The main thing everyone overlooks is that no one has ever bothered to do a baseline survey -- that is, what is the rate of some sort of psychiatric dysfunction among non-geniuses? Nobody bothers because non-geniuses are boring; it's exciting for psychologists to "get near" Gould and Charlie Parker and the biographically noisy Vincent van Gogh; who would burn up comparable time researching and writing "psycho-bios" of Rod Farnley the goofy bus driver?
As this thread takes a detour into black jazz musicians of the USA -- particularly those who spent most of their lives living in the USA -- it needs to consider the experience of every black American, genius or not, loony or not. I can't imagine the degree of insensitivity necessary not to be driven into serious emotional dysfunction by being black in America. How blacks got to the USA is a unique historical horror, but what keeps happening to them and to their communities to this very day are personal pressures and burdens it is very difficult for Caucasians to project themselves into. Billie Holiday wrote "Strange Fruit" after actually seeing a lynching; her extraordinary musical genius, however, played no special part in the dread lynchings impose on every American black woman, man and child.
One reason I tend to be antipathetic toward the "genius and madness" thang, particularly when psychologists take their inevitable periodic whacks at it, is that I perceive a hidden agenda -- an attack on non-conformity, a desire to control and mold the childhood personality so society can do a far better job of making everyone come out The Big Cookie Cutter in a far more uniform way. I deeply distrust those whose replies would be, "Well, we're just trying to make more people happier; lots of adults are very unhappy." Besides being wildly subjective, "happy" is the most questionable and dubious of all life goals. The USA's Declaration of Independence declares the pursuit of happiness to be a fundamental human right, but very wisely gives no hint about defining it. Yes, I prefer on any given day to be happy than to be sad, but I don't necessarily leap from that preference to the conclusion that Happy is the meaning of life. Lincoln was very clearly a profound and lifelong depressive; but I'm very glad history chose him to steward the USA through the Civil War. In his last weeks, W.C. Fields said, "I wonder what it would have been like without booze?" But you and I only recognize his name -- and many of us roll around in the aisles clutching our sides with laughter -- because of what he did while addicted.
People with unusually high intellects and unusual artistic and/or intellectual gifts are on no particular Fast Track to emotional or psychiatric dysfunction -- they just naturally perceive a very different, more layered, richer, more textured world, rather as a beagle perceives a far "smellier" world than the world the human nose perceives. We're all here letting me bore you because Gould "saw" and heard an unusually fantastic depth and richness not merely in music, but in travel and in kinds of community. I have always assumed most of what people cubbyhole as Gould's emotional goofiness is just the inevitably "normal" way a person with such gifts sees and interprets the world. Right off the bat, such a person rejects "off-the-rack" standard interpretations of even the most ordinary things. And that always strikes the more conformist-oriented as some sort of mental illness. It ain't.
Bob Merkin
John Hill wrote:
jv wrote:> One of the wonderful things
> about art is that it can be enhanced by its creators' abnormalites; you
> couldn't say the same thing about the profession of surgery, say, or of
> air traffic control.True. One has to wonder about folks like Miles Davis, who was basically
drug-addicted and dependent for large periods of his adult life. Would
an absence of mind-altering chemicals have stunted that creative output
(which was stunning, to say the least) or made it even more rich? Same
thing with Monk, although there the question would have been about
internal brain chemicals and not the ones that are snorted, smoked or
injected.jh