The Line Between Genius & Madness

Monsieur Redacteur sent me to our local English bookshop to grab Simon Winchester's "The Professor and The Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary". Obviously any title with "madman", "murder", and "insanity" captures one's attention, but the story that Winchester tells of Dr. James Murray's first encounter with Dr. W.C. Minor after the latter submitted 10,000 words to the committee overseeing the making of the OED holds it.

I won't ruin the entire story by blabbing away, but the real "twist" of this book is its intimate look at the fine line between genius and madness.

In 2009 scientists found a link to genius and madness on a genetic level. The gene, called neuregulin 1 plays an important role in brain development, but a variant of the gene is linked to schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder and more importantly, creativity.

Volunteers who were more creative and had achieved more success related to their creative outputs were found to have the variant of neureglin 1. Less creative volunteers did not.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has spent four decades studying the creative process with the end conclusion that "madness" may have no role in heightening creative output. Psychologist Robert Weisberg, who studied the manic periods of composer Robert Schumann, had similar results.

When mania struck, Schumann wrote more great pieces—but he also turned out more ordinary ones, too. Mania "jacks up the energy level," Weisberg points out, "but it doesn't give the person access to ideas that he or she wouldn't have had otherwise."

It's entirely possible, Weisberg notes, that the elevated rates of mental disorders among artistic geniuses comes about as a result of the creative lifestyle, which hardly provides emotional stability. Many artists struggle against poverty and public indifference in their lifetime or if they achieve recognition it becomes a struggle to live up to their own "hype".

Dali, often considered a mad genius, had this to say: "There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.” 

Strindberg, Kafka, Plath, van Gogh, Wittgenstein - all displayed "madness". Simply reading Plath's "The Bell Jar" will give you an intimate look at the link between the creative process and the tendency to self-destruct.

Dryden expressed it first and most concisely in Absalom and Achitophel, concluding his allegorical portrait of the Earl of Shaftesbury with the celebrated couplet: "Great wits are sure to madness near allied/ And thin partitions do their bounds divide."

If you'd like to do some further reading  here's a list of works by "madmen" (and women):

Inferno, August Strindberg - is by far the craziest of his works.  

Heaven and Hell, Emanuel Swedenborg about his ability to communicate with angels is pretty nuts too.

The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, Salvador Dali's diaries/memories. It is a truly fascinating look into Dali's life and work.

The Blind Owl, Sadegh Hedayat. You can read my blog post about this book here.

Exegesis, Philip K. Dick. It's not so much a book as a filing cabinet of things he collected maniacally regarding a vision he had in 1974. Valis, was born from this bout of "madness" and may just be his best book.

Une saison en enfer, Arthur Rimbaud. He switched from absinthe to opium and gave the world this work of maddening genius.

Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs. He doesn't even remember writing it.

Les Chants de Malador, Comte de Lautremont. "God grant that the reader, emboldened and having become at present as fierce as what he is reading, find, without loss of bearings, his way, his wild and treacherous passage through the desolate swamps of these sombre, poison-soaked pages; for, unless he should bring to his reading a rigorous logic and a sustained mental effort at least as strong as his distrust, the lethal fumes of this book shall dissolve his soul as water does sugar."

When Rabbit Howls, Truddi Chase. Written by a woman who was diagnose with 60+ multiple personalities.

Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, William Styron. Not only did Stryon write Sophie's Choice, but his Parisian bout of madness was inspired by Strindberg's Inferno.

Do you know any other similar books to recommend?

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The Pre-NY's Clean Up

The new year is approaching and so, bored out of my mind I decided to rearrange the books.

I should have taken some photos during the process - when there were books going up the stairs and me up to me cloxters (sp?) in Beckett.

Here is the first snap. One bookshelf uses a heavenly quirky system.

First shelf: The bible under the lost books of the bible and Colin Wilson's The Occult. Random serious thinkers like Emerson,Kahil Gibran, Nietsche, and Rabelais. Complex scientific books, chess strategy books, Philip K. Dick, the letters of Mozard, biographies on Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner. A book on art.

Second shelf: Greek mythology, Plato's The Symposium, 3 Volume set of Gibbon's Roman Empire, erotica like Bataille's L'Histoire d'Oeil, Rimbaud, Blake, and Shakespeare.

Third shelf: sadly only three volumes by African authors and then starts the hugenormous American lit section breaking at Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn and continuing on the fourth shelf with Miller's Rosy Cruxification. The fourth shelf gets us past Vonnegut and Wharton and ends with Tobias Wolfe.

Fifth shelf: pretty much starts with Beckett and Joyce with a few other Irish authors in between before going into English lit with Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy sitting comfortably next to a few volumes of Chesterton.

Sixth shelf continues where the fifth stopped adding Gerald and Lawrence Durrell, Philip Larkin, and Pound's ABC of Reading. The sixth shelf also gets to bear the burden of my Somerset Maugham obsession. I have a stunning set of his short stories printed by Folio Society which can be a bit hard to get your hands on, a pleuthora of paperbacks including The Moon and Sixpence (my second favorite of his works after The Razor's Edge) and a first addition of his Writer's Notebook, which was a birthday gift from someone extremely sexy to me. I mean dear.

Seventh shelf has a bit of English including my budding collection of Evelyn Waugh. So far I've collected his diaries, the complete collection of his short stories, Put Out More Flags, and A Little Learning.

The rest of the shelf has a mix of European authors such as Hamsun, Kundera, Strindberg, and Sebald.

By the time I was tired and feeling much less motivated. Since I decided to organize by type of literature I still had: Russian, Asian, French, and loads of biographies, oversized books, and odd one offs like a book on Jack the Ripper. Where does one keep the Ripper?

As you can see, I also don't have enough shelf space. In my perfect world, one of the things I would require to be perfect would be bookshelves. They would never be too shallow for bigger books or too deep for littler ones. As you can see the problem with the second bookshelf was that it's far too deep for paperbacks.

The top has the most room, so the most books. Over half the shelf is various Asian literature including (drum roll please)...All the books from Mishima's Sea of Fertility (Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, The Decay of the Angel)! Soseki, Murakami, and a little known book called The Gay Genius. The little chunk left is stacked with Russian and Latin American/Hispanic Literature, including my new favorite Unamuno and my old favorite Asturias.

The rest of the shelf isn't worth taking about except a few great memoirs (The Words, Jean Paul Sartre and Rodin's On Art and Artists).

Still, I got the job done.

Then I thought, why not further refine the system?

But only for a second. I did go through and pull out books I wanted to remember to read, but I'm not touching a thing otherwise!

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