sing, O Muse...

An interesting idea that Boice brings up this week is the perennial question of writers & madness. Why do we often think writers are nuts? Or rather, why do we think GENIUS writers are nuts? From my preliminary speculations this afternoon, post-latte, it seems to me that one aspect of this association has to do with the hidden source of a good writer’s writing. How did Milton ever come up with the idea for “Paradise Lost”? Good question. I doubt that even he could tell us exactly, though he could clarify things by telling us what he was reading and thinking about at the time. There is something stubbornly mysterious about the source of good writing. I’m not saying I don’t edit my poems and seminar papers, because I sure do—over and over and over and over. But the precise genesis of my ideas remains foggy. There’s a famous passage in the Aeneid in which the Sybil gains access to divine prophesy by being ridden or tamed by Apollo—violently, it seems, and almost against her will. And of course it was “the thing” to invoke the Muse before beginning one’s epic poem. (“Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s sacred citadel.”-the Odyssey) So it seems that nobody is sure where ideas come from. But isn’t it okay not to entirely understand it? However, I don’t think we can say that “madness” is essential to good writing, or even that it’s particularly helpful.

In my opinion, serious emotional disturbance hampers writers, rather than makes them writers. Poets/novelists/essayists write IN SPITE of such difficulties. In the times when their manias were most intense, Lowell and Woolf were utterly incapacitated. Lowell roamed the streets and said he was Napoleon. Woolf lay in bed for days and was unable to say anything. Though I do think that some aspects of these altered states made it into these authors’ work later (for instance, Septimus in Mrs Dalloway hears birds speak Greek, which was apparently one of Woolf’s own symptoms), I don’t think their work depended on the emotional turmoil that these authors experienced. The interplay of Woolf’s identity, talents, ideas, and acquired skills can’t possibly be the result of her manic-depressive condition, because her illness was just one aspect of her complex personality. If Woolf had been completely stable, I think she would just have found other things to write about.

In sum, I think our idea of “inspiration” or writerly madness is just a theory to explain a process we don’t understand. Fantastic writing, in its finished form, is so unusual and special that it seems inspired by either a god or a disease. But I think we should allow for the simple (!) human capabilities of taste, imagination, curiosity, and speculation.