Panic Insanity

"The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.”

Albert Camus

“Ah, yes! The Torture Garden!  Passions, appetites, greed, hatred, and lies; law, social institutions, justice, love, glory, heroism, and religion:  these are its monstrous flowers and its hideous instruments of eternal human suffering.  What I saw today, and what I heard, is no more than a symbol to me of the entire earth.  I have vainly sought a respite in quietude and repose in death, and I can find them nowhere.”

Octave Mirbeau, The Garden, Chapter 9, The Torture Garden, 1899.

Art is, and usually has been, not a monologue or rant – but a dialogue and discourse, a debate, and a shared communal celebration. I do not believe that only those that suffer can make great art - art history in fact proves the opposite. Most great artists have been healthy and socialized human beings, capable of running professional careers, that brings them into contact with others. Likewise, the world is full of people who suffer more than van Gogh or Artaud ever did, but they are not artists, and there are plenty of mediocre artists who will never create anything of significance. However, the art that I have mostly needed to look, has a tragic component to it, which usually was born from artists who had similarly tragic visions.

I have always made art because I suffer. I often paint my best works when racked by misery and self-loathing - but if I manage to create something and I am proud of it - I am briefly relieved like an addict who gets a hit. Suffering may have fuelled many of my art works, but it has also prevented me from creating freely countless times. The shadow of my mental illness, arrived at the same time as my creative urge, however, if I have continued as an artist, it has often been because I have had few other options. Trying to make the most of my limitation, I have tried to make a virtue out of my trapped, and circular creativity. Still, my borderline personality disorder and psychotic ambition led me to over-rate my arts importance, and its testimonial rights. I tried to turn my purgatory of creativity into a socially lionized fetish. My masochistic confrontation of my own failings – led me down an ever more tragic cul-de-sac. The solipsistic, autobiographical, pessimistic, anti-social and transgressive elements of my art, only further doomed me to failure in an art world that deemed such traits as old-fashioned, irrelevant, and unacceptable as art. Until my success with the Oisín Gallery, I thought that my suffering would end with money and fame, but in fact in many ways in increased; it took me years to realize that the trouble was in my head - not in the world.

A lonely, needy boy, my brooding introversion cut me off from the rest of the world, and made me the subject of suspicion and jokes. I went around with my eyes cast downward, and with a perpetual pout. I became dark and suspicious, reacting aggressively to any slight, and was paranoid that the world was out to get me just as my mother had warned me. I lived through a terrible kind of loneliness as a child. I felt like a dog kicked so many times it could only cower in a corner. Within this solitude, I had to learn how to entertain myself. I lived more in my head than in the world. I had an unbounded capacity to enter books and paintings, to inhabit cultural worlds often long since passed. The more I avoided the real world, the more literary and artistic worlds became my greater reality. I was moved by art so much that Dickens and Kafka, Renoir and Degas seemed more real to me than my own family or friends. I used art to both escape the real world and at the same time reshape it. 

I have taught myself without any greater purpose than to stimulate my mind and find solutions to my own existence. Teaching myself from books, I let my tastes and interests at the time to guide my idiosyncratic studies. I find being taught by someone else almost unbearable. Yet, when I was young, and I trusted you, I could talk to you for hours about Schiele, but I did not know how to pronounce his name! Because, I had only read about him in books.

Intellectually and creatively, I may be very talented, but emotionally I am stunted and immature. Most of my talents are those of the housebound ‘genius’, not the active man of the world. Locked in my bedroom, I dreamed of artistic glory. My fantasy that I was the greatest artist alive, was based on nothing but a depressive need to justify my meaningless life to myself.

Sometimes I have a great day with the paintbrush, other days I cannot seem to do anything right.  Thus, every few weeks I find myself plunged into depression, unable to find any pleasure in life, in art or in friendship. Like a cripple, I lie in my bed, my stomach tight, my brain like cement and my mind running in a downward spiral. None of this is new to me, I have suffered similar bouts of despair all my life and I will suffer them again. They come and go as inexplicably as rain.

They say that more women suffer from depression, but that more men kill themselves. trying to answer this riddle some have suggested that the reason for the disproportionately high rate of male to female suicides is because of the more aggressive ways that men chose to use to kill themselves by. There is some truth in this, but I would ask, what does it take to push a man to the point of a lethal means of disposal, one with no hope of rescue? I think that the answer lies in men's repressed and inarticulate psychology. Men and boys in particular do not have the language skills, and emotional intelligence of girls and women. Men can never assume the mantel of victimhood that women own, nor can they act and manipulate people as easily as women. Although people often tell men to open up about their feelings, they do not accept men if their feelings are about politically incorrect issues of masculinity, or issues with women. Moreover, for a man, it is often worse to admit depression than to kill themselves, such is the shame and emasculation they feel. Add to that men's lack of close friendships, physical comforting from others, and inability to talk about mucky female things like 'feelings', and you have a molten ball of hopeless self-hate, with nothing to cool it down. Unequipped to analyse and deal with their darkest emotions, men bottle up all their frustrations - until it explodes upon themselves or on others. 

When I ended up in a psychiatric hospital at the age of twenty, after my first attempted suicide, my family and doctors kept asking me, "Why did you want to kill yourself?" I could not answer the question. I did not know myself. All I knew was that my life was unbearable. It took me years of therapy for me to realize that my fucked-up childhood had twisted and distorted my mind beyond reason. I mention this not to go into my past but to point out that many people don't understand their illness or as the psychiatrists say, they have no 'insight' into their condition. Personally, I found that understanding the root of my mental illness was vital, though not a cure.

There are many kinds of depression, but since I am not a specialist in the workings of the mind, I will restrict myself to my own. People think that depression is a rather monotonous catatonic experience, if only that where true. My depressions range from mild sadness to morbid melancholy to boiling rage, to self-loathing bile, and self-pitying martyrdom. Depression seems to strike like a blow to my heart and mind, robbing me of all courage, energy and will to live.

Swamped in depression, I morbidly feared for the beloved lives of my mother, my girlfriend, my best friends or even my pets both living and dead. Or I could only selfishly think about myself, my suffering, my rotten childhood, my rejections from women and the art world, my failure as an artist, my pain, and me, me, me and oh yes me!

Some say that depression is a highly narcissistic illness, and they are not wrong. Perhaps that is what makes it feel like such a selfish, cowardly, and defeatist experience. Depression feels like a capitulation from the fight of existence and the race for power, but it also feels like the most clear-headed assessment of existence - absurd, meaningless, cruel, and pointless.

I remember reading Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy (1946) and in his chapter on Arthur Schopenhauer he pointed out, “From a scientific point of view, optimism and pessimism are alike objectionable: optimism assumes, or attempts to prove, that the universe exists to please us, and pessimism that it exists to displease us. Scientifically, there is no evidence that it is concerned with us either one way or the other. The belief in either pessimism or optimism is a matter of temperament, not of reason, but the optimistic temperament has been much commoner among Western philosophers. A representation of the opposite party is therefore likely to be useful in bringing forward considerations which would otherwise be overlooked.” (Bernard Russell, History of Western Philosophy, London: Routledge, 1993, P.727.) 

Those people unfamiliar with depression like to trot out helpful tips like, pull your socks up, stop pitying yourself, go for a walk, get some sun, make a list of your achievements, tell yourself that you are a good and worthwhile person and so on. But how do you go for a walk, when merely getting out of bed is an ordeal? How do you get pleasure out in the sun, when you crave the privacy of a darkened room? How do you make a list of your achievements when even if you do, you find them all hollow and meaningless? How do you tell yourself you are a good person when every single sin, act of cruelty and stupidity you have ever committed, lurches forward in your mind like a mass of mutant zombies? 

Yet that is all part of the madness of my emotions. When I am depressed, I don't think to myself, "You have a distorted sense of reality!" Instead, I say to myself, "Ah-ha here I am again - staring the reality of human existence full in the face! Life is utterly meaningless! There is no God! My art is worthless and will end up on a rubbish tip when I die! There is no hope! Life is just a vicious and unjust game - and I am a loser!" 

When I am depressed, I can hardly bare to watch television or listen to the radio. I see the smug, vain, and stupid media heads chattering utter gibberish, talking about this new car or that new film, or this new actress, or that new dress - my stomach turns, and I am fit to puke. Watching hour after hour of boasting fools; attentions seeking whores; strutting macho pricks; sub-standard intellectuals pontificating; Feminists moaning and carping; politicians lying, fighting for power, shitting all over each other, and seeking to police the thoughts and actions of everyone in society - makes me revolt against the whole world. But watching the news is even more upsetting in all its painful barbarity, senseless violence, and human misery. As for pop music with its ‘I love you. You love me’ or 'I'm a sexy boss-bitch you'd be so lucky to have me', or 'I'm a gangster stud bow down to my greatness', or ‘shake your booty’ chants, is sickening in the extreme! A loop of hormonal repetition, and narcissistic posturing as insane as any lunatic’s rant.

Personally, the only cures I have found for my mental illness are my art, anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, psychotherapy, and the time to reflect and rebuild my psychic defences. Then one day out of the blue I wake up and feel happy, and events conspire to encourage my optimism. I paint, I draw, and I enjoy my hours and days again. As the days progress I feel more and more confident and start to hope that my art will be one day be recognized, then I start thinking about my retrospective in the Museum of Modern Art, my interview in Artforum and my lecture at Yale! Of course, I am genius I realize, so I send off some submissions, to small art galleries in Dublin and abroad. Then I wait and wait and wait. Like a trickle the replies come back one after the other, no, no and thanks but no thanks. So back, I fall once more, into the cold dark light of reality.

You see for me art is an alternative religion, a purpose for living and literally a reason not to kill myself. As a religion, it is not up to much. Even if I were to become a genius like Michelangelo, Goya, or Picasso, it would not be enough. I would still die, still rot in the ground, and my art no matter how revered and cared for by the most skilled conservators in the best museums in the world, would decay to nothing in a few thousand years. I remember when Woody Allen as a child in Anny Hall went to the doctors suffering from depression. The doctor asked him why he was depressed, and Woody said something to the effect that the universe was endlessly expanding and would eventually burn itself out - so what was the point of doing anything? It was utterly hilarious, but exactly the kind of thoughts I have had all my life. To a megalomaniacal egotist, such thoughts are part of the morbid fabric of despair. Art creates a fictional lottery of immortality, but the prize (even if you win it) is a bogus one, with a built in used by date.

But I do take courage from the fact that heroes of mine like Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Vincent van Gogh, Winston Churchill, Sylvia Plath, Woody Allen, Leonard Cohen, Robert Hughes, Morrissey, Curt Cobain, and Brian Sewell have all suffered similar 'black-dogs'.  To me that is one of the great things about art, it is a community of like-minded souls who as Morrissey would say, "Have lived and loved and suffered just like me.” In a world of shinny happy people, their voice is even more profound and all the more meaningful. For one of the most perverse things I have found, is that the sadder I am, the more I need to hear sad music, but it does not make me feel worse, it makes me feel a bittersweet joy that sooths my heart and calms my mind.

Of course, there are communities and communities, and some are more helpful than others. One of the saddest things I have ever heard about on the Internet, are those suicide groups in which sick and twisted people goad others into killing themselves. Personally, I find such groups utterly revolting. If suicide is anything, it is a personal choice, anything else is murder and cowed stupidity. Moreover, if depression has taught me anything it is that depression is a temporary emotional state, that can change with a kind word, embrace, or new friendship. As they say, "suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary crisis.” For me suicide is no longer an option, I have long since outgrown it. Maybe life is meaningless and absurd, but everyone has the right to live his or her life to its fullest expression.