Keith Haring On Creativity, Self-doubt, and the Love of Life in the Face of Death – The Marginalian

“Life loves your courage,” Maya Angelou observed when reflecting on the meaning of life in 1977, exhorting: “You must live and life will be good to you.”

That spring, the youth Keith Haring (May 4, 1958–February 16, 1990)—who would grow up to be a constant not only in art and activism, but the spirit of a generation and the soul of a city—faced the meaning of his life and what it really means to live it in the pages of his diary, which was published posthumously as a silent miracle, accompanied by harmony. Keith Haring Journals (public library).

Five days before his nineteenth birthday and just before he left Pittsburgh, where he attended art school, to move without faith to New York City, he faces the difficulty of knowing what we really want and writes:

This is a blue time… it's blue because I'm confused, too; or should I say “still”? I don't know what I want and how to get it. I act like I know what I want, and I seem to follow – quickly, but I don't, when it comes down to it, even know.

In an epic piece of fiction, he echoes the young Van Gogh's thoughts on fear, risk-taking, and how inspired mistakes drive us forward, and looks at how the trap of self-comparison prevents him from developing his artistic and human abilities:

I think it's because I'm scared. I'm afraid I'm wrong. And I think I'm afraid I'm wrong, because I always associate myself with other people, other experiences, and other ideas. I have to look at both in perspective, not in comparison. I associate my life with an idea or example that is a completely different life. I should be relating it to my life only in the sense that each has its good and bad points. Each one is different. The only way for someone to achieve enough merit, to make it worthy of my admiration, or for a long time to copy it, is to take chances, to take it in their own way. It has grown in different circumstances and experienced different heights of equal joy and sorrow. When I keep trying to fix my life after another, mine is wasted by redoing things to accept my vanity. But, if I live my life my way and allow only one [artists] influence me as a reference, a starting point, I can create an even higher awareness instead of staying asleep… I just wish I could have more confidence and try to forget all my crazy ideas, misconceptions, and just live. Just live. Just. Live. Just live until I die.

And then – in proof of my strong conviction, and Blake's, that all good creatures are tree-lovers – he adds:

I found a tree in this park that I will return to, one day. It stretches sideways over the St. Croix and I can sit on it and measure lying on it perfectly.

Over the course of ten years, Haring's determination to “just live” until he dies collides with the sudden approach of the most likely death – a wide area. until he was infected for an uncertain but almost short-lived period as the AIDS epidemic began to kill his generation. A century later Alice James, the brilliant and laid-back sister of William and Henry James – wrote when she discovered that the life left before her was “the happiest time in life, the only truth when life seems to be life,” Haring, after taking a long break in his diary, returns to a blank and empty page. life and death cases:

I always think that the main reason I write is the fear of death. I think I finally see the value of life. While watching the 4th of July fireworks one night I saw my friend Martin [Burgoyne]I saw death. He says he has been tested and cleared that he does not have AIDS, but when I looked at him I saw death. Life is very fragile.

In the evocative sense of the neurologist Oliver Sacks in the memorable remark of Oliver Sacks in his poetic and courageous exit from life that when people die, “they leave holes that cannot be filled, because it is the destiny – the genetic and emotional destiny – of everyone to be a unique person, to find his way, to live his life, to die his death,”

It is a fine line between life and death. I can see that I am walking this line. Living in New York City and traveling by plane a lot, I face the possibility of death every day. And if I die no one will take my place… That is true for most people (or everyone) because everyone is unique and everyone is irreplaceable.

But even as he trembles at the fragility of life, Haring continues to shine with the deep love of life that gives his art endless joy:

Touching people's lives in a positive way is as close as I can get to the concept of religion.

Belief in oneself is a mirror of belief in other people and in everyone.

He returns to the love of life that filled his days with meaning and his magnetic art – a great and humble love, in the middle of our eternal mysterious dance:

I think it is very important to love life. I have met people in their 70s and 80s who love life so much that, behind their aging bodies, the numbers disappear. Life is very fragile and not always available. Just when we think we “understand,” there is another mystery. I don't understand anything. Which, I think, is the key to understanding everything.

Again and again, Haring declares in the pages of his journal that he lives for work, for art – the purpose, of course, if there is any purpose of art, is to make other lives more livable. As the thought of AIDS kept approaching him, this creative force continued to grow stronger in him, echoing Albert Camus's insistence that “there is no love of life without despair of life.”

In early 1988, a few weeks before his thirteenth birthday and just before he received a diagnosis that would be a daily life event, Haring composed a hot pot of journal entry, about to boil over with his lifelong passion:

I love paintings a lot, I love color a lot, love to see a lot, love to hear a lot, love art a lot, love a lot.

In the following month, he has dissipated a lot of fearful energy into a calm acceptance that exudes even more love:

I accept my fate, I accept my life. I accept my mistakes, I accept the struggle. I accept my lack of understanding. I accept what I will not be and what I will never have. I accept death and I accept life.

After the sudden death of one of his closest friends in an accident – a friend so close that Haring was his son's godfather – he copies one of his friend's recently poignant poems about life and death into his journal, and writes under it:

Art, natural or otherwise, is my only link to relative death.

But perhaps his most poignant and prophetic entry came ten years earlier – a short verse-like illustration found in a thoughtful meditation on his art, life, friendship, and personality, written on Election Day:

I am not a beginner.
I am not the end.
I am a link in the chain.

Keith Haring died on February 16, 1990, before he was thirty years old, leaving us his joyful love of life embodied in interesting lines and bright colors that made millions of other lives – including mine – more accessible.

Married with Painting on the Walls — Haring's autobiography inspired by his journals — then revisits a young surgeon's wistful meditations on the meaning of life as he faces his own mortality, an aging comedian-philosopher on how to live fully while dying, and an astrologer-poet's masterful “Antidoaths to Fear of Dear.”