Four cups of Ethiopian coffee, and still suffering the abandoned mind ... Ideas running through each vein, yet, the ink seems to run dry. What is that demon, the inner voice, that compels writers to write to the point of burning themselves out? What is that depth of passion and why does it suddenly abandon the writer? The series of events in our lives projects, or shall I say personify in a manner often times difficult to comprehend the burning desire(s) of our senses, thus, of a recent encounter leading to writing this article....

"To think is to add flame to fire," wrote Balzac, mental activity being in his view an "instrument of destruction and deteriorates our nerves and is the cause of our illness and death." Writing was Balzac's only true love, the muse for whom he burnt out his life. The exhilaration and pitfalls of creativity run haunting strains through his work including Louise Lambert where a young genius turns mad.

In the The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin the author, Richard Lourie, remarks with relief towards the end that the book was dedicated to whatever spirit possessed him to write. He hoped that he was now exorcised of this demon that haunted him.

Creativity is a mystery dissolving into the metaphysics of personality and passion for the deep senses. Is inner passion to create engendered by the artist's personality? Even though Mirza Asadullah Khan-Ghalib disagreed and believed that "the best poetry was not an expression of personality but an escape from personality", few books on Ghalib claim that much of Ghalib's poetry seems to reflect his life; a summit of despair, pleasure and philosophy. The artist's persona they believed surfaced in his work, and in his daily affairs. Yet, many a times he was left as abandoned writer, perhaps, at his most dire times....

A writer or poet has to have certain qualities, such as finely tuned sensibilities and, the zest to create the mundane and the ordinary that reawakens a sense of wonder. Ismat Chughtai, found grandeur drawing from the characters of her childhood memories. She realised that life is so remarkably astonishing you simply could not improve on it. It was full of meaning and possibility, with some moments as works of art in themselves that, she ceased to consciously remould and reorder reality. Grinding away with hope that by writing one is perhaps released from suffering, a suffering the internal conflict. And when that conflict is challenged by not being able to write, the writer is left with a heavy pit in the stomach, almost a sickening emotion resonating, and ultimately leaving the poet or the writer abandoned.

To perceive and inject the ordinary with import and significance requires an innate quality. A certain way of thinking, which penetrates beneath and beyond the external surfaces of things. It might be a gift of wonder, internal passion or something as abstract as Animism - the belief that all natural things have a soul which is separate from their physical existence. But how does the intensity to create cease? Does the quality of thinking and feeling too much lead to emotional burnout? Or the inner critic becomes too overwhelming.

Our own self-criticism makes us hopeless and rather despaired. This is masochism in its extreme form. This is what happened to Ernest Hemmingway the author of A Farewell to Arms. He seemed to have lost his senses by the 1970's. After successfully For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), he left the literary world and moved to the tropics isolating himself from anyone who knew him as he really was. Perhaps the artist kills his/her own self. The fault lies with their external experiences. Ghalib's creative dissolution was conventionally ascribed by (literary) intellectuals to drinking and despair. Faulkner's decline goes back to 1940's when he dissipated himself whilst working screenplays for Hollywood.

Words' unveils the event in the writer's mind, whereas painting veils its subject, waiting for its release by the minds of others, who are equally searching. Perhaps searching the enigma...Perhaps in search for the final resolution of the largeness in their existence, and sometimes in the process one loses structure, (at least structure of our own climate of minds), suffering bouts of temporary abandonment from the self.. Thus, the enigma of the mind! 

December 16, 2007

Image under license with Gettyimages.com

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