Into the Void(2): Elevated to Madness

Looking at Wikipedia's list of suicides is a shocking reminder of the poet's affinity with the reaper. But what drives our best and brightest to divorce this life in monoxide trysts? What is the impetus to self-sacrifice? Studies reveal that artists are commonly plagued by mental illness, which results in both fantastic art and memorable quietus.

This works to their advantage in craft, but may become self-defeating in practical life.

+ The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences.
-Arthur Rimbaud

The poetic process is thus an act of distillation, an ingestion of the raw world in all of its agonizing grit. It is an all-too-intimate relation with nature and an homage to the unseen. A good poet turns reality into fantasy, and what is given into what is taken. The poet is a valiant conduit to mysteries that lie beneath the hard rock. He plays shashdara and wins, courts Pandora, opens the gates of Les Paradis Artificiel. He wields the power he finds, and channels it onto the page. His mysteries possess him, and he is reduced (or elevated?) to madness.

+ I accustomed myself to simple hallucination; I saw quite deliberately a mosque instead of a factory, a drummer's school conducted by angels, carriages on the highways of the sky, a salon at the bottom of a lake; monsters, mysteries, a vaudeville poster raising horrors before my eyes.
-Arthur Rimbaud

And this is all part of the artistic paradox. The vision of the poet blinds him to proprietary success. His subjective reality is a collective fiction. He is married passionately to life, but seeks death as relief from its blistering intensity. He ensures immortality through death.

On the other hand, it could be pure narcissism that pushes a poet to the edge. A lifetime of unenthusiastic reception is quickly cured by an untimely (and grossly public) death. I'm sure over half of Plath's readership came to know her through her morbid suicide, and even Thompson sprang from gonzo-counterculture obscurity to the limelight of his sacrificial altar in 2005.

But the fact remains: troubled lives make for good literature.