Here's something I've been thinking about a little as I work on my psychobiography of photographer Diane Arbus: Can great art sometimes be worth more to an artist than his or her own life? And would it ever make sense to argue that art kills? I know that's put rather too starkly, but here's what I'm getting at. Take Sylvia Plath (in some ways an obvious choice). In the weeks prior to her suicide she was an artist possessed, churning out poem after poem, many of them spectacular. She knew, as she wrote in a letter to her mother, that these poems rose to the level of genius. It was the best work she had ever produced. She had achieved, at long last, a kind of perfection, the complete realization of her immense talents. Then, very sadly, she suicided. To make the poems she made, she went down very deep, into the darkest regions of a very dark psyche, and she never was able to re-emerge. She blended with material that was virtually psychotic, and thus dangerous. And, as I was saying, it killed her.
Then there is Diane Arbus. In the weeks leading up to her suicide, she too was doing work that she considered especially fine--this being her photos of the mentally retarded, published in the book "Untitled." As she said at the time, "Finally what I've been searching for." These pictures were a departure, a culmination, a new beginning (or so it seemed). Then a few days later, Arbus was dead.
What's going on here? It's more than a little uncanny. As Wendell Berry once said: "To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark." Both Plath and Arbus knew the dark, but this knowing came at a massive price. The dark stayed dark. Forever. Some artists--not all--do not survive the hero's quest. Maybe, when the moment comes, they lack the requisite "ego strength" to re-compose after the decompensation that a certain category of art requires. Or else: once they achieve genius, the question becomes: Where do I go from here? Having reached the top of the mountain, there is nothing left but the descent, and the idea of descending is simply intolerable, ultimately depressing.
Such a model would not apply to all artists, of course. Ken Kesey, to take one example, knew that "Sometimes a Great Notion" was his masterpiece (not, by the way, the decidedly inferior "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"). After completing it, he never wrote another novel. Still, he survived. The question is: Why didn't Plath and Arbus?
Mistake
This links the sickness to the genius, separated by a thin line of fact and reality, when at best, reality is an amalgam of perceptions threaded to form a consensus. Artists like Plath were ill. From a different perspective, consider if a cancer patient were to create one final powerful composition of music, we don't say that the cancer drove them to do so. We may allow that the cancer gave them incentive to use what was already within them. At some point, art must be separated from its evil twin, psychosis. The mental illness pervasis in many artists does not present art as a symptom. Rather, art is a conductor of emotions (which is why I believe we so often look at the conductor as the charge--no, they're two different things. A piece of metal isn't inherently electric, right?)
I understand that it's often very difficult to get away from this archaic belief in the artistic symptomology of psychosis. But, art must be viewed through a lens that observes all of life as inspiration. So Dark life inspires great works (because the audience has an inherent human attraction to the macabre.) But Great Work is not always the product of Dark Life.
At best, the misunderstanding holds no harm. But I think to be mindful of art, we must demarcate greatness from insanity. Not mutually exclusive, but certainly not automatically relative.