I was walking along a path with two friends - the sun was setting -
suddenly the sky turned blood red - I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence - there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city - my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety - and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature. Munch
Here is a copy of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" - sometimes called "The Cry". If I were looking for an evocative image to portray raw angst of life
this is it ...
This reminds me so much of the other side of Jean Paul Sartre's nausea for whom the idea of other people was hell and for Munch raw existence without connection is also hell. It's interesting that this painting is part of a greater series of painting he did, The Frieze of Life, a series of paintings he produced in the 1890s. The Frieze symbolically examines the journey from love and passion, to jealousy and melancholy, to anxiety and death.
Just examine his biography. Munch's life was full of anxiety. When he was 5 years old, his mother died of TB and his favorite sister Sophie died nine years later. Then he was 25, his father died and yet more happened. After his father's death, his sister, Laura, went mad and was committed to an asylum. I find for myself a link to Nietzsche's death of God and through Munch's being influenced by a nihilist philosopher, Hans Jaeger.
My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness ... Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder....My sufferings are part of my self and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art.Munch I think was part of the expressionist period of art history where the artist does not reproduce reality like a photograph but is recording the raw emotional impact on his own consciousness.
I suspect that Munch found this fear necessary to be creative. What sort of fear might be creative or even essential to the human person?
For me I am influenced by Paul Brand's ideas about both the negativity and positiveness of pain. This has been real for me across my life and I met him many years ago in my godmother's home. Few people would count pain as a blessing His publishers assert "But his fifty-year career working with leprosy patients in India and the U.S. convinced Dr. Paul Brand that pain is one of God's great gifts to us. As an indicator that tells us something is wrong, pain has a value that becomes clearest in its absence. Those who feel no pain reap terrible consequences."
I suspect fear is what drives us both positively and negatively. The beginning of Wisdom is fear of the Lord says the Bible. Fear and despair can drive us to seek meaning and purpose in life. Without this we become dead inside.
I prefer strangling and death, rather than this body of mine. I despise my life; I would not live forever. Let me alone; my days have no meaning. "What is man that you make so much of him, that you give him so much attention, ... Job 7:15-17
