They have wandered the streets, film studios, books, oil paintings and watercolors, songs, poems and novels with the freedom of the wandering spirit that does not stop in the face of sadness.
Ernest Hemingway, Frédéric Chopin, Vincent Van Gogh and Juan Ramón Jiménez. Credit: MSP Photomontage
Van Gogh, Chopin, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Julia de Burgos, Ernest Hemingway, Anthony Perkins and Reinaldo Arenas are just a few names that we can mention. They all belong to the same club: the greatness of his legacy goes hand in hand with psychotic episodes and pain that shakes even the most internal muscle.
It has been depression and other mental afflictions that have most disrupted the lives of these fantastic minds. In the case of Frihda and Julia, the suffering served as an inspiration, savoringthat morbid sensation of creating in the midst of anguish.
Van Gogh cut off his ear and later shot himself, dying soon following; Julia died in the street, distraught and alone; Frida left this world drawing her pain and hallucinations; of Norma Jean – real name of Marilyn Monroe, that poor orphan who achieved world fame through her films – it is still debated whether she committed suicide or was murdered by order when she was found dead on August 4, 1962 .
Julia de Burgos, Marilyn Monroe, Frida Khalo and Van Gogh had something in common. They were human beings with an enormous capacity to suffer and love. To create and live tormented. They were tragic and brief lives. His evident state of depression seemed to inspire them to the point of stimulating their creativity.
Aristotle made an effort to posit that there was a secret thread between madness, melancholy and inspiration. This seems to explain how the sadness and emotional and physical suffering of these personalities was able to regenerate and make a phenomenal turn, to become undeniable, valid and fruitful.
For example, when his career as a composer began to emerge, Ludwig van Beethoven experienced the first symptoms of his deafness and yet this did not prevent him from being one of the most important composers in history.
The case of what is considered the forerunner of romanticism and contemporary painting was more dramatic. When he tasted success, Goya lost his hearing and that deafness produced a personal pain that had a great effect on his work, beginning to see life from a more critical and less friendly point of view. Much of his most revered art is a reflection of his bitterness and pessimism.
And although the suffering, and sometimes the deterioration that an illness produces, leads many to a state of rest and recollection, in these people it seemed that their ailments stimulated their genius.
At the age of twenty, the writer Juan Ramón Jiménez began a process of hospitalizations in various health centers in France, Madrid, Argentina and Puerto Rico. They never found a diagnosis that warranted hospitalization. In the midst of one of his stays in a clinic where psychiatric problems were not treated, he wrote: “In this convent and garden environment I have spent two of the best years of my life. Some romantic love, of a religious sensuality, with the peace of a cloister, a smell of incense and flowers, a window overlooking the garden, a terrace of rosebushes for moonlit nights”.
The poet Rubén Darío, one of the greatest exponents of modernism, wrote to him: “Jiménez, sad Jiménez, don’t cry. The world is happy, life is hurtful.
The mental illness of the Nobel Prize for Literature took him to the point of moving to houses near doctors’ offices and hospitals. None of this managed to reassure him or convince him that a terrible disease was stalking him and that he was being misdiagnosed by the many doctors who treated him. To his wife he wrote: “Wrap me with your light so that death does not see me.”
The hardships of Ponce native Héctor Pérez -known as Héctor Lavoe-, which included the accidental death of his son and internal struggles with his own demons, made him a generator of sung stories through his inspirations or soneos. The scenes he presents in “La Fama”, “El Día de Suerdo” and “Loco”, to mention a few, they show much of their experiences. Lavoe makes fun of his own tribulations so many times and attacks the sins of society with a well-articulated irony in a sublime acting gesture because he had ceased to be a cheerful and happy guy.
It has been so. Sensitivity, embraced by pain and suffering, has been able to paint, sing and write all the beauty or intoxication of a society. And it is that, on occasions, life gives birth to people like that, anguished geniuses, who come to be a miracle in the kingdoms of this world.
