Making Art of Madness

On Nov. 15, 1934, Virginia Woolf began her rewrite of a novel eventually titled “The Years.”  “Lord! Lord!” she noted in her diary, “10 pages a day for 90 days: three months … now, damnably disagreeable, as I see it will be – compacting the vast mass – I am using my faculties again.  & all the flies and fleas are forgotten.”

Seven years later the flies and fleas and larger plagues drove Woolf, who had fought mental illness throughout her life, to suicide.  An increasing number of psychiatrists, neurologists and geneticists, says an article in this week’s Science Times, believe there’s a link between the genius and madness of artists such as her.  Maybe so.  But as anyone who’s ever read Woolf’s letters and diaries can attest, it’s the link between imagination and self-discipline that got her a place in literature’s pantheon.  Her mind may have had a grasshopper’s fleetness, but her industry was the ant’s.  “People who have experienced emotional extremes, who have been forced to confront a huge range of feelings and who have successfully coped with those adversities, could end up with a richer organization in memory, a richer palette t work with,” said Dr. Ruth Richards, a psychiatrist in Belmont, Mass., which often served as a haven for Robert Lowell, the fine American poet.

At least three fine English poets – Byron, Shelley and Coleridge – also suffered from manic depression or severe depression; and so did the composer Robert Schumann, who starved himself to death when he was 46.  Dr. Robert M. Post, chief of the biological psychiatry branch at the National Institutes of Health, sees the link between bipolar disorder and creativity as “fortunate”, because it is in so many other ways “a devastating illness.”

To be mad is not necessarily to be creative, or there’d be Shelly on every street corner.  And to be creative is not necessarily to be mad, or Shakespeare would not have been a monument to shrewdness and adaptability.  But to be creative is almost invariably to be diligent – and, manic – depressive or no, to swing high, swing low.

Source: Editorial published in the New York Times, October 15, 1993.

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Posted on August 6th, 2009 under Bipolar Disorder, Psychology • Tags: art, bipolar, creativity, depression, insane, insanity, madness, manic depression, psychiatry, psychology. • • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback