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\n\t\t\tWhen AI first began colonizing language \u2014 which is still our best instrument for bridging the abyss between us, a container for thought and feeling that shapes the contents \u2014 I asked chatGPT to compose a poem about a solar eclipse in the style of Walt Whitman. It returned a ledger of cliches in rhymed couplets. Getting the form wrong \u2014 Whitman did not rhyme \u2014 seemed like an easy correction by a line of code. Getting poetry itself wrong was the interesting question, the question that gets at the heart of why we make poems (or paintings or novels or songs) \u2014 a question fundamentally about what it means to be human.
\nI asked an elder poet friend why she thought chatGPT rang hollow where Whitman could compact infinities of feeling in a single image, could unseat the soul in a word.
\nShe paused, then said: \u201cBecause AI hasn\u2019t suffered.\u201d
\nOn the one hand, this echoes a dangerous myth: the archetype of the tortured genius handed down to us by the Romantics, who, cornered in their time and place, in a century of bloody revolutions, deadly epidemics, and punitive Puritanical norms, must have needed to believe that their suffering \u2014 those lives of poverty and privation, those ill-fated exercises in projection mistaken for love, all those premature deaths \u2014 was a fair price to pay for such creative volcanicity.
\nOn the other hand, this is reality: Art is the music we make from the bewildered cry of being alive \u2014 sometimes a cry of exultant astonishment, but often a cry of devastation at the collision between our wishes and the will of the world. Every artist\u2019s art is their coping mechanism for what they are living through \u2014 the longings, the heartbreaks, the triumphs, the wars within and without. It is these painful convolutions of the psyche \u2014 which used to be termed neurosis at the dawn of modern psychotherapy, and which we may simply call suffering \u2014 that reveal us to ourselves, and it is out of these revelations that we create anything capable of touching other lives, that contact we call art.
\nOur power and our freedom lie in learning to neither negate our suffering nor romanticize it but to harness its catalytic power as a current passing through us to jolt us alive, then passing on and down into the ground of being.
\nCarl Jung
\nNo one has refuted the myth of the tortured genius without negating the fact and fertility of suffering more pointedly than Carl Jung (July 26, 1875\u2013June 6, 1961), who thought deeply about the nature of creativity.
\nIn 1943, a scholar of Kierkegaard asked Jung\u2019s opinion of the relationship between \u201cpsychological problems\u201d and creative genius. With an eye to Kierkegaard\u2019s gift for letting his anxiety fuel rather than hinder his creativity, Jung declares him a \u201cwhole\u201d person and not \u201ca jangling hither and dither of displeasing fragmentary souls,\u201d and writes:
\nTrue creative genius does not let itself be spoilt by analysis, but is freed from the impediments and distortions of a neurosis. Neurosis does not produce art. It is uncreative and inimical to life. It is failure and bungling. But the moderns mistake morbidity for creative birth \u2014 part of the general lunacy of our time.
\nIt is, of course, an unanswerable question what an artist would have created if he had not been neurotic. Nietzsche\u2019s syphilitic infection undoubtedly exerted a strongly neuroticizing influence on his life. But one could imagine a sound Nietzsche possessed of creative power without hypertension \u2014 something like Goethe. He would have written much the same as he did, but less strident, less shrill \u2014 i.e., less German \u2014 more restrained, more responsible, more reasonable and reverent.
\nArt from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.
\nA century before Alain de Botton offered his assuring perspective on the importance of breakdowns, Jung weighs what makes suffering generative or degenerative:
\nNeurosis is a justified doubt in oneself and continually poses the ultimate question of trust in man and in God. Doubt is creative if it is answered by deeds, and so is neurosis if it exonerates itself as having been a phase \u2014 a crisis which is pathological only when chronic. Neurosis is a protracted crisis degenerated into a habit, the daily catastrophe ready for use.
\nJung considers the advice he would have given Kierkegaard about how to orient to his suffering, which was the raw material of his philosophical writings:
\nIt doesn\u2019t matter what you say, but what it says in you. To it you must address your answers. God is straightaway with you and is the voice within you. You have to have it out with that voice.
\nCouple with a forgotten young poet\u2019s extraordinary letter to Emily Dickinson about how to bear your suffering, then revisit Kierkegaard himself on the value of despair.
\nArt from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.<\/p>\n