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“Rank asked why the artist so often avoids clinical neurosis when he is so much a candidate for it because of his vivid imagination, his openness to the finest and broadest aspects of experience, his isolation from the cultural worldview that satisfies everyone else. The answer is that he takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art. The neurotic is precisely the one who cannot create—the “artiste-manque,” as Rank so aptly called him. We might say that both the artist and the neurotic bite off more than they can chew, but the artist spews it back out again and chews it over in an objectified way, as an external, active, work project. The neurotic can’t marshal this creative response embodied in a specific work, and so he chokes on his introversions. The artist has similar large-scale introversions, but he uses them as material.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
I’ve mentioned this book several times in related posts, Ernest Becker’s 1973 Pulitzer-Prize winning book, The Denial of Death. I finally decided to just write a whole post on it because why not? Clearly, it’s had a profound impact on me. I first heard about the book during a podcast by Sam Harris discussing death.
For a very long time, I’ve had an intuitive feeling—rarely sketched out consciously on the page or verbally—that death underlay all human emotion and behavior in some way. It seemed fairly obvious. Throughout my life, I’ve noticed that most people seem to wear what Becker calls a “character armor,” a sort of metaphysical suit of armor that makes them magically believe that they either won’t die, or it’ll happen to “them” or that to the extent that they will die it’ll be a long, long time from now, and there’s no need to worry or think about it. (Why would you, right? Why go into that morbid, macabre corner of consciousness?)
But, as the above Becker quote suggests, the artist (and the neurotic, which are usually one and the same), “bite off more than they can chew.” Here’s another Becker quote:
“The ‘normal’ man bites off what he can chew and digest of life, and no more. In other words, men aren’t built to be gods, to take in the whole world; they are built like other creatures, to take in the piece of ground in front of their noses. Gods can take in the whole of creation because they alone can make sense of it, know what it is all about and for. But as soon as a man lifts his nose from the ground and starts sniffing at eternal problems like life and death, the meaning of a rose or a star cluster-then he is in trouble. Most men spare themselves this trouble by keeping their minds on the small problems of their lives just as their society maps these problems out for them. These are what Kierkegaard called the ‘immediate’ men and the ‘Philistines.’ They ‘tranquilize themselves with the trivial’- and so they can lead normal lives.”
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
The Artist, then, is the opposite of the philistine or the “immediate man”: He bites more than he can chew, he is a scatological clown, a cosmic lunatic, a spiritual punker. He’s a weirdo, a revolutionary a freak: He cannot help but “biting off more than he can chew”; he cannot ignore Reality, the thundering cold hard reality of Death, always present, always lurking there just around the corner of existence. The Artist is an ontological mutant. He cannot avoid the anxiety, the dread of being alive. This is what makes him an isolated loner: he is excommunicated from the land of the free and easy, the immediate men (Kierkegaard’s language) who see only the small and immediate right in front of their noses.
I’ve always been fascinated by people in general, society, “community” (there’s something squeamish and grotesque, to me, about this trendy millennial word, similar to the feeling I get about the equally trendy word “intersection”), and how human beings in modern times lie to themselves. Becker discusses this in detail in the book, the lies we tell ourselves about life and death. We try so hard to project outwards, using “perception-management,” to present ourselves and our families, partners, etc to The World. We think—falsely—that if we control the externals this will somehow map onto the inner landscape. But of course it doesn’t.
The privilege of the average person is the ability to lie to themselves about what Becker refers to as their “basic essential creatureliness.” We’re not gods, Becker warns the reader, we’re worms who have self-consciousness, metacognition, and sadly think we’re gods.
We feel this most sincerely as teens and in our twenties: Death is such a far-off illusory fantasy that it hardly feels real in any way. Unless, of course, you experience it directly and first-hand for some reason. In 2007—when I was 24—a good buddy and I were being driven by a woman we’d met at a bar in Ventura, California, where I grew up. We were all wasted. She crashed the car. Multiple roll accident. The car landed on its side. One second I was in the back, drunk, windows down, listening to The Misfits full volume, my buddy and the woman flirting up front, and the next second the car was on its side, part of the engine was on fire, glass was strewn across the road, the woman was pinned against the street in the driver’s side, and my buddy was lugging me carefully and slowly out of the wreck.
In that moment, young and dumb and drunk as I was, I grasped the realism of death.
Becker, as I said, discusses how death denial—a fundamental and unconscious process—affects more or less everyone. It’s near impossible not to struggle with this phenomenon on some basic level. Think about it. As far as we know, we’re the only creatures on Earth who have this crippling (for some) self-awareness about our own creatureliness. We know that we’re here for a limited amount of time, that life is temporary, ephemeral, brief. Nabokov’s “Brief crack of light between two abysses,” as he writes in his brilliant, stunning memoir, Speak, Memory. How do we reconcile these two realities: We have supreme self-awareness of the limitations of our existence…and we die. Not only do we die: We have little to no control, really, over how or when we die. Some control, but very little. And in the end, one way or another, it captures us.
Freud, characteristically for a book published in the early 1970s, is discussed throughout. Like many post-Freudian thinkers and psychologists today, Becker both appreciates the father of Psychoanalysis’s takes on the foundations of neurosis, and also criticizes the many problems and fallacies inherent in Freud’s ideas. If the man was a genius—and I think it’s obvious he was—he was a deeply flawed one, with at once the strong ability to trailblaze and come up with new profound theories, coupled with a bad case of ego, narcissism, sexism, fallacious ideas, and megalomania.
According to Becker, broadly speaking Freud’s biggest mistake was mixing up sex with death (which symbolically are quite linked together). For Freud everything—all neuroses—came back down to sex: Libido; taboo sexual cravings which had to necessarily be stifled in civil society; anal or penile fixation; penis envy; the child’s Oedipus Complex, the sexual desire for the mother and fugue need to alienate or symbolically “kill” the father; etc.
Becker’s point is that: Really, the true bullseye wasn’t sexual repression but death repression. What we fear is not sexual denial but death denial. The neuroses we experience stem not from taboo sexual cravings but from the deep terror of the fact that we die. Ergo, we are trained, consciously and unconsciously, by parents, society, the media, culture, peers, books, TV and film, etc to narrow our spiritual and metaphysical vision down to manageable size.
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