I am an artist and I am in a period of creativity? Is irritability the humour of the artistic spirit? Is it requisite for the artist to be a neurotic mess, or is this a romanticisation that many of us have taken to heart as the truth of the matter, and therefore have allowed ourselves to behave poorly? And does this neurosis condemn us to a life of misery?
If we were to turn to philosophy (often a fool's errand, unless it supports my particular view, which is now bolstered by superior philosophical reasoning), we could first speak of Schopenhauer, the temperamental artist's favourite. Schopenhauer believed in the Genial Temperament, an insinuation that to create did in fact require genius, thus the temperament of a genius is a mercurial one. The genius is allowed to be mercurial, as creation is an undertaking of great strain and import, and in order to do so, the genius must be perceptive. It is this perception, this unwavering state of noticing, that perhaps is the cause of the artist's unhappiness. In seeing everything, the artist is able to zero in, with great speed, on what he or she likes or doesn't like. And it seems many of us have come to choose dislike, as it is more brooding, and therefore more interesting, or so we believe. It conjures up images of the bohemian fallen aristocrat of the belle époque, the Toulouse-Lautrecs of the world.
Neurosis Nr.2, Hilal Can, 2016.
Alternatively, Plato would argue against the existence, or rather the validity, of the artistic temperament, if not the entire undertaking of art. One should mistrust the artist, as fundamentally the artist is a liar, a charlatan implying things which are not there. They are mere imitators, without the breadth of vision to see beyond their own narrow point of view. While I may not personally agree entirely with Plato, I will concede that an element of what he said may ring true. If we should extrapolate from his idea of this narrow point of view, as many artists of my acquaintance can be remarkably myopic, we can see how, paired with this high perception, they can have tendencies towards irritability, even if those tendencies are entirely their own fault and have nothing to do with creation but rather their own inability to see the bigger picture.
Finally, I shall leave you with a remarkable case study: an artist whose vision is, in my view, unparalleled in his field, that is to say, the late great David Lynch. Our dear friend David was a man of great neuroses and habit. He would only eat one meal, without variations, sometimes for years at a time, his fondness for Bob's Big Boy burgers being well documented. He would keep himself to a strict, entirely self-imposed mental diet of waking times, meditation, and reading materials. And yet from this strictness was birthed a cinematic, visual, and literary world of remarkable colour, uncanniness, and beauty. And he was happy to boot.
That's right, folks: an artist who discovered a third path, one of both neurotic habitude and profound calmness and joy. In fact, David had been oft-quoted on this, stating that a true artist cannot approach creation from a place of crankiness, a place of unhappiness, as it tinges the art and makes it unpleasant. The artist's temperament, or at least as far as I have found it (i.e. irritability), is 'hooey'.
William Campbell, David Lynch supervising a fire scene on the set of The Straight Story, 1998.
What, if any, profound takeaway can we take from these three examples? Perhaps we should scrap the endeavour completely; each to their own, we cannot replicate the method of another and get a result as unique as we so desire. Perhaps, rather than an exaltation of the artistic temperament, we should focus on the end product of the artist. Romanticising the artistic method is how we have come to a world of middlingly talented (if that) Jackson Pollocks and ankle-biters like Banksy. The way you made it means nothing. You, the artist, are in the back seat of your own creation; do not romanticise your own suffering, nor your own intellect. Allow the art to speak for itself. And wake up every day and thank God almighty that artists don't run society.
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