Out of Egypt:

writing like crazy

I read an interesting article by that title for SIP class. Here's my journal response to it, in which I talk a bit about the closeness between genius and madness, and argue that there's more to it than simply that crazy people write more, so there's a higher chance that they'll get good at it. Rather, I argue, there's something about the ways in which creative people that's more likely to drive them crazy, placing them in a state of heightened creativity (a feedback loop) until (& unless) it goes too far.

This was a scary article for me to read, since, unlike many (perhaps most) people I know, I have had experience with the phenomena which it discusses. It’s hard for me, perhaps, to know how honestly to speak about some of what I have experienced, since this is a reading response, not a piece of confessional writing.

However, I cannot deny that I am one of those who, at the least, sometimes feels almost inescapably driven to write. Blog entries (whether in the style of a personal essay or still more informally), discussion board posts, poems, and (when I was in my manic state) diagrams and clotted clusters of notes – I’ve written them all under the influence of such an impulse. Many of these works were good, on looking back, though some were written in a mood so frenetic and dissociated from reality that they aren’t worth remembering. Between the two poles of complete lucidity and near-complete irrationality there is a continuum, of course, with most of all the uncollected, non-externally motivated writing that I have done closer to the rational end than otherwise. However, at times my compulsion to create, even when the products of that compulsion were worthwhile, was detrimental since it distracted me from the more mundane tasks of writing and other academic work that I had to accomplish. Weaver’s statement about the strength of intrinsic motivations to write, as opposed to extrinsic, is quite true. Curiosity and a desire to develop ideas are infinitely more motivating than the desire for a grade.

However, on the ever-controversial subject of the line between genius and madness, Weaver is less convincing. While what she says about the physiochemical basis for hypergraphia seems accurate, psychiatric theory, in my opinion, cannot yet account for the qualitative state experienced by many manic individuals experiencing hypergraphia, at least those of above-average intelligence (as were Dostoevsky, Flaubert, and van Gogh, her three main examples). About halfway through the article, she writes “[A] compulsive need to write may indirectly make good writing more likely by increasing the time the writer spends practicing. This may be one factor in the very high incidence of manic-depressive writers. Kay Redfield Jamison calculates that poets are up to 40 times more likely than the general population to have had manic episodes.” While this may be one factor, in accord with Thomas Edison’s famous quote on the nature of genius, which she references, I am almost certain it is not the only factor, or even the main factor. Rather, my own experience, for as much as its worth, suggests to me that since poets, if they are any good, necessarily perceive the world in unorthodox, metaphorical, and richly imagistic ways, which might appear to other more conventional thinkers to be simply a form of dishonesty, they are constantly engaged in the business of making connections between portions of the brain that remain separate in the population at large. Therefore, since both mania and temporal-lobe epilepsy (which are likely related since they both respond to the same medication) cause neural firings to become more rapid and uninhibited, in one whose brain pathways have been prepared by creative work, the mental illness will create not merely a greater desire to write but also a greater ability to make connections between disparate realms of thought, and thus the work of one suffering from mental illness may well manifest a higher degree of creativity. However, this can go too far, as it did in my experience, when one descends into a state where it is impossible any longer to tell the difference between what is “really” true about reality and what is only figuratively true. Once one reaches this point, one’s writing becomes densely allusive and imagistic, as did mine, but also impenetrable to the normal mind, since it exists in a thought-world unanchored to conventional reality.

Thanks for your thoughts on this. It's a subject that intrigues me much.

Posted by: funke at October 3, 2005 12:30 PM