Dokter Geyer: Literary Rx, Free Advice, Etc.

I always chuckle when I hear the mental health folks start talking about “the link between creativity and mental illness.”

Creativity is not a symptom of mental illness — rather, it is actually at the very center of intelligence. What could be a surer sign of intelligence than the ability to solve a complex problem? That is what artists, writers, musicians and creative people in all walks of life in fact do in their work.

Why then this appearance of a link between between creativity and mental illness? Highly intelligent people also seem to be people who experience very intense emotions, and sometimes they have trouble reining in those emotions. That is all that is going on here.

Let’s not forget that the mental health folks have a $$$ financial interest in seeing mental illness anywhere and everywhere (perhaps here they are suffering from “creativity confusion disorder”?). Whenever a party has a financial interest in making a particular diagnosis, that diagnosis should be regarded with a special degree of skepticism.

Not popular with the general public, mind you — the rise of free verse in the 20th century went hand in hand with the decline of poetry’s importance in our society (i.e. the general public has repeatedly demonstrated that it has no interest in reading this material).

No, free verse is popular with writers, because everyone can write it. All you need to do is jot down a few “my thoughts” sentences, stick line breaks in a few strategic spots (this takes about 5 minutes to learn how to do) and voila now you are a poet.

I cannot draw worth a damn. About the best I can do is draw stick figures (and even those aren’t very good). My approach to these disappointing circumstances is not to jealously condemn the work of a master like Gustave Dore as being outdated, artificial and phony, while trying to advance stick figures as being more sophisticated, and a more democratic way of illustrating (because everyone can draw them)…rather, I acknowledge that I am poor at drawing, I sit down and I let more capable people take care of business in this area.

If you are a writer and the best you can do is insert line breaks in some prose sentences, then sit down and do not present yourself as a poet. Let the people who are producing rhymed and metered poetry — i.e. genuine poetry — have the stage. Perhaps our society will become interested in poetry once again.

Dokter Geyer and the Critical Theorist sat down at a cafe table.

Dokter Geyer: “So let me tell you what I was trying to bring across in my latest poetry collection–”

Critical Theorist: “Shut up! I want to count the number of hairs on your left forearm.”

Then Dokter Geyer fell silent; for he knew that the Critical Theorist was engaged in the scientific study of literature, and he did not wish to disturb him.

A lion appeared on the horizon and started in the direction of some ostriches.

9 of the 10 ostriches stuck their heads in the sand so the lion was no longer “there,” making this the normal and mentally healthy response.

The 10th ostrich looked the lion straight in the eye. This ostrich was deviant and must have been suffering from a mental disorder.

My money’s on the crazy ostrich.

The British author Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849) is renowned for his sustained and dedicated work on the problem of death, long and widely understood to be one of the great questions of human existence. His macabre musings on what death is, or might be, and what that means for how we should view our world and conduct our lives, stand as one of the most impressive achievements in British literature.

Death of course frightens many people, including literary ones, so we should not be surprised at the nature of the critical response to Beddoes, who has been viewed as something of a stand-in for the Grim Reaper and therefore largely regarded as a threatening figure.

Although Beddoes is one of the great writers in our language (and is among those authors included in Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, for example), his work has received surprisingly little study. When literary critics find out about Beddoes’ preoccupation with death, many of them quickly move on to other authors. This is the “flight” reaction.

A few critics choose to “fight” Beddoes and his interest in death. They charge that Beddoes was insane, obsessed, had bipolar disorder, was a frustrated homosexual, was warped by exposure to corpses as a child, anything and everything they can drag out of the woodwork. If they can convince themselves that there was “something wrong” with Beddoes, well then they do not have to take him so seriously, the threat is reduced and they can continue on with their lives as before.

Their desperate efforts are destructive to our understanding of the man and his work. The all-out attempt by these critics to diminish this author for having devoted himself to one of the great questions of human existence is laughable on the face of it and underscores their lack of sophistication.

If they are so afflicted with death anxiety that they are willing to disfigure one of our great authors, they (and our literature) would be better served if they sought counselling at a church, mosque, synagogue or temple. Or if they are materialists, I’m sure there are many psychiatrists who would be happy to talk to them and drug them if the money is right.

I am discouraged by the number of male critics who disparage female authors for their portrayal of men.

It is only the propagandist who seeks to control the portrayal of a thing; and this behavior is a poison to any of the arts.

If a woman has had a negative experience with a man, and feels wronged by him, why should she not be allowed to criticize him in her work without fear of being branded a misandrist?

If men have sometimes or even frequently behaved in a selfish, exploitative and destructive way toward women, why should this not be revealed in our literature?

We do not need nor should we desire only “positive” portrayals of men. If our literature is to be a healthy and genuine literature, it must also be an honest one.

I have sometimes heard a literary person insist that good poetry must include concrete imagery. The correct term for this is “blather.”

The truth is that the presence of concrete imagery is irrelevant to whether a poem is “good” or not. The emphasis on concrete imagery is part of the modernist movement in literature and has no particular authority beyond that. Modernists might wish to make one of their pet methods into one of the “golden rules of poetry,” but the rest of us know better.

(It is worth noting that concrete imagery serves as a Great Refuge for poets who have difficulty managing abstractions.)

Here is a small masterpiece by William Blake (1757-1827) that contains no concrete imagery at all.

THE DIVINE IMAGE

To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
All pray in their distress;
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.

For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is God, our father dear,
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is Man, his child and care.

For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity a human face,
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.

Then every man, of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine,
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.

And all must love the human form,
In heathen, Turk, or Jew;
Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.

So it turns out that people with very powerful intellects also have very powerful emotions. Wow, what a surprise.

Why should this be construed as mental illness?

On the scale of human emotional intensity, at one end there will be people who experience very high “highs” and very low “lows,” while at the other end there will be people with unusually low emotional responses. This is simply part of the natural variation among human beings.

People need to realize that mental health professionals are not only competing with Dr. Beam and Dr. Daniels, but also with things like yoga and the martial arts. If they can convince people that they have a malady these other guys can’t handle, that becomes a huge cash industry for them.

The psychiatrists fried Heath Ledger’s brain pretty good with their various “medications” (lobotomies live on, only now they are conducted with pharmaceuticals…). If he had taken up something like taekwando as a means of reining in his mind and emotions, he’d probably be alive today.

Naturally many English professors are all over this hokum. Every literary genius past and present now has “bipolar disorder.” Wonderful.

The study of “bipolar disorder” is the phrenology of the 21st century. Let’s forget this crap and get back to studying the works of our great authors.

“The more I think about myself, the more impressed I am. In fact, I think there should be a song about myself, and I should be the one to write it. I will call it ‘Song of Myself.’

It will be about myself.”

There’s no question that Walt Whitman had a powerful (if misguided) voice, but whenever I read his “Song of Myself,” I always get the impression that I am hearing someone giving a speech rather than reciting a poem. Whitman’s line breaks are not the apparatus of a real poem, but simply a marking system that indicates where the dramatic pauses in the speech should go. Whitman was a prose writer, not a poet, and we should not fall for this con. We could really take any speech, such as Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream,” and insert line breaks into the text to indicate where the dramatic pauses should go, but no one (apart from some members of our literati, I guess) would take that to mean that King had written a poem rather than a speech.

Whitman evidently had “the poet bug.” He was so eager to breathlessly declare himself “a poet” that he started sticking line breaks where they ought not to go (namely, into his speeches). If he wanted to be a true poet, he should have modelled his work after that of Edgar Poe.