Rereading Jamison’s Classic on Art and Madness

It’s no secret that many of the artists and writers in history are prone to depression, madness, lunatic asylums, and suicide. From Van Gogh to Virginia Woolf, the most creative of our predecessors are loony tunes. Upon examination, even those who are not so firmly entrenched in the public imagination as mad were mad indeed. Or were they? I’ve long perceived my own temperament as truly reflective of nature, of humanity. The ‘normal’ are the insane- they exist with the delusion that life is even-keel, feeling nothing of the storms and darkness, nor of the miraculous, while my wild mood swings reflect the tempestuous polarities of life here on earth: at turns vivid and gorgeous, at turns torturous grief. The human condition spans barbaric war and torture to astonishing achievement, base compulsive atrocity to stunning, miraculous creativity. My mind spans these heights and lows, naturally.

I take my rightful place among a long lineage of artists and writers who felt such extremes, and whose creativity could not have manifest without. Yes, there are many creative people who don’t experience depression or the bizarre and exhilarating impulsivity and joy they call mania- you know, as in ‘maniacal.’ I don’t know those people, however, and the more I research history, the more I am convinced that the ‘bipolar mind’ is synonymous with creativity.

Thomas Chatterton, already a prolific and influential poet by age 17, committed suicide with arsenic before his 18th birthday

While this phenomenon has long been researched in relation to schizophrenia, with its trademark racing thoughts, the delusions and hallucinations, there is another madness called manic depression that explains the lucid periods of our artistic predecessors. Bipolars can range from fully functioning humans who are a ‘little offbeat’ or a little ‘moody’ or sensitive to those who swing between bedridden depression and speedometer busting psychoses. Those who go completely mad during mania can reach full-on psychotic breaks with delusions and bizarre behaviour, sometimes requiring hospitalization. It’s not always so extreme, however, and may simply manifest as rapidly spinning thoughts, heightened joy, extreme enthusiasm and productivity, speed talking, and radical impulsivity. Manic episodes that don’t necessarily interfere with functioning or ruin a person’s life are called ‘hypomanic,’ meaning ‘not quite as manic.’ The depressed phase can range from abject suicidal torment to listless functionality. Dispersed between these poles of experience are periods of complete normality. Creative people who experience this fluctuating range of sensitivities can produce work at all stages, most rapidly during mania.

Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison’s classic seminal study, Touched With Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, is a must-read for any bipolar person, and for anyone remotely interested in the link between creativity and ‘eccentricity.’ Students of art history and of literature do themselves a disservice to miss this valuable and fascinating scholarship. Jamison, one of the world’s experts on bipolar ‘disease,’ is herself manic-depressive. In this incredible exploration, she surveys a full range of artistic biography, from Coleridge to Schumann to Poe to Byron, documenting the mercurial temperaments and the creative productivity, and mapping the diagnoses of family relationships to show hereditary links.

Jamison eloquently maps patterns historically in the creative temperament, from drug and alcohol abuse to suicide, both traits extremely common to the bipolar person. She quotes thinkers and philosophers throughout history on the tempestuous minds of those possessed by the muse. While she points out clearly that not all bipolar people are talented writers or artists, the connection between creativity and manic depression is frequently occurring.

Intriguingly, I am not alone in feeling that my nature reflects nature, and Jamison, in a decidedly more scientific fashion, outlines the circadian rhythms of light, seasons, and weather and compares them to the biology of mania and depression. “The rhythms and cycles of manic depressive illness, a singularly cyclic disease, are strikingly similar to those of the natural world, as well as to the death-and-regeneration and dark-and-light cycles so often captured in poetry, music, and painting.”

Finally, after an incredibly vibrant journey through history, biography, music, painting, and writing, Jamison considers some volatile questions about our nature, about culture, and about the ethics or desirability of treatment. Will treatment, not available in the past, stop great art and music? Is it desirable to modify nature’s mood swings? “Clearly, a close association between the artistic temperament and manic-depressive illness has many implications- for artists, medicine, and society. Modern psychopharmacology and genetic research raise almost endless possibilities, both liberating and disturbing, but the ethical waters remain disconcertingly uncharted,” Jamison writes.

Touched by Fire, 1993, is by now a classic of bipolar literature, but I read it fresh and anew for the fourth time. This time, what I drew most from it was a sense of confidence. I commit to stop retreating from my temperament, hoping to appear more moderate and appease those peers who expect me to be anything buy my wild and creative self, prone to melancholy, prone to chaos, prone to joy. From now on, I will refuse to conform to a mold into which I do not fit; into from which nature herself recoils. Thank-you, Kay: I will celebrate the vividness of the highs, and see the truth in my depressions. It is upon these fluctuations that creativity flourishes.

Lord Byron

If you enjoy fascinating, creative, unusual biographies, you may enjoy writer Lorette C. Luzajic’s other blog, www.fascinatingpeople.wordpress.com.

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In Which the Author Goes on at Length About Greg Bottom’s Book The Colorful Apocalypse: Journeys in Outsider Art

The more I see as I’m running up that hill is that pathology is everywhere you look. The word ‘normal’ has little meaning, beyond showing a societal and cultural construct of what it esteemed. That what may appear on the surface in any given setting is not really there becomes more and more clear. “Normal” possibly doesn’t exist, and certainly it is minority, within any given society and the mores therein. I mean, growing up, I thought I was absolutely neurotic, with my weird little rituals and a full cast melodrama at home, the little fantasies, the anxieties. In the 20s I spent a great deal of time in therapy working through the mire. I was gung-ho for the pills, too, curious as hell, if Prozac could make me better than well. Guess I wasn’t one of the lucky ones. Paxil made me suicidal. Wellbrutrin was great, sort of, was it? It was hard to tell if it was placebo, or if my thoughts were really calmer. It could have been me starting to mellow out. I think truly it was probably the yoga that I began around then, also in search of balance.

Then, sometime around 30, I wondered what the hell I was struggling so hard to be sane for, when the entire damn world was a nut job. The only illness is in trying to make sense of the thing. I was prone to extreme analysis, as a writer, but I wanted to start thinking about other people’s madness and not mine.

You start to put pictures together. Whole pictures. You see various levels of shit. So you know you fit in here: not as balanced as some, not as bad off as others. You stop thinking of what it ‘should’ be like, lose the weight of unrealistic goals of capability and grandeur, start accepting the way things are, realistically, and work harder on the possible stuff, let up on the rest. You start being real grateful for how well you’ve managed- some blow their brains out, some have lost children, some see little flashing lights in the sky or cameras in the trees. You’re fully functional girl, come on now.

I’ve been drawn to outsider art since I stumbled on Margaret’s Grocery during my Kerouac trails in days of more bravado. Zappa For President! our humble pick up voted, rolling past all the blues into a topsy-turvy red and white lego-esque world where we bought warm Coca Colas from a dim little counter. Margaret told us that her husband, the ‘Reverend’ was the artist who had turned every surface in sight into a red and white painted tribute to the Lord. Bible verses, my mother tongue, were scrawled everywhere. My girlfriend and I were young hippies, visionaries who believed in the goddess and LSD. We were vegetarians. Luminaries. I was the bard; Julie Ann was the one who’d be able to make a fire in the woods and kill the bugs that came near me. Now THIS strange little market was something worth analyzing. But analyze it? I couldn’t even describe it.

Years and years later I chanced on a pricey art mag that was resplendent with colourful, juicy, crazy pictures and magical thinking. It was right up my alley- voodoo, mermaids, Bible stories, and schizophrenics. All that messy childhood and the New Orleans I’d taken in, mixed with a madwoman in a book shop who told me to paint my way through upcoming sorrows, had made me newly into something of an artist. I’d dabbled in art as a teen, but now I felt compelled to follow the orders of the lady in the yellow dress. She had told me that I simply had no idea how many friends I was going to lose, and if that I were to live through it, I’d better paint. I didn’t know, but a few days after the conversation, one of my best friends was diagnosed with full-blown AIDS. I picked up my paintbrush.

I set store in fate. Now, fated again, I found a magazine that had ‘voodoo art’, something I found quaint because my very first art show was called “VOODOO- art can bend your mind.” And inside an issue of Raw Vision Magazine was where I saw that strange old Lego world of Margaret’s Grocery. Outsider art- the unschooled, message-driven, unrefined, multi-media, apocalyptic, rapture-pending, hallucination-spun work of insane visionaries.

Oh, fuck. How I hoped to be an Outsider Artist! At last I’d found the art world I fit into- not the established academia or art snobbery, where everyone knows no one knows. Not the world where a red square would sell for two billion dollars, but the world where a man would paint from the inside out, his truth and its changes, on anything he could find.

And yes, I was “unschooled”- at least in art- not even an artist, yet, really. I was raised on Baptist truths though I’m un-baptized- not even God wanted me back then. I painted on boards and glued magnetic alphabet pieces and doll parts into assemblages, too! But alas, I wasn’t really all that peculiar. Outsider artists are outsiders- they are former slaves who took up painting at 83 and made 15 thousand works. They are instititutionalized geniuses who drew intricate patterns out of everything from pencils to feces. They are people so poor that they practically painted crates to make Margaret’s Grocery. Sometimes God told them to do it, and sometimes it was the devil.

So began a fascinating passion for me- not so much the ‘study of’ but an experience of outsider art. I’ve read Raw Vision and other books. I’ve been to a few museums and plan to travel to Baltimore, always have, as soon as I have a dime to spare. Magical religious stuff and addictions are interesting to me, so the art of people with those experiences is something I take in. I always stop for ‘folk art’ signs and love learning about the expressions of the marginalized or the unusual. While I’ve questioned whether I’m being patronizing- oh, aren’t those poor little poor insane people nifty?

But the truth is, I’ve always been fascinated by the other artists too- you know, the other crazy poor little poor artists, like Van Gogh, and a whole host of other suicide ones whose paintings sell for millions. Once again, it’s that thing- crazy? Yeah, and so is everybody else…You know, like Britney, flipping her lid out loud. But then there was Berlioz, the French composer of Symphonie Fantastique, an obsessive love poem for his heart-throb, who planned to murder another of his fiancées out of jealousy and was found walking through Paris in a woman’s wig, carrying a bag of oranges. See what I mean?

Now if you are one of the very few ‘normal’ ones in ‘healthy’ relationships, with a ‘balanced’ lifestyle, relative ‘health,’ few ‘problems,’ a moderate but never fanatical spirituality, (sorry, atheism isn’t quite normal yet- it’s ALWAYS been fringe) and you have no relationship whatsoever to drugs, alcohol, or prescriptive medicines, you might be thinking “now, those are all artist nuts.”

Sure. Creative types tend to be highly visible. But today I saw a lady pushing a baby carriage at the store. Inside the carriage was a Pekinese dog in a bonnet and booties. A man called this morning but it was the wrong number. When I said, “no worries, have a nice day” he yelled, “Who do you think you are, Marilyn? I know he’s there with you!” And last week came the news- not of blow jobs in the white house, but of blow in the white house. When the Zero Tolerance old-timers are running a White White House on the cocaine-fueled Harvard days of yester-yore while blathering on about how God hates Muslims (and faggots), you might think you’re at the end of the world. But you’re not. This is just everyday life, and it always has been.

Greg Bottoms is an amazing writer. His unforgettable memoir Angelhead; My Brother’s Descent into Madness was one of the stories that made me look around at my life and think, honey, this ain’t nothin. Although drugs made two men I loved into paranoids, neither of them tried to kill my father or anything like that. Beyond the story itself is his poetic ability to convey the nuances, the terrors, the underlying currents of humour that occasionally tuck into the most devastating of circumstances.

After his brother’s death, Greg went looking at some art by a handful of religious outsider artists who seemed to have some experiences in common with his schizophrenic brother. He saw some parallels that merited deeper exploration, and so he went deeper.

“Each of the artists in the book experienced an extreme religious epiphany after a time of daunting anxiety and stress and intolerable pressure—this epiphany led to the outpouring of art, in exactly the same way that it did for the “schizophrenic artists” in Prinzhorn’s book. These epiphanies—in a secular, scientific light—would be diagnosed as mental breakdowns, of course. So perspective and semantics become an interesting part of the investigation, so to speak. The human mind must rationalize and relativize experience, keep reshaping it, naming it, making it useful—when it can’t there lies an abyss just ahead,” Greg said in an interview with the University of Chicago Press.

In his foreword, he writes: “That’s how these travels began: absurdly, one might say, or at least haphazardly; with a tinny radio voice, a notebook, and a sudden, unwieldy uprush of memories, the themes of my personal past-illness, breakdown, the myths and symbols of Christianity- flooding through me again like a great, gray wave. I set for myself, that day in the car, a few simple tasks: to travel and look and listen and record. I didn’t know what I would find.”

I went with Greg to visit Norbert Kox, an ex-biker who paints ‘apocalyptic parables’ and Myrtice West, who started painting her visions after her daughter was murdered.

Reading about the artists from the perspective of both the academic (but not ‘art critic’- Greg’s a writer and professor) and one with some proximity to madness personally is refreshing. Greg’s journey is not a volume of poetry, but it could be. The book is slim enough to digest even if you just want to wade into the colorful but macabre world of outsider art. But there’s enough depth to sustain even those who’ve read everything about madness, religion, or outsider art.

Greg says himself that he kind of fell into being a writer by mistake. “I remember feeling a jittery uneasiness, like an itch below the skin, about having been portrayed as some hero-survivor, a success story. I felt, in fact, after a couple of interviews about the book, that I had done nothing more than sell my tragedy in an au courant literary form, the trauma memoir, which courts, in this cultural moment, self-aggrandizement, even if that …is half-buried under iron or self-depreciation. What had I done for my brother, or for schizophrenics? Made a few bucks for myself, become a ‘writer’ and received some praise for my ‘bravery’-bravery?- and crisp prose style.”

That Greg lets run-on sentences like that fly is a relief to my wordy, digressive prose style that I always hope is strangely alluring but fear may simply lack succinctness. I’m aware of my wordiness, my use of commas to pause the flow, just for a lull of it, and to keep showing the flow with a new thought, one I hope is poetic, emotive, luminous and illuminating. It amounts to just loving words so much, and being so damn emotional, at the same time. When editing, I look for a period at least every other line, give or take, otherwise I’m in there, making the sentences shorter. They do not come out short, naturally!

Now, it’s true that Greg’s got a few books out, but still refers to himself as a ‘writer’ inside quotations. He’s hardly a renowned literary figure, though I suspect that will change due to the personal quality, the integrity, and the swiftness of his eye for peculiar and pertinent details. His writing is smart and lovely to read at the same time. That he is almost shy, almost reticent about imposing his observations on our psyches makes him all the more astonishing, for somehow he earns my trust in the foreword, where he talks about being an unbeatable REM-loving teenager. “We wanted to be bigger than life, bigger than tragedy,” he confesses. The way he talks about meaning, you know he’s really looking for it. And after what he’s been through, meaning isn’t something contrived from a first year psych of religion class.

As a writer, Greg may be just a few books in, and I’m not in any of his classes, but I say fully that he’s my teacher. He could say what he wanted to say- despite those commas and hyphen-sliced racing thoughts and introspections – in 175 pages. One can delve further, into many great writers and thinking that he mentions. But for what it is- something vast and yawning, still about the dead brother, the growing up with madness stuff many of us are still trying to sort out- chasing that in ourselves, but growing confidently as we relate to a world half absent through loss- well, so we find each other.

Now I’ll say that not everyone’s a big fan like I am. It seems two of the artists believe that Greg intentionally misrepresented them due a huge conspiracy on his part. A writer that never says anything bad about his subjects still got blasted for his woeful misinterpretation of their art. In fact, the Thompson and Kox number on the cover was conspiratorially reduced in print to evade some of the numeral additions that would lead up to 666. Greg had me feeling for you guys, you and your schizo world where the Masons, the Illuminati, the false church, and Mary the Whore of Babylon are everywhere. Now that you have recoiled from his intuitive and gentle gaze, I can only say, “nutters.’ Sorry, friends. I loved a man very much, but it ripped me to shreds, a man who thought there were fibre-optic cameras in my pet’s eyeballs, a man who thought I’d created a web portal called Spy on Bob, when the site was for a video game called SpyBot. He thought I worked for Mac Computers along with my father, taking swabs of his saliva and acne juice while he slept.

If these artists can’t see the gentleness, the tenderness of Greg’s interaction, if they can’t see outside themselves into his world of loss and paranoia and hell, they are missing out on an unusual and spiritual blessing- the one of being contemplated. When someone contemplates our creation, we must never take that for granted, even if the conclusion is different than was our intent. There are six billion voices out there. If someone listens to ours, say thank-you Lord, even when we are sure they’re not quite getting it.

It seems the accusation is that they are portrayed as a bit off the rocker. That he was reading his books about mental health, looking for a diagnosis, because of his brother. Hello? Yes, that’s right, more or less. I mean, come on, I love it when the mad are functional enough with their systems of survival. But let’s not wear kid gloves here and pull around at semantics. Crazy? Hell, yes, my artist friends. As Greg says in one of his art-defending posts, this time his own, the Catholics and the Jews and the Masons could all be suing these artists for what they say about conspiracies. But they don’t want to waste their time, I surmise- with someone not fit to withstand trial.

Let me illustrate here that these wonderful artists evidently misunderstood that other artists also have perspective, legitimate perspective, that their universe of truth is nowhere near the only reality. One criticism they made was that Greg’s book was called “The Colorful Apocalypse” but that there were no colour illustrations inside the book! These are people with whom Greg never meant to engage in any kind of exchange except peaceful- but they are indeed people, like many fundamentalist Christians, who believe their perspective is the only true one, and that all the Catholics are going to hell, and so are the ‘heatherns.’

I live in that world Greg mentions, the world some people experience, full of magic rituals and special signs, and the world where every coincidence means something. I realized early on it was a little unusual to mention my peculiar beliefs in certain circles. The church folk thought Tarot and other symbolic fromage of the Old Age were devil rituals. The secular university colleagues thought both Tarot and Christian iconographies I was fond of were for weak-minded spiritualists. I got more religious than ever, but kept it to myself. Then the signs started leaping around so strongly- the lady in the yellow dress for example who told me I had no idea how many friends I would lose just before a string of events where about ten very close loved ones would die in a medley or tragic circumstances, seldom relating one to another, just random death coming my way from every angle. Given that the art she encouraged me to make is truly what has kept me from flipping out, I say loudly and clearly that I believe in signs. So what? Take me away? Like many other nutbars, I’m a contributing member of society, of no harm to anyone, and quite productive in work, in church, socially.

Things are nutty, tenuous, hysterical at times. But I’ve found the ways of ordering chaos that work for me, little ways, baby steps, but no going backwards. That’s a big deal. I’m moving forward.

Tonight there’s no way Greg could see into my home. But if he did, he’d conclude I’m fairly normal, on the Richter scale but…the art on my walls is making sense of a lot of things. Hopes to Escape, one says. I don’t look like a widow, says another. One, a gun to your head, a gun borrowed from Roy Lichtenstein the art crowd might notice. These are all about the crazy world of methamphetamine madness, one that nearly emptied me even though I was not on it. Three beloved are dead. There is one survivor. And the good wife, me. So fucking solid.

But I am. Just like that woman told me, I found strength through my art. The salvation is in creation, just like Greg observed so astutely in his journeys. Art is a place where nothing can hurt us, no one can stop us, nothing can enslave us. All of us, them, me, you.

And what about this Greg Bottoms character, who has now offended the insane whom he was showing reverence for?

He makes it all clear in closing his story. “As an amateur, I am never, not even on Halloween, an art scholar, art theorist, cultural anthropologist, sociologist, ethnographer. Many days I’m simply the guy cutting lawns or changing diapers. This book then, is my willfully subjective presentation of a sliver of a sliver of the world of outsider art….”

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. She is the author of The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos. She has written for dozens of magazines and web portals including Adbusters, Geez, Book Slut, Gremolata, Dog Fancy, Women Can Do Anything, The Fiddlehead, White Wall Review, and more.

Art Explained by Robert Cumming

Now here’s a gorgeous, juicy book that will make us all better conversationalists at dinner. If you always wanted to know a little bit about art, but not come across looking like a pompous fool, this is the perfect place to start. If you ever wondered why certain paintings were masterpieces, soon you will know.

Each page features a full colour reproduction of a painting with explanatory blurbs that shed light on the history, era, artist’s life, story, details, techniques and so on.The language is accessible and absorbing, and the sidebar format is wonderful. It lets the painting speak for itself while illuminating details that make the work come alive. Even those already familiar with terms like ‘chiaroscuro’ or ‘pre-Raphaelite’ will appreciate this solid review. By the end of the book, you’ll definitely get more out of future gallery experiences, finding symbols and story lines you missed before. This treasure is a great general art history class, and will encourage you to participate more in art and culture with confidence and joy.

Art Explained
Robert Cumming
rev. ed. 2007

www.thegirlcanwrite.net