How important it is to know you are not alone? I can tell you: very. In the solitude you slowly shed your humanity, I know this, become an animal ready to run at sight of those apex predator beasts that you just alienated yourself from. The willful exile, they call it, the punishment for being the insolent that trespassed, yes, and stumbled on some things that touched you somewhere so deep you'd rather forget such stigma, hold on to your purity and innocence rather than integrity, because everyone you touch with this black acid will tell you, you did this to yourself. If not already contaminated by original sin, you can't just say you were innocent to begin with.
Well, they also say you must suffer to be an artist...
"Art, Camus claims, is not owned by the privileged, and a literature that encompasses everyone is a stronger art. `In the face of so much suffering, if art insists on being a luxury, it will also be a lie,´ he said. He continued that `if there is any man who has no right to solitude, it is the artist. Art cannot be a monologue… Art advances between two chasms, which are frivolity and propaganda.´ Towards the end, Camus noted that `all greatness, after all, is rooted in risk. The time of irresponsible artists is over.´ In a line that has stayed with me, Camus cuts to the core of what great art must aim for, regardless of its author or ken: `[t]he aim of art… is not to legislate or to reign supreme, but rather to understand first of all.´ Art does not seek to dictate the rigid laws of a society; instead, it must seek to try to capture something true about the world it conjures up. Camus goes on to condemn art crafted purely out of hate. We must do the opposite of hatred, which, as I said after Trump’s election, is not love, but empathy, understanding."
(This is from an outstanding literary essay by Gabrielle Bellot: On Danticat, Camus, and the Art of Exile)
Yeah, it is not a fucking luxury to write yourself a sentence that condemns you to an absurd isolation you can't talk about without sounding fucking crazy. Yes, maybe a bit tongue in cheek, biting it to forget the pain you are about to inflict on yourself as you describe the way to reach the absurd desert integrity will lead you if you don't fucking submit... It is fucking selfish, you understand, to ask for the poison that ends it, now hand it to me, I want nobody to follow, I don't want to map this pain, to continue the melodrama of a drunken lunatic howling, the vox clamantis in deserto. And just like that the circle is closed, the ascension led back to where you started; the hysterical animal at the mercy of nature.
Maybe you learned something, you became an altered animal, one with a sense of self, of trajectory, a purpose as long as you can live with the pain, and don't succumb to fear knowing that the dangers are real out there in the open and you go naked.
(Pic by Asta Kaluževičiūtė)
