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my experience is that depression and producing stuff tend to be mutually exclusive.
i have assumed for some time that the correlations of the two comes from the outside (critics, etc.) who for some reason prefer to see art production through the lens of romantic myths about art in general. but that i speaking from where i think i am now.
these myths about art, about artists, often have their worst effects on younger artists, particularly those who come to what they do from outside the usual channels of training, etc.---in my experience, this population (which includes a younger version of myself--actually, this "population" might be only a younger version of myself--it is hard to know) tend to believe all kinds of goofy, debilitating things about what enables them to think and work as they do. maybe this is a function of a kind of search for authorization. maybe it is a pretext for getting fucked up. i dont know, frankly. but i remember when i was younger, for what its worth, i relied entirely on this thing called "inspiration"--about which diego rivera was right when he said that inspiration is for amatuers---i associated "inspriation" with extreme internal states---what i did musically reflected these assumptions in that the piece would not develop, but were rather one idea after another after another.
the point here is that i associated particular internal states with making stuff, such as it was: it happened that my particular associations were shaped by hallucinogens and attending cultural debris rather than by depression (the brooding artists type seemed to me dull--i prefered jumping off the edge of rational communication altogether)
maybe this kind of thing explains another quote, this from t.s. eliot:
everyone is a poet at 18---no-one is at 40.
it is more complex with bipolar disorder. a close friend is both an extraordinarily gifted artist and someone who fights with bipolar disorder--when he was younger his art production was definitely linked to cycles of the condition--partly i think because he associated the two for himself
anyway, when i first met him, he was working his way out from the effects of the drug-oriented treatment regime into which he had been routed and was worried about starting to work again because of the various associations he had fashioned for himself between the condition and his work. it took some work and considerable courage (to my mind anyway) to push into this knot and seperate the two (production from bipolar phases)....
i think that underneath all this is the change that seems to me necessary for someone to move from being a younger artist to being one that might be able to keep going and developing for the longer haul---for the latter, it seems that a coherent process has to be developed, where the former might not see the need for a process in the same way.
as for the question of "profundity"---i have to say that i do not know what this means. i dont what its characteristics are, nor do i know how the notion of the "profound" can operate as a motor for what anyone does.
for example, it does not seem to me particularly "profound" to work out that much of the reality folk live through is a type of illusion insofar as it is wholly shaped by the dominant ideology of the time. but working something of this out by seeing it during an lsd voyage when i was 19 certainly seemed profound. i remember wanting to write down some of the Deep Thoughts that were occurring to me around this insight. i found a notebook and began doing things in to to catch the Insights that felt like they were raining down on me--then i wandered away and did other equally profound things, which probably involved looking at trees or listening to "bike" for the 30th time--i found the notebook the next day and saw that i had drawn a squirrel. there was a big arrow drawn next to it. i guess i wanted to be sure that i remembered that i had found the Secret of the Universe, and that this was It.
all this profundity stuff seems mostly about things that will later embarass you.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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