To begin, I want to reiterate my commitment to producing regular content on this Substack.
This delay in my output was not something I intended, but rather a matter of fate and my own biology. I sincerely apologize, in so many words. Instead of further belaboring that, I would like to discuss instead how dealing with various issues over my lifetime inspired me to attempt to rewrite one of the great academic misconceptions regarding illness and creative productivity.
Many moons ago, as a requisite to finishing my masters in communication studies, I wrote a thesis confronting and dismissing a principle espoused by scholars both ancient and modern, namely that madness begets genius, divine madness by another name. This, I knew, was false. Mental illness is debilitating. It is pain. One in pain, as I have been in other ways, cannot create. Often, whether physical or mental, pain consumes the totality of one’s being, recovery (if one is lucky) or mere survival is always the primary focus of one dealing with pain. It is therefore absurd to think that someone in pain can produce anything of genius strictly because of that pain or during its suffering. I believe, however, and attempted to prove that a tangential issue is likely what is/was meant by scholars, namely that the aftermath of pain can sometimes lead to a space of great innovation, creation that I termed radical.
Thus, I constructed my theory of radical creativity, producing a rubric that I hoped would afford scholars assessing works and actors in a positive light that celebrates their triumphs first, and their illnesses only as a possible notation. This meant I was arguing with Plato, a brazen thing for a mere junior scholar to do, but I’ve never shied away from work that is challenging. My thesis highlighted a number of examples of mad rhetorics (my pseudonymous term for works of radical creativity) and mad rhetors, analyzing the characteristics that I believe marked them as exemplary of the principles I outlined. Coming from the disciplines I was trained in (English literature and communication studies), the focus of my analysis was always on that which was tangible rather than that which can be gleaned from assumption based on tangential factors, as I was attempting to demonstrate that one cannot prove (and thus assert) that a creator’s work sprung from divine madness, but one can isolate within a produced artifact (any produced work) acts of radical creativity.
Any valid theory requires the construction of a rubric through which one can test its conclusions. The criteria of the rubric I created are as follows.
1. All acts of radical creativity are temporary endeavors. A product (or artifact, as is the scholarly term) is crafted and refined, it being the sole construction that is able to intrinsically prove, prima facie, that it fits the criteria.
2. Such creations can constitute a mere section of a larger work, but what distinguishes something as radical creativity is that it always advances the milieu (or literature, the like) it works in and that preexists it.
3. To be radically creative is to pluck some unique idea from the æther, and subsequently incorporate that idea into one’s work, advancing the bounds of whatever tradition one is working in by hewing one’s contribution to the language and form of that enterprise. It is crucial that one appends one’s idea to a recognized and recognizable format, as that affiliation’s function constitutes the difference between the production of a work of outsider art (works that can be quite beautiful but that lacks signifiers that reach a larger audience, like the art of those in an asylum) and something fashioned to elicit appreciation from the larger world.
4. One’s work most be promulgated with the express purpose of garnering greater appreciation. In other words, a mad rhetoric must be an act of communication, not mere notation or conjecture.
Sadly, I never followed up on what ended up being award-winning work because I chose to leave the world of academia behind. Previously, I wanted to earn my Ph.D. in my field of study, but I witnessed the trend of how academics were being mistreated and didn’t want to spend years attempting to accomplish what might ultimately end up discounted. I have at times taught at the collegiate level in the years since, and I may talk about those experiences at a future date. I have always retained an earnest love for scholastic and for teaching, but I wasn’t going to subjugate my future to the whims of an industry that, like many others have in our increasingly debased era, might either discount my experience or sabotage my earned progress. The courses I taught were always adjunct affairs, but at least I controlled my own destiny, something I could not claim if, after achieving a higher degree, I ended up being forced by the system into a similar modality anyway.
I have always been someone who is dedicated both to producing work that is both of quality and that is infused with the vitality of the moment. Whether this work is produced under my own aegis or under another’s isn’t relevant; I strive only to earn my way on the merits of my effort and behavior rather than the dictates of some overseer who is more interested in achieving savings at the expense of organization function and prospective excellence.
Pain is a constant in my life, and it does take me down on occasion. The purpose of my thesis was to demonstrate how efforts in spite of pain are what matters, and to show how works of genius are not inspired by madness, but produced despite of it. In my experience, what pain does do is carve out a portion of your psyche, a scar of the soul that is filled with the suffering one endures and is left hollow once the pain recedes. It is our choice as to what we wish to fill that recess with, and it is true that the experience does sometimes allow one to develop sensitivities that one might not have enjoyed previous to one’s bout of trauma. Those sensitivities can lead to compassion, but they can also within their corpora free up unique perspectives that can ultimately inspire acts of radical creativity. One can choose to allow pain’s aftermath to build one’s character and engagement with the larger world, or one can allow it to drag one down into a spiral of woe. I have always tried to follow that former directive because the later is ultimately both useless and destructive. Depression is a natural response, so I am not qualifying that as a malignancy because it is not a matter of choice, but rather of internalized reaction. What leaves an impact on the world is what one produces of one’s own free will, and if one’s actions result in a radical creativity, then in some small way, one’s suffering may result indirectly in the advancement of human achievement.