Looking on creativity through a Prism | Jyotisman Debnath
The Prologue
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At the very outset I must make it pretty clear that I know this is not like the era of the 1960s when people, especially from the western hemisphere, thought that they needed to live life by experiencing free love (whatever that means) while using pills and needles recreationally to broaden the horizons of their mind ! They tried to live in a fool’s paradise for some time, in fact they did stay at that make believe Shangri-la of their own imagination forgetting how disrupted this blue planet of our’s has always been . In the beginning this whole counter- culture, alternative way of living, got sold to young creative adults in no time like hot cake. For poets, singers, painters and for art in general it was the best time to create something new but gradually when realities of life knocked the doors, barring a few creative geniuses, rest of the guys came back to do ‘normal things’ in life; eat-sleep and procreate.
It’s a shame that the revolution had died down before fulfilling its main goals and principles.
I must also add that here I’m not trying to write heart thumping- blood boiling slogans concealed as a literary article to some seemingly anti-establishment, anti- bourgeois(heavy words, aren’t they?) magazines which might’ve been read by a few guys with long hairs/beards while sipping Diet Coke with rum and getting confused by their own general unhappiness towards life as the ‘Pillars’ of Nietzsche’s thoughts on Nihilism. Talk about the wonders of life…!
Ok, enough semi- political talks but I do need to explain why am I taking the timeline from the 1960s? Actually I believe even though some 60 plus years have gone by, the current unrest that has been prevailing upon our world for quite some time is identical to that of the 1960s. And we may criticise that era for many reasons but we can’t refute that it was a great time for creating art. So when I talk about the similarities between the 1960s and our own, even by taking the law of averages into account, can we say the time period we live in is great too in terms of creating arts? ( Especially since we have AI-like tools in our hands now). We should’ve been able to say ‘Yes’. But can we?
If you’ve somehow read this far, then think of the lines written above just as some background noises.I do have other reasons too, such as the names of the artistic geniuses and their turbulent lives that I’ve used to compose the main body of my article, got their due fame, got rediscovered and discussed in that era only. And the main focal points of my discussion got scientific approval in that same era too. Or who knows, perhaps subconsciously back of my mind, like the fabled counter- culture generation I too believe that art is the only way to cleanse our soul, Art is the only way to reaffirm reassure the belief that it’s the only way for human salvation…but then to create art you always need to have a ‘sound’ mind, right? wrong…!
Creativity and health of the mind:
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Now coming back to the main topic of my discussion,which I’d try to construct using a few examples of mentally troubled creative geniuses , some popular legends associated with them and some scientific findings in this regard. Obviously for writers of higher calibre it’s no rocket science. ( but for me yes, it’s harder than rocketry, no offence ISRO ) So all I’m just trying to find out is why and how some stereotypes in the field of arts ( take it as an umbrella term) have come into existence in the first place, how whoever refused to swim with the stream got the tag of being abnormal? And most importantly If there remains a correlation between creativity and mental illness, if yes then how and so on.
You all must have heard about some legends or myths of brilliant yet suicidal poets, mad writers, erratic painters etc. What is truth and what’s fiction that’s another matter. But irrespective of the creative trade, these myths have one thing in common and that is the peculiarity of doing things by those artistic geniuses. The way they used to approach things was so peculiar and devoid of conformity that the society of that time tagged their actions as not normal. And thus started the legends of mad,crazy suicidal poets, writers or painters etc. At times it was so extreme that the mastery over using simile and metaphors of poets, language and plot selections of story writers and novelists, subjects, accuracy of paint and brush strokes of painters, voice quality and lyrics of singers, delicate body movements of a ballerina got superseded by how they behaved or presented themselves in front of the society in general.
Does melancholy act as an instigator in the process of creating something new?
And the other foremost question is what do the common people love more? The art? Or the artist (whenever necessary put that extra ‘E’), and why even way before the birth of romanticism the act of suicide has been so alluring for poets and why an artist who committed suicide, his popularity suddenly gets increased atleast by some factors of Pi…! ( Metaphorically of course)
Forget modern times, even the ancient Greeks believed that creativity came from the gods, in particular the Muses (the mythical personifications of the arts and sciences, the nine daughters of Zeus) and desolate thoughts of a pure heart. According to Socrates, madness was the channel by which people received the greatest artistic blessings.In the Aristotelian tradition, genius was viewed from a physiological standpoint, and it was believed that the same human quality was perhaps responsible for both extraordinary achievement and melancholy. Romantic writers had similar ideals, Lord Byron pleasantly expressed, “We of the craft are all crazy. Some are affected by gaiety, others by melancholy, but all are more or less touched.”
In the New Yorker magazine Canadian journalist and author Malcolm Gladwell has written about the infamous ‘Sylvia Plath’ effect, where he opined strongly that
Poets die young. That it’s not just a cliché.
He further added ” Something about writing poetry appears either to attract the wounded or to open new wounds—and few have so perfectly embodied that image of the doomed genius as Sylvia Plath.” He then shared a little known painfully funny story about her, we all know during her lifetime(30yrs) she tried to commit suicide several times and finally succeeded. During one of her unsuccessful attempts she deliberately drove her car into a river—then, in a typical Sylvia Plath fashion, wrote a poem about it:
“And like the cat
I have nine times to die.
This is Number Three.” (it was her third attempt)
Don’t get me wrong I’m not trying to justify Gladwell’s claim , I’m just trying to dissect myths from reality.
But on the contrary we’d find for each and every Sylvia Plath (30) there is a Robert Frost (88),T.S Eliot (76) Walt Whitman (72), E.E Cummings (72), Charles Bukowski (73) Maya Angelou (86) and so many more.
In the pop-lore, individuals with mental illness are said to display a capacity to see the world in a novel and original way; literally, to see things that others cannot. However, as per many modern scientific researches people do not require a mental illness to do so. A creative genius may suffer from any kind of mental illness but his creative brilliance can’t be viewed as the cause and effect relationship. Moreover first we need to understand that there is no standard definition of what creativity is and there is no universally accepted method to measure it. Whatever we have in this regard, a common man who has never read anything of ‘real’ psychology, for him these words that explain the methods of assessing creativity might seem to be mere psychological mumbo-jumbo, filled with some bombastic terminologies and nothing else.
From the lines above it’s quite evident that there is no credible scientific evidence to link creativity with mental illness. At best it can be termed simply as overgeneralization by awestricken
admirers.
If we look deeply into the matter we’d find layers upon layers of astounding facts and opinions that cover up the subject. We’d find it’s common people’s love for underdogs, love for stories of tattered flawed geniuses and if that creative genius committed suicide then the interest in legends associated with him increases at least by some factors of Pi.(as mentioned earlier) Life is hard but ironically people love to hear the stories of grief and misfortune, in movies, and in books people kind of celebrate the perils of those geniuses! The underlying philosophy can be seen evidently in poet P.B Shelly’s immortal line ” Our sweetest songs are those that tell the saddest thought.” Facing the tyranny of life people do need those stories to reaffirm their belief that despite having so many troubles, poverty, mental illness, and despite dying early most often by suicide, people’s dear poet, writer, and painter has achieved immortality through his/her works and left his legacy as a creative genius simply by celebrating all aspects of life. Despite being bogged down by grief, and misfortune and despite ultimately ending his life by suicide, the creative genius has gifted the mankind something so profound in so little time that leaves the common people in an awe-inspiring state of mind. Often these works are the celebration of all aspects of life, negative or positive it doesn’t matter, reminding us that the greatest achievement of mankind is nothing but to be alive, having the heartbeats running to see, feel, and appreciate the wonders of life no matter for how long.
But for the common people, The distinction between their favourite creative genius’s life and his works often gets blurred and most often through the eyes of a common man, his life becomes his greatest work!
And at times the suicide of a creative genius increases the popularity of him and his work. As if by committing suicide he gave the last push to be immortal in the hearts and minds of his admirers. But the way you don’t need to have a mental illness to become super creative it’s the same way you don’t need to kill yourself to become famous!
In pop-lore, there are so many stories about the so-called ” 27 Club” ( The 27 Club is a list consisting mostly of popular musicians, artists, and actors who died,mostly by committing suicide at the age of 27. it has become a cultural phenomenon, with many celebrities who died at 27 noted for their high-risk lifestyles that include drug abuse, lack of concern towards mental health issues, etc) Currently, some members of the 27 Club are Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse. It is a subject of great interest for both celebrity journalists and common people as a whole. But the problem for the common man is that the greater part of the media only talks about unusual things that can be hyper- sensationalised like this so called 27 club members while talking about, say rock music. They’d talk about the contributions of the 27 club members more than someone who is alive or died due to natural causes. That’s why some worthy talents never get their due recognitions for they may sing brilliantly but their lives aren’t spicy enough to become a part of the public frenzy. I can bet my tongue on that…!
In every field of creative expression, we have examples of creative geniuses, madness, and untimely deaths. Perhaps we all know the legends of the depressed but brilliant painter Vincent Van Gogh, his painting “Starry Night” is considered as the third most famous and recognizable painting in the world. But along with that, the stories of him slicing off a part of his ear and gifting it to a prostitute just because she said something nice to him and painting a self-portrait with bandaged ear, his relationships was with two of his ardent supporters, his brother Theo and his sister-in-law Jo van Gogh-Bonger and finally his attempt to shoot himself and dying from the same bullet wound later are equally famous. In all fairness, one has to agree novelist Irving Stone made this side of Vincent immortal in his book ‘Lust for Life.’ It is also full of irony that the painter who couldn’t sell even a single painting in his lifetime, ( which was a major source of his depression) his painting “The Portrait of Dr. Paul Gachet “(1890) was sold for a record-breaking $82.5 million in 1990. Talk about the sardonic smile of life!
Another great example in the tortured genius category is Virginia Woolf. It feels astonishing that the woman who did write masterpieces like ‘Mrs.Dalloway’, ‘To the Lighthouse’ to name a few and who could write the brilliant essay titled ‘A Room of One’s own’ was a lifelong patient of schizophrenia and ultimately committed suicide by drowning herself in the river Ouse near Lewes in East Sussex. She loved her husband too much and her husband Leonard was wholeheartedly devoted to her well-being. It is bound to make eyes get misty if one reads her gut-wrenching farewell letter to her husband. In the letter she wrote,
“Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will, I know. You see, I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.”
in a way she wanted to relieve her husband but she was wrong, really wrong for Leonard was still in love with her with his entire being. Ah! Another irony of life!
If one looks at creativity and the turbulence of life sprinkling some philosophical salt, You’d see grief does work as a trigger to get busy with any forms of artistic expressions, Say you are a writer and you are feeling a bit complacent in terms of your writing in that scenario you won’t bother to writ@e as often as you did before but when you have a constant void inside, when your life is riddled by grief, at times it instigates to create something new, something brilliant in exchange for all the things, all the people you’ve lost along the way. On the other hand creative people are really sensitive within and it is that sensitivity that soaks up the creativity and heightens it. Because of their highly sensitive mind they can create something so wonderful from something that seems ordinary for the common folk. Sensitivity towards self pain, pain of others, self joy or joy of others just to name a few are the causes that instigate the creative genius to create a masterpiece. Many died in the Spanish civil war, many had witnessed the horrors of that war but It took the genius sensitive mind of Earnest Hemingway that could write a masterpiece like ” For whom the bell times”. In the same war people have witnessed the destruction of the city of Guernica, but it took an utterly sensitive Picasso to immortalise the event in his most famous painting of the same name. ( The painting ‘Guernica’ can still be seen in the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.)
Indeed, at times it’s tough to understand if people love the poet Sylvia Plath or the grief-stricken life of Sylvia plath. It’s hard to decipher the poet who wrote brilliant poems like ‘Daddy’ and ‘Cut’ to name a few where she opened herself up in front of the readers as her poetry is often termed as confessional. But no matter what the critics said about her poems, she was a darling of her readers and whatever you try to remain neutral, it is agonisingly hard to know who matters more to people. The brilliant poet or her life ( and her subsequent death by suicide). Here too one must agree that her life was her most famous work.
The same thing can be said about famous writers, painters and philosophers such as Franz Kafka, Lewis Carroll, Tennessee Williams. Ezra Pound, Friedrich Nietzsche, Eugene O’Neill, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoievsky and Francisco Goya to name a few who clearly fit the bill of the mad genius stereotype. And what is more popular? their life or their work? To be the darling of the public, people must love their life as well as their works but at times defining this becomes pretty difficult. Most often a book written about his life or a movie made about his life increases this difficulty. At times the combined efforts of celebrity journalists, brilliant novelists, and above-average screenwriters do the trick. The trick is to give equal importance to the works of a creative genius and the grief-stricken aspects of his life. But mind you, it’s not always easy because most people keep their favourites at an altar. And we know one who lives on the altar, he is no less than god and god can do no wrong!
For example, the movie ‘Total Eclipse’ is based on the life of the great French poet Arthur Rimbaud, (a young Leonardo Dicaprio brilliantly acted in the title role). The movie talks about Rimbaud’s audacity to speak in front of French elites to throw away all the French poetry till the time he started writing, his pivotal relationship with an older French poet Paul Verlaine and its catastrophic impact on the lives of them as well as others. But mostly it talks about Rimbaud’s propensity of running away from home and his relationship with his mother who every time used to find and bring him back home. If one has read not even a single poem by Rimbaud after watching the movie, he is bound to love the troubled young man Rimbaud rather than the poet Rimbaud. ( in the popular lore, the story of him running away and getting killed in Africa is quite famous and it’s equally famous that in his tombstone his mother Vitalie Rimbaud writing the inscription “Arthur can run no more”). No matter, even though he wrote some of the superlatively magnificent poems , it’s his life that has all the ingredients for a common man to go ga-ga over.
True, people will always have an inclination towards the myths and legends that strengthens their mad poet, writer, painter etc stereotypes for the simple reason that the creative genius of their liking had written, painted , sung or simply made something so marvellously beautiful, something new, something that speaks for itself, something that screams quality despite being riddled by the perils of life, despite suffering from various mental illnesses which had no chance of cure it at that time( even with the help of modern medicine and countless hours of therapy sessions mental illness can not be fully cured, it can only be made just manageable) and despite having all these troubles on his plate, through his work he celebrated life. No matter how short his life was, no matter if he had killed himself, in the least little time he had, he managed to give mankind something so wonderful, something fresh, something that was entirely new and something that can’t be forgotten once it has been read, seen or felt.
For a common man having these traits are simply unimaginable, extraordinary and for that reason he’d believe all the myths and legends associated with his favourite creative genius. Believing in his larger than life persona is in fact a kind of tribute offered by the common man.
And thus the tales, myths and legends of mad poets, suicidal writers and erratic painters grow big day by day. What else could a common man offer more to the altar of their creative gods?
Epilogue :
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In the prologue section, I did talk about the similarities of the counterculture era of the 1960s and the time we live in now. I mentioned the tremendous technological advancements like user friendly AI (Artificial intelligence) that’s in our disposal now. But can AI help me find that one word or that one line which is stuck in my head but refused to come to the paper and I’m so desperately trying to remember it because if I find that word my poem will get the meaning I originally envisioned, can AI do that? No it can’t. No doubt, It can do wonders in the field of technology. Obviously technological advancements are needed but a time like the days of counter-culture is also needed as it was one of the greatest time for artistic creativity, it’s also needed for it showed how tremendously powerful art can be ; As It did show the world which was so materialistic in its core that through art the revival of human values were possible. I strongly believe in today’s selfish times we need to have the same kind of counter culture revolution (subtracting all the pitfalls of the last attempt of course) to show the world that human dignity doesn’t always revolve around a selfish eat- drink and be merry sort of philosophy. And it’s only art that can show us the way forward.
I’m just a poet and a dreamer but this open eyed dream of mine is indeed the best one I’ve seen in a long long time.
P.S: Some write-ups don’t need an epilogue, yet still…!