Dirty Hands and a Clear Head

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 -"He still has this inner struggle,

                                which means that he still has good art in him."

Several of us can relate to the ever defiant self-battle between good and evil or right and wrong.  Many artists use it as milestones for their creativity; Vincent Van Gough, Johnny Cash, Virginia Wolfe, David Choe, etc.  We try to figure out where we fit in the Big Picture and more importantly do we even deserve a spot in it?  Are we good enough, noble enough, sane enough, morally endowed enough?  Sometimes when we want resolution to these questions, we find we must face our demons and look into the eyes of our own Medusa’s if we want to move forward and live the life we’ve been granted.  But when you start to question what you really believe about yourself to be true, you must dig down into the depths of darkness; and if you dig deep enough, you’re bound to come up with a little dirt on your hands. 

There is a fine line between delving internally into the corners of your own hell and getting lost to where you’re no longer living externally.  In Bessie Head’s novel, A Question of Power, the narrator, Elizabeth searches for truth and faces her Medusa in order to ascertain a sense of creativity in life and a new world itself.  Creativity can be incontrollable and is often associated with being free, gaining insight and releasing your inner child, your id.  These analogies of creativity are in a sense a way of escaping or losing reality, to a world that is surreal.  It can be imagined without boundaries or frames which can be self-destructive.  Elizabeth, described how people who had gained “the insight into their own powers had driven them mad, and they had robbed themselves of the natural grandeur of life (p. 35).  Therefore by solely focusing on living internally will only amount in one losing sight of reality and miss out on life externally.  Basically if you face your demons, your Medusa, and solely focus on the negative, you will succumb to it and be engulfed by it, never to really enjoy the actual world around you.

“One can be overwhelmed by ones own internal darkness, that when he finds himself in the embrace of [his] Medusa, she is really the direct and tangible form of his own evils, his power lusts, his greeds, his self-importance, and these dominate him totally and bring him to the death of the soul (p. 40). 

Elizabeth is struggling with her own evils; trying to understand her place in her world, her self-importance and where she belongs.  She doesn’t feel womanly; she doesn’t feel at home; and doesn’t feel she has a race.  Her Medusa consistently mocks her to where Elizabeth believes she is worthless.  When you’re constantly told that “you are inferior, you are filth,” you are going to begin to believe it (p. 47).  When Elizabeth is lonely and all alone, her Medusa thrives on her subconscious and tells her she’s ugly, she has no one, Africa doesn’t want her; ‘they hate you and you hate them.’  It is only when you have truly been faced with despair can you begin to comprehend the meaning and worth of things around you.  When Elizabeth is struck by lightening bolts of despair from her Medusa, another image named Sello, tells Elizabeth that only she could pull that kind of power out of Medusa because it is only when “her life was assaulted like that that peeps into the boiling cauldron were allowed (p. 40).”  Only when you are at the lowest low do you begin to ‘peep’ back on your life and take stock in your life now. 

In trying to discern between right and wrong, good and evil, it is easy to understand the finite line that molds us into who we are because “evil and good travel side by side in the same personality (p. 98).”  Creativity is all encompassing; it is not solely good or solely bad.  It is found at the heart and sometimes the only way to find it is to journey into the depths of our own souls.  In a quest to live the external life more spherically one must know all sides of himself internally.  So only by Elizabeth’s internal self-destruction and being dragged through her hell by her Medusa, questioning her own beliefs about herself and challenging her own demons, only then could it make her understand the importance of her life externally.  Although creativity can be connected to pain, suffering and torment, it is the journey through which you overcome these fears, that is the masterpiece.  Therefore, Elizabeth comes to recognize that her tormented journey was actually “justified suffering (p. 98).”  And although being dragged through your own hell is bound to be painful and a little messy, in the end it is worth the dirty hands in order to have a clean and clear conscious.