Euphoric mania is an intoxicating state of mind: exuberant, exalted, and inclined toward a sense of cosmic relatedness. Anything is possible; all relates to all. But mood during mania is also fluctuating and volatile. Mania, observed Emil Kraepelin, “is predominantly exalted and cheerful, influenced by the feeling of heightened capacity for work. The patient is in imperturbable good temper, sure of success, ‘courageous,’ feels happy and merry, not rarely over flowingly so.” But, he continued, there often exists a “great emotional irritability.”
Among adolescents suffering early in their lives from mania, scientists can distinguish two subforms of the condition, one that is predominantly irritable and another that is predominantly exuberant. This is consistent with studies of mania in adults. These patterns appear to be genetically determined. The exuberant manic patients are more likely than the irritable ones to score high on measures of verbal intelligence and to show better psychological and social adjustment.
Mania is more than fevered mood and pelting thoughts. It is a disinhibiting force to act on ideas, fearlessly and however rashly; put ambition to action; scald the earth, splash color against the gray; to harm, to create. The seventeenth-century English physician Thomas Willis wrote that “Madmen are not as Melancholicks, sad and fearful, but audacious and very confident, so that they shun almost no dangers, and attempt all the most difficult things there are.” Mania is tied as well to temperament—the largely hereditary characteristics of personality—and, specifically, to many of the characteristics of temperament associated with creativity. Stanford researchers have found, for example, that bipolar patients and highly creative individuals have more personality traits in common than do healthy controls and creative individuals. Patients with bipolar illness, in general, show more emotional responsiveness to people and events in their lives; they are, as Emerson put it, “of a fibre irritable and delicate, like iodine to light.” Patients with the more severe form of bipolar illness, or those who have a predominantly manic course, are more likely to have an underlying hyperthymic temperament; that is, to be warm, extraverted, uninhibited, independent, energetic, and self-assured. They are also more likely to take risks others would not and to vigorously explore the environment around them. Their disease may be virulent when it is active, but their temperaments allow for greater reengagement with the world, more resilience. Many of these traits of temperament are closely associated with creativity as well.
Most patients say that they feel good, exquisitely good, in the early stages of mania, on the way up. They feel they can do anything, charm anyone, write rings around Dante and Shakespeare. One of John Campbell’s manic patients summed it up as many do. When told by his doctor that he was ill he replied, “If I’m ill, this is the most wonderful illness I ever had.”
Patient says he “thinks in hallucinations.” This is representative of the entire tone of the patient which almost suggests the desirability of psychosis as a qualification for great artistry. Apparently the whole thought process is unrealistic although the actual phrases are very comprehensible and make good enough sense.
—HOSPITAL ADMISSION NOTE FOR ROBERT LOWELL, DECEMBER 1957
Mania, whatever its relation to art, is a serious illness; the delusions and hallucinations that often accompany it make this particularly clear. Delusions—fixed, false, idiosyncratic beliefs—marked Lowell’s attacks of mania from the time he was first ill until his final episodes in the year before he died. This is more common than not in mania; half of those who have been manic have been delusional at one time or another. Of those who have been delusional, half have had grandiose delusions and half have had paranoid delusions. Lowell’s delusions were overwhelmingly of the grandiose type. (In children with bipolar I disorder the rate of delusions is even higher than in adults, and grandiose delusions are far more common than persecutory ones.) Delusions during mania are often religious, expansive, and infused with the experience of special journeys and identification or intimate communication with the great. The manic patient is a prophet, observed Kraepelin; he has to “fulfill a divine mission, hides the world-soul in himself.” Delusionally manic patients take journeys that only they can take, participate in special adventures that no one else is privy to. Manic delusions intensify the external and internal worlds; the fear and ecstasy of the psychotic mind are projected inwardly and outwardly.
Psychosis, in the form of delusions, hallucinations, want of reason—madness, in short—have implications for creative work that go beyond those of exuberance and elated mood states. What is the impact of even a single psychotic break, much less repeated ones, on the inventing brain? At a biological level, psychosis—manic insanity—almost certainly changes the chemistry of the brain, and perhaps even its structure as well. It is likely that a single attack increases the chances of future attacks of mania. There are progressive changes in the brain—decreases in gray matter volume in the prefrontal region, for example—related to the number of manic episodes. These, it has been hypothesized, may be due to decreased levels of neuroprotective factors, stress-induced elevation in cortisol, or neuroinflammatory factors. The psychological effects of psychosis on the brain, as well as on the person who has been psychotic, are pernicious. To lose one’s mind and to have to live with the emotional and professional consequences of having done so are among the most terrifying experiences anyone can have. To be haunted by the fear of going mad again, to lose faith in the reliability of one’s mind: these are fears not knowable to anyone but those who have been psychotic. The life that follows the breakdown is the broken plate that F. Scott Fitzgerald described. One can enter into life again; less well can one reenter the fray of life.
And yet, in some minds that have been attacked by mania, under some circumstances, a psychosis may expose imagined worlds that are so intense, so believable, so wonderful, so terrifying, so inhabited that the mental landscape is scorched and also broadened in a way that changes not only the content of thinking but its form. Like the Australian banksia flower that needs fire to release its seeds, mania sets loose dormant thoughts and emotions. Once escaped, they take root in unexpected ways and places. The mind must then expand and create to comprehend what has happened. Psychosis compels that a bridge be built, that the mind invent a way from madness back to sanity.
The grandiose delusions of identity to which Lowell fell captive so often—he was at times Christ, the Holy Spirit, Achilles, Aeneas, Saint Paul, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, King James IV, Hitler, Henry VIII, the Messiah, John the Baptist, Dante, Milton, Julius Caesar, T. S. Eliot—reflected the imaginative history in which he moved easily. He knew these figures well, their work better. They were creators and destroyers: gods, heroes, tyrants, and saints. When he was manic, Lowell entered their world; he assumed their rage and took on their charms, saw the Devil and smelled the brimstone: felt keenly the danger in which the world hung, hacked his way through the walls of his house looking for the Etruscan treasures he knew had been hidden there. He entered into history—world, personal, psychotic—with sympathy and wisdom; provided detail from a teeming, informed mind. At times, the Devil and brimstone were metaphoric; when he was mad they were real; when he was well again, they were metaphoric but differently known and expressed. Poetry called upon life. “It is hard to say what you can put into poetry,” he told an interviewer in Maine. “It has to be something you’ve lived.”
With distance from his illness came the opportunity to use slivers of his delusional experience for poetry; the backward look discomfited. “What can you do after having been Henry VIII or even a cock of the walk weekly sheriff?” he wrote to Peter Taylor. “You get beautifully your character’s living for the moment he is seen or heard. All life for the flashes! Everyone has a lot of that, and we writers more than most, only the words, the structure, the tune come out of us, are us.” Lowell’s delusions came from the dangerous, as well as the extraordinary, elements within himself. He could uniquely hurt with his command of language; he could uniquely captiva
te by the same power. He drew upon his discipline, imagination, and courage to write.
Lowell’s delusions came in part from the random stirrings of memory, shredded and rearranged, in many ways apropos of nothing. Delusions are like the bits of recollection and perception that push to the surface during delirium or dreams. But unlike delirium, they usually coalesce into a story. Lowell’s delusions came as well from his personally registered history of the world; his loves and his convictions; his deep reading of poetry, classics, and history. His psychosis, although beyond his control, was beholden to the specifics of his life and to the intricate minuet and genius of his brain; when he recovered, he would change and chisel the poetry he had written when he was manic. Parts were unsalvageable, others radically original.
Mania gives rise to “new and wonderful talents and operations of the mind,” wrote Benjamin Rush in 1812. It can be compared to an earthquake, “which by convulsing the upper strata of our globe, throws upon its surface precious and splendid fossils, the existence of which was unknown to the proprietors of the soil in which they were buried.”
“The foundations of the earth do shake,” it says in Isaiah. “Earth breaks to pieces, / Earth is split in pieces, / Earth shakes to pieces.” Mania shook Lowell’s brain from its moorings; assailed his identity and certainties. There were hard ways back to sanity—imagination, work, grit, love, and medicine—and he made use of them.
Art in the early twentieth century, Lowell said, was a remarkable thing. The creative world was on fire. Foundations broke. “Life seemed to be there,” he said. “It seemed to be one of those periods when the lid was still being blown. The great period of blowing the lid was the time of Schönberg and Picasso and Joyce and the early Eliot, where a power came into the arts which we perhaps haven’t had since….They were stifled by what was being done, and they almost wrecked things to do their great works.”
Lowell’s imagination moved as on tectonic plates; during mania, the plates shifted and clashed. His mind and poetry did not rest; they grew, innovated, transformed. “He could have settled into a fix,” Derek Walcott wrote. “But every new book was an upheaval that had his critics scuttling….Then his mind heaved again, with deliberate, wide cracks in his technique.” Any attempt to understand Lowell’s work must necessarily be “more seismographic than aesthetic.” Upheaval was beyond the will; the discipline to shape it was not. Imagination was somewhere in between.
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Words Meat-Hooked from the Living Steer
The needle that prods into what really happened may be the same needle that writes a good line, I think. There’s some sort of technical connection; there must be at best. Inspiration’s such a tricky word, but we all know poetry isn’t a craft that you can just turn on and off. It has to strike fire somewhere, and truth, maybe unpleasant truth about yourself, may be the thing that does that.
—Interview with Al Alvarez, 1963
Inspiration, like his moods, came fitfully to Robert Lowell. Poems fueled by it, he said, “somehow lift the great sail and catch the wind.” It was a wind Lowell had known since childhood, when his mother read to him from Hawthorne’s retelling of the Greek myths. Pegasus, the winged horse who lived in the wind, was imagination, Lowell said; Pegasus was the sky flyer. He had taught Lowell to “travel in the sky.” Day after day, “we walk the same sidewalks, go into the same rooms, see the same people.” Then, the shift: “Imagination catches us and carries us off on the winds of invention. Dragons smoke, gold blazes in rock holes, we stare at the dull old carpet and see a kingdom.”
Some, said Lowell, even great writers like Horace, set limits on what they allow into their imagination. They insist that horses cannot have wings. Horace, who like most Romans “wanted to see things straight and as they are,” may have believed that horses can’t fly and are meant for plowing, wrote Lowell. He might in our modern times have told Bellerophon, who rode and mastered Pegasus, “to go to a hospital.” But perhaps Horace was right, Lowell added. Perhaps “even people of imagination must learn to walk on the ground.”
The boundary between vivid imagination and madness is porous. It is notably so for those inclined to mania. Percival Lowell, astronomer, writer, and distant cousin, more than once slipped across the border from the fever of imagination into breakdown. He wrote about life on Mars and sketched canals built by Martians yet also warned that there should be a balance between shackle and unreined forces. “Let me warn you to beware of two opposite errors,” he said. “Of letting your imagination soar unballasted by fact, and, on the other hand, of shackling it so stolidly that it loses all incentive to rise. You may come to grief through the first process; you will never get anywhere by the second.”
Imagination needs a bridle—Pegasus had a golden one—but it needs as well an open field in which to run. How best then to balance the bit and the spur is the question for any imaginative writer. It was a struggle Lowell knew well: how to master natural forces, how to use them artfully. Mania, of all the forces, was uncontrolled, kept a capricious schedule, brought destruction. But, now and again, it brought inspiration as well. And shook the foundations.
Neither life nor poetry moved in a line. “The arts do not progress,” said Lowell; they “move along by surges and sags.” Inspiration was part of it, certainly, but so too was hard work. Jonathan Miller once asked Lowell about the traditional impression that poets lay in wait for inspiration and then wrote “in some sort of transport.” Lowell disagreed. Inspiration may be needed but it was not enough. “There is something inside [that you] have to catch,” he said. “It’s not a feeling usually, it’s some sort of image or even abstract image or sequence—and then it’s days and different moods tinkering with it.” At some point in the creative process, he argued, mood ceases to be as important as the ideas being worked on and the effort put into shaping them. “I think it must be sort of rough dirt that can be formed into something…but it’s not valuable until that’s done.”
The wind of inspiration was an image that Lowell returned to often. Wind was a natural force: fickle, undivinable, part of the long history of the race. Wind dispersed seeds, scattered life, moved the still. He saw it—on the ponds and ocean, moving its way across the fields, and in the shaking of the leaves and branches. The wind, Lowell said during a reading at the Library of Congress, was at times inspiration; at others, it was nothing but nothingness. In the summer of 1968, he wrote to his eleven-year-old daughter, Harriet, from their summer home in Castine, Maine: “While you were playing your music, I was lying on my bed in the bedroom, watching the tops of the elms, tossing high in the wind and sunshine—by themselves, if you could imagine them somehow not part of their trees, the tree-tops were no taller than bushes on the ground. I wrote a poem about it all: you playing your own work, the trees tossing in the wind, and that other wind, what I might call the wind of inspiration, what blows in your mind when you compose or just think.” The poem begins:
I see these winds, these are the tops of trees,
these are no heavier than green alder bushes;
touched by a light wind, they begin to mingle
and race for instability—too high placed
to stoop to the strife of the brush, these are the winds.
It ends on crosswinds and mystery, on the uncertainty of imagination: “how often / winds have crossed the wind of inspiration— / in these too, the unreliable touch of the all.”
Toward the end of his life, after mental illness had taken a greater toll, Lowell wrote more darkly about the wind’s way through the trees. “Tops of the midnight trees move helter-skelter / to ruin,” he wrote when he was living in London in the 1970s. “We stand and hear the pummeling unpurged, / almost uneducated by the world— / the tops of the moving trees move helter-skelter.”
Lowell’s poetry is thick with images of winds and tides, nature’s forces that ebb back, and flow. Rivers. The poet is a fisherman: “groping for trout in the private river, / wherever it opens, wherever it happens to op
en.” He writes too of flight, escape, and navigating high places; of balloons and bubbles, transients that float “jobless” in the air, only to burst pricked or too high; to die. Beholden to time, wind, caprice, they are slave to the forces that make them rise, pull them moonward, skyward, sunward. A balloon once blithe now is snagged “high in an elm.” Bubbles and balloons, like hope, rise, swell, burst; they are given, like Achilles, a short, glorious life before an early dying. The bubble’s beginning, like the balloon’s, edges into its end. Colonel Shaw riding on his bubble in “For the Union Dead” waits for the “blessèd break.” The bubble, not the rose or skull, is Lowell’s chosen symbol for mortality, memento mori.
Like balloons and bubbles, mania rises and expands: insistent, illusory, precarious. Seductive. Lowell took his epigraph for “ ‘To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage’ ” from Schopenhauer: “It is the future generation that presses into being by means of these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours.” Illusion is necessary. Mania bursts after its early, inebriating days. “It’s not much fun writing about these breakdowns after they themselves have broken and one stands stickily splattered with patches of the momentary bubble,” Lowell wrote to a friend in the wake of a manic attack. Mania was glorious but transient, and its damage lasted. So too did the knowledge that it would return, rise, swell, and break again. “Surely, there’s some terrible flaw in my life that blows a bubble into my head every year or so,” Lowell wrote to Elizabeth Hardwick.
Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character Page 33