And isn’t your life extremely flat with nothing whatever to grumble at! (W.S. Gilbert)

We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities… still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin. (Charles Darwin)

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded. (Gustave Flaubert).

Since I no longer expect anything from mankind except madness, meanness, and mendacity; egotism, cowardice, and self-delusion, I have stopped being a misanthrope. (Irving Layton)

The world is populated in the main by people who should not exist. (George Bernard Shaw)

I only go out to get me a fresh appetite for being alone. (Lord Byron)

The Bible tells us to love our neighbours, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.  (G. K. Chesterton)

Crowned by gentle Venus with the Victory of Love

Source: http://vi.sualize.us/view/3da7de66b318903a55ff08ca28b7debf/

from Linda Goodman’s “Love Signs”, page 31

The Planets

we’ve fought a long and bitter war

my Twin Soul and I

lost and lonely, fallen angels, exiled

from a misty, half-forgotten galaxy of stars

wounded cruelly by the painful thrust of Mars

caught in Neptune’s tangled web

shocked and torn asunder

by the sudden, awful violence of Uranus

tortured by the clever lies of Mercury

crashed beneath the icy weight of stern, unyielding Saturn

who lengthened every hour into a day

each day into a year

each year into eternities of waiting

scorched, and nearly blinded

by the Sun’s exploding bursts of arrogance and pride

as Eve and Adam, stilled and helpless, deep within us, cried…

still we fought on in unrelenting fury

striking blow for blow…driven by the pounding drums

of Jupiter’s giant, throbbing passions.

stumbling at the precipice of the Moon’s enticing madness

to fall, at last, in trembling fear

before the threat of Pluto’s ominous, tomb-like silence

consumed by inconsolable sadness, and the bleakness

of despair

we bear…

the wounds and scars of furious battle

I and my Twin Soul

but now we walk in quiet peace

with all our scattered pieces whole

together, hand-in-hand…full serpent circle

back into the Pyramid-shaped rainbow

of tomorrow’s brighter Eden

crowned by gentle Venus with the Victory of Love

that did not die

but has survived the night of selfish seeking

to wait for morning’s soft forgiveness

and the dawn of understanding

Love may be blind but marriage is a real eye-opener.

It is a Saturday, a sunny and cold day in Toronto.  In 1993, February 6^th was a Saturday, it was sunny in the morning and cold, the roads were slippery (talk about signs!!!), but then it warmed up enough for a real snow storm in the night.

So, today is my wedding anniversary with my first husband to whom I am no longer married.  I am not divorced from him either.  The divorce is still in the process…

I often wonder when the break up really happened and who broke what… and honestly I don’t know.  The saddest part is that I still care.  The best part is… well, the best part remains to be discovered.

Another chapter in my journey.  As much as I am unable to do anything these days or write anything, I could not miss this day.  I should make a post.  And, surprisingly enough it turns out to be the post # 342 (here it comes again, my number 42).  Madness?  Eccentricity? 

“Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Remarriage is the triumph of hope over experience…”

 

“The secret of a happy marriage remains a secret.” – Henny Youngman.

 

 

“I never knew what real happiness was until I got married; and then it was too late.”

 

 

“I think weddings are sadder than funerals, because they remind you of your own wedding. You can’t be reminded of your own funeral because it hasn’t happened. But weddings always make me cry.” – Brendan Behan (1923-64) Irish playwright.

 

 

“Three rings of marriage: The engagement ring, the wedding ring, and the suffering.”

 

 

“I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury.” – George Burns.

 

 

“Marriage is for women the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.” – Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), British philosopher, Marriage and Morals.

 

 

“Many a man owes his success to his first wife and his second wife to his success.” – Jim Backus.

 

 

“By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll be happy. If you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.” – Socrates.

 

 

“The trouble with some women is that they get all excited about nothing — and then marry him.” –Cher

Love Quotes inspired by my Love (Infatuation) for “Mein Lieber A.”

Just to give you some hints why some quotes seem to be more relevant than others.

“I am beautiful.”  Charming, yes…

“Why do you want to be infatuated with me?”  It  was not exactly my choice.

“I love Goethe quotes.”  Well, so do I.  It is nice to have something in common.

“Do you need my permission to laugh?”  1. Yes; 2. No; 3. Maybe; 4. Does it really matter? 5. All of the above.

Do I love you because you’re beautiful,
Or are you beautiful because I love you?
~Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Cinderella

 

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.  ~Eric Fromm

 

Love has no desire but to fulfill itself.  To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.  To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.  ~Kahlil Gibran

 

When love is not madness, it is not love.  ~Pedro Calderon de la Barca

 

Love is a symbol of eternity.  It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end.  ~Author Unknown

 

The art of love… is largely the art of persistence.  ~Albert Ellis

 

If I love you, what business is it of yours?  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

 

No one can understand love who has not experienced infatuation.  And no one can understand infatuation, no matter how many times he has experienced it.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

 

Sometimes it’s a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence.  ~David Byrne

 

The excesses of love soon pass, but its insufficiencies torment us forever.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

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.

From “Psychology. An Introduction. 8^th edition” by Jerome Kagan and Julius Segal  (page 488)

When people have recurrent episodes of depression like the one just described, the disorder is called unipolar disorder.  But there is another severe affective disorder – known as bipolar disorder, and referred to in the past as manic – depression – in which the lows typically alternate with exaggerated highs.  Most of us, of course, know that our mood can shift – sometimes for no apparent reason – from bright and joyful to dark and sad.  For those suffering from this disorder, the emotional pendulum swings wildly from intense excitement to deep melancholy, at first with long time intervals in between, but later with frequent and abrupt shifts from his to low (Goodwin & Jamieson, 1990).

A recent study of people with bipolar disorder estimates that more than three million Americans have the disorder (National Depressive and Manic – Depressive Association, 1993).

My comment:  when I read this in the year 2000, to be precise when I studied this book to take the proficiency exam at DeVry, I was depressed, as always, since the age of 10 and I did not take any antidepressants.  Maybe I was not always depressed, but more often than not.  The whole three years at DeVry for sure.  But I was not diagnosed.  In 2005, when my depression made me dysfunctional to the point that I could not do anything with my life but to seek help, then I was diagnosed as having depression and I was prescribed anti-depressants. 

 

Little did I know, that it would lead to mania.  Drug induced, mind you.  So, my first episode happened in December 2005 – January 2006.  I did go to see a Psychiatrist # 2 (the Psychiatrist # 1 who gave me the bloody drugs disappeared without a trace).  I told him I might be bipolar.  He did not believe me.  “Do not rush with the diagnosis”, I was told.  In May 2007, when I was doing the JVS program I had my second episode.  And that was when the whole hell broke loose. 

 

I will tell that story eventually, just give me time.  It is painful to write about it, but living this life was always painful.  Coming to grips with whatever happened to me is really worth it.  For you, my reader, it might save some pain in the future.  You are not alone.  Your situation may not be the worst.  And for those who in the different category (sane and good boys and girls), it might be just hilarious bordering on ridiculous.  Read it, if you have ever been depressed, on drugs, diagnosed with bipolar or were treated in a hospital, chained to a bed.  Well, back to the book…

Like unipolar depression, it appears to be on the rise – as shown in Figure 10.4.  Bipolar affects men and women equally, and sometimes appears during childhood.  Unfortunately, childhood or adolescent onset predicts more treatment difficulties and increased social disability.  The disorder often can be managed fairly well with drug therapy, but people often delay seeking treatment when early symptoms appear, and the problem is often misdiagnosed.

Bipolar disorder magnifies common human experiences to larger-than-life proportions.  Among the symptoms are exaggerations of normal sadness and fatigue, joy and exuberance, sexuality and sexuality, irritability and rage, energy and creativity.  To those afflicted, it can be so painful that suicide seems the only means of escape: about one of every four untreated for the condition actually does commit suicide.

In the manic phase, people with this disorder ten to be talkative, restless, aggressive, boastful, and destructive.  They develop a feeling of intense well-being and even ecstasy.  Sexual and moral inhibitions disappear and life is one uninterrupted “high”.  The manic person needs little sleep and is filled with abundant energy and grandiose notions.  Soon, however, most manic individuals plummet back to the depressed phase, becoming so gloomy and hopeless that they are immobilized.

As far as the ancient Greeks, society has believed that the artistic temperament is often touched by divine madness.  In recent years evidence has accumulated linking mood disorders to creativity (Jamison, 1993).  From the melancholy Lord Byron to the suicidal Sylvia Plath, biographies of celebrated poets, musicians, and artists have attested to extreme moods in creative people.  Here is how writer Virginia Woolf described her divine inspiration:

“As an experience, madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at: and in its Lava I still find most of the things I write about.  It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does” (Woolf, 1978).

            Despite the links between creativity and bipolar disorder, it is important not to glamorize or trivialize the disorder.  In fact, most sufferers are not great creative geniuses, and most talented artists are mentally stable.  Modern medicine can today offer relief to those who endure the ravages of mood.  In the past, artist who were in the clutches of this devastating disorder had nowhere but their art to seek solace.  A further discussion in the Psychology and the Media box entitled “Making Art of Madness” (to be continued.)