An article on CNN.com yesterday raised an age-old question: How are creativity and mental illness connected?
Present company excluded (ahem) it’s no secret that visiting the heights of human experience also opens the doors to its depths. The writer who gave us “The Brothers Karamazov” also penned “Notes from Underground” … Fyodor Dostoevsky also gave us that unbearably true scene in the “Idiot” when the beautiful but doomed Natashya takes an enormous pile of money and tosses it into a fire.
The article looks at the life and work of David Foster Wallace, a writer who died last month of his own hand. (I am among those who will greatly miss DFW and his work.)
Of course the CNN article takes that broad-brush approach all big media have to, but IMHO it misses the nuance of what it is to be human, and searching. The search gives us art; the struggle is meaning.
I would ask instead, What drives someone to search? What compels someone, a writer say, to obsessively seek meaning? Then, not finding it in the world, we hunch over manuscripts to create one where there is meaning.
Van Gogh is the quintessential “tortured artist,” but if you read his letters, collected in Dear Theo, you understand that Van Gogh’s expansive soul drove him to feel the human experience very deeply, which he translated into those beautiful canvasses. That depth also pained him, and drove him to desperate acts of self harming.
We must be very careful when glossing over the lives of artists, writers and others whose visions come from a soul-place we don’t understand. Explaining trivializes them and robs them of the genuinely human. Instead we should be grateful for the vision and art of these enormously gifted, emotionally sensitive folks and leave the answers for the next life.
PS … For a warm send-up of DFW’s prose, see this Gawker post by “The Downsized Employee.”
