Blog 10

Last night, I was watching an episode of Bones and the case that they were working on reminded me of the Hughes readings that we had to do this week. A little girl was dying of Mesothelioma and was confined to a hospital bed most of the time due to her dilapidated state, so she took up painting (very Matisse like indeed). This was enough of a connection to start a blog conversation about, in that the sickness that claimed her ability to go about her daily life gave her the opportunity to discover a hidden talent that she had (oh, did I mention that the art she created looked a lot like Matisse too? Coincidence, I think not…), but it went even further. The flowers she drew resembled the look and shape of the cancer cells in her bones that were destroying her life. While I understand that this is just a television show, it got me to thinking about the idea that we are subconsciously aware of our beings and dimensions on a level that our normal reality does not understand. I found this to be an interesting connection to what we have been learning and got to understand better that the our minds are more in sync with our bodies than we are consciously aware of.
Other than that when I read these few chapters in Hughes, I could not help but relate them to someone in my life who, for as long as I have known her, has been afflicted with mental illness. My mother is a manic depressive who also suffers from paranoid delusions. And what it talks about in Hughes about the connection between sickness and creativity, on certain levels, makes sense to me. My memories of my mother from childhood are a mixed bag of emotions and events that were as much of an emotional rollercoaster as her condition was to her. In the blink of an eye she could go from telling the most fantastical tales of adventure and pirates and fairies and thieves and sword-fighting with dragons to utter panic and depression. She could come up with the most intricuit details of made-up lands and people and their lives… all these things contributed greatly to my overactive imagination and total disillusionment with reality that has been a part of my life since then… but I digress. I wanted to tell this story because I see how this is plausible. Living constantly in an altered state as she did created a whole other world and understanding of life for her kids, but also ended up in her not being the most reliable or safest of parents to be left in the charge of. In the book it talks about the creative effects that Depression can have on people, and while I have seen it in numerous people, that when they are sad or down they feel the floodgates of creativity open up and some of their best works show through during this period… the point I want to say is that it is not always that glamorous. In my experience, it was always her manic times (and the bouts of paranoia) that moved her to the most creative actions. Her depression was always destructive and unproductive… usually amounting to nothing more than her staying in her room, sleeping for hours on end and eating an abundance of ice cream and watching fletch lives over and over. I digress again.
What I want to say here is that, while this book is interesting, I find it to be a bit biased towards the positive aspects of mental/physical/emotional illness. I read this and almost felt as if I was being left out and in the need of some ailment in order to improve my creativity and intrigue and that is not necessarily how it is. I see where he is coming from, and I understand that he is trying to show the different ways in which creativity presents itself, but it is by no means across the board that these illnesses or conditions can help you attain a creative status. I think that natural underlying ability still has to play a vital role in the process.

Hannah