Desperation
My take on desperation has changed a bit since I started reading Charles Bukowski. Before diving into what has changed, I need to start from the beginning.
Here’s my take on desperation from 2 years back:
Nice guys don’t finish last. Desperate guys finish last. Your desperation leaves a stench behind you, which isn’t an attractive trait and it pushes people away. The more desperate you are, the more you push away the thing you truly want.
But when you pursue your goals with aggression. There’s an aggressive energy that people love to be around. They love seeing the fire and drive within you. Hone it. But don’t let it go towards the tangent of desperation. Take it towards obsession.
Desperation makes you look weak and gives an upper hand to your opponent. No mater what curve ball life throws at you. You are jobless for over a year or whatever. Have the aggression to do something about it. Don’t be desperate that someone will come and give it to you.
I still stand by those words but there’s more to desperation than I thought. There is a certain kind of artistic beauty that you can’t achieve unless you have been touched by desperation.
In Bukowski's words, “It takes a lot of desperation dissatisfaction and disillusion to write a few good poems. It's not for everybody either to write it or even to read it.”
Now, I don’t understand it. I have always seen poetry akin to divinity that comes from a place of love, sorrow or something heartfelt. I have experienced that when I read poetries by Rumi or Lang Leav. But still, I tried to dig into what an author’s or artist’s expression would look like if it came from a place of desperation, and one word came to mind — Authenticity.
When someone is desperate, disillusioned or in deep despair, they are at the lowest of their life. They are going to experience raw emotions that can translate into emotionally powerful creative works.
The depth of that suffering acts as a catalyst for them to tap into their vulnerability and creating something honest and real on the page or canvas. They start seeing the beauty amidst the pain, and the full range of human emotions
Now Charles Bukowski naturally came from a place where he had to see the worst and live through it. But the starving artist persona created by people who were influenced by his works is a mirage. They came up with the idea of starving artists to basically torture themselves for raw emotions. I guess that speaks of their desperation.