Creativity and Disease- How illness affects literature, art, and music
Philip Sandblom (Marion Boyars, NY)
Notes for Class Discussion
Frida Kahlo led a painful life both physically and emotionally in her relationship to Diego Rivera as well as injuries on top of disease. These emotions and specific painful experiences translated into her art.
14 “Frida is an impressive example of the fact that severe illness is an experience with a far-reaching influence on our lives, as well as our creativity.” We can’t become accustomed to lingering pain.
We are drawn to artistic details of which we have special knowledge.
15 Connection between illness and the arts are close and common. TB patients who used Occupational Therapy (painting) during their disease and treatment had symbols of the stages of their disease in their paintings.
Studying the artists’ illness may also enhance an understanding of their art.
Thesis point: When we can appreciate the high and lows of an art form so expressly as music, it exceeds the literature and art world because of the levels of feeling we experience. When 3 different conductors faint at the same part of the same piece we must study what is in that piece of art that effects the soul so dramatically/
22 Nietzche observed that is a malicious pleasure in the misfortune of others.
Updike felt that descriptions of an artist’s pain became dull within a few paragraphs but was still able to convey interesting details of his psoriasis and later when he had an appendicitis he described it “delightfully”
Goethe, “Our own pain teaches us to share the misery of our fellow creature” because we can identify with pain more accurately than happiness
25 Philoctetes (peerless archer of Greek mythology whose snakebite suppurated with a stench so horrible that his companions left him behind on a desert island found that to express his pain meant to express himself. “Now that I am no longer with men- and I took to telling the story of my suffering, and if the phases were very beautiful I was so much consoled; I even sometimes forgot my sadness by uttering it.” In other words, the act of expression becomes a healing and therapeutic element in the experience of disease and pain.
26 Kierkegaard – “A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music.”
31 “By preventing other activity, disease may be a factor that awakens artistic creativity in those with dormant talents and offers the opportunity to develop them” The disease can act as a catalyst to inspire the less inclined toward artistic expression.
30-40 Michangelo, Handal and Byron all experienced mental illness and had impacts on their work. Handal composed Messiah in 3 weeks during a manic-phase, Michelangelo painted The Day of Judgement and included his own depression in the martyr of St. Bartholomew. Byron was also aware that he had different mood swings which impacted his work in positive and negative directions.
41 “Baudelaire – genius is simply childhood, rediscovered by and act of will.” Regardless of cause, most artists are different from the non-art creating population.
46 “Artists have, above all, an urge to seek new and personal means of expression, paths of communication with fellow beings who can appreciate their new creations and share their deepest feelings, “our terrible need to make contact,” in Katherine Mansfield’s words.”
Reflection: Sick or healthy anytime someone has the need to express themselves the gravitate toward their own predispositions of how they are influenced and how the world has impacted them. Perhaps those that have a greater cognitive filter express their experiences in less artistic ways while those that experience the world more acutely feel the need to express their experiences through art.
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