We of The Craft, Touched with Fire

‘ “We of the craft are all crazy,” remarked Lord Byron about himself and his fellow poets. “Some are effected by gaiety, others by melancholy, but all are more or less touched”; specifically the artistic voyage, seen as ‘a fine madness’ – the fierce energy, high mood, and quick intelligence, a sense of the visionary and the grand; a restless and feverish temperament – commonly carrying the capacity for vastly darker moods and energies, often interlaced with volatile or stormy emotional behaviour. When infused with the artistic genius temperament, can become a powerful imagination and a force of inner-workings, eccentric and extreme force.’

‘The aura of ‘mania’ endowed the genius with a mystical and inexplicable quality that served to differentiate him from the typical man, the bourgeois, the philistine, and quite importantly, the “mere” man of talent; it established him as the modern heir of the ancient Greek poet and seer and, like his classical counterpart, enabled him to claim some of the powers and privileges granted to the ‘divinely possessed’ and ‘inspired’.’ – from ‘Touched With Fire’, first published 1993 by Kay Redfield Jamison

“I am groaning under the miseries of a diseased nervous system; a system of all the others of the most essential to our happiness – or the most productive of our misery…. Lord, what is Man!
Today, in the luxuriance of health, exulting in the enjoyment of existence; In a few days, perhaps in a few hours, loaded with conscious painful being, counting the tardy pace of the lingering moments, by the repercussions of anguish, and refusing or denied a Comforter.
– Day follows night, and night comes after day,
only to curse him with life which gives him no pleasure”
– Robert Burns