9. Are creative people more likely to be nuts?
Footpath
I find you raking up moss bare-handed, fingers bloody.
We kiss cheeks, me treading backwards,
your cheek smeared with soil, my anorak
snagging on hawthorn; beyond your shoulder
ground-elder, bindweed meshed over a wall, trickle
of unseen beck water; above us the sun, filmy.
Your sleeve is unravelling, a sycamore’s flat wet palm
wrapped round it, brambles lashing at your ankles
but you don’t feel them, railing against the pope
and the way TV’s been taken over by aliens
as you pull secateurs from a pocket – your father
would not let you out of the house with shears.
Together we tread back nettles, massacre
vulnerable plant-life, giant umbrella-weeds –
thick hollow stalks disengaging from earth,
flat plates of soil tilting, ripping.
This floor’s a mess, these leaves in heaps,
this rook’s nest. Everything’s rotten.
I wave the biggest stalk to distract you,
toss it into the hidden ditch. You stop
cutting and trampling, pluck a grass stem,
tickle my face with its fluffed-up panicle
then fling yourself onto a bed of bracken.
A duck flaps manically. Black marbles
of sloes, a holly bush in berry, self-planted
beech saplings. You inspect a crab-apple
our phones are tapped by the politicians,
only god knows what goes on in those units
and closing in, squash flat the swollen nipple
of a rosehip, kick a fungus-ridden tree’s
white flesh, spot a conker, bowl it over me, over
the hedge, bark out a laugh at the prospect of
getting banged up with loonies in Bradford.
Some bullocks have collected, staring.
End of year half-light. Against the paleness,
the black ear-tips of a hare. Another roll-up,
your match flaring. I reach towards the invisible water,
pick a soft rush. See this – here at the floret,
how grass can exude something so human-looking:
is it a bubble of spit, or a tear?
Life (1)
The last four-weeks’ discussion of eating disorders etc sort of segues into the topic of mental health.
Are creative people more mentally unstable? Or is it everybody? I think I’m in a minority in my peer-group for never having been on Prozac. Mental ill-health – the spectrum from depressives through to psychotic nutcases – seems endemic among my acquaintances. Is that only because I know a lot of ‘creatives’? Anyway, it throws up the same question that I have asked about eating disorders: WHAT IS GOING ON?
Poetry
The above poem, the first of two making up a piece called SCHIZO DIPTYCH, was written by my self-styled ‘minder’ Sue Vickerman after she spent time with Liam, a lovely gifted insane artist who got carted off to an institution – actually between the writing of the first and second poem – because he’s too bonkers to live in a normal household. Not even with family members who love him.
By the way: Jekyll and Hyde, the classic stereotype of a schizophrenic, is a simplistic concept of ‘split personality’, one person being good, the other bad. Just in case you had made an association, Sue Vickerman and I do not exemplify this. We are both good. (-;
SCHIZO DIPTYCH has latterly evolved into a collaborative piece between Sue and print-making artists Helen Peyton and Tony Connolly. It has just been installed (by Helen and Tony coz Sue doesn’t like ladders and hammers and things) as part of the annual Art Trail at this year’s festival in Grassington , a beautiful Dales village in God ‘s Own Country of Yorkshire in the north of England. Photos and info re SCHIZO DIPTYCH are on ‘Read my work’.
Art (1)
I have selected a sequence of head-and-shoulders portraits of myself for this and the next three posts, since I am focusing on the head and its contents.
Incidentally, whenever I get to the end of a long pose in another freezing ex-woollen mill or chilly chapel – maybe a four-hour workshop in which I have gradually turned blue from the feet upwards – and I see results that are mere heads and shoulders, it does beg the question – couldn’t I have had a cardi on?
Art (2)
I am not going to pretend to be scientific. I will back up my Daily Mail style opinions with miscellaneous and arbitrary ‘facts’.
When I talk about ‘creatives’, I mean artists, writers, actors, musicians, poets, thinkers…
It seems to me that creatives are more sensitive, and it is sensitive people who get afflicted with mental health issues. Here’s my proof:
- The best poet on my Creative Writing MA topped himself.
- Van Gogh
- Sylvia Plath
- Artist and former life model Fiona Halliday (she painted my portrait at the top of this post) tells me, “I had a little phase of thanatophobia [abnormal fear of death], brought on, I believe, by modelling. I’d run out of things to think about while modelling and was thinking about how death would actually feel etc. And with not being able to move, it really freaked me out and stayed with me and I couldn’t stop thinking about all that sort of stuff. I was a bit of a mess for a bit!”
See. We’re all more or less loopy (I would include myself in this).
And my point is?
Life (2)
Creatives have more mental health problems because it is harder for us to live in this world. ‘Making art’ – visual, written-word, music-making – puts you at odds with the western world’s dominant cultural values. I mean capitalist ones, obviously. Capitalism dictates the norms and bestows the rewards and accolades, only affirming our success in whatever our daily endeavour is insofar as it achieves financial returns. Which creativity – apart from exceptionally – doesn’t. There is no social status in being an impoverished creator living on peanuts or benefits or some soul-destroying crappy day-job to make ends meet.
And it’s harder for men, because women creatives have the default option of creating a child to gain their sense of a raison d’etre, purpose, fulfillment. It’s creative boys who feel that there’s nowhere to go, and so take the drugs and addle their brains and end up psychotic. Or else, as the statistics show, top themselves.
Enough already!
This week’s pic: Fiona Halliday
OLD COMMENTS
These were the 20 Responses from the original blog. They have been copied here to the newly revised website. It is possible to add further comments below
Creative people are by definition goofy.
In answer to your question: be it yea, or be it nay – the onus to create remains the same..?
The poem is fecund.
Below is a sample of American sculptor Joseph Stevens’ work which he emailed to us along with the above comments. See Joseph’s website http://www.stoneartist.com/
Hi Joseph –
re creative people being “goofy”… I think that means you agree with me…
Sue says thanks for fecund (re her poem). She’s taking it as a compliment.
A great poem Suki (tell Sue I said so). I know what it’s like to have someone close lose their marbles.
As for my own sanity (if there is such a state), it must’ve dropped a few degrees recently since filling my head with too many youtube videos and reading too many books on conspiracy theories about /Area 51/UFOs/Illuminati/9-11/fakemoonlandings – blah-de-blah-de-blah. I just don’t know what to believe any more – so I tend to not believe anything and just keep an open mind. But I can’t resist a good conspiracy.
I shall have to get back to watching more comedy and reading more ‘grounded’ fiction and non-fiction – to give my mind a rest.
Of course I have a level of protection, myself being an alter-ego; Cal Wallace does officially not exist. Shhh – don’t tell MI5
Hi Cal, I feel very affirmed by a fellow writer coming out as nuts. Sue Vickerman has of course loved having her poem complimented again.
Are all the responses to my current post going to be loopy creatives telling me how bonkers they are, I wonder…?
Something I dredged up from my artistic psyche…
O my god, am I going to have a run of self-portraits of deranged artists (the little guy in the pic above is Nic Carlyle)…?? I thought I was going to get some erudite responses setting me straight re the ‘nonsense’ I’ve posted about men, especially creative ones, hanging by a finer thread in this world…
Instead I’ve got a rush on people ‘coming out’ to me as insane (including tweets).
Okay Suki, You want erudite comments rather than demonstrations of artists’ being a few colours short of a balanced palate.
Well, my thoughts are:
In the beginning was magic and art was a craft of magic, or in the beginning was art and it was a magical craft – both are true, and the difference is lost in ochre-splattered silhouettes of hands, ritually drawn dots and stripes, and the cunning through paint of the animal spirits. Art called upon the spirits and art made sense of so much in human consciousness, and much of what went on around you.
Or didn’t. The potency of art and the spirits and things happening can being potentially be more threatening than fear of actual dangers. Damn it, these artists were sorcerers and art is just one of their arts.
We all know the rest of the story, or have our own versions of it. We pull it around in different forms. We all know of the creative process being a climbing out of an undifferentiated experience of life around us, and presenting that does something powerful. It affect us, and others around who see it.
Creative people are, in the cultural trophes I wallow in, are shamans, ngandas, witches, priests, etc. And ‘everyone’ hates them, or fears them, or idolises them, but basically hates them. Just as they learn to hate ‘everyone’ and conquer them by reciprocal division as ‘the boorish’, ‘philistines’, etc. And artists fling their curses of parody, mockery, outrage, just as a witch will bend a simulacrum of a person’s life into an unpleasant distortion.
You may well think I’m teasing with all this stuff outside the cultural canon of daubing and sloshing pigmented materials onto surfaces. But I’m satisfied that using witchcraft discourse makes one sort of sense of Suki’s comments about the gender differences in creative ‘madness’. Most witchcraft discourses, because they derive power from differentuation and a wyrd’s arithmetic of multiplication of entities through division, make an absolute meal of gender difference. It is often deeply sexist in practically all senses. Thus, ‘woman’ is profoundly creative as ‘woman’ is both embodied but equally hidden in her reproduction; receptacle but also progenitor, she ‘cooks’ babies.
Physiologically with no demonstrable oestrus (yes, Suki, I’m talking chimps again) but technically an ever-ready libido (from an anthropological perspective), the female of the human species is a maddening conundrum to the male (sorry, this heterosexual behaviour is, or has been until amazingly recently, necessarily the human reproductive narrative’s key thread).
Menstrual blood is really scary for men. I think blood has a profoundly different cultural weighting between the genders. The appearance of blood is not, for men, ambiguously a badge of creativity / temporal non-creativity; I think, in the male psyche, the sight of blood always connotes loss and potentially death. Thus women are innately bound up in red magic, blood magic, the most powerful there is; they are all potentially witches.
Which ties up my themes nicely, and I end with a modest proposal. In terms of ‘insanity’, ‘creativity’ and the roots of their connection, artists ought to go back to drawing magical forms in menstrual blood, with no cop-outs of red ochre this time.
Bloody hell, Nic.
Somebody answer Nic.
Or just come out as bonkers – I like themes.
I have just sponged copious amounts of menstrual blood out of my bedroom carpet this morning. You know when you stand up from bed and, surprise surprise, it just falls out of you?
I view that (I mean, women’s reproductive powers) as my ‘default’ creative life – the thing I can do that is definitely creative and definitely purposeful and valued and worthwhile, if my creative life as a writer fails. See. That’s where it’s harder for you male creatives. If you don’t elbow your way into importance – get your work out there – you will not achieve a sense of self-worth.
I used to believe the business of the artist as madman, and worked really hard to have some sort of mental imbalance, but just found I was working harder on being mental than I was on being creative. There haven’t really been that many great artists who were mad. Everyone knows Vincent was a bit loopy, and suspects Hieronymus Bosch was at the mouldy bread, but most of the rest were as sane as anyone else.
Sanity is a relative term historically, anyway. Richard the Lionheart had 3000 Muslim men, women and children murdered because he couldn’t be bothered to feed them, and successive monarchs enjoyed torturing, hanging, burning, castrating and decapitating anyone who disagreed with them. Nobody ever says they were nuts, so why pick on Hieronymus for painting naked people being shat out a devil’s arse?
Even Vincent looks quite sane compared to some of his contemporaries who were massacring Native Americans or Africans in the name of white supremacy. Cutting off your own ear isn’t as mad as collecting body parts of indigenous people.
I think the “sane” majority would like to pretend we’re the mad ones, whilst they get on with their wars and their debts and their giant 4×4′s.
That sounds a bit mad, doesn’t it? ;( Better put my tinfoil hat back on!
First can I say how much I like the striking portrait of Suki by Fiona. I find it very dramatic and powerful.
The poem I also found powerful and moving.
Regarding sanity and madness Gavin compares evil tyrants with those we consider mad – making the mad look sane by comparison.
It is interesting that this is currently being acted out in a very real arena. Anders Behring Breivik has been prosecuted in Norway for mass murder. He admits the acts but insists he is sane. The prosecution argue that he is mad and should be detained in a psychiatric hospital. There is an assumption that anyone who could do such a thing must be mad. However he denies psychosis and insists on a political motive.
So is he mad or evil?
I’m not sure that I believe in evil. But then I’m not sure I believe in madness either.
I don’t believe in evil and I also don’t hink he’s necessarily mad. He just hasn’t learned the thing that stops the rest of us (mostly) from picking up guns and shooting. Or else he has somehow accidentally unlearned it, like some essential data getting lost. There have been lads coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan – in fact from every war – who have unlearned the thing that ordinarily stops us from picking up guns and shooting loadsa people, but that activity has been for them in an official context and permitted, so they never get called mad. No, the Norwegian guy isn’t mad.
It’s heartening to know that it’s a lesson that’s very hard to unlearn. The statistics from the second world war showed only 15-20% of soldiers actually fired at the enemy. Most just fired in the air in the general direction of their opposite numbers.
Sadly, since the war, all armies have put a lot of effort and research into how to break down this reluctance. Now that’s insanity.
‘Fraternising with the enemy’ is something that military forces spend a lot of time worrying about. They used to spend a lot of time and training inculcating a them and us distinction, but with this stood on its head by ‘winning hearts and minds’ operations – digging wells, mending bridges etc blown up by rebel forces, and everything getting pretty murky on the ground – ‘the human fog of war’ as it were – the technologizing of combat has been a imperative. So now a drone does the killing – it’s all one big video game now, with the humans taken out and the bodies left. As mad as extracting a 2D image from a full 3D body, and hanging the 2D representation up for admiration? Well, no, art is magical, and war is naked power.
My theme of madness has turned to the madness of war/killing. Standing in my eighties feminist peace womon shoes, let me make the observation – this is an old chestnut – that it is all male madness.
Men.
But that ‘eighties cynicism and ‘blame’ (men are responsible for all that is evil) does not sit well with my latter-day observation, as a post-feminist, that men have it harder; that they are more vulnerable, hanging by a finer thread in this life… that it is harder for men than for women to find a raison d’etre and mentally and emotionally survive…
In general I have a bit of a problem with words: slippery, imprecise, inadequate stand-ins for that which we see and touch. But I’ll stick to a few of those used here.
“Creative people” can be factory builders, business starters, policemen, nurses; depends on their attitude. I don’t like the way the notion of creativity has been appropriated by “artists” (see – there’s another one: slippery cuss).
And “madness” is a construct that describes just that point in a person’s life where the disjunction that we all feel between what’s inside and what’s out becomes so painful and/or disruptive to other people’s lives that society’s institutions are forced to take an interest, or so I’m led to believe.
As to whether painters, poets, musicians are more prone to mental distress than others is an interesting question that defies a simple answer.
For over the last 20 years I have been a painter. It’s my life and reason for being and I’ve often wondered about the pathology of following a path that is so economically pointless. In an exchange of letters between John Berger and Leon Kossoff, the latter wonders whether the point of drawing is to bring order to experience. I’ve often thought that there is something in why I draw and paint that is the healing of a divided self, and I know that I am not the only painter who is driven by a need to make whole.
Over the last 4 days I’ve been at a ceramics fair in Nottinghamshire with my wife and daughter. It rained, it blew a gale, people’s beautiful (and very expensive) work got broken. All this was on top of continuous economic gloom which undermines customers’ confidence and reduces the income of many brilliant and very hardworking artists and craftworkers. I’ve never experienced such group anxiety and tension before. Remember this is people’s livings I’m talking about, not their self-expression. I’m saying this not because I’m being all self-righteous and unsympathetic but because I think that at the heart of so many artists’ distress and despair is the fact that they live a marginal existence both economically and socially. Lots of others do, but where artists win out is that that distress has a marketable value in that it signifies sensitivity, whereas in others less ‘gifted’ it causes annoyance. Of course the prime example of this is Van Gogh whose biography often outshines the paintings he worked so hard to make.
Mind you, the outcome of this storm and mayhem at the potters’ market was of equal note. I’ve been going with Anna to these events for the last 15 years and this time the feeling of togetherness and emotional warmth and support was really moving & unprecedented- it seemed as if this wholeness was not possible without the trying circumstances.
I do hope this makes sense, Sue, but when I saw the topic I had to reply despite being falling-over shattered. Paintings work when I abandon something in my self; they are not rational constructions.
Thanks for making me think.
This is really good. Real. Thanks.
‘local history’
Thanks for your esoteric ‘local history’ comment Janey, which I know to be the title of your MA thesis which is ‘local history’ in the sense of being the story of your personal evolutionary journey as a feminism-influenced artist of the seventies through to today. And isn’t that 1970s-80s warped feminist world-view enough to make anybody nuts.
Thanks Dave, I am so glad that you have clarified and taken deeper some of the provocatively superficial nonsense with which I initiated this topic of the mental health of “creative people”. For a start I am glad you’ve pointed out that speaking of artists as some sort of elite of super-creative people is dubious. Creativity is part of the make-up of humans. And we are all of us sensitive. It’s outrageous to ‘rank’ creativity and sensitivity in the way I have, though you make the cogent point that an artist’s reputation for especial sensitivity (an artist/writer/poet who becomes known for being suicidal or whatever) will excite more interest. Will sell better. While a tax accountant’s sensitivity won’t even be noticed or will, as you say, be annoying (who’d be a tax accountant).
I have already wondered somewhere in this week’s postings whether the reputation of painters, poets and the like for greater than average levels of mental distress does relate to the sheer fact, as you have put it, of their economically and socially marginal existence; the fact that it is simply harder for them to live: unsalaried, unrecognised, unaffirmed.
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