Hypergraphia: Am I a Genius or Mentally Ill?
originally published at Hip Mama Magazine, March 2019
By Elizabeth Bachner
I have lines and fragments of Wislawa Szymborska poems running through my head — poems I don’t have memorized. Poems I’ve only read in translation, so I’ll never hear them the way the poet first heard them in her own head — but maybe even if I read and wrote in beautiful, fluent Polish, I still wouldn’t ever know them in her voice.
Of your children, only the ones who were born.
~~~
Every beginning
is only a sequel, after all,
and the book of events
is always open halfway through.
Although I can’t speak any languages but my own, I go to talks about translation theory. The talks are one of the few places I feel less homesick. It’s nice to be surrounded by other people who care about the complications of how letters are arranged and rearranged, the ways the universe both inside and outside of language can be indecipherable.
My grandmother, my mother’s mother, was a housewife in a small town in America, and she had a study cluttered with books and notebooks, and every book and notebook was filled with her notes, tiny notes in her tiny handwriting, notes in margins and notes on blank paper, all about spirituality and philosophy and comparative religions.
By all accounts she was lonely, and probably unhappy, holed up in her study with an alcoholic husband downstairs, watching TV in his plush grey armchair. Like the other women on that side of my family, she waited on her husband, cooking him breakfasts and dinners from The Joy of Cooking and cleaning the house, the architect of her own little prison really, always pretending that he was less of a dick than he was. All of us arrogant and hamstrung, our work never leaving its basements or storage units or dirty studies, our brilliance disappearing or twisting into a kind of tic, into impotent rage. I don’t know what the women on my dad’s side of the family were like, other than what my dad said once in passing about his mother, a dancer: “high-strung.”
I don’t know where all of my grandmother’s annotated books and journals have gone.
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They might be with the things my dead mother left behind, or it might be that an uncle across the country is systematically throwing them away as I write, with the other things he’s thrown out since my aunt went in for surgery — a monogrammed baby hairbrush, old family photographs.
There’s a Terry Tempest Williams book, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice, where she opens up her dead mother’s journals — all three shelves of them — and every journal is blank.
When I was fifteen and sixteen, I wrote all the time, hunching and squatting with my journal in bathrooms or wherever I could be quiet and uninterrupted — poems, a novel with hundreds of inserts and add-ons, labeled and coordinated by numbers and letters (A2, B2). On the day I turned forty-four and a half, I came across “hypergraphia” in an essay or article I was reading, a term I must have heard before, but didn’t remember — compulsive, nonstop writing, associated with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia and hypomania and temporal lobe epilepsy. And it made me think about other things I’ve read about various mood or thought or brain disorders, and how they were like my writing bursts at sixteen and twenty-three and twenty-six and a half — the grandiose excitement of writing something that felt numinous, the manic reading of large piles of books all at once, the sense of words and lyrics from a foreign entity being channeled through my fragile body onto paper, the way the text seemed electric when I got those words right. When I was sixteen and twenty-three and twenty-six and a half, I assumed that these episodes were visits from my genii,furor poeticus, rather than signs of mental illness. I assumed I was a receptacle, a “secretary to the invisible” (as Czeslaw Milosz puts it), somebody who was burdened and lucky, somebody who was born with an obligation to the work.
I thought that I wasn’t ill, I was just an artist.
And at forty-four and a half, even though I I know how blurred the lines are between art-making and mental illness, and how almost all of us have both threads (and infinite other threads, too) twisting through our genomes and our psyches and our lives, and even though I have those piles of unseen, unpublished work — like my mom, like grandma — that’s what I still think. That it’s just that I’m an artist, like the ones who came before me. And even though I still think that, and even though the vast majority of good poets and novelists and painters have had trouble with their work — enough that those stories of multiple rejections and years living in shabby bedsits, eating garlic to feel full, are a cliche — I’m still defensive about it. And then the defensiveness is a hint, a sign, that I’m not an artist (or not a true one, good one, “real” one) — that I’m delusional, grandiose, or maybe not ill but just pretentious, just wrong — a sign that the piles of tiny words in the piles of books in that small, cluttered study, hidden forever and never to be read, aren’t beautiful. That if you were to finally read them, they wouldn’t say anything, they wouldn’t come to life, they wouldn’t change you, you wouldn’t feel anything.
But I’m an artist, the real kind, so I ignore those signs and keep working, except when I can’t, because I know that some of my work is alive. Which is also what a delusional person would do.
My five-year-old daughter and I are reading A History of Pictures for Childrenby David Hockney and Martin Gayford, illustrated by Rose Blake. My daughter isn’t interested in learning to read yet, but she loves to draw. Her favorite picture, the one she wants to look at over and over again, is a detail from The Arnolfini Portrait (1434) by Jan Van Eyck.
David Hockney writes that Van Eyck’s paintings are “full of objects that have never been shown in that way before. No painter had ever included a mirror like the one in the center of the Arnolfinis’ portrait. It would’ve been difficult for Van Eyck to draw. But anyone who drew one afterward would have his example to follow.”
I want to give my daughter a different example than the one I grew up with, but I don’t know how.
There were centuries when, as far as we can know, no one had ever painted a realistic mirror. And then once we knew how (and we are a we, that is one of the main points of art, one of the reasons our genii bother to visit, even when the world seems broken or the landscape is hostile, even to be trapped unseen in dark studies or tucked away in closets), we all started painting mirrors, mirrors and then later David Hockney-style swimming pools, realistic shoes and children with lifelike proportions instead of the distorted, creepy adult heads of medieval portraits.
But in Van Eyck’s painting, just like in my unpublished novel or my grandmother’s annotations or in my daughter’s kindergarten drawings or in Terry Tempest Williams’ mother’s empty journals or in her own full, beautiful book about them, time doesn’t unfold in the linear way that it does in our fantasies.
There are mirrors in the background.
There’s the possibility — even though I’m probably just an artist, probably not delusional, probably not ill, or at least not sicker than everybody else — that my work actually comes before my mother’s, that my daughter’s work comes before mine, and that somehow, magically, I’m going to show her, or she’s going to show me, something new. Every beginning is only a sequel, after all.
Elizabeth Bachner is a writer and sociologist whose essay, Gravity, was a Hip Mama contest winner. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in the Wreckage of Reason anthologies, and her work has been cited and praised in The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review Daily, The Millions, and The Rumpus. She lives in New Jersey with her rad daughter.
Originally published at hipmamazine.com.
