touched with fire, treated with lithium: a personal ......pseudo-aristotle, problemata xxx. the fish...
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Touched with Fire, Treated with Lithium: A Personal Perspective on Creativity and Bipolar Disorder
Eric G. Wilson
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Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly of an atrabilious [or melancholic] temperament, and some of them to such an extent as to be affected by diseases caused by black bile, as is said to have happened to Heracles among the heroes?
Pseudo-Aristotle, Problemata XXX
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The Fish gasps on the glittering mud, the mud of this once full stream, now only moist enough to be glittering mud/ the tide will flow back, time enough to lift me up with straws & withered sticks and bear me down to the ocean. O me! That being what I have been I should be what I am!
The Poet is dead in me — my imagination … lies, like Cold Snuff on the circular Rim of a Brass Candle-stick, without even a stink of Tallow to remind you that it was once cloathed and mitred with flame.
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Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does.
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all I’ve suffered, and all the suffering I’ve caused, might have arisen from the lack of a little salt in my brain.
Like thousands, I took just pride and more than just,struck matches that brought my blood to a boil;I memorized the tricks to set the river on fire—somehow never wrote something to go back to.
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When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
i dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
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John Keats, “Ode on Melancholy”
She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
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Emily Dickinson
Water, is taught by thirst.Land—by the Oceans passed.
Transport—by throe—Peace—by its battles told—Love, by Memorial Mold—
Birds, by the Snow.
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