Madwoman or Muse? Poems, ramblings, rants & reflections: Coté Sombre de la Rue ~ Dark Side of the Street

Biography

Gráinne Quick Humphrys was featured in the RTE two-part documentary ‘Behind the Walls’ by the late acclaimed investigative journalist Mary Raftery. In part two of the documentary she told the story of her son’s father’s 5 year incarceration in a maximum security forensic psychiatric unit in Cork city, Ireland. She has also campaigned for more humane responses to emotional distress.

Gráinne is a writer and singer songwriter. She has 1 daughter and 1 son. She lives in West Cork, Ireland. She has a degree in Theatre from Dartington College of Arts. She is interested in literary fiction and non fiction, poetry, music, dance, art, film, fashion, vintage dresses, photography, philosophy, family systems therapy, alternative health, yoga, traditional Chinese medicine, travel, comedy, home décor, cooking, spirituality, nature, the supernatural and Jungian psychology.

Gráinne is a survivor of extreme states.

Tuesday, June 25, 2019

Coté Sombre de la Rue ~ Dark Side of the Street

Personality disorders, addictions, traumas, antisocial behaviours, mental illnesses; when it comes to artists, writers and musicians self-destruction can often go hand in hand with high levels of creativity. Why is this? And how can creatives ride out their more turbulent periods, which are often where their source of creativity springs from in the first place, without imploding or destroying themselves in the process? If you sit too near a volcano or get in a cage with a tiger you cannot avoid getting burnt or bitten! As it is with creativity, if you sit near the source of creation one also encounters the forces of destruction. In many ways the two are inseparable. In order to create one has to destroy and when one destroys one must create again out of the ashes. Art that has weight has navigated both of these dimensions. The artist is the vehicle or channel for these energies, like an energy sculptor with the clay of both creation and destruction.

According to Dr. Jordan Petersen the best climate to produce a creative person, apart from being born with a right side brain creative nature, is to experience early trauma followed by an emotionally restricted and a strict oppressive atmosphere. According to research (started by Swiss psychologist Alice Miller), this combination of trauma and restriction, although it messes up your chances for a normal life, the pay-off is high levels of creativity that is turbulent and cyclical in nature. Of course along with this comes a side order of mental illness.

Because our brains are endlessly creative and because formative years shape us, it is as if another door to another world opens in our imagination to ward off madness. And yet paradoxically herein lies our madness. So our coping strategy initially created to prevent madness ends up being the very thing that leads us towards madness. This is the irony and the deep-seated attachment to madness and imagination. Our already creative brains have been further wired to live in the world of imagination and creativity as if our very lives depended on it. They do! Remove that and the full force of madness hits. We are only ever two steps from the chasm of madness. The only thing that saves us is our creativity. It is also intrinsically connected to madness, mania, the void.

Madhouses know this which is why occupational therapy became such a big thing in recovery programmes. Madness is like a first cousin of creativity. Creativity serves as a bit of a boundary for madness, something to make sense of it all. Creativity is a container for madness whereas madness has no boundaries and is as vast as the abyss. Many artists live with this knowledge on a daily basis. Stand between them and their art and you stop their very raison d’etre, their very breath. And so, it can take many years to navigate this terrain.

Many artists become so consumed by their mental illness that they do not achieve much in their lives with their vast creativity lying dormant like a dragon in it’s lair. They do not want to wake the dragon of creativity and power because then they also wake the dragon of destruction. So they medicate their creativity (their dragon) with booze, drugs, prescription meds or destructive relationships, they become fantasists or get over-involved in other people’s lives or hopeless causes as a way to ward off the whole crazy thing. They procrastinate, they party. They pretend they are normal with a normal job for as long as they can before they come apart at the seams with a restlessness and inner knowing that they are living a lie.

It is a maddening Catch 22 (not to mention a 27 Club) and what a troubled creative person has to do is navigate all these states and get to know themselves and their cycles very well so they can anticipate each stage. It is a delicate balancing act. We do not want to deny who we are – a creative - or how we cope – with creativity – but we also need to befriend and master self-destruction.

Destruction comes in like a tsunami and you have to learn to ride that wave rather than be engulfed by it. This takes years upon years to master. One has to practice detachment to a certain extent unless you want to be entirely devoured by madness. Self-destruction is very seductive at first. I got seduced when I was very young by that trickster who took me on a merry-go-round of mania. By the same token he led me to the goldmine where I would go mining. He took me deep into the underworld and far out into the abyss. He took me up into the skies and deep down into the ocean of myself. Without destruction there would be no creation. It was in his deep mines than I found my gold and returned to the surface with the raw materials for the creative process. My medium was writing; stories, poems, songs. I had the gift for painting and performing too but I did not develop those mediums as my immediate go to was writing.

But I devoured great art in the museum and stood awestruck by the shared knowledge on the canvases. It is like a secret language that us creatives speak and yes, if you are asking, we do suffer for our art but that is what makes it so powerful, visceral and life-affirming. We have scaled great heights and depths for you, we have navigated states of terror and got burnt and broken. We have bled for you. We do it for ourselves, to survive, but it is our gift to you. That is why we are here. We navigate the soul and come back from the brink to tell you what we saw, what we felt and what we thought. We wrestle with elemental, primitive forces, with the very core of human existence and the human condition. We hope this will inspire you as it inspired us. We hope we can elevate you, we hope you can transcend with us. We wrestle duality on a daily basis. It is our job.