I certainly agree about the silliness of romanticizing madness, or drug
use, or poverty. But it's not as if most of us have unlimited choices,
being who we are. The madness, etc., is part of the package, not an "if
only he'd lived a more stable life imagine what he could have done with all
that talent."
One can romanticize stability as well. In doing so one may be discounting
as useless much of human possibility. With the perseverance that whoever
your favorite less than stable artists manage to display they give us news
from the edge that we're not likely to get from the cozy hearth.
If, for instance, Kerouac had the regular habits of say Thomas Mann he
probably couldn't have written "On the Road." And vice versa. I'm not real
happy with the example, but you get the point.
I knew Gregory Corso--I don't think anyone who did would reduce whatever
happened to him, good and ill, to drug-use.
At 03:05 PM 3/4/2002 +1100, you wrote:
>At 6:08 PM -0800 3/3/02, Mark Weiss wrote:
>>Try, on the other hand, to imagine Herman Melville or Emily
>>Dickinson, or for that matter Baudelaire or Sade, at a faculty meeting.
>
>I did try to imagine it (not that I've ever been to a faculty
>meeting) and it was enormously entertaining. Especially Sade.
>
>However, I can see Andrew's point about the dangers of romanticising
>a certain kind of derangement as "artistic". (Also makes me think of
>Wilde's quip, "only amateurs have temperament"...) Anyone who's had
>anything to do with mental illness knows there's nothing romantic
>about intense human suffering; and it seems to me that the fates of
>poets like John Wieners, or John Clare, had very little to do with
>choice. (Or many poetic vocations, come to think of it... and many
>of them not very enviable: I wouldn't be Pessoa or Pound or Celan or
>Rimbaud or Trakl or Rilke for any money).
>
>Best
>
>Alison
>--
>
>
>Alison Croggon
>
>Home page
>http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
>
>Masthead online
>http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
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