Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

"What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you,

`This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moon-light between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!'

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, `You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine!'"

In his essay, Mourning and Melancholia, Freud states that melancholia, like mourning, is a reaction of grief to the loss of a loved object. "In mourning, it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia, it is the ego itself."[3] Therefore, mourning is grief over the loss of someone or something beloved. Melancholia is grief over the loss of the ego. "With one exception, the same traits (of melancholia) are met with in mourning,"[4]

Freud states. Melancholia remains an unnatural open wound; mourning, a natural process, frees the participant upon its completion. The mourning or death process is similar to the creative process … the mourning process is a death process for the living in which the participant travels the cycle of adjustment when a loved one leaves. In the death process one may or may not find permanent rebirth, but one loses self-awareness and so achieves a temporary rebirth at least. In the mourning process, one must find rebirth; if not, one is in a cycle of melancholia instead. The mourning/death process, likened to the creative process,[5] gives new life, new art, new form.

Freud says the need to be an artist comes from early childhood and a sense of loss that enables the artist to see things differently. This vision rules his life. Not entirely neurotic, not entirely normal, the artist is endowed with a creative personality and a ruthless passion that allows him to separate his own grief feelings of melancholia from his grief feelings of mourning (death/rebirth or creativity cycle). Longing for normalcy, the artist is constantly fought by his need for art, by his vision, by his inner life. Beset by melancholia, his ruthless passion for his inner life during his session (days, weeks, months) of producing an art work separates him from his neurosis. Grief is interpreted as mourning, not depression. Mourning, a positive process in life, leads the sufferer to change and growth, to a kind of rebirth, to a condition previously unknown.

http://www.critiquemagazine.com/article/joyce.html

...my opinion is that it`s certainly best to separate an artist far enough from his work, so that one does not take him with the same seriousness as one does his work. In the final analysis, he is only the precondition for his work, its maternal womb, the soil or, in some cases, the dung and manure out of which it grows - and thus, in most cases, something that we must forget about, if we want to enjoy the work itself. Our understanding of the origin of a work involves physiologists and vivisectionists of the spirit - never the aesthetic men, the artists, never!
From the Genealogy of Morals. What Do Ascetic Ideals Mean? Nietzsche.