Two high-profile albums have come out recently: Taylor Swift's double album Tortured Poets Department and twenty one pilots' Clancy. Those might be two of the artists in contention for most popular act in the world right now. I'm headed to see twenty one pilots soon, and they sold out a stadium in Columbus three nights in a row. I don't need to explain the Eras tour's success.

The success of these artists is comparable in a number of ways, but the one that's interesting to me today is the authenticity and vulnerability for which both Tswift and TOP are known. Taylor's lyrics are so relatable for so many women. In a full stadium, each audience member feels like she's singing directly to and about them, and their experience. Tyler Joseph is so sensitive and open about his struggles with mental health. He really wears his heart on his sleeve in all his lyrics, and the listener feels a closeness to him. Being publicly and openly wounded is massively successful. TSwift's album name encapsulates this: the Tortured Poets Department sums up this brand of self-expressive songwriting. The musicians suffer, and in working out the torment on the inside of their hearts in music, attract an audience of people also suffering. And that audience is large.

This requires a certain commodification of one's suffering, and even of the self. The Tortured Poets Department employs tortured poets, whose experience and reflections on their suffering rendered into a commodity in musical form are then sold for literal billions of dollars. The business of brokenness is booming. But what does it mean to carry this kind of employment? What does it feel like to be famous specifically for having your heart broken or being suicidal? Taylor sings about having to do it with a broken heart, but there's no other way she could do it. Her fans are filling her stadiums and paying her royalties to have access to her broken heart. Tyler Joseph's lyrics seem a bit more positive, like he's in a better place emotionally since his marriage and having kids, but there are a lot of songs on the new album about his fear of backsliding in his mental health. Even his success is wounded by a haunted past. It's not that the suffering isn't real, of course. I don't doubt at all Taylor or Tyler's tears. But the nature of the gig is that those tears are the product, and there's a clamoring crowd that wants to see them every night in sold out venues. What does that do to a person?

Another artist who's dealt with this problem is Say Anything. I saw them live earlier this year, replaying their breakout album …is a real boy for its 20th anniversary. That album was a particularly rough time for Max Bemis - he was involuntarily hospitalized for a mental breakdown as a result of drug use. He very truly became famous because of his psychological distress. In a much later song, he reflected on how his fans haven't liked his music as much since he's gotten his life together:

"I hate that dude now that he's married
He's got a baby on the way, poor Sherri
That's not apropos
He's not the wretch we know
Chop his family up, so we can feed them to the front row
Spike his fifteenth espresso with drugs
So he's convinced it's a manic delusion to know true love
Be 19 with a joint in hand
Never change the band
Never ever be a ... real man"

In typical Max Bemis style, it's a little over the top, but the point is pretty clear. His success is directly antithetical to what made him famous and appealing in the first place. The torture is required for being a poet.

This is something that I think a fair amount about in my own lyric writing. We're consciously choosing to write music that's (vaguely) in the emo genre. Dealing with our own feelings, especially those of suffering, with authenticity and vulnerability is the hallmark of the genre. I find myself rooting through my memory, finding feelings and experiences I can shape and mold into open-hearted songs. It's a genre that I love, and a musical form that comes easily to me, but is it virtuous? Is it good? Is there a way to do it that doesn't end up performatively recycling one's tears for a crowd?

I think St. John of the Cross has a window into this in his Ascent of Mount Carmel and his discussion of the purgation of the memory. Through suffering and prayer, the specific contents of the memory are surrendered to God. The person retains no attachment to anything they remember, either good and pleasant or bad and sorrowful. This is necessary for union with God and sanctity. As the Doctor of the Church explains,

“There is no way to union with God without annihilating the memory… Union [with God] cannot be wrought without a complete separation of the memory from all forms that are not God.”

This sounds severe - and it is - but, when practiced, it provides a road to freedom.

To understand what St. John of the Cross means, we first need to understand what attachment to particular memories means. A modern, psychological take would be to say: I am attached to my memories if I take them as forming my identity or personality. “I am the person who suffered this injustice,” for example. My memory of having been wounded informs how I think about myself. Detachment from the memory, then, would be to find the “me” that is prior to my memories of suffering (or happiness or embarrassment or whatever). This is a good start, but it's insufficient. After all, those things did happen to me.

I really think that true detachment requires something deeper and specifically supernatural, as St. John of the Cross makes very clear in the quoted passage: “God must place the soul in this supernatural state.” When this happens, the soul is indifferent to its memories of pain or of joy. When the Spirit so moves the soul, those memories come up, and the soul can recognize how God was active in those moments and make use of them for the Kingdom. This doesn't mean that the soul doesn't feel anything - on the contrary, painful memories will still be painful, and joyful memories will still bring joy. But the soul is not attached to that pain or joy. The pain or joy are experienced in a deeper and purer way, in fact, because the soul only sees them in light of Christ's saving activity. This is possible because of a union with God that is deeper than and underlies all particular experiences. Of course God was there when this bad thing happened, or this good thing happened, because He's always there. I don't need to worry about my suffering or my happiness, because everything has its root in God.

With practice, I think, one can go through the memory, find particular things, and examine them in light of God's undying love. The poet can feel the full weight of the torture he or she has been through unafraid, because God has freed them from fear. It is in this light, with confidence in God's loving care, that I think artists can use their experience of suffering to create beautiful works. This doesn't create a didacticism or reductivist revisionism that boils down every experience to some moral lesson about God. It's so much deeper than that, because both the moralizing of suffering and the nihilistic denial of meaning in suffering ultimately fail to go deep enough. Suffering does have meaning, but it's a meaning too deep for words. The Truth about suffering will set you free, not because it's a set of things you have to think, but because Jesus Christ is the Truth about suffering. God's answer to suffering has a face - the face of Christ, crowned with thorns. In encountering Him there and surrendering the memories of my suffering to Him, I can face dark and hard things with confidence and trust. Jesus is the chair of the tortured poets department, and in Him all that poetry about suffering finds its ultimate meaning.