Romanticising Depression

I HAVE A 'Starry Night' replica hanging on my bedroom wall. And on some starlit nights, I listen to 'Vincent' on my old mini-compo. I am very, very much in love with both of them.

Don McLean wrote Vincent after reading a book about the life of artist Vincent Van Gogh. In the 70s, the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam played the song daily. A copy of the sheet music, together with a set of Van Gogh's paint brushes, is buried in a time capsule beneath the museum.

Starry, starry night

Paint your palette blue and grey,

Look out on a summer's day,

With eyes that know the darkness in my soul...

van Gogh's Starry Night

Vincent was thirty-six when he painted Starry Night, in an asylum with a window through which the constellation Aries and the planet Venus appeared. Venus is the brightest star-like object in the sky. I can imagine the way it may have beaconed to a visually gifted genius on the edge of sanity. The spiral currents are imagined, but he could reproduce them because he knew that these currents run through the universe though we couldn't see them.

Vincent was suffering, no one understood, and through his color and brushstroke he was alive with feelings and emotions that the world only understood after he was gone.

Genius fired by madness.

It’s been speculated that the manic phase of his bipolar disorder (manic-depression) likely provided the power surge he needed to complete an incredible 400 or so paintings in the last three years of his life.

Via salon.com:
What if Prozac had been available in van Gogh's time? Would the paintings be less revelatory if van Gogh himself were not so miserable? Would they even exist at all?

There are perhaps, many people who can relate to his high energy and identify with his creative zeal brought about during manic phases. In their minds, depression is integral to the creative temperament. We might lose some of the triumphs of art and culture if it were wiped away.

Great wits co-exist with madness

Virginia Woolf, British novelist, essayist, and critic helped create the modern novel. Her writing often explores the concepts of time, memory, and people’s inner consciousness, and is remarkable for its humanity and depth of perception.

One fine morning, she left her home, taking her walking stick, and crossed the water meadows to the river, where she put a large stone in the pocket of her coat. Thus, she drowned herself at the age of fifty-nine.

And closer to our times and cultural sphere...

Life imitating art ?

At age forty-six and dogged by depression, wildly successful actor and singer Leslie Cheung took a dive from the 24th floor of Hong Kong's Mandarin Oriental Hotel two years ago, on April Fools Day. "In my life, I have done nothing wrong" wrote the star of the canon of Beijing Opera, 'Farewell My Concubine’"Why does it have to be like this?"

It’s no wonder we romanticize it. We make such virtue of it. We are infatuated with it

"A good therapist, knows that a persistent preoccupation, however superficially banal, suggests a significant underlying problem.", says Peter Kramer, a professor of psychiatry and author of “Against Depression”.

"The depressed will often swear that they have at last perceived

the fundamental futility and drudgery of life,

a brutal fact that the rest of the world chooses, idiotically, to ignore…"

Is depression the only honest, thoughtful response to a cruel world?