Into the Void(3): Curing the Conflict

Studies reveal that artists are commonly plagued by mental illness, which results in both fantastic art and memorable quietus.

While any degree of madness arguably works to the creative mind's advantage, it also stigmatizes its social manifestation. The artist shares a certain opprobrium with the outcast and the criminalized, and his behaviors are labeled with almost clinical distance: hypergraphic, logophilic, anti-social, bipolar, erratic, noncomformist, etc. Of course, many poets encounter no trouble sequestering their private temperament from their public persona. Others find the act to be an agonizing performance, and still others make no attempt to divide the two. This is the categorical difference (respectively) between the likes of Emerson's intellectual equanimity, Sartre's "l'enfer, c'est les autres," and Ginsberg's homoerotic impudence. In varying degrees, each involves a clash of the private and the public. Sometimes such a war just isn't sustainable.

The artist takes more than he is given, devotes his body to sloth and his mind to violent crusades. The individual imagination puts him at odds with a pragmatic world that demands economy, action, and industry. When emotional resonance is labeled "strange," or worse, "useless" by the dominant ideology, the poet is stripped of his social validity (unless he can play the part above). This devaluation is either effacing or pugnacious; it disavows the artistic mindset or puts it at odds with social orthodoxy.

Orthodoxy requires uniformity. It tells us a tree is a tree, that light doesn't slant, and that proverbs cannot come from Hell. The poet is Faust, Prometheus untethered, a proud Satan shrugging off his nimbus.

The poet is a kinsman in the clouds
Who scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day;
But on the ground, among the hooting crowds,
He cannot walk, his wings are in the way.
-Charles Baudelaire

He is a hero to fellow demons. He cannot comprehend business. He may kill himself to cure these conflicts:

Private vs. Public
Sloth vs. Industry
Creation vs. Consumerism
Exile vs. Acceptance
Internal vs. External
Individual vs. Communal

Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.

God's lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees! ---The furrow

Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks ---

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else

Hauls me through air ---
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.

White
Godiva, I unpeel ---
Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child's cry

Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that flies,
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

-"Ariel," by Sylvia Plath