Tin Man's Books and Records: When Walls Become Doorways

Dear Companions,

My dad used to tell me that great philosophers never come from warm climates. Meaning, when the weather is good, people do not worry about the deeper things. Numerous other experiences shaped my belief that philosophers and artists must face adversity in order to be great. But I guess in my naive imagination, I always envisioned something romantic, like a good looking drug addict, someone who wasn’t deeply depressed but rather forlorn. An artist in a cafe in France, holding court, smoke cigarettes with ageless lungs.  I didn’t think about the isolation they may instead be living through, prison sentences, the chronicity of illness, the real unenviable depths of enduring hell that many, artists go through. Often, it’s not a romantic place whatsoever. There is no beauty in it, unless you create the beauty, unless you transcend.

Tori Zausner, wrote a book called When Walls become Doorways specifically addressing many artists, both contemporary and classic, that were shaped by a transforming illness, including sudden or chronic illness, accidents, physical injuries, visual disturbances, cognitive difficulties, congenital defects, and more. Zausner herself diagnosed with ovarian cancer, but later completed a doctoral degree, began painting and researching biographies of other artists in similar predicaments.

She asks:

What is transforming illness and how does it work? Can anyone have a transforming illness? Why is creativity central to its effectiveness and so beneficial that artists choose to be creative when they are sick?

I think this book is a useful resource for folks who have fallen on hard circumstances, or need some motivation to dig deep. Everyone is an artist inside, it’s just that the world is so alluring, it is difficult to say no to it, to focus, until you are forced to, compelled to, sidelined, left behind.

We all have an inner artist, an inner creativity which can come out in how we raise our children, or tend to our garden, but often the activities of life override our real potential. Illness presents the opportunity to fill the empty hours with creation. 

A great example to start with is Francisco Goya. He is inspirational to me in the sense that he was struck with illness in his prime, which forced him to be less social, and dramatically changed his style. He became more prolific, stopped working solely on commission, and produced his great pieces of art afterward.

Goya began having blackouts and hallucinations. His other symptoms were deafness, partial paralysis, vision problems, noise in his head, loss of balance, etc. He was in bed for months, deaf, half paralyzed and intermittently delirious. Most symptoms went away, but his deafness was permanent, at the age of 46 years old. [We do not know exactly what disease he had], but Goya felt that he barely escaped with his life, and after the ordeal he created his best work. He said of the group of paintings made shortly after his recovery, not only for income but to occupy imagination, which had been depressed by dwelling on his misfortune.  He said of his deafness, that it was not silence, but a barrage of unwanted sounds, and he used painting to divert himself from the constant inner noise. 

Difficult as it was, the illness became a turning point and afterward his production increased. Perhaps the deafness limited his social interactions, forced him to concentrate on art, thus making him more prolific. Previously he painted on commission now he painted more for himself….Before being sick, he made brightly colored paintings, but afterward dark shadows appeared giving his images greater structure and power.

Goya’s last largest project, known as the Black Paintings, are scenes of fantasy and the macabre. Works that artists create for themselves reveal their innermost nature. Social amenities are dispensed with and the unconscious becomes visible. Beginning as an 18th century rococo painter of colorful and pleasant pastimes, Goya changed the essence of his work after his deafness. He became a romantic painter and one of the great forerunners of modern art

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This Black Painting entitled Saturn Devouring his Son comes up a lot at our dinner table over the years….

I’ve talked a lot about isolation in Away Messages, often mentioning the walls. While I adorn them more and more with posters, maps, and inspirational photographs including Helen Bonham Carter in Fight Club, I know that these images are affixed upon a barrier, a physical manifestation of the existential threat of life. It is the walls, more than the pain, which I believe will forever haunt me.

Chicken scratch by me having a bad day, stuck in my room, in front of the big mirror.

In the book, I was struck by the profound number of of artists who learned by simply drawing the things in their room, where they may have spent months on end. As Zausner writes:

The heightened sensitivity during illness can be affected by objects as ordinary as furniture in a room. Sometimes a bedridden child will be influenced by gazing at whatever is nearby. Humans need visual stimulation. We usually receive this form the variety of objects and events we encounter in daily activities. But a child sick in bed with few distractions may fills this need by focusing on objects in the immediate environment. A piece of furniture can become so important to an immobilized child that it shapes the art produced in adulthood. This happened Tony Smith during bouts of tuberculosis.

Tony Smith trouble with TB started at 4 and continued into adolescent. He was quarantined in a room built in the backyard of his home. He focused on the magnificent piece of furniture in the room, a black metal stove. Its geometric form because extremely important to him. “If one spends a long time in a room with only one object, that object becomes like a deity.” The adult Smith became known for his large geometric sculptures many done in black metal, like the stove that dominated his room….

This Tony Smith piece is called Moondog (1964), but I can see the oven too.

So why is it that illness presents such an opportune time to develop one’s creative self? Why is it our instinct to do so? How does creativity and art become our will manifest to survive?

Zausner puts forward several explanations.

1. Chaos Theory: One theory she posits likens illness with chaos . Chaos theory holds that a state of turbulence in which things may appear disordered, actually has an inherent structure that can produce new order  Transforming illness also looks disordered but it too holds the seeds for a new existence. 

2. Coping: Another theory she posits is psychological, that creativity as a coping mechanism for something unbearable. 

3. Self Efficacy: Creativity also generates self-efficacy, the way we perceive ourselves and our belief that the things we do make a difference. These beliefs inspire motivation, and determine our behavior. 

4. Projection: Another interesting suggestion is the idea of artist sense themselves in their creations. We can paint or write something and become enveloped in the moment of its creation, becoming what we create as it appears.

   “The feeling of projection is so intense that it becomes the artists total world in the moment, blocking out all other stimuli.”

And it goes beyond that.  Creativity is actually healing in and of itself. As Tori explains:

Creative pursuits consist of commitment , control and challenge, all of which an illness aims to destabilize, destroy, and with it one’s immune system. Regaining a sense of control, enhances one’s immune system . You decide what is going to be on the paper or canvas and control the world you create. By compensation for what is lost due to illness, creativity restores a sense of wholeness. 

One more interesting perspective presented by the psychologist Paul Camic, who worked with people suffering from chronic pain, said that creativity may produce a response in our body similar to laughter. I remember the first time I laughed in the abyss of pain this summer. It’s nice to imagine that even when I typed Away Messages with the grimmest of feelings, the very act of it had the effect of inducing laughter in my nervous system.

Allow me to share some more examples of relevant artists with transformational illnesses from Zausner’s book:

Rembrandt could not see colors, which made him more sensitive to the gradations of light and dark, one said of him “seeing the world more or less in browns, freed him to calibrate luminosity with a delicacy as expressive as any palette of colors.”

Frida Khalo was in an accident at 18 years old, left her immobilized in bed for months. In addition she had spina bifida and polio from earlier in life. When she describes paining, she said it gave her a feeling of control, even if only on the canvas. She said: I paint because I need to. 

Renoir had debilitating arthritis, and eventually he used a wheelchair.  The more intolerable his suffering became, the more he painted. 

I suppose since the medium I have a special predilection toward is writing I should include a few authors as well. Proust wrote entire books in bed, and between chronic illness and predisposition, ended up spending much of his life there. He is said to have suffered from anything between asthma, to Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, while also considered one of the greatest writers of all time. To read Proust, my dad recommended I start with In Search of Lost Time, which comes in a 4-box book set. Wishing myself luck!

New Yorker: Proust was a serial reviser, changing isolated words and perfecting sentences and phrases right up until the very end. Even at the late galley stage, we find him still undecided about one of the most famous sentences in all of modern literature, finally settling on “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure” (“For a long time, I went to bed early”).

Writing is adept at relieving discomfort and anxiety, not simply by diversion, but by extraction. The page becomes a companion, and the words a desire for survival by their very existence, and by the fact that they are endless. They become the proof to oneself, when proof is sorely lacking, that one wants to press on, even if to catalogue the most mundane of things, or to express the desperation to not live on. But then once once revises each crestfallen word so that it is written well, one is left with a feeling of satisfaction, perhaps even marvel supplants the sadness, and ultimately the self destructive force is partially vanquished by the mere act of editing.

Joan Diddion said in her essay, On Why We Write:

Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind? 

And so I continue to clack away. With the guiding spirits of Rembrandt, Proust, Khalo, Diddion, Smith, Renoir, and many more. In fact, who is exempt from transformational illness? Yes, there are certain illnesses that are more prone to transformation simply due to their acuteness, or the way they drag on, or for the feelings of isolation they create, like Long Haul folks, TMS folks, all the people who were isolated in hospitals or in nursing homes during COVID…but ultimately, all humans, all bodies decay, encounter strife, all of us know what we are up against, at the end, and things will cause the full-on stop, or the detour, or the veer, yet we persist, we seek to say something with our lives. Tori Zausner again:

Wholeness is our core self that cannot be destroyed, and when we can access it through creativity, the result is art. While perfection is an end, wholeness is ongoing and unique for each person. It is a place that transcends perfection, a natural force that physical illness cannot diminish or takeaway, it is available to everyone. Nobody is perfect, yet all of us are whole. Embracing or wholeness we realize there is a choice: We can focus on discomfort or we can transform. And when we change ourselves, we change our world. 

So perhaps the next time I see a sick child, or an isolated adult, I will buy them art supplies, a beautiful notebook with a written prompt inside, or I will buy them a class from Gotham Writing Workshops online. I know now that these will not be received as facetious or simple gifts. They will offer doorways for my friend to find his or her new existence, and perhaps we can meet somewhere in the ether, like in the wild imagination of Drop Dead Fred.

Much Love from the HealingVrse

Rebecca