I wrote something about how mental illness remains uninvestigated in geniuses in 2015 after reading Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar [A thread]

Borges once said, “It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books.” It is true, defying the laws and confines of reality lands one in an abyss of derangement.

Treading his twisted labyrinths for plots, one can grasp the extent to his otherworldly and unreal, imaginative madness. Literature has blurred the distinction between madness and genius-

how often has history portrayed a mad person as a genius and a genius as a mad person. Taking from the lesser-evil end of the spectrum, mental illness has been rampant in recognised geniuses.

Sylvia Plath, David Foster Wallace, Anne Sexton, Hart Crane, John Berryman, Hemingway, Virginia Woolf are stuff of legends for not being able to bear the burden of their intellect; they took matters in their own hands and took their own lives.

Nietzsche went insane, falling over to the higher-evil end of the spectrum.

Kafka was neurotic and Sartre loved his amphetamines and Burroughs' junk-obsession is no secret to anyone. Most of the world agrees there was something extra-ordinary about those misfits, whether one loves or hates them.

Their deviance from what was commonplace, ordinary, done-to-death, mundane and accepted made them outliers.

Madness is not an epiphenomenon, biology and the universal considerations of our human existence do not necessarily explain it. Through history, the way madness has been depicted in religious myths and fables is fascinating.

From Saul's spiraling into madness through Yahweh's orders, for not being able to carry out the letter on the Lord’s command to slay every man, woman, and child of the Amalekite tribe, to the madness of the mighty king of Babylon,

Nebuchadnezzar, who turns into an animal, madness has a legacy of explaining medieval disease, an inability to conform to divine will or even widely rebuked characteristics such as savagery or jealousy.

While instrumental in explaining the shortcomings of human character, madness was treated with a skeptical eye. Hieronymus Bosch’s satirical painting of 'The Cure of Folly: The Extraction of the Stone of Folly (1494)' shows how medical claims about madness were dubious.

Voltaire rightly said, 'Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all.' It's incurable, the tendency towards obsessive speculation has a genius living on the edge at all times,

anyone can fall, slowly and gracefully like a snowflake, or abruptly and cartoonishly like an anvil.

So while reading 'The Bell Jar' for the third time, I traced a certain musicality to Esther's madness. On account of Sylvia Plath's poetic prowess, it seemed fitting. She alludes to Seneca's suicide without naming him.

She glorifies cutting oneself in places and bleeding to death in a warm bath, a most strange way to die. She glorifies death, calling it beautiful and serene, observing silence. She thinks of death as absolving one of all that is ugly and heavy-

'To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace' it possesses her as a better alternative to living a dull life. She craves simplicity, unlike Hunter S. Thompson who was infinitely exhausted of old age and needed respite from boredom.

His suicide note said,"No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax.This won’t hurt.”

Thompson's suicide was quite literally Hemingwayesque. He too put a bullet through his head, like a man unwilling to let pain get in the way of his resolve. That was perhaps his last thrill.

Plath on the other hand, like Anne Sexton, wanted to cross over to the realm of death, unruffled- they chose carbon monoxide poisoning, a most tranquil way to die. It was not so much of a desperate choice.

I must qualify here, that 'The Bell Jar' is a seminal work, and not just a glorified suicide note. The overture may have raised expectations, for the method to madness to unfold.

Esther's descent into insanity appears to be a smooth transition- as if she was prescient of her madness, waiting to tumble. Rosenberg's electrocution- the idea makes Esther sick- she wonders what it would be like to be 'buried alive all along your nerves'.

Her attention to everything that has to do with madness and relief for it through exerting her ultimate agency, like when she is speaking to Cal about the play debating whether the protagonist's mother killed him or not, all she could remember is the madness of the character.

She constantly likens it to not having a brain in her head- she expresses her disbelief at others around her not noticing it. It is also a reflection of how little it matters to society if we are not in tune with our internal environment-

Esther cannot eat, sleep, read or write- but the world around her does not seem to care. It could also be that she is in a state of utter indifference and her internal state of not caring is mirrored by the world around her. She becomes minuscule... (Continued)