Is it true that tragedy chisels the best out of the good? Why is it that an Anurag Kashyap and a Franz Kafka had to have peculiar and traumatizing childhoods, which irked them to come out as avant-garde artists? Is it only the wronged and fractured who is entitled to have greatness as an attribute?
What of that normal, average Joe who wants to come out of the mould of mediocrity he’s made to fit into without being beset and hounded by tragedy and gloom? What of that person whose biggest tragedy in life is hair growing out of his derriere and chest fat accumulating to give rise to a shameful bulge? Why cannot a person with excellent parentage, jovial childhood, normal adolescence and merry adulthood be entitled to artistry of the finest class? Is it because of the prosaic and mundane nature of routine, everyday life? Is it because the tragedy of great men is itself looked upon as their greatness? Is the normal, healthy, ideal upbringing so enforced and encouraged by all forms of media, governance, textbooks and the likes only but a myth, an unachievable, impalpable average?
Why is a normally brought-up, normally grown-up, aspiring artist looked down upon with sneers that, if words had been given to them, would blare at full volume questions on the lines of “How can you create a work of art if you haven’t seen the harshness and ‘reality’ of life for yourself?”
Under these circumstances, is our Tom, Dick and Harry unjustified in inflicting tragedy upon himself? Is this the very harshness of life he is so fervently and constantly reminded by the so-called connoisseurs of art? Isn’t it the perfect, glistening example of ‘Misery seeks company’? If tragedy is so vital in character building and imparting artistic tendency, is not suicide and murder justified for an artist, someone who hasn’t been inherently bestowed with tragedy, but imposes it upon himself? Isn’t it similar to talent versus practice, of which the former is intrinsic and in-born, and the latter is gained, acquired through practical repetition and infliction? Or does it only mean that without involuntary or inborn tragedy, true artistry can never be achieved? Or is this write-up just a study in irrelevance and baseless argument?
The painter is not the art. Never commit the folly of interchanging the art and the artist, which we so often do. We talk not of the art as much as we make inroads into studying the artist. To understand Kafka’s body of work, many an interpreter choose to study his childhood. Wrong! Let the artist be independent of criticism, let his art be put to scrutiny and not himself, except, of course, when the central figure of your scrutiny is him instead of his art. The why, how and ‘under what conditions..’ are merely result of the deep rooted human trait of investigating for meaning, searching for answers, without which the mind refuses to be at rest. All human action is, when viewed from a large-enough frame of reference, genetic, pre-programmed and predictably instinctive. The inquisitiveness to find meaning in randomness, godliness in cold natural selection, reassurance and order in chaos is a result of humanness, something that unifies the most artistic and the blandest parts of us. The questions, though, still remain.
Bob Dylan’s (titular) few words have all the answers. Smell them, feel them, and grasp them if you can. I cannot, and the result is this discharge. I feel purged already.
