Redtree Times

Ring of Fire #4 

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. Artistic paternity is as wholesome as physical paternity. Moreover, it is worthy of remark that when a poet really was morbid it was commonly because he had some weak spot of rationality on his brain. Poe, for instance, really was morbid; not because he was poetical, but because he was specially analytical. Even chess was too poetical for him; he disliked chess because it was full of knights and castles, like a poem. He avowedly preferred the black discs of draughts, because they were more like the mere black dots on a diagram. Perhaps the strongest case of all is this: that only one great English poet went mad, Cowper. And he was definitely driven mad by logic, by the ugly and alien logic of predestination. Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in health.

–G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908)

I found the passage above from G.K. Chesterton interesting. There were a couple of things in this short excerpt from his book, Orthodoxy, that caught my eye. I liked the idea that creativity and imagination serve as some sort of protection against insanity.

I sure hope so.

Basically, when a creative artist comes across something challenging what they believe to be logical, it doesn’t stop their progress. They find or create a way around whatever barrier is created by this conflict in logic. Maybe even create a new form of logic or imagine a better situation beyond what is in front of them, one to which they can see a path.

That makes sense to me.

It also made me look up Edgar Allen Poe’s short treatise on his dislike of chess and his preference for checkers. As Chesterton pointed out, Poe appears a bit too analytical, too stringently logical. Hardly poetic.

But I did like his final thoughts on 18th century poet William Cowper, who struggled with depression and mental health issues throughout his life and was placed in an insane asylum for periods of time. It was his struggles with logic that bedeviled his mind and poetry that kept him alive.

Art and imagination can do that. It has that power.

The whole thing reminded me of a favorite passage from the 1858 book The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., the popular poet/philosopher of the time and father to the famed Supreme Court justice of the same name. This passage always makes me both think and chuckle:

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

Makes me thankful for art and my own stupidity. Without it, I might go crazy.