Why art matters in difficult times

  • Post category:Book NewsCreativity
  • Reading time:2 mins read

Writing at the Wellspring: Tapping the Source of Your Inner Genius is now fully typeset and laid out, and the proofs have been through a couple of rounds of corrections. Here’s a two-page spread from the book’s introduction. It’s a section where I talk about why art matters in difficult times. Creative pursuits, following your muse or daemon, can seem trivial in an age bristling with real-world crises. I argue that this impression is mistaken, as artistic creativity is all the more important at a time like this.

Yesterday I came across a popular TEDx talk from five months ago in which author and creativity coach Amie McNee makes the very same point, though with some different emphases. Titled “The Case for Making Art When the World Is on Fire,” it resonates strongly with my words in the Wellspring intro, as reflected in the video’s official description:

The world is on fire—figuratively and literally. And in the middle of all this chaos, I want you to make art. In this passionate and empowering TEDx talk, writer and creative coach Amie McNee challenges the idea that art is frivolous or indulgent in difficult times. She argues that creativity is not a luxury—it’s a necessity. Art calms us, connects us, and gives us purpose. It heals our bodies, minds, and communities. More than that, it’s an act of rebellion, a tool for hope, and a legacy that outlasts us all. If you’ve ever felt like your creativity doesn’t matter, like painting, writing, singing, or creating is a waste of time in a world with so many problems—this talk is for you.

The talk is well worth listening to:

Writing at the Wellspring is scheduled for a November release, with cover art currently in the works. For progress updates and launch news, you can subscribe to this blog or to my Living Dark newsletter. Or to both. I’ll let you know when preorders are available.

When reality outweirds fiction

At what point will we no longer need to read weird fiction or watch weird cinema anymore because we can just look out the window, step out the door, watch the news, or introspect for five minutes to encounter everything we always sought from such art and entertainment?

There’s a great deal of strangeness and dread afoot these days as we navigate collectively—and, it seems to me, rather blindly—through a kind of transformational gauntlet across every dimension of life: social, cultural, political, psychological, economic, educational, religious, spiritual, ecological, and even biological. It will be fascinating to see what this all does to art and literature. Or maybe, with the meteoric rise of the weird to an unprecedented level of cultural prominence and centrality in the early twenty-first century, we’re already seeing it.

The real question may be just how truly weird reality will end up becoming. On this note, one can’t help wondering: Would—or will—that quality of weirdness be located only in our subjective experience, in our minds and perspectives, standing as a mere mental interpretation and emotional coloration laid over an objective world that remains unchanged? Or will it also, in the manner peculiar to the very mode or genre of weird storytelling, manifest “out there” in the world, revealing a nondual identification of outer and inner? Will it perhaps take on the guise, role, and unsettling force of the Old English root of our modern word “weird”: wyrd, meaning fate, destiny, and/or a supernatural force that controls both.

More: Has the weird already done this, already alchemized the inner-outer field of our experience, working a fundamental and still-unfolding transmutation upon it, while we simply weren’t paying attention?

Is our current global weirding not an aberration, but an indication, an unveiling, a revelation of a deeper order?

Gloating over violence corrupts us all

A friend has posted the following at Facebook: “Irrespective of how much you dislike someone, gloating over their death is a sign of low-IQ scumbaggery.” He’s talking about the outpouring of glee among some liberal quarters over Charlie Kirk’s murder two days ago. This friend is a die-hard liberal, mind you. And what he’s saying is correct (though I think the form of his criticism, with its harsh name-calling, is not helpful).

The current indulgence, among some people, in selectively condoning or even praising violence based on their political identification reminds me of the same trend two decades ago, back during the George W. Bush era. It was less developed in America then, but at the time, when I was operating under a former (now deleted) Facebook account, I noted with dismay—and I publicly criticized—some of the rhetoric that some self-identified progressive liberals were freely using to invoke violent images and ideas in their tirades against W. I mean things like referring to the French Revolution and guillotines when proclaiming their profound antipathy for Bush and all that he and his administration represented. I got pounced on by a few friends for supposedly not understanding the situation, for minimizing how awful Bush and Republicans were, for downplaying the apocalyptic gravity of the crisis they represented, etc., etc. People tried to tell me that violent language was fully justified by the circumstances.

My response back then was the same as my friend’s response to Kirk’s murder now: Literally and absolutely nothing justifies gloating, joking about, or advocating—whether sarcastically or seriously—political violence. This kind of talk can have nothing but ill effects, whether it’s liberals spouting it toward Trump and Charlie Kirk or conservatives spouting it toward Obama, Biden, and Kamala. And yes, of course, I’m well aware that people on the right end of the political spectrum are quite guilty of it, too.

Such language represents playing with fire. And the fact that the people who indulge in it try to justify it, both morally and on utilitarian grounds (“Somebody has to call out the evil people! Somebody has to stop them!”), and that such an attitude has taken root pretty broadly in some quarters, shows just how far down the rabbit hole of a polluted and corrupted social-political environment and accompanying warped media ecosystem we’ve fallen.

At this point it’s up to each of us, individually, to wake up, examine our conscience, and make responsible choices. Maybe questioning the validity of our own viewpoint and the effect of our inner state on the world we perceive, especially if that viewpoint and state are marked by self-righteousness and an attitude that demonizes and dehumanizes other people, would make a good start.

The strange freedom of choosing misery

Most of us are engaged, more or less unconsciously, in a continual attempt to convince ourselves that it’s impossible for us to be really, finally happy. We make an airtight case for our unhappiness, pinning it on various supposedly unalterable conditions and inescapable circumstances. Our life, we say—at least to ourselves, and sometimes to others in one way or another—simply won’t let us be happy.

But the truth is that no condition, whether objective/external or subjective/internal, ever forces our ultimate attitude or outlook. As Viktor Frankl famously observed in Man’s Search for Meaning, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” The external context where Frankl discovered this truth for himself was one of the most nightmarish imaginable: a series of Nazi concentration camps, where he was imprisoned for three years. One might expect an environment like that to torture the sense of attitudinal autonomy clean out of a person. But for Frankl, it was the crucible where a living awareness of ultimate human freedom was forged.

Importantly, a corollary of Frankl’s insight is also true, representing its complement or converse: We can actually choose to limit our own freedom of choice. Usually, we do this unconsciously. As Richard Bach observed in Illusions, “Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.”

It’s a sad and, in the end, useless thing that we do, employing our freedom to convince ourselves and others that we’re not free, that our life is a miserable trap. The door is always open, but we insist that it’s closed.

The Intimacy of Writing by Hand

  • Post category:Book News
  • Reading time:1 min read

Today I started correcting the first batch of page proofs for Writing at the Wellspring. Not with a computer keyboard, but by hand.

I love the tactile sense of intimate connection to the text that’s generated by this approach. Stephen King has talked about writing the entire first draft of Dreamcatcher by hand when he was unable to sit at a word processor while recovering from his near-fatal encounter with that van. He said this approach reconnected him with the language in a way he hadn’t felt for years.

I grok that completely. Whether writing or editing, working with text by hand is the most intimate experience you can have with it, a direct and embodied relationship. And it’s deeply satisfying for the clarity and connection it brings.