Art and Loneliness - and Vacation

I was recently pondering the pop cultural connection between art and madness: The concept of the mad (usually starving) artist has its corollary in the neat mapping out of various psychological diagnoses onto long dead artists: Emily Dickinson was depressed, and Dostoevsky may have suffered from schizophrenia…the list goes on.

This seems to be paralleled by a pop-cultural connection between prophecy and madness: Cassandra's prophecies were seen as madness, where in the Bible, prophets are constantly being taken for crazy people, and thus, their words go unheeded.

This seems to have continued in the Middle Ages, when there was a connection between seizures, fits of madness, and prophecy/religious truth. This phenomena has been documented by Foucault, and, as a college professor taught me, adds an interesting dimension to Dostoevsky's "The Idiot". Even in the Bible, in the book of Samuel 1, Saul is seized by a sort of fit that causes him to prophecy*.

I think that in popular imagination, the madness of the artist, who has replaced the prophet in the modern, secular world, is deeply tied to unhappiness. The malady most attributed to artists is depression, and the image of them is one of lonely starvation in an attic.

Recently, I wondered: If I were 100% satisfied in every area of my life, would I still be able to write? That question scared me. Was I merely buying in to pop culture? And did the answer matter - after all, I plan on continuing to pursue optimal satisfaction in my life no matter what. I realized however, that the answer may be that humans can never be 100% satisfied - even if you achieve something, you will always strive for the next level - it is part of our nature, and it what keeps us going. Of course, from an evolutionary perspective, this means we have a strong drive for survival, which is good for the spreading of our genes. From a religious perspective however, the Rav Soliveitchik saw this aspect of human nature as part of man's divine mission, which he outlined in "Lonely Man of Faith".

Loneliness and art seem also to be related; perhaps because to create art, you must recede inside of yourself, at least while you are creating. On the other hand, the act of creation can make you feel more deeply connected - to yourself, to God, to others.**

I keep thinking of this line from Lev Grossman's "The Magicians". I do not have the book on me, so I will have to paraphrase: A student asks his teacher why the students of the school develop the ability to do magic, and the teacher replies that it is loneliness. To me, at least, magic in the book is a metaphor for art, but especially for the art of writing, and this scene resonated with me more than I care to admit.

On an unrelated note, I will be traveling, God willing, from May 24 through July 5th, and may not update the blog during that time. Thank you for reading, and I hope to update when I get back. Have a marvelous summer, full of beauty and adventures.

* See verse 10: http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt08a10.htm
** Hence part of my hesitations about blogging, or rather, about creating for a blog: How much can you be inside your interior world when you are conscious of the cyber gaze?