The Addiction of Genius

Lorca, Robert Bly, and, more recently, Edward Hirsch have called the leaping, scarifying, anarchically creative spirit duende, from the Spanish for "lord of the house," and Hirsch specifically refers to Plath "storming upward through the air" in the Ariel poems. "The furies were certainly loose and stalking," he writes in The Demon and the Angel, "when Plath wrote her ferocious last poems in England. The notoriety of Plath's suicide has obscured how dedicated she was to her poetic craft, how persistently she worked to shape experiences, even as she probed the depths -- braving taboo subjects, courting a wildness that defies control... It's as if the duende was struggling out of her body to become a spirit of pure air." Hirsch also clarifies the musical dimension of poetic acts, as well as the death-hauntedness of many great artists. Describing the Kind of Blue studio sessions, for example, he quotes pianist Bill Evans comaring the lunar former addict Miles Davis to Japanese brush painters: "These artists must practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communion with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere. The resulting pictures lack the complex composition and textures of ordinary painting, but it is said that those who see will find something captured that escapes explanation." In a similar context, Nola Dalla, who is completing a biography of Ungar, compares him to Bobby Fischer, another spellbinding persona whose artistry "escapes explanation." A player whose brains, paranoia, and other demons drove him in 1970 to the pinnacle of chess, Fischer soon vanished down the maw of pathology; Ungar and Plath each traced a similar, though steeper, trajectory.

Mental illness remains disgracefully misunderstood in our culture, yet it seems fair to say that the headlong talents of Fischer and Ungar and Plath (or van Gogh, Davis, Berryman, Lowell, Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, et al.) stem from parallel habits of mind, which themselves spring from brain chemistry. In the back of their forehead, more specifically in the anterior cingulate of their frontal cortex, some humans have more vulnerable dopamine systems, "psyches" (as we used to call them) more easily hijacked by rewards like sex, dope, money, or laurels. Mstering the inherent unpredictability of any game or art form can trigger overpowering "pleasure," and this dopamine rush gets deeply embedded in the memory of some of the most talented practitioners. Normal brains work this way, too, but they tend to operate within narrower "mood swings," with smaller jolts (or squirts) of strange insight. "The same neural circuity involved in the highs and lows of abusing drugs," says Harvard neuroscientist Hans Breiter, "is activated by winning or losing money, anticipating a good meal or seeking beautiful faces to look at."

McManus, James; Positively Fifth Street, p82-83