Welcome to this week’s Friday thread! In place of an essay, I’ll offer a few questions to continue conversations begun earlier in the week. I’ll drop in and out of the discussion throughout the next few days, and I hope you’ll feel free to contribute as you have time.
I'm bipolar. And in unmedicated, I'd write a dozen poems in the middle of the night. And every once in a while, I'd write a good one. So as a manic poetic epiphany? Good. But bad for me as a person. I'm serious about my meds and therapy now. There are no middle of the night epiphanies now. I won't allow myself to write even if I happen to be awake at that time.
How fascinating -- and thanks for commenting. I'm curious now about how much your fiction has been changed by medication (if you're willing to talk about that). Much of what I love about Tonto and the Lone Ranger Fistfight in Heaven, Ten Little Indians, and Flight comes from a kind of brilliant exuberance that I suppose could overlap with mania somewhat? It seems like a really difficult balance for artists to find. My own default setting skews toward depression. I'm not alone in finding melancholy a fertile source for art -- some of my favorite music from the nineties is, at its heart, depressive -- but there can be debilitating versions of it. As I suppose Kurt Cobain and Chris Cornell illustrate.
I will have to ponder its effect on my fiction. Hmmmmm. And I'll take a look at that Pollan article. And, yes, being a Seattleite, I'm intensely aware of the link between art and suicide ala Cobain, Cornelle, and quite a few other musicians here in town of lesser fame.
True. Valid perspective. But have you read Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Big Magic”? I mocked it at first because it’s E.G. but it’s actually pretty insightful. She discusses the myth of the depressed, suffering artist/writer. I just finished reading a biography on Gauguin. Talk about depression and mental illness! But brilliant, of course. For me, I’ve always done stronger writing when I’m feeling okay. When I’m depressed I tend to isolate and not write well.
I agree with this. There is a difference between real depression and the more fertile melancholy. A healthy brain is better than one that turns on itself. I'm thinking of David Foster Wallace's line -- now haunting in retrospect -- about why so many suicides involving guns are shots to the head (ostensibly killing the "terrible master"). I see your Big Magic, and I raise you Bright-Sided (Barbara Ehrenreich's critique of unrelenting positive thinking). But I'll confess that I'm not always clear on when my polemics are useful in the sense that Ehrenreich describes and when they drift toward less constructive forms of negative thinking.
Well put. This reminds of of the DFW story about depression, which I'm forgetting the name of. Powerful though. (Especially, as you alluded to, in the light of his 2008 suicide.)
The example of the failed epiphany is curious and makes for a great word-to-word read. Would you think of it as a sort of Icarus moment? The lines "what she had gone so far to snatch" and "It was too bright" have that sense of moving too far forward, too far overhead.
Another instance of epiphanies in fiction: "Near to the Wild Heart" by Clarice Lispector, whcih has examples of positive, negative, and anti- epiphanies. But, since the novel is so internal, its epiphanies are usually self-created. For instance, when Joana (the protagonist) moves closer to "the source itself" during an affair, when she speaks an unknown phrase: "as mild and sweet as daybreak in a wood, inspiration was born....Eyes closed, surrendered, she softly spoke words born in that instant, never before heard by anyone, still tender from their creation—fragile new shoots."
I'm replying to your example from Lispector separately because it sounds so similar to some of Kate Chopin's work. How interesting that Joana has her eyes closed at this moment of revelation (that seems to square with the examples I gave on Tuesday of shutting off external sensory input to allow percolating thoughts to rise into consciousness). I don't know enough of the context here to say what the source is for Joana, but if it is desire, as it is for Edna Pontellier in The Awakening, then one might say that there is still an external source and thus the epiphany is not purely self-created?
Okay, I can work with that. The context of the epiphany is definitely relational, thus external. But her epiphanies evolve through the novel, as she removes herself from the people around her and delves deeper into her own mind.
Readers of the novel have thought of this scene less as an Icarus moment than as Lucy's reach exceeding her grasp. According to those readings, Lucy just doesn't have the "stuff" to complete the revelation or to translate it into artistic expression. There's a character in a Woody Allen film, maybe September, who expresses a similar frustration about feeling the desire to create, but lacking the intellectual talent to satiate that desire. At least I think this notion is distinct from Icarus possessing the power to fly, but falling prey to arrogance.
I think those readings of Lucy are wrong, incidentally, and I spill a lot of virtual ink explaining that this scene illustrates a cognitive impasse, and that a later scene (too long to quote here) shows her achieving a legitimate breakthrough after a period of diversion and incubation.
I'm bipolar. And in unmedicated, I'd write a dozen poems in the middle of the night. And every once in a while, I'd write a good one. So as a manic poetic epiphany? Good. But bad for me as a person. I'm serious about my meds and therapy now. There are no middle of the night epiphanies now. I won't allow myself to write even if I happen to be awake at that time.
How fascinating -- and thanks for commenting. I'm curious now about how much your fiction has been changed by medication (if you're willing to talk about that). Much of what I love about Tonto and the Lone Ranger Fistfight in Heaven, Ten Little Indians, and Flight comes from a kind of brilliant exuberance that I suppose could overlap with mania somewhat? It seems like a really difficult balance for artists to find. My own default setting skews toward depression. I'm not alone in finding melancholy a fertile source for art -- some of my favorite music from the nineties is, at its heart, depressive -- but there can be debilitating versions of it. As I suppose Kurt Cobain and Chris Cornell illustrate.
This is a separate topic, but you now have me wondering about Michael Pollan's recent work on psychoactive plants, and the role they might play in epiphanic moments. https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/the-intoxicating-garden/
I will have to ponder its effect on my fiction. Hmmmmm. And I'll take a look at that Pollan article. And, yes, being a Seattleite, I'm intensely aware of the link between art and suicide ala Cobain, Cornelle, and quite a few other musicians here in town of lesser fame.
You’re reminding me that I need to write a few of my crazy drunken stories which happened in Seattle circa 2006/2009. Wild.
True. Valid perspective. But have you read Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Big Magic”? I mocked it at first because it’s E.G. but it’s actually pretty insightful. She discusses the myth of the depressed, suffering artist/writer. I just finished reading a biography on Gauguin. Talk about depression and mental illness! But brilliant, of course. For me, I’ve always done stronger writing when I’m feeling okay. When I’m depressed I tend to isolate and not write well.
I agree with this. There is a difference between real depression and the more fertile melancholy. A healthy brain is better than one that turns on itself. I'm thinking of David Foster Wallace's line -- now haunting in retrospect -- about why so many suicides involving guns are shots to the head (ostensibly killing the "terrible master"). I see your Big Magic, and I raise you Bright-Sided (Barbara Ehrenreich's critique of unrelenting positive thinking). But I'll confess that I'm not always clear on when my polemics are useful in the sense that Ehrenreich describes and when they drift toward less constructive forms of negative thinking.
Well put. This reminds of of the DFW story about depression, which I'm forgetting the name of. Powerful though. (Especially, as you alluded to, in the light of his 2008 suicide.)
The example of the failed epiphany is curious and makes for a great word-to-word read. Would you think of it as a sort of Icarus moment? The lines "what she had gone so far to snatch" and "It was too bright" have that sense of moving too far forward, too far overhead.
Another instance of epiphanies in fiction: "Near to the Wild Heart" by Clarice Lispector, whcih has examples of positive, negative, and anti- epiphanies. But, since the novel is so internal, its epiphanies are usually self-created. For instance, when Joana (the protagonist) moves closer to "the source itself" during an affair, when she speaks an unknown phrase: "as mild and sweet as daybreak in a wood, inspiration was born....Eyes closed, surrendered, she softly spoke words born in that instant, never before heard by anyone, still tender from their creation—fragile new shoots."
I'm replying to your example from Lispector separately because it sounds so similar to some of Kate Chopin's work. How interesting that Joana has her eyes closed at this moment of revelation (that seems to square with the examples I gave on Tuesday of shutting off external sensory input to allow percolating thoughts to rise into consciousness). I don't know enough of the context here to say what the source is for Joana, but if it is desire, as it is for Edna Pontellier in The Awakening, then one might say that there is still an external source and thus the epiphany is not purely self-created?
Okay, I can work with that. The context of the epiphany is definitely relational, thus external. But her epiphanies evolve through the novel, as she removes herself from the people around her and delves deeper into her own mind.
Readers of the novel have thought of this scene less as an Icarus moment than as Lucy's reach exceeding her grasp. According to those readings, Lucy just doesn't have the "stuff" to complete the revelation or to translate it into artistic expression. There's a character in a Woody Allen film, maybe September, who expresses a similar frustration about feeling the desire to create, but lacking the intellectual talent to satiate that desire. At least I think this notion is distinct from Icarus possessing the power to fly, but falling prey to arrogance.
I think those readings of Lucy are wrong, incidentally, and I spill a lot of virtual ink explaining that this scene illustrates a cognitive impasse, and that a later scene (too long to quote here) shows her achieving a legitimate breakthrough after a period of diversion and incubation.
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