Kay Sage, Take 2 ...

Or on trying again to be the writer I really am, to get my voice and brain back from the inanity of algorithmic writing

I published my article on surrealist Kay Sage the other day. It was fine. It shared what I wanted to share about the artist’s biography and her mental health. And yet it’s been nagging at me that I wish I’d done something different somehow. It’s been nagging at me for years that I’m not writing the way that I want to be writing. And then I am, and then I’m not …

I have been a writer for as long as I can remember. An avid journaler, a voracious reader, a go-back-to-school-again-because-I-love-learning person … a person who writes to understand herself and the world, who writes to connect with others. I’ve also been a writer for income for the past nearly two decades. I’ve written books, blogs, print and online articles, social media content, reviews, even horoscopes over the years. For many years, I wrote about many things, pretty much anything that the Internet would pay me to write so that I could afford to live in San Francisco as a writer. For many years, I wrote the kinds of things that ChatGPT can write for me now. Alongside that, I also always wrote more original things, things I was passionate about, things I believed in.

Over time, though, those things naturally collided. I hit a point where in order to pay the bills, I was churning out so much “content” that I began to think in keywords. I was writing for money, for Google, for Yoast. (One of my pet peeves is that to get a green light from Yoast, you have to use a ridiculous number of transitional words (furthermore, moreso, however, therefore …) and you have to write to an eight grade reading level … I don’t want to live in a world where all things are written this way.) I am grateful for all of the writing jobs I have been paid to do. And honestly a lot of that writing was fine in the sense that I had reached a stage of my career where at least I could pick to write about topics I cared about. I had been honing my niche for a long time in writing at the intersection of art/craft and mental health/ wellness so that even these paid gigs often allowed me to interject my expertise, my areas of interest, my passions and opinions. I was lucky that way. And yet … to even remotely pay the bills, there was just soooo much content to churn out. I began writing on autopilot. Sometimes it feels like I’ve been writing on autopilot forever, sometimes it feels like I don’t have a voice of my own.

It’s not true, though. Or it’s only partially true - a thing to be aware of when I’m writing. I started my Patreon-only blog a few years back (which I’ve now switched to here on Substack) because I wanted to start getting my voice back, my brain back, my ability to write for humans instead of algorithms back. I have consistently continued to honor that voice in private and public writing. And yet … I am still working on getting it back or getting to the next place with it or … something.

So, I wrote that article about Kay Sage. And it’s fine. Looking over it today, I see that it’s not keyword-stuffed or broken down into 300 word maximum subheadings like I had imagined it was. But it’s also missing the key thing that I want to make sure to address in everything I write here … my own original thoughts about the intersection of art and mental health in the piece that I am writing. It’s easy to pull together the quotes from different sources to compile the story and that’s part of the job of what I’m doing … but it’s harder to take the time to actually digest the information and slow down and share what I really think about it. What I have forgotten as a writer is less about how to write and more about how to slow down and digest and edit and add and let it all percolate before hitting publish. That’s the part I want to remember. The part that is hard to stick with because of this era we live in of publishing such a ridiculous amount of “content.” It’s the part I’m working towards.

To that end, I’ll be paying closer attention to this in the articles to come. For now, just a few things I want to add to supplement the full Kay Sage article I already shared. To recap just a little, here’s what stood out to me about her work and her mind:

She had an unusual childhood with financial privilege and formal art training but was raised by a single mother, traveling a lot through Europe. She married an Italian prince which was apparently perfectly fine but also very boring and she didn’t create much during that time. Her father and sister both died, she left the prince, and she began to paint, sharing her work and inserting herself into the world of the Surrealists. They didn’t fully accept her but she married fellow surrealist painter Yves Tanguy, and they had a full creative relationship that was also emotionally volatile. He died fifteen years later, at which time her eyesight was failing, and the combination of those things led to depression, decline in her work, and ultimately suicide. And yet, through those last years, she continued to create, to put together collections of Tanguy’s work, to write poetry and create assemblage pieces, to mount a final show.

Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of information about her mental health, particularly as she herself perceived it. As I shared, perhaps that’s why I started with Sage in terms of studying the Surrealists in more depth, because limited information does mean that it’s easier to digest and summarize. But what I’m interested in, as far as we can know it, with a little imagination thrown in, is how art and mental health might have intersected in her life. Here are some thoughts:

• It is believed that she was creatively stifled during her first marriage. What comes to mind is a scene from the TV show Scandal in which the president’s wife, Mellie, is inanely choosing china patterns when she would rather herself be running the world. It’s one picture of a thousand pictures of a million women across time. We don’t know if she was depressed during this time but she was at the least in a creative drought. Perhaps the boredom made it impossible for her to create and she had to get out of the boredom before she could make art. Or perhaps making art was all that helped her from losing her mind to the boredom and so she turned to it wholeheartedly. Both things have been true for me - when life was so empty because of depression, I couldn’t create and I had to create.

• The deaths of others seems to be tied up in her making. It was after losing her sister and father that she began to create actively. It was after losing Tanguy that she stopped creating as much. Loss and grief are very close to depression (notably different, but with similarities, and one can become the other.) What comes to mind is how

  Leon Macfayden
  responded to a note of mine today saying in part: “I think part of it is because we fear death. Not the physical death, but the death that comes when our name is spoken for the last time ever. We long for something that lives beyond the small time we have on this planet.” Death, loss, they impel us to create. And also they can freeze us for a time. In Sage’s case, she didn’t paint for about six months after Tanguy’s death … then she created Tomorrow is Never, one of her most famous paintings.

• One of the things that interests me is how mental health challenges change our creative content, process, medium, productivity. It is widely accepted that Sage went into deep depression after Tanguy’s death if not before. This is also tied up with her failing eyesight. Mental and physical health aren’t separate. In my own life, my father coped with lifelong untreated depression and “work” (woodworking, writing) was what helped him most get through each day. As he got older and it became harder and harder to do those things, his work changed (smaller scale woodworking, for example, and he adapted) but maintaining a healthy mindset got harder, too. He lost a finger in a woodworking accident and he was never the same after … physically he could still work but mentally it meant something devastating to him and he never quite mentally recovered. Without as much passion for the work, with a lot more hopelessness and pointlessness seeping in, his desire to keep creating was strong but his feelings of not-worth-it were often stronger. We don’t know why Sage died by suicide but we know she had vision loss and depression …. these things changed her medium (from large scale painting to assemblage and poetry), her content (my favorite of her works, Le Passage, is one of the only paintings that has a figure in it), and her productivity (which declined greatly in those later years.) We don’t know why she chose death but I am drawn to a quote of hers as explanation: "I have said all that I have to say. There is nothing left for me to do but scream."

• People have had a lot to say about the muted tones of her work, the barren landscapes, and how they might reflect depression. I don’t disagree … or agree … I am still mulling this one. I know that I’m drawn to them and that Le Passage feels like depression visualized for me because depression is loneliness among many other things that it is.

• I suppose what I am trying to express here is that my two cents, my interpretation, my narrative that I place over her story (which may or may not be accurate) is that Kay Sage was compelled to create, that creating gave her life meaning and purpose and excitement, and that when it came to the end of her life and she felt her ability to create slipping away from her (because her creative partnership with Tanguy was done, because depression was eating away at her mind, because her vision was failing and surgery didn’t help) she didn’t see a reason to keep on keeping on. Creating was her purpose and without it she saw no purpose. Perhaps.

Those are my additional thoughts for now. What are yours?