"In this country we encourage creativity among the mediocre, but real bursting creativity appalls us. We put it down as undisciplined, as somehow too much." ~Pauline Kael (The New Yorker)
In Kay Radfield Jamison's Touched with Fire, she touches on the relationship between creativity and madness. Many of the most creative people in history suffered from some form of mental illness, including Vincent Van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, Lord Byron, Virginia Woolf, William Styron, Edvard Munch; the list goes on. The medium of art and the type of illness hardly matters either. Mediums range from painting to acting and writing, while the types of illness are mostly depression and bipolar disorder but can also include schizophrenia.
What underlying condition(s) causes this? I don't believe it's entirely genetic. Speaking for myself, the depression, mania, and "altered states" I had resulted from my voluntary withdrawal from society. Childhood trauma contributed to it as well. There may be some neurological condition that I'm unaware of, but my retreat inward was more clearly the result of environmental problems.
When an artist has a mental illness, one of the hardest things to do is tame it enough to produce quality work. The more severe the illness, the harder it is to create something coherent that many can relate with. Most mainstream art that becomes popular is restrained enough for the common man to appreciate. Occasionally you get some wild artist who is completely out of his mind, such as Frank Zappa or Salvador Dali, who see the world so differently that you must figure some kind of "illness" is involved in their creative process, although they are functional enough to participate in society on some reasonable level. And for someone as talented as a Dali or a Van Gogh, their illness can hardly be seen as a bad thing, since it brought them so much attention.
In no way do I think my talent is on the level of these artists. However, without my emotional instability I know my writing would suffer, and I'd be less creative. It really is a gift to be able to pull things out of the subconscious as prolifically as I can. I just wish I was able to piece it all together in ways that a better artist could. Perhaps then I would put my work out there more.
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