When I First Screamed
Whether you write or sing or dance, whether you paint or sculpt, if your life is a poem, then your need to create is likely as strong as your need to live.
“Millions of people can draw,” Chaim Potok proclaimed in his 1972 novel My Name Is Asher Lev. “Art is whether there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way.”
I first screamed in September 2012. After resigning from senior management at Forbes Media, the purveyor of billionaire capitalism, I took the bus from Madison Square Garden in New York City to Union Station in Washington, D.C., where my father picked me up. I wanted to visit family before I set off on my walkabout. We got in the car to drive to my childhood home in the suburbs where my parents still lived. Worried I’d abandoned my job without a plan, he admonished me not to do anything that would “violate my covenants,” a reference to the sacred promises Mormons make in their temples. He patted my knee as he said this and as soon as he did my breathing became fast and shallow. When we got to the house I rushed up the stairs to my old bedroom, shut the door behind me, and flopped facedown onto the mattress. Then came the scream, which erupted like lava from a volcano, blistering the walls.
The scream was defiant. It defied the disconnection I felt from my body and soul, from nature and True Nature. The philosopher John Holloway says, “It is from rage that thought is born, not from the pose of reason,” and since then, for more than a dozen years, I’ve investigated reconnection and wholeness, chasing down leads like a detective hunting, doggedly, for an abducted child—only it’s more personal, like a father out all night, night after night, in search of his son, surviving on the intensity of his indignant love.
After all the searching I arrive back at art, and I’m not alone in resorting to it as both a refuge and a battle cry. Here is how diarist Anaïs Nin explains it:
“I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me—the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living.”
Like her, starting with these words, I’m creating a world in which I can live.