All the Mornings in the World

The idea that creativity and suffering are inextricably linked - that creativity in fact demands suffering - is age-old and widespread. Aldous Huxley wrote in Antic Hay, "Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?" Artists from El Greco to Gaugin to Marvin Gaye have echoed this thought, and the list of creative geniuses who have tortured themselves in one way or another goes on almost endlessly.

I know exactly when I first grasped this concept. It was 1993, and a wonderful cello teacher named Milly took me and a friend to see the French movie Tous les matins du monde. It's about a famous viola da gamba player, Sainte Colombe, who shuts himself away from the world after his wife's death, and tragedy ensues. I am sure there was much about the movie that went over my 13-year-old head, but I do remember thinking as we left the theater that perhaps Sainte Colombe wouldn't have been such a great musician if he hadn't been so unhappy.

I thought of this again while watching the new Netflix documentary Tig. The first half of the film chronicles a string of stunning misfortunes that befell stand-up comedian Tig Notaro in 2012, starting with a near-fatal C Diff infection, followed by her mother's death in a freak accident, followed by the diagnosis of her breast cancer. You might think that after experiencing all that a person could never be funny again, but instead she did a show the very next day at the Largo, and that show has made her career. She opened with "Good evening. Hello. I have cancer.” Louis CK called the set "masterful", and Ed Helms called it "one of the most amazing stand-up sets I've ever seen". The album of her set sold 75,000 copies in a week.

I'm sure Tig Notaro, like all of us, would rather not have had cancer, and I'm sure she would also rather not have had C Diff and would rather not have lost her mother. But without suffering through those horrible experiences, her brilliant Largo set wouldn't have happened. Would she have done something else equally as brilliant? The world will never know.

But what I want to believe is this: creativity doesn't require suffering, it requires courage. The confusion comes in because courage so often coexists with suffering, because courage is necessary in order to survive the suffering. But if you do survive, the memory of the pain fades, while the strength it imparts to your soul remains forever. And that strength is, I think, what allows someone let go of their fears and do something bold.

As I approach the end of my first - and I hope, last - year of cancer, a year of more suffering than the rest of my life combined, I find myself wondering what I might do now that I wouldn't have had the courage to do before. I'm not planning to take up the viola da gamba or stand-up comedy, but I know that I do feel the urge to do something, make something, be something more. When I was first diagnosed, my sense of loss was profound. But now I think I get it - my losses have made room in me for something new.