Creative Investment: A Christmas Reflection

One of the really fascinating things that Marvel Comics did in the late 1970s was to tap into the over-the-top personas and spectacle of theatrical rock acts with a series of issues featuring the band KISS. It outlines the idea that the band have become their true selves–superheroes who are connected organically to the wisdom of the universe.

Throughout the series, they battle villains like Dr. Doom and Mephisto, who are using musical contexts to alienate and control fans through the drug culture and artifice of progressive rock or the impersonal, mechanical rhythms of disco. In contrast, KISS offers an alternative that resonates with the true nature of humanity, freeing anyone in captivity to live out their true selves. In many ways, this echoes the Romantic idea that music allows us to escape the prison of the Industrial Revolution and the rat race that controls us, to rage against the machine, to stick it to the man.

But the first issue of the series includes an article called, “Blood on the Plate,” which asks the question:

“How much is a band supposed to give? The mind? The body? The very souls of its members?...how about life itself…Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones and Jimi Hendrix have achieved legend status by taking what might be termed a permanent pause for the cause…If a star goes out in a blaze of glory, it might create a stir, it might sell a few records, but ultimately, it deprives the audience–not to mention the star–of any future thrills, chills, and aesthetic gratification.”

This idea that artists suffer for their art stretches back at least to Beethoven, who told his brothers that the only reason he didn’t end his own life is that the universe has given him so much talent that he can’t possibly rob the world of all the music he has to give. In light of all the acts who have succumbed to that suffering in the 1970s, the article offers what it calls “a vote for keeping the endangered species known as ‘rock star’ from extinction.”

Rather than escaping the pressures of stardom, the band puts its inner demons in costume right on stage and in the case of this comic book, they become the art itself. The article goes on to describe the ritual sacrifice celebrating the publication:

“...the ceremony took place not out on the moors, cloaked by fog, but behind pristine white screens under the glare of photographers’ lamps...While I watched, the foursome rolled up their sleeves, or removed their gauntlets, and extended their arms. The doctor unveiled his gleaming needles, and, one by one, with cold, professional precision, the veins were pierced and the dark red liquid extracted. The vials were then placed in the official KISS First Aid Kit and transported to a place of safekeeping–before Gene could drink them. Was there a purpose to all this, you ask? There was indeed. When the magazine goes to press, those vials will be lovingly poured into the vats of ink, making this the first comic book ever to be printed in blood. A bond exists now and forevermore among KISS, their fans, and Marvel Comics. A blood-brotherhood of truth, justice and rock’n’roll. That’s how much a band is supposed to give.”

In other words, they have put themselves literally and physically into their art, bleeding for their fans, who come from the outcast corners of their schools and find a place of belonging where they live into their authentic selves, bound to the artists who touch them and the corporation that distributes that life force. And while this satirical marketing campaign reaped a significant monetary return, it hints at a bigger human desire: intimacy.

Today is Christmas Eve, and as many of us celebrate the birth of Jesus, reflecting on that thread takes on a new significance. In Christian traditions, there are many things we can say about the idea that God becomes flesh: he shows us how to be human, he bleeds for us, he saves us when we haven’t earned it, he brings truth and justice to a sick world. But another thing we can emphasize is the kind of gratuitous, totally selfless investment it suggests, a kind of community and belonging we otherwise don’t know.

In her book Sisters of Dust, Sisters of Spirit, Methodist theologian Karen Baker-Fletcher points out that if Jesus is fully God and fully human, then he is fully spirit and fully dust. He is vulnerable not just to disease and disfigurement and death but to decomposition–this cyclic return to the bottom of the food chain that nourishes the bacteria of the earth. And even in the audacious hope of resurrection, he is glorified forever as that dust–a child of Adam–glorified as one who forever carries the scars marking the violence and alienation of spaces humans create into the space of something new.

This is a communion so beautifully articulated in an older, Orthodox tradition that through the Incarnation, God fulfilled a desire for intimacy–and that that union is the very plan God had determined before the foundations of the earth were laid. The creator intimately joined with his creation, vulnerable to weather and health and economies and political regimes and agricultural peculiarities…and also to breast feeding and caregivers’ mood swings and fallible educational traditions and his own weeping. The one who could have made that creation a personal playground–just like the gods of Greece or Babylon did–is instead reared by it and deeply impacted alongside it…

…and he thoroughly transforms it.

The artist Makoto Fujimira argues that “the cultural river runs with the tears of God.” Those tears convict injustice and, mingled in that river with our own, ours multiply “like the fishes and the loaves that Jesus touched.” That river flows generously to the very places where creative work matters most, irrigating the fields that make community and the feasts we celebrate possible.

As people who create things–whether large-scale orchestral works or innovative companies or cancer therapies or the combination of clothes we assemble before going to work in the morning–we are always making investments. There is always something we give in the moment of creation, someone we offer it to, and a purpose for that investment; we give it with our bodies and in the circumstances where we find ourselves as we look toward the future. We take risks, and we impact others in significant ways, whether we hope to reap the return on our investment ourselves or to yield it where those tears point.

As we look around and see opportunities to create things as an escape from those tear-filled places or to dominate them and make them our personal playgrounds, may we consider instead the hope our bodies and our circumstances offer: we can each uniquely live into and with those investments, intimately and positively transforming those spaces in ways that extend far beyond ourselves and cultivating those fields that make belonging possible in the here and now. As Alice Walker said, “I have the uncanny feeling that, just at the end of my life, I am beginning to reinhabit completely the body I long ago left.”

I wish you a beautiful, restful, and fruitful holiday season.