16.3.10

Sanity and/vs. Creativity

This is a discussion prompt! Please write word-floods in response. I'm working on something and need everyone's thoughts about some of these ideas....

Insanity in sane people. Does stress, sleeplessness, too much caffeine or simply being human ever make you feel crazy? (When you literally doubt your sanity.) If or when you reach that very delicate line between sanity and insanity, what does it feel like? What questions do you ask yourself? What thoughts or actions seem insane to you? What in particular makes you reach this threshold? Have you ever crossed it? If you did, what was that like?

The creative process and sanity/insanity. Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love mentioned that working in creative professions, or simply being creative, makes other people nervous about our mental health in a way that working in other professions doesn't. Successful writers and artists do have higher rates of suicide and depression or mental disturbances than the average accountant -- is this the cost of creativity, the cause of creativity, or mere coincidence? If it is the cost of creativity, what is about creative endeavors that strains the sanity of the creator? Is it the pressure to be original? The fear of running out of inspiration? Bitchy muses?

Go!
Posted by mooresy @ 6:44 AM
* ,

7 comments:

laws said...

From a cursory glance at this post, I feel like you need to read Touched by Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison.

I will have more to say later.

March 16, 2010 at 10:46 AM
laws said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
March 16, 2010 at 10:46 AM
laws said...

First things first. I strongly believe that we shouldn’t pathologize our emotions; we should experience them. As Melville says via Ishmael (yes, my Moby-Dick obsession is going to spill over from my blog onto this one), “nothing exists except by contrast”.

When I was a summer student at Jackson, we had a series of seminars by a post-doctoral fellow somewhere (I wish I could remember, seriously) whose work focused on defining what, philosophically and societally, we consider mental illness. While scientists would like to be able to develop tests and treatments for the myriad mental disorders currently psychologically defined, psychiatric evaluation remains a primarily qualitative (and trusting, if you think of it) exercise. With the impending release of the DSM-V, it seems more apparent than ever that mental illness is a relative consideration rather than a static point of reference. The face of a particular disease changes as the DSM changes and as social ideas shift; schizophrenia is a prime example of this.

The creative process and sanity/insanity: this is an interesting question, but I think that you (or maybe Elizabeth Gilbert) do it a disservice. While I’m sure that the so-called “creative professions” have more of an opportunity to capitalize on the highs and lows often associated with “diseases” like manic depression, I’m not sure that they actually experience it at a higher incidence than others. Since I’m in science, I’m going to throw my field out as an example. Success in this field is also directly correlated to an individual’s ability to produce, especially since, if one is incapable of production, one will never be funded. Being a good scientist, thus, often requires one to learn to “ride a wave”: one must be able to sustain some sort of hope in times of no data/malfunctioning experiments/no money in order to stay afloat in the field. A lot of people leave science at the graduate level when they realize that this is never really going to change.

I guess that it looks like I’m leaning toward “pressure to create” as a causal force implicating the creative process in insanity and, in fact, all fields. I’d point you toward the recent suicides at Cornell University (in the gorgeous gorges): both engineering students. When it feels like your entire life’s success depends upon the task at hand, this seems like an obvious side effect.

Mania, in the manic-depressive sense of the word, drives production. This could be experimental production in the case of science; it could be paintings, sculptures, and novels. But mania is part of a dialectic, and not everyone is equipped to deal with the other side of the cycle. The “creative professions” are at an advantage in that both parts of the cycle can, theoretically, be productive for them.


Okay, but there’s a difference here. I think it’s this:

When Sylvia Plath committed suicide, it added a layer of…something…to her poetry, no? If a scientist were to commit suicide (I’m thinking about Wallace Carothers, who famously poisoned himself in the 1930’s after inventing nylon), it’s not like his “audience” approaches his work from a different angle.

What do you guys think?

March 16, 2010 at 2:43 PM
mooresy said...

I love the example you give of Plath and Carothers. Why is it that if a person creates a useful object like nylon or a vaccine, the "audience" or "users" are unable to interpret it in any other way? Maybe what Plath was creating was not actually poetry (which could be called an object, like nylon), but rather a PROCESS that looked like poetry. Maybe she was creating a conversation of sorts with her work, and her suicide was a sentence in this conversation. (And thus had the power to affect everything she'd previously "said.")

I do think science is a creative profession, as well as dance or cooking or mathematical theory -- as is anything else that asks the creators to step outside of themselves for a moment and live in a world where something -- poems, paintings, buildings, and most of all, IDEAS -- come from the seeming nothing.

Someone else, in answering these same questions, said to me "Crazy is a gradient." Maybe I shouldn't be asking "have you crossed the thin line between sanity and insanity" but rather, what are your lines of sanity/insanity shaped like? I can imagine that maybe in a more creative state, when we haven't slept and we're in the flow of things, our "lines" actually curve into a shade of crazy that would seem strange if we were doing something more menial, but is perfectly normal if we've just had a epiphany about a project or problem. Does any of that make sense?

March 17, 2010 at 5:26 AM
Rosalyn said...

Im grappling with these very questions as I am walking the thin, fine, precarious, dangerous, beautiful line of sanity and insanity. I am creative. I create. Creativity and intelligence come with a sort of sensitivity and heightened awareness to the world. This heightened awareness would obviously come with baggage. We are sensitive to the beautiful, the sumptuous, the sensuous, yes, but we crazies are also wide open and susceptible to the pain, the worry, the overwhelming sense of self-doubt, all the hurts in the world - think spiderman hearing the cries for help non-stop. To this spiderman metaphor- with great power comes great responsibility. Also to whom much is given, much is asked.

Insanity must be our burden to bear. What a beautiful line to stand on, but what a painful one as well. It takes this vulnerability, and the awareness of a vulnerability in others to understand what this world is about, to write about this world, (my joys, your joys, our pains) in a poem or to paint the love of something on a canvas. Its about the human condition. We are fragile. We feel.

March 17, 2010 at 12:55 PM
Joshua said...

Yeah, I think that Kate brings up a good point. The definition of insane is quite pertinent to the topic. We tend to use words like hate, love, depressed, crazy, retarded, OCD, etc. in a very trivial way. We speak in hyperboles without really amounting or maybe understanding what it means to actually reach that point of insanity. Have you lost the boundary between the collectively perceived world and the one your mind creates? Do you commit acts without being able to understand or care about the consequences? Do you hear voices? I think that extreme mental and physical fatigue do not merit insanity; otherwise, there would be plenty of college students in straight jackets. People may be pushed over the edge if they had a previous condition, but I do not think that simply being creative or sensitive is a quality that can preempt insanity.

Like Kate was saying, I do feel that artists have to produce consistently in order to gain headway in the industry and make a living. Think about it. Are we more stressed out when we are thinking of an idea or is it through the act of production? I personally get burnt, and I do not believe that it creates a mental imbalance. Gilbert does say that artists have a perspective that they are the center of the world; thus, with the pressure to continuously work and the inherent selfishness and definition of one's ego, artists can have a self involvement that can certainly become destructive. Also, Sarah mentions accountants to represent other professions not directly involved in creative action. I think that there are plenty of sensitive, creative accountants, the difference is that they place their energy into something other than themselves. It's just my perspective, but there is more to tipping the scales than simply being creative. Maybe the idea is that artists live in a bubble and watch and reflect on the world with their work without touching it, but then, they realize that they are subject to all the problems of worldly mechanics. And... they can't deal with it. Just a thought.

March 18, 2010 at 10:28 PM
mooresy said...

Josh, that's a good point about the hyperbolic use of emotional words like 'hate' and 'depressed,' and it makes me realize that I wasn't being specific enough about the kind of crazy I meant. I don't mean the kind that creates imaginary people and stirs phantom voices or disconnects people's perceptions of cause and effect. I suppose I mean -- or am least asking what other people think it's like -- to be really deep in your own head to the point where reality sometimes seems far away. Or maybe I'm the only one who feels this, and I am crazy. ;)

This is what I mean -- at some point we all have to wonder how different our perception of reality is when compared to other people's, and whether our perception would be deemed "normal" or not. I know I've sometimes thought things or felt things that I suspect wouldn't be called "normal" if I asked a group of strangers on the street. But how much of that is just the fear to explore the self? To really dig in and get mentally muddy. All of us have such different mental constructs and worlds of meaning built in 20+ years of memory and association. There's bound to be something a little mystical or "odd" in all those neural pathways. What is "normal," anyway?

This is really helping, guys. I was hoping it would turn into a conversation like this. :) Thanks, and I hope to hear more from everyone else!

March 19, 2010 at 1:46 AM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)