Fever Waking up, surprised by my own ill-temper, like finding a stranger in my room who doesn't belong there. The stranger is a stranger only because he is nameless (it is a he), but I know him. It will last a day, two days. Three if I'm unlucky. It is torturous -- the minutes crawl by, saturated with doubts. Water with heavy metals dripping from a tap. I drink, smoke, write and even work... in the end it breaks like a fever breaks.

Sometimes I'm inclined to take a pill for it, but I don't know which. Truly, if there isn't a drug to relieve the symptomatic effects of misery, they should certainly invent one and make it widely available. All the treatments I know of seek to address the root causes, to pull out the root and 'cure' you. I don't want to go on a healing programme with 3 different kinds of drugs and psychoanalyic counselling. What I want is asprin.

Many people think of dear old Van Gogh as a 'tortured genius'. Every brushstroke revealing the orgiastic writhings of inner demons. However, as anyone who only wishes to work will tell you: misery is debilitating condition. It makes work impossible. Work is not cathartic, should not be cathartic. Gardening is cathartic, or fishing, or needlepoint, or watching Oprah. Work is work. When you have a fever you cannot work, at least not very well. Vincent was only able to paint AFTER the attacks passed. Perhaps the world has branded him the ultimate misunderstood artist, but I think he understood himself perfectly well.

Here I heap my own lump of soil on the myth of the Suffering Artist. Let it be buried forevermore!

Labels: sweet misery

  ¶ 3:37 PM