Touched with fire - notes on mental health and poetry
Hey everyone!
For those of you that have been tuning in to my social media, you probably saw that I was in the process of reading the book, “Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive illness and the Artistic Temperament” by Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison.
What I love about this book is that it is a convergence of multiple passions of mine: Poetry and Psychology. If I’m being honest, I was slightly alarmed that I identified so much with the creatives alluded to within this book. But I also felt very understood; less alone in my conscious experience. While I do not suffer from Manic-Depression, I do suffer from Unipolar Depression and ADHD. As such, I do not suffer from mania, but I do tend to go through bouts of hyper-focus with my creative endeavors, and my internalized hyperactivity often results in being all of the place and dissociated from my environment. Perhaps this period of overstimulation is a partial explanation as to why I related with this book as much as I did. I was also fascinated by the fact that most of the artists that dealt with at least depression, described a feeling of being a chameleon, or are themselves an amorphous identity. They are very adaptable but are drawn and quartered between the polarity of everything. This is something I recently heard Jordan Peterson speaking about in regards to creatives, and is something that I very much understand.
Now, while the book is chock-full of highlights that I made while reading, I don’t want to drown you in a slew of factoids. However, I do want to share at least a handful of facts and quotes that I found particularly intriguing. Consider me your own personal CliffsNotes!
FACTS:
Writers and artists show a vastly disproportionate rate of manic-depressive or depressive illness.
Poetic or artistic genius, when infused with these fitful and inconstant moods, can become a powerful crucible for imagination and experience.
The highest rates of psychiatric abnormality were found in the poets (50 percent) and musicians (38 percent); lower rates were found in painters (20 percent), sculptors (18 percent), and architects (17 percent).
Irrational fears, feelings of panic (including actual panic attacks), obsessions, and delusions are also present in many types of severe depression.
Notable artist families with tainted bloodlines include:
Byron, Tennyson, Melville, James, Schumann, Coleridge, van Gogh, Hemingway, Woolf
QUOTES:
Robert Lowell (Poet)
“John Berryman in his mad way keeps talking about something evil stalking us poets. That’s a bad way to talk, but there’s some truth in it.
“Seeing too much and feeling it/with one skin-layer missing” (on what manic-depression is like)
Hector Berlioz (French Composer)
Stated that his depression was the most “terrible of all the evils of existence” and continued to say:
“It is difficult to put into words what I suffered- the longing that seemed to be tearing my heart out by the roots, the dreadful sense of being alone in an empty universe, the agonies that thrilled through me as if the blood were running ice-cold in my veins, the disgust with living, the impossibility of dying.”
Edgar Allen Poe (Poet)
“They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their grey visions they obtain glimpses of eternity….They penetrate, however rudderless or compasses, into the vast ocean of the light ineffable.”
Henry James Sr
On his nervous breakdown suffered in his mid thirties, lasting two years:
“In a lightning-flash as it were - fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake. To all appearance it was a perfectly insane and abject terror, without ostensible cause, and only to be accounted for, to my perplexed imagination, by some damned shape squatting invisible to the within the precincts of the room, and raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life… this ghastly condition of mind continued with me, with gradually lengthening intervals of relief, for two years, and even longer.”
“Suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all Dayton one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them inclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other. That shape am I, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own merely momentarydisdcrepancy from him, that it was if something hitherto solid within my breast gave away entirely, and I became a mass of quivering fear. After this the universe was changed for me altogether…although the immediate feelings passed away, the experience has made me sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since. It gradually faded, but for months I was unable to go out in the dark alone.
Anne Sexton (Poet)
“Hurt must be examined like a plague.”
“Poetry led me by the hand out of madness.”
(Not to be morbid, but she maaaay have spoke to soon considering she committed suicide not long after this quote, just sayin’.)
Paul Celan
“Wherever one went the world was blooming. And yet despair gave birth to poetry.”