Never real and always true
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 23: Essentially Creative
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by James Bradley
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James Bradley's biography and other articles by this writer
In 2003, after more than a year in the grip of a major depressive episode, I consulted a doctor to discuss my condition. Alone in his surgery, I filled in a multiple-choice questionnaire, answering questions along the lines of ‘Do you feel worthless (a) never (b) sometimes (c) constantly?' and ‘Do you consider suicide (a) never (b) occasionally (c) often?'
After I had completed the test, my doctor returned. His manner was calm and understanding as he told me that yes, I certainly had results that suggested serious depression. Speaking gently, he prescribed a course of SSRIs and I left his surgery.
Given that my doctor's practice is located in Darlinghurst, and caters largely to middle-aged gay men, many of whom have HIV, I'm sure it's a conversation he has had a lot of practice at. And I suppose logically I should have been upset or disturbed by the outcome – I had, after all, just been diagnosed with a mental illness, albeit one that afflicts a surprisingly large portion of the population. But if I felt anything, it was something closer to liberation.
This was not my first experience with medication to control my moods, nor was it the first time I had spoken to a professional about my psychological or emotional state. But it was the first time I had been prescribed one of the family of medications that have transformed our society's attitudes to and treatment of the range of conditions rather glibly described as depressive-anxiety disorder. And, perhaps curiously, it was the first time any of the professionals I had spoken to over the years had used the word ‘depression', or at least the first time I had heard them say it.
The weeks that followed were curious. As the weight of my mood, the distractedness and clawing anxiety I had fought to control for many months began to lift, I felt a sort of dissociation set in. Experience took on a strange glassiness, as if I were outside myself, looking in. It was not a matter of feeling dulled, or anaesthetised, more a sense that I had become less real, or at least less engaged by questions of the self. The effect was not so much unsettling as curious, a process to be observed, a response that was itself an expression of what I was experiencing.
Over time, these feelings grew less pronounced. I stepped back into myself, became whole once more. But simultaneously I was aware that the self which was reintegrating was a different one – subtly perhaps, but different nonetheless.
For all that I knew they were there, the differences were not easy to put my finger on. At first I was mostly aware of a certain hardening of my emotional responses. While even in a non-depressed state my emotional responses are intense and often unpredictable, when I am depressed I am so emotionally labile that even ordinary moments of human life often bring on a raw ache I can barely control, leaving me afraid I will break down and weep in the most inappropriate places. On the medication, my frightening lability was gone – but so too was the sense of sadness and tenderness in the everyday of which I have always been aware.
But this loss of sympathy was not the only change. There was something deeper and more profound as well. In the months leading up to that visit to the doctor, I had been almost unable to write. Whether the stress from problems with the novel I was working on had triggered my depressive episode, or a cyclic depressive episode had affected my writing, for a year or even longer I had been struggling to write.
At first the problem had been confined to the novel on which I was working. After writing a first draft with relative ease, I had become stuck not far into the second. My attempts to resolve a small matter of plotting and pace had somehow begun to unpick the fabric of the whole, until finally it had come unravelled altogether. Despite my efforts, the book's problems only seemed to grow worse with each attempt to repair them. Sections that had slipped easily into each other began to clash and jar; language that had seemed hypnotic and sinuous began to sound stilted and forced. Faced with what seemed increasingly like disaster, I found myself without direction or control, my intuitions and self-belief eroded by an increasingly corrosive doubt in my own abilities, until at last I reached a point where I could barely compose an email or look at my computer without wanting to vomit.
With the SSRIs in my system, I could write again – at least in a superficial sense. But something more fundamental had changed as well. For, while I could make sentences again, form ideas, write coherently and persuasively, the deeper impulse that had led me to write in the first place, that oddly compulsive need to find words to contain and express the things I felt, was gone.
In itself, this was a curious and confronting discovery. The act of writing, the idea of myself as a writer was, I had always believed, so central to my sense of self I could not imagine who I was, what I was, without it. But as the weeks and months went by, I began to wonder whether I might be able to make sense of myself without writing, whether that version of myself who had written might be able to be left behind as well.
MOOD DISORDERS AND MADNESS HAVE LONG BEEN ASSOCIATED WITH CREATIVITY. In the fourth century BCE, Aristotle argued that an excess of the bilious humour, while causing melancholy, was also a necessary component in creative genius: ‘All those who have attained excellence in philosophy, in poetry and in art, even Socrates and Plato, had a melancholic habitus; indeed some suffered even from melancholic disease.' Likewise, Rufus of Ephesus argued that melancholy, which he believed might be temperamental or acquired through overly heavy consumption of wine and red meat, or excessive intellectual activity, was also a condition to which those of genius are particularly prone.
Yet it was Renaissance writers who gave the first systematic expression to the notion that creativity and melancholy might be intertwined. Marsilio Ficino famously argued that melancholy was the manifestation of a yearning for the great and eternal which, while universal, was necessarily more pronounced in those artists and philosophers seeking to transcend the concern of the everyday, and strive towards the divine. Truth, loss and melancholy are thus indissolubly wound together, the striving for the first both an admission and a consequence of the second and a cause and a function of the last. Robert Burton is more succinct: ‘all poets are mad', he declares in The Anatomy of Melancholy.
But it was the Romantics who gave fullest expression to the notion that madness, melancholia and creativity might be inextricably wound together. ‘We of the craft are all crazy,' Byron famously proclaimed. ‘Some are affected by gaiety, others by melancholy, but all are more or less touched.'
More recently, we have grown less comfortable with the notion that suffering or madness might be connected with creativity. The reasons for this shift in attitudes are complex, and in many ways contradictory. On the one hand, public and private discourse has become increasingly inflected with the jargon of psychology and medical psychiatry. We routinely speak of closure; label our moods depression, our impulses compulsions, our worries neuroses. Yet this language is, for all its semblance of meaning, a jargon that denies complexity and erases individuality, reducing all experience, all suffering to a set of almost programmatic responses. It is impossible to listen to grieving families speaking of their need for closure, or those most unfortunate in our society – the addicts and homeless – who have the most contact with the psychological and social work industries describing their experiences, and not hear the way the glibness of pop psychology obscures as much if not more than it reveals.
Fundamental to the model of human nature contained in this version of psychology is an assumption that happiness is the end to which mental health is directed. Yet this assumption is questionable, both because the model of mental health it relies upon is so narrow and because it is unable to accommodate the idea that agitation and pain, sadness and hurt might be more than mere stages to be overcome on the road to wholeness, or might have positive qualities it cannot describe or explain.
Within such a framework, if creativity is to be something positive, it must by its nature be a manifestation of mental health and happiness, not what it understands as emotional dysfunction or unhappiness. In the place of the tortured genius, we are encouraged to see creativity as essentially therapeutic, or part of a broader program of self-improvement through the pursuit of individual ‘passion', a shift that transforms creative endeavour from a vocation into a lifestyle choice.
This unease is mirrored in our intellectual culture's unease with the Romantic conception of the artist, and more particularly its implicit assertion of a privileged status for certain works and creations. After more than thirty years deconstructing the canon, we are wary of the idea of aesthetic significance, wary of hierarchies of quality. After all, if texts are texts and everywhere, their creation cannot be confined to those of genius.
Likewise, as our public culture has grown increasingly censorious, we have become more suspicious of attempts to excuse bad behaviour as the legitimate expression of the creative life.
Yet alongside this unease there has been a growing resistance to this attempt to reduce human existence to the triteness of pop psychology. Writers as various as Kay Redfield Jamison, Julia Kristeva, Eric G. Wilson, Andrew Solomon and Lewis Wolpert have sought to forge what Jonathan Dollimore describes as a new subjectivity from the experience of breakdown. In different ways, all seek some insight into the nature of existence from the experience of loss, pain and what Lewis Wolpert calls ‘malignant sadness'. As Dollimore correctly discerns, this subjectivity has echoes of Ficino and his belief that melancholia has moral and religious aspects, of the notion that suffering might be virtuous. But, simultaneously, all seek – in different ways – to recover something contemporary culture often seems in danger of losing: a sense of the fleetingness of things, the knowledge of loss that necessarily infects even the most joyous moments, the fragility and preciousness of life and being.