As a writer I often feel like I am in
trouble. This is something a writer should never say or admit to
feeling. Not if they want to continue to write and not if they want
others to think of them as writers who know how to write. Writing
produces constant dread and anxiety: the feeling that I have to write,
but can’t. That I don’t know how or never will again. This is how
writing starts. This means that writing is not simply what I do, it is
also what I cannot do and might never do again.
In the documentary Bergman Island (2006), Ingmar Bergman
makes a list of his demons and then reviews each one on camera. Bergman
admitted to having many fears, but the one fear he said he never had was
the “Demon of Nothingness,” which is “Quite simply when the creativity
of [your] imagination abandons [you]. That things get totally silent,
totally empty. And there’s nothing there.”
Bergman Island ends with Bergman describing a fear that he
claims to have never had, to have never even known, and which his huge
body of work (63 films) corroborates to some extent (the way that a
corpus of work always corroborates the ability rather than the inability
to work), but which nevertheless burrowed into his life in other ways:
his films, which featured characters, often artists—both men and
women—grappling with the fear of Nothingness. In Bergman’s films,
characters wrestle with being abandoned and betrayed not by their
imaginations—for fears produce their own fantastic fiction—but by the
inability to creatively hone, represent, and endure those imaginations.
In Bergman Island Bergman also talks about the Nothingness
of death. The way he thought about and was “touched” by death every
single day of his life. Then one day, while under anesthesia for an
operation, he realized that because death is nothing (“a light that goes
out”), it did not need to be feared. The love that Bergman felt for his
last wife, Ingrid von Rosen, to whom he was married (after many other
marriages) for twenty-four years until she died, forced him to once
again reevaluate death and whether or not death effaces Nothingness.
Bergman loved Ingrid, wanted to feel her presence after her death;
wanted to be reunited with her, and therefore couldn’t allow himself, he
says, to see death as an end to life, for that would have meant an end
to Ingrid too.
I watched Bergman Island and Bergman’s 1968 gothic horror, Hour of The Wolf,
at the same time. I considered them companion pieces. I was heartbroken
after a breakup and struggling with my writing. The two films confirmed
how difficult and elusive creative work is. What motivates one person
to work, resulting in hyper productivity, is the very thing that makes
working impossible (paralyzing) for others. While some people work in
order to avoid thinking about what is behind their working— that is, in
order to not think about what is not working; what doesn’t get
recovered and compensated for by work—others work as an attempt to fix,
evade, or control what is not working. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/ingmar-bergman-made-a-movie-for-each-one-of-his-fears/
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