By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

When AI first began colonizing language — which is still our best instrument for bridging the abyss between us, a container for thought and feeling that shapes the contents — 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 — Whitman did not rhyme — 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) — a question fundamentally about what it means to be human.

I 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.

She paused, then said: “Because AI hasn’t suffered.”

On 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 — those lives of poverty and privation, those ill-fated exercises in projection mistaken for love, all those premature deaths — was a fair price to pay for such creative volcanicity.

On the other hand, this is reality: Art is the music we make from the bewildered cry of being alive — 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’s art is their coping mechanism for what they are living through — the longings, the heartbreaks, the triumphs, the wars within and without. It is these painful convolutions of the psyche — which used to be termed neurosis at the dawn of modern psychotherapy, and which we may simply call suffering — 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.

Our 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.

Carl Jung

No 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–June 6, 1961), who thought deeply about the nature of creativity.

In 1943, a scholar of Kierkegaard asked Jung’s opinion of the relationship between “psychological problems” and creative genius. With an eye to Kierkegaard’s gift for letting his anxiety fuel rather than hinder his creativity, Jung declares him a “whole” person and not “a jangling hither and dither of displeasing fragmentary souls,” and writes:

True 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 — part of the general lunacy of our time.

It is, of course, an unanswerable question what an artist would have created if he had not been neurotic. Nietzsche’s syphilitic infection undoubtedly exerted a strongly neuroticizing influence on his life. But one could imagine a sound Nietzsche possessed of creative power without hypertension — something like Goethe. He would have written much the same as he did, but less strident, less shrill — i.e., less German — more restrained, more responsible, more reasonable and reverent.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.

A century before Alain de Botton offered his assuring perspective on the importance of breakdowns, Jung weighs what makes suffering generative or degenerative:

Neurosis 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 — a crisis which is pathological only when chronic. Neurosis is a protracted crisis degenerated into a habit, the daily catastrophe ready for use.

Jung considers the advice he would have given Kierkegaard about how to orient to his suffering, which was the raw material of his philosophical writings:

It doesn’t 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.

Couple with a forgotten young poet’s extraordinary letter to Emily Dickinson about how to bear your suffering, then revisit Kierkegaard himself on the value of despair.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.