Good Art, Good Grief 4 comments

By Lucas Kwong

I was supposed to turn this entry in approximately a week ago, and it was supposed to be about Bjork’s February 16th concert in Seoul, which I had been planning on attending—art, faith, mystery, and Icelandic wailing.

Instead, God decided that my life should become infinitely stranger than even Bjork herself, and on the evening of the concert I was at home in Vancouver, B.C., mourning the loss of someone close to me. Not family, but someone as close to my heart as family.

After plunging headlong into the “anger” stage of the Kubler-Ross grief cycle—a less-than-dignified episode that found me drunkenly careening through the halls of a Korean ski resort, while singing Death Cab for Cutie’s “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” at the top of my lungs—my brain, having no other defense, turned to familiar preoccupations. Even as I fumbled through the personal repercussions of my friend’s passing, the artist in me could not help but meditate on the aesthetic possibilities inherent in the tragedy. The circumstances surrounding my friend’s death are so archetypal as to be the stuff of some as-yet-unwritten folk dirge: a wintry day in the country, a casual decision to hitch a ride across a frozen lake, a crack in the ice, a flood of freezing water. One might also note that my friend, a devout Catholic of 22 years, died on the Feast of the Presentation, a holy day commemorating the Christ child’s dedication in the temple.

Lastly, she died two days before my birthday, meaning that, for the rest of my life, Feb. 2-4 will represent a kind of personal Easter, death and life intimately intertwined.

It’s not too much of a stretch, then, to surmise that someone of my proclivities would be obsessing over the difficulties of forging art from grief. I initially felt a vague sense of self-loathing at the thought that my friend’s passing should become mere fodder for my creative endeavors. Was I, in some sense, exploiting her death as a means to create? Writing a song usually provokes an instinctual sense of joy for me, but the thought of deriving any joy from the circumstances turned my stomach.

Moreover, even once I’d realized that such qualms were superseded by the overwhelming need to make something from my misery, I ran into another problem. So overpowering is the shock of losing a loved one, particularly for the first time, that it seemed to completely obviate the sense of rigor and ruthlessness that I have always associated with artistic craft. “Kill your darlings” has always been a cardinal rule for me, but how to put one’s darlings to death when death has unveiled itself as the ultimate foe? I wanted to work out my pain through music, but the last thing I wanted to do was commemorate my friend with a diary entry masquerading as song lyrics.

Now that a few weeks have passed, I’m starting to realize that making good art out of grief requires bifurcating into two selves: the griever and the craftsman. Only by consciously shifting from one mode to the other can one hold onto sanity in the act of creation; yet only through the partnership of the two personalities can anything good truly come to fruition. The craftsman serves to check the impulses of the griever; to gently but firmly channel the excess of expression that emotional trauma demands; to ensure that what is produced is a fitting tribute to the dead it seeks to honor.

Meanwhile, the griever continually grounds the craftsman in the here and now, insisting that what is produced be rooted in raw reality rather than the exploitative sentimentality that I so feared at first...and, in the case of the performing songwriter, I think it is the griever who ultimately takes the stage to act out the psychodrama of grief.

Admittedly, while all this makes for an interesting exercise in abstraction, I have yet to work out how to practically manage the two selves, how to quiet the griever long enough for the craftsman to take control and actually finish a work. I suspect, however, that working out these questions may be a long-term enterprise. Death has a way of raising questions that require the rest of one’s life to answer.