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The Warped Muse

© John McManamy

"We are guilty of glamorizing the horrific, and in the process we diminish the tragedy ..."

Below is an update of my June 8 article:

The list of names reads like an honor roll of the past two centuries, names like Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill and Vincent Van Gogh, Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Hawking, and Buzz Aldrin, just to name a few.

All suffered from either depression or bipolar disorder (manic-depression). The list goes on: Virginia Woolf, Judy Garland, Jack London, Marylin Monroe, Sylvia Plath, Mike Wallace, Kurt Cobain ...

But I come not to celebrate. My particular disorder was not how I wished to join this select list. The writer Kurt Vonnegut literally took the words right out of my mouth when he was quoted in a New York Times piece many years ago to the effect: "I would suffer like Van Gogh to paint like Van Gogh. I would not suffer like Van Gogh, however, to paint like Gaugin."

Perhaps depression and manic-depression has a way of coaxing out the most noble and creative and visionary in us. If so, God must have a very twisted sense of humor. I think of the brilliant works produced under this muse, and I also think of the promising lives cut tragically short: Virginia Woolf's body fished out of the water, weighted down by stones, Van Gogh cradled in the arms of his brother at age 37, a thousand Starry Nights never to be painted, Sylvia Plath with the gas on and her kids in the next room, Marilyn Monroe found in a state of partial rigor mortis, forever young.

Sure, it's nice to know that depressives and manic depressives can accomplish great things, but then I consider the terrible tolls they all had to pay, and realize we are guilty of glamorizing the horrific, and in the process we diminish the tragedy this disorder has left in its wake.

Then I think of all our close calls. Suppose Abraham Lincoln had had one of his colossal depressions as Lee was marching on Gettysburg? What if Winston Churchill had decided to stay in bed as the Battle of Britain was being fought?

Then I think of all those who never became famous, all those great minds gone to waste, their talents dissipated by their curse. How many Churchills and Van Goghs and Tchaikovskys and Woolfs might there have been had there been no beast to wrestle with? Perhaps today we wouldn't be satisfied with Buzz Aldrin's footprints on the moon. Maybe instead we'd have a whole colony of healthy people on Mars, right now.

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