The Guilt of Living
Survivor’s guilt is defined as ‘the experience of psychological distress due to surviving or escaping a situation relatively unharmed or unaffected, as compared to others.’ (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/survivor-guilt) It can be all consuming, taking over your psyche at such depths, you cease to function as you should. Survivor’s guilt destroys you, just as much as the event and those who were affected by the trauma.
There is darkness in the motivations to create. A sense of deep personal inadequacy and insecurity that needs to be expunged and is done through the creation of…something. Whether it be art, an institution or an ideology. No other artist I can think of brings to cruel life this darkness more than Francis Bacon. His images are unnervingly spot on in their brutality, and though the surrealists didn’t accept him, he more so than they knew what we humans really are: nasty, brutish, short and grossly inadequate.
A man of gourmand level of excesses, Bacon was fascinatedly able to compartmentalize. Being a patron of the sado-masochistic arts, he could hide his inner turmoil and schmooze unaffected with dignitaries, when upstairs was a very fresh corpse. This contradicts and therefore offers insight into the man who was very publicly and apologetically his mad self. Just like the rest he wanted more, and if it meant hiding a few key layers of himself, so be it. His greatest foe and love was George Dyer, a man who equaled Bacon’s early life depravity yet on different ends of the societal spectrum. Both desperately wanted what they couldn’t handle, so fought, fucked and faked their way through their shortcomings, eventually melding so intrinsically into one another that for the rest of their lives, whether dead or alive, they’d haunt each other. Funny that while one created to soothe and the other destroyed, they both ended up alone. A foreshadowing Bacon painted in his brilliant Study for self-portrait--1976. By now Dyer had been dead a few years, and after suffering both a mental and physical breakdown, Bacon was searching for solace. And what better place to find answers than within.
It's a portrait that’s subdued in Bacon terms, yet brashly intrusive. Clothed, yet naked, a singular being sits, yet is two-faced before a black background, gnarled, twisted and conjoined with one another in an invisible box. The question being posed: are we horrible because we’ve survived, or have we survived because we were horrible?
The guilt I grapple with is that I survived and have seemingly nothing to show for it. I am not a titan of industry, I am not a star of stage, screen or airwave. I am simply a survivor. And that cannot be enough. I wish I could say that the life I live provides me contentment in its simplicity, but that’s not the case. When I tried to live a simple life, the grating feeling of I want to do more, be more, began to scratch me so raw, that by the end I packed my bags and hail mary’ed it. And even then, the gaining of myself brought on more of that wicked, ambitious, desire; a never-ending cycle of gaining, wanting, doing and remaining unfulfilled.
In Francis Bacon’s portraits, I see myself. I see him and I see George Dyer. All of us suffering with the realities of living in a world where we may not fit, yet desperately want to. We’re deformed, macabre, screaming in an agony of existence that brings us both suffering and pleasure. We’re lost, frantically and hopelessly searching for something to give us meaning. To allow us to be ourselves without judgement or expectation. That’s why neither Francis nor George could quit each other; because each man saw in the other that twisted dark creature of self that haunts us for wanting something better. I have simply been burdened with a hope that has never materialised.
Life is suffering; The cause of suffering is wanting; To stop suffering, stop wanting. Easier said than meditated though completely true. I believe in these truths, and once I used to believe in its ability to garner hope. But I live in the world--not just the United States—of 2025, where greed, hatred and power are what rule men. It doesn’t matter what I survived as a child, or the 6 and 9 hell’s I’ve walked through, living in this age, this time of humane bankruptcy, is what’s ultimately broken my faith. The beacons of hope I once believed to exist are being smoked out and the pillars of belief, hard work, and empathy that have served humanity ad infinitum are being crumbled by machines we cannot see, only hear and speak to. It is the eternal dark struggle in our solitary souls that destroys us, and the painter Francis Bacon understood that in the end no amount of faith could set us free from it. This is the guilt we carry in ourselves, survivor or not.
Study for self-portrait image from Art Gallery of NSW website
