Home » Mind & Soul » Depression » The Warped Muse - Page 2

The Warped Muse - Page 2

© John McManamy

Then I think of all the rest of us, those of more modest talents, the ones who got the worst of this disorder in full measure, with little or none of the benefits. Is the fact that Hemingway was one of us supposed to console us? If so, do they treat diabetes and other diseases the same way? Does someone with Lou Gehrig's disease feel better because he shares his affliction with a famous athlete?

And again, if we are to give this beast credit for say the Sistine Chapel and Starry Night and the Choral Symphony, then perhaps we are compelled to admit that we are little more than mere puppets on a string, yanked back and forth by the whims of some unseen hand, incapable of emotions of our own volition.

Which means many of us are setting ourselves up to be disfranchised of our own joy and anger and grief and everything in between. It means knowing looks from our close friends and significant others, as if to say, that's really your illness talking, not you.

But having said all that, a new book, "Manic Depression and Creativity" by D Jablow Hershman and Julian Lieb MD (Prometheus Books, Amherst and New York, 216 pages), makes a compelling case in favor of this warped and twisted muse. The book zeros in on four famous personalities - Isaac Newton, Ludwig Van Beethoven, Charles Dickens, and Vincent Van Gogh - whose words and activities form Exhibit A.

"As for me," Beethoven wrote, "I am in despair so often and would like to end my life." That is when he wasn't feverishly testing the limits of his new hi-tech pianoforte, bashing it for hours on end, composing in a white heat, often on walls and shutters if he could find no paper, and dousing himself with water that ran down through the floor into the apartment below.

And so we begin to see four famous lives from a viewpoint many of us know too disturbingly well: Newton, whose existence alternated between that of the hypomanic life-of-the-party to dysphoric manic feuding with his colleagues to long spells of depressive seclusion. Beethoven who so desperately lived for those ultimate highs that he sought to freeze into music. Dickens whose inexhaustible manic engine ultimately wore the rest of him out, and Van Gogh who was fated to be Van Gogh.

Manic depression, the authors are quick to note, is as much a hindrance as a muse: Newton kept delaying publication of his Principia for no apparent reason. Painful mood changes would stop both Beethoven and Dickens in their tracks, and suicide felled Van Gogh at age 37.

The copyright of the article The Warped Muse - Page 2 in Depression is owned by John McManamy. Permission to republish The Warped Muse - Page 2 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.