A New Dark Age? Or, Negativity is a Friend to Good Art.

Today's task: To find a positive hidden in the negative.

The world just keeps on going to shit, doesn't it?

There's no point in sugarcoating the truth. We live in strange, broken times. Every single step forward is seemingly countermanded by two steps back. The Hydra effect; every time you succeed in cutting off one head, that motherfucker just grows two more back to replace it...and bites down on your hand just as hard as before.

Last year, my home country finally pulled their heads out from their collective arse and voted into power the first left(ish, let's be honest) government in nearly fourteen years. Indeed, things can only get better, as the song goes. Just a few months later and many could argue that our transatlantic brethren did the opposite, taking a big step back in time four years, to re-elect quite possibly their worst, certainly their most divisive, Commander-in-Chief in history. I won't even write his name, you all know who I'm talking about. By the time this post is published, he'll be calling the shots again. To say that many of my American writer friends were understandably shaken by the fact that their fellow folk could be so forgetful as to revisit the still-recent past would be one massive fucking understatement. But hey, he promised cheaper eggs and gas, so it's swings and roundabouts, right? Things can only get better? Not for a while they can't. Sorry D-Ream, your optimism rings like little more than hollow naivety right now.

Find a positive hidden in the negative. How in the name of Satan's left bollock are you going to do that? I hear you ask. Bear with me a little while longer, okay? I'm getting to it, I promise.

Vincent Van Gogh produced some of the most beautiful works of art known, yet ended his life in obscurity, a tortured man who believed that he would amount to nothing in his lifetime. Charles Bukowski is heralded as a great author (by some people, at least), he was, it has been strongly suggested, a rambling drunk. Sylvia Plath was an incredibly talented and rightly-regarded poet, whose personal struggles with depression eventually became too much. All too often, phrases are bandied about such as poor starving artist, and tortured creative, and gifted soul plagued by demons. Beauty is often borne from pain, art transcends misery. Horror is a real emotion, something that comes from reality, that speaks to people, reminding them that maybe their own lives aren't quite so bad after all. What I guess I'm trying to say with this is that horror is a necessary genre, it's vital. It holds a mirror up, reminding us of what we actually have, as much as what we risk losing. It's a safe way to venture into the darkness without a torch, in the knowledge that, if the shit gets too deep, we can still stumble along and find our way back out again. But in addition, it also serves as a form of therapy for the creator. I've said before on several occasions that, for me, writing is therapeutic, it's a vent, a way of exorcising the darkness and frustration from life. If gives cause to wonder, would Van Gogh have created such works of art if his life was more straightforward and comfortable? Would the writings of Sylvia Plath and Edgar Allan Poe have been as memorable, so beautiful and ugly and macabre if they were happier? Would Bukowski have been able to write about the seedy underbelly if he hadn't experienced it - lived it - himself? The world is a dark place, filled with things of which to be afraid. It is the role of the artist to embrace that darkness, to lay it out for all to see, to show that, yes, the light at the end of the tunnel is weak and flickering. But at least it's still there, providing something ever so faint to walk towards. Darkness begets good art, and in times of trouble, art is what people turn to. They need it...and they need the people who make it.

And there's plenty of good art still to be made.

Chins up people, we've got work to do.

Love,

- L