Alice Minium

I remember the smell of my apartment. It smelled like milk, mixed with old fall leaves, mixed with your uncle’s shed, mixed with an Aéropostale department store, mixed with … well, it smelled like garbage, honestly. It smelled like garbage because everything in my apartment was, actually, garbage. Not garbage like what your roommates leave in the kitchen and forget to take out for six days, but real, actual garbage. It was different, the smell of actual garbage, garbage from a Real Dumpster. It’s almost alluring, in a way, the smell. It gets my nervous system going like a drug. I love the smell. There is a very distinct smell to garbage juice.

My apartment was busy. It was a world of its own. Every square inch was a thrift-store museum exhibit to the obscene excesses of capitalism, as displayed both in the amount of useful things people decide are “trash,” and the amount of useless things I was convinced were not trash at all. We were running an adoption agency, rehoming and loving lost things that people had forgotten, abandoned, or failed to appreciate. It was a victory each time, like winning a game or hunting a boar; we were the good guys, we were the rescuers, we were the scavengers, we were derelicts, we were free.

My life was populated with objects containing moments from other people’s lives. A USB drive with a Word Document of a Christian boy’s coming out story, stacks of discarded birthday cards, notes from classes that people had poured months of their lives into documenting. I liked these things the most, the things people loved and used. They contained imprints of a person, imprints of a world, imprints of an entire life. I found them, these treasures, these fragments of people, in heaps of old beer bottles, and I dug them out and cherished them like sacred artifacts catalogued by a collector of the world’s most bizarre museum. I was in love with these artifacts. I was in love with these moments of these people’s lives. I was in love with the people who threw them away. I was in love with the act of finding it. I was in love with the objects themselves. Every time I found a thing, it was like free money — a free life hack. I took pride in using everything I found. I found joy and childlike wonder in the way I began to see all objects as having value, all objects as having potential, all objects as being alive. It is us that gives meaning to objects. It is us that gives objects their value. It is us that can sanctify or strip the value of any material thing.

Capitalism is very much an ongoing negotiation of what objects are worth. We act like there is scarcity, we act like there is not enough. Our scarcity mindsets restrict us from recognizing the infinite resources existing everywhere in space and time, not at all dictated by money, but only accessible through creative mindsets more obsequious than they are expedient most of the time. We do not live in a world of scarcity — we live in a world of abundant, unfathomably nauseating excess. There is more than enough to go around — way more. Exorbitantly more. It thrilled me, it disgusted me, to find this out about our world, to find this out about who we are as people. There is so much panic, so much frenzy, so much buying, and so much “trash.”

I abandoned the entire concept of “trash.” Nothing is trash, things just have different value at different times. The absence of need does not equate to the absence of value. The presence of value definitely does not equate to the presence of need. I abandoned my “need,” my need for anything, and I found my freedom waist-deep in the bottom of a rust-green industrial spaceship marked DUMPSTER.

I had everything I could ever want or dream — I hadn’t spent a dollar on literally anything in months — and I was free. I was utterly, inhumanly free. I was free in the kind of way that is radically, embarrassingly socially deviant, the kind of way that is Highly Frowned Upon. People looked at me with face-plate masks of politeness when I made social errors bragging about my conquests, (“I like your necklace.” “Thanks! I found it at a dumpster!”) things that sound amusing to me but that are the mark of an insane person to others. I don’t even think it was what I said, it was the eagerness and pride with which I said it. I was okay with their disgusted looks, their What-Is-This-Person smirks. I didn’t mind their disapproval. In a way, I actually relished it. I was forever forgetting what I considered to be liberating was to them a mark of degeneracy, poverty, and low moral principle. I was forgetting, and I didn’t care. I didn’t care at all, because my life was cool. It was organic. It was real, and my relationship with Things was no longer a transactional one — Things came to me when they willed it, I could summon them with intention, I could discover them by simply looking, I could appreciate them for what they were and not for what they cost me or for what they were worth in others’ eyes.

This wasn’t one of those “I found a cute couch on the side of the road” kind of dumpster diving situations. This was an every-single-day-I-live-for-this situation, where every day I wake up, write some articles, see my friends, and then visit my Home Base, the operative spot of my primary recreational activity, the adventure of my favorite game — and every day, I would change into yoga pants, long sleeves, and rain boots, pull back my hair and double-wrap it in a bun, and then climb over fences, grab metal handles to anchor myself as I climb, and then plunge feet-first into the dumpster, and that was when they let the games begin.

At first, diving awoke some kind of primal hunter-gatherer instinct in me. It still does every time. But at first, everything I found that was moderately useful, new, or interesting was a source of wonder and amazement (see my favorite mantra: “Who would throw this away?!”). But after a while I became a seasoned scavenger, and the game got methodical. We had unspoken rules. We had procedures.

Basic Dumpster Protocol

RULE #1: This is the single most important rule for hygiene that you must never, ever break if you want to maintain any separation of social constructs of Clean and Dirty, and if you want to avoid literally living in filth. As soon as you get back to your apartment, deposit the items from your haul in one corner away from all your other stuff. Do not touch them. Immediately go into the kitchen and wash your hands, including under your fingernails and all the way up to your elbows. Before entering your bedroom, strip down head to toe and take off everything you are wearing. Immediately deposit your clothes into the washing machine. Do not touch those clothes again. After touching those clothes, avoid touching your face or any other surfaces. Immediately go into the bathroom and take a shower, washing your body thoroughly, and put on a new set of clean clothes. Wash your hands again before and after sorting through the items from your haul in the isolated part of your room. When your Dumpster Clothes have completed washing, wash them again.

While diving:

—Avoid skin contact with liquids when possible. Wear long sleeves to avoid cuts and abrasions. You will probably encounter both anyway, but do your best.

—Grab a mid-tier shopping bag from the dumpster and separate your items into bags by category of filth as you collect them. Remember that whatever you grab, you’re gonna need to carry back with you to your apartment. Shopping carts are super helpful.

—Bringing hand sanitizer is a pro-tip, because your hands will always be sticky.

—It’s always, always good — not just for efficiency and expediency, but for safety — to have a spotter, or at least a partner in your Dive.

Don’t attract the attention of authority.

—Be shameless in your act of the Dive — do not be embarrassed by what you are doing. You’re cute. You’re eccentric. Always say “hi” to passers-by, who will usually apologize, laugh, and look confused when they throw a trash bag in the dumpster and it accidentally hits a person. Be conversational, a normal person going about their business.

—Nighttime is preferable for retail store or corporate dumpsters. University dumpsters are generally better during the day, but you want to lay low regardless.

—Avoid cops if at all possible. If you do encounter university cops, be normal, be friendly, and be honest about exactly what you are doing. It helps to start with, “Hey! Sorry, people are just throwing the craziest stuff away. You would not believe what I just found.” It helps sometimes if you mention the economic value of your haul and mention that “you could totally sell this stuff,” because for some reason capitalism legitimizes everything and we all have given each other a collective free pass for doing ridiculous and otherwise utterly degrading or horrible things, so long as we are doing them for money.

—If you ever encounter hostile cops or city law enforcement, do exactly what they say, apologize, and leave. Abandon your haul if necessary. If they accuse you of trespassing, say you misunderstood. What you’re doing is technically legal, but let’s be real — it looks sketchy.

Safety first, adventure second, money last.

Unspoken Rules of Dumpster Diving

1. Do not make a mess. Always leave the site cleaner than you found it.

2. Finders, keepers.

—If you find and do not need, think of your friends and your community. Whatever you find belongs to everyone, because Trash is communal property. If you find something and someone else needs it more than you do, it belongs to them. It is theirs. It is meant for them. That is just the way it is.

—“Finders, Keepers” applies in the fact that once you find something, it is yours to either keep, distribute, or discard. It is the assumed moral responsibility that if someone else would appreciate the item found more than you that it should belong to them.

—Items found in a mutual Haul should never be re-sold or traded to other divers or friends. Whatever you find, you must share. The objects found you, and they are yours simply by luck of discovery. Once you find it, is yours, and you have the ultimate say. But that is not a power to be abused. We do not adhere to the social mores of a normal economic system, as is made obvious by the fact that we are foraging through dumpsters.

3. Safety first.

“Finders, Keepers” being said, when dumpster diving with your comrades, spot each other, assist in buildering (climbing on top of and through urban structures), and always consider that the Haul (everything you gather) is communal, and ownership can always be sorted out later. The most important thing in the field is working together and looking out for each other’s safety.

Pro Tips

Things you should always take, because you will always need:

Shampoo, conditioner, body wash, soap. Laundry detergent. Dishwasher detergent. Cleaning supplies. Toiletries. School supplies (tape, empty notebooks, pens, printer paper, calculators). Household supplies (lightbulbs, batteries, phone chargers). Unopened food.

Things Good For Flipping:

Lamps, rugs, carpets, Ikea furniture, mirrors. Electronics. Household appliances. Fine jewelry or gift cards (any items of objective fixed retail value). Any duplicate factory-sealed retail items in extremely large quantities. Furniture.

The Three Levels of Trash Bags:

Gold: Full of valuable objects.

Mid-tier: Mostly paper, sometimes food, sometimes objects to be found.

Actual Trash: These are big black bags, which mean they are industrial trash. Actual Trash also applies to regular-looking bags that are just obviously full of food waste, wrappers, and other things that cannot be repurposed. Depending on the location of your Dive and depending on the time of year, it’s possible that you could have an even ratio of Bags vs. Bags of Actual Trash, or, in other circumstances, the dumpster could have a potentially tragic 80/20 ratio of bags to actual trash. Worse altogether is when people mix their disposables with their Actual Trash, but most people don’t do this. Most people organize their trash methodologically in a way. You learn to gauge a bag before you open it, and you learn to look for indicators of potential as soon as you open it to quickly determine whether or not it’s worth your time.

Fast-forward one month:

(Okay. I guess I’ll be honest. Fast forward two days.)

It is a burning-hot July. The smell permeates everything. The wonder is constant, the excess unfathomable. We, we being me and my life partner (my partner in love, my partner in crime, my partner and equal in all things, including especially dumpster diving, who was not only cool with my agenda, but extremely down, perhaps more or even as much as I was), are currently living in a four-bedroom apartment nearing the end of our lease. Our other three roommates have moved out for the summer, so we have three empty bedrooms and a massive living room, all of which are filled with Stuff.

Room One, Alicia’s Old Room, is the End of the Road, because her room has really bad vibes. Alicia’s Room is where we keep the shopping carts and bags full of all the stuff we don’t quite know what to do with, or that we want to keep but have no immediate use for.

Room Two is Grace’s Room: Grace’s Room is The Museum. Grace’s Room has a full bathroom and bed set-up — it is decorated like an ordinary room, except entirely with things we found in dumpsters. Her bathroom has bath mats, a shower curtain, towels, toiletries, toilet paper, hand soap, even make-up. Her bedroom has Egyptian cotton sheets and a plush Target bedspread, Tempur-Pedic pillows, sea-green curtains, atmospheric paintings, three dorm room lamps, and a pink shag carpet. Every drawer of her dresser and desk and every available surface is brimming over with Stuff. Books, Victoria’s Secret lotions, Vera Bradley wallets, Halloween costumes, prescription drugs, school supplies, TVs, printers, vacuums, herbal teas, coffee mugs, silk Express ties, boy band posters, and boxes of food. The Museum is the room of stuff we kind of want but don’t particularly need, stuff that we want to share. The Museum is where our friends can come over every day and go shopping for whatever they want, reaping the benefits of our adventures, creating our own sort of Sharing Economy.

Dominique’s Room is for The Essentials, or, as we put it, the things we’re trying to sell and/or things we really want to keep, things of value — either to us personally or to others financially. This room (though also outfitted with full bathroom decoration from dumpster goods), is a Secret Vault of cleaning supplies, bulk food products, expensive make-up, Haunted Dolls, speaker systems, X-Boxes, and tie-dye tapestries we could never, ever part with. It’s also full of the most bizarre items (Christmas trees, … stockpiles of glitter, Tupperware jars full of Googley eyes, the personal diaries of strangers, love letters between couples we never knew), that we love, but don’t necessarily want to look at all the time. I don’t know how to explain the themed flipbook Evan made Karen for their one-year anniversary, nor the pile of eleven unsubmitted Absentee Voter Ballots…. I would not know how to explain to someone why we have these things in our house. I would not know how to even explain it to myself.

All I knew was that we were living, and every day was a new conquest — every day a new adventure.

I rationalized dumpster diving as a practical thing, but if I’m honest, it was never a practical thing. Not really. Not once did I climb into a dumpster and think, “I will harvest items to sell for a living today.” No. That’s not the spirit of it. That’s not the way it is at all. It’s an excuse to unlock some kind of primal creative instinct. It’s a video game in real time. It’s dangerous, ridiculous, and the art of delusional degenerates. In a society of values with which I have almost nothing in common, what most see as delusional, I see as the most obviously sensible thing. What they see as deviant, I see as genuine. What they see as meaningless, I see as radical. What they see as a numb, mute procedure of operational behavior, I see as a blank canvas for a creative medium, the creative medium of living. What they see as degenerate, I see as noble. What they see as trash, I see as living objects. What they see as trash, I see as resource unutilized. What they see as trash, I see as promise — the promise of freedom, the promise of infinite potential, the promise that whatever you need can be found, whatever you want can be made, whatever you have can be given. What they see as trash, I see as proof of immortality, that nothing dies except the part of it that dies in you, that nothing is beyond redemption, everything is just hidden beneath piles and piles of rank-smelling garbage and empty beer bottles, and no one is willing to climb in the dumpster, but if you did, if you had that faith, just once (because, according to the laws of dumpster diving, if you want to find Something, you will), and if you stop believing in meaning as prescribed by society and start creating meaning in accordance with your desires, if you stop believing there is ever such a thing as Trash, and start realizing that every living moment is the Object You Desire, and if you don’t feel content with your things, it is you that are Trash, not your Things … and that we don’t need a concept of Trash, we cannot sustain a concept of Trash, if we are to look around us and remember what it means to use and touch a thing for what it is and that alone.

Dumpsters aren’t gross, not really. Human bodies are gross. Nature is gross. We are part of nature, and our trash is just the cosmic compost of our modern industrial world. Plastic polymer stretch-proof bags of cellophane egg shells and orange peels and crumpled theses drenched in coffee stains are just the crumpled compost of human beings. They contain imprints of us. They are not profane. They are profound. These are not pits of our excess, these are archives of our culture. These are sacred tombs that testify to the fact we live and are alive, to the fact we are doing something, we used something, we loved something, we are something, whatever that is.

We exist in these object-imprints more than we exist in any real-world form. We exist in these collective capsules, these communal projects of mutual disposal, mutual value, bought, exchanged, and then abandoned, the things we relegate to trash bags. We are the things we put in trash bags. We etch meaning everywhere we go, with everything we touch. When we throw it in a trash bag, tie it up, and set it free, we are relinquishing claim to that piece of Identity-Ownership self and giving it back to the world, back to the collective system of bureaucracies we implicitly trust to pick it up every Monday morning and make it go away, to make those parts of ourselves we once owned be owned no more, all the pieces freed from restrictive ownership to coagulate back together in their new respective forms: in this one thing, we are ownerless, in this one thing, we are absolved, in this one thing, we are made free, from the tyranny of Self and Things.

Trash is art. Trash is real. Trash is without apology. Trash does not contrive itself to look and sell shiny or pretty, it is just trash, it sits shamelessly in the white bags marked NOTHING, the red-strings tying up the white bags which scream “NOTHING OF VALUE GOES HERE” and they sit there, these bags, content in their Trashfulness, content to be Nothing Of Value, content to Never Be Owned Again.

I want to be like trash. I am, in a word, human garbage. I am a garbage human being. I am content to writhe in dumpsters, more content than men in meadows under awnings of singing trees, I am content among the garbage. I am content, I am alive, within the collective kaleidoscope artifacts of humanity. I feel wonder, I feel childlike awe crawling up my spine, pressing its thumbprint on my forehead and my sternum like a pulse, like the defibrillator of God, innervating my innate curiosity long flat-lined by the asphyxiating monotony of Input and Output, System and Unsystem, Good and Evil, Two Weeks ’Til Paycheck, Please Dial Nine, Please Drink Responsibly, Sign Below The Dotted Line, the hereditary mortgage of adulthood, of impermanence, of culture as an industry, of ubiquitous art to the point of no meaning, to the stifling humidity of cerebral Law and Order which presupposes the necessity of sanity and simultaneously extinguishes any flicker of wonder or free will.

I want to be like those white bags marked Never To Be Owned Again. I want to be the things I find in dumpsters. I want to be Technically Nothing. I want to be Everyone’s. I want to be No One’s. I want to be free.

We cherish the blood, sweat, and tears, but we forget about the trash of humanity. And humanity is trash, this much I know. Nature is trash. Nature is filth. Nature is an art museum of shock, awe, sheer disgust, and wonder. Nature is something you throw in the garbage.

And for all of our ideas, for every crown jewel of our civilization and culture, humanity is still no more than just one collective dumpster. And you can act like it’s dirty forever and a day, but you know you want to dive in.

Alice Minium

“If there be any thing that seems Romantick, I beseech your Lordship to consider, these Countries do, in all things, so far differ from ours, that they produce unconceivable Wonders…. What I have mention’d I have taken care shou’d be Truth, let the Critical Reader judge as he pleases….This is a true Story.” ~ Aphra Behn

Where does history end and myth begin? In the “New World” of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and Sir Walter Raleigh’s “The Discovery of Guinea,” both 16^th– and 17^th-century works, the lines between fact and fiction seem to blur. To the modern mind, the distinction is clear — a tale begins to break the laws of science, impossible events occur, human emotion colors the plot. To the ancient mind, however, the lines begin to blur. For where, but in myth, can man infuse the magic of history? How, but in prose, can one portray the turmoil of a battle, or the fervor of a victory, or the complicated stream of fluctuating experience that is human life, out of which all our social and historical constructs are formed? And, if history serves the role of documenting the past, would it not be inaccurate to portray that past as soulless, void, reductionist fact? Does not fact require a little bit of fiction to actually imitate life? Is life not always a constant intermingling of both, and through their profusion emerges experience, civilization, wars, passion, and art?

Every literary work is a history. Each account, every creation of an author’s mind, is a snapshot into her world — a very real world she experienced firsthand through the lens of socially constructed beliefs, values, and ideals about the world. Readers may drink in the nectar of literature’s structural and linguistic beauty, as these are also intrinsic goods in and of themselves, but within these constructions we may deduce and define an underlying framework of mind one might call the lens of the author. The lens of the author is the lens through which they write, interpret, create, and understand. The lens of the author is also a microcosm of the lens of society. Every work is a portrait of self. Every work is also a portrait of society — a miniature universe, a self-contained world.

The self, both ancient and modern, is full of dreams. Every mind construes sensory data in the context of ideological illusions and underlying meaning. Imagination is the web through which we connect seemingly meaningless dates, numbers, and images; imagination is how we infuse them with meaning, draw conclusions, and create constructs of reality. Without imagination, constructs of reality fall apart, for where, exactly, does one stop and the other begin? What of “Alice” is real, and what is imagined? What of “The New World” is real, and what is imagined? What of God is real, and what is imagined? What of “slavery” is real, and what is imagined? What of “gold” is real, and what is imagined?

In fact, from our modern perspective, much of Behn’s and Raleigh’s descriptions of the “New World” sound downright fictional. In Behn’s words, on page 52 of Oroonoko, “For ‘tis the nature of that Country to Rust and Eat up Iron, or any Metals, but Gold and Silver.”

Obviously the North American continents are not possessing of some absurd environmental conditions wherein all metals except those directly commodifiable to Europeans magically are rendered inert. Instead, perhaps, “Gold” is more of a concept than a truth — what Behn is saying is the nature of this land is rich, alien, and unlike any of the brute metals that have formed our past civilizations of old. Perhaps what this land possesses is entirely new, and the metals forging ancient wars and societies of Europe now stand as inferior to a newfound tool with which man may forge civilization — the “Gold” of a New World where feudalism did not apply, where social rules could experimentally be broken across the globe quite quietly, where new societies could be created both mythic and dystopian in theme. If the “New World” was anything, it was rich fodder for the imagination. If its soil had any magical properties, it was a fertile bed for every seed of the Enlightenment’s dreams.

These dreams are recurringly embodied in “Gold,” which implies both the lust for capital and commodity as well as the lust for ideological actualization. Every bidder of every schema saw the New World and wanted to cast their bet; every one of them saw their own “Gold.”

The Gold was extravagant, imaginative, and quite literally unbelievable. We know now that, when Raleigh describes tales of the land of El Dorado, he is describing a mythical world that most certainly did not exist, but to Raleigh, or to his reader, this world was as real as Washington, D.C.

His language is extravagant and his description mythical as he writes of it in pages 6-7 of his 1595 account to Queen Elizabeth, entitled “The Discovery of Guinea”:

All the vessels of his house, table, and kitchen, were of gold and silver, and the meanest of silver and copper for strength and hardness of metal. He had in his wardrobe hollow statues of gold which seemed giants, and the figures in proportion and bigness of all the beasts, birds, trees, and herbs, that the earth bringeth forth; and of all the fishes that the sea or waters of his kingdom breedeth. He had also ropes, budgets, chests, and troughs of gold and silver, heaps of billets of gold, that seemed wood marked out to burn. Finally, there was nothing in his country whereof he had not the counterfeit in gold. Yea, and they say, the Ingas had a garden of pleasure in an island near Puna,  which had all kinds of garden-herbs, flowers, and trees of gold and silver; an invention and magnificence till then never seen.

Raleigh’s “Gold” was everywhere. His description is enticing, idyllic, almost Eden-like. The New World was, to Behn, Raleigh, and in many ways the collective European mind in and of itself, the New Eden — it was a chance to start again. It was rich with visions and myth, and these were as formative to the societies thus created as were facts and figures, if not more so.

In fact, it is “Gold,” it is imagination, it is fiction, which fuels everything, which settled the New World, which inspired its authors, which defined its religions, which articulated its dreams. Without imagination, there would be no growth. Without myths and dreams, there could be no history. Without fiction, mankind stands mute, armed with dumb tools of logic and fact. Mythical thinking is not optional. It is older than old for a reason: because it contains the collective consciousness of man, within it are embedded our secrets, our desires, our dreams, our framework for knowing, our placement of self, our sexes, our governments, histories, and gods. Myth is the oldest kind of history, because only in imagination can be fully contained all that which is known to man.

Therefore, of course the New World does not cause bronze to rust, and there are no trees of gold that grow, but does it matter? The “New World” was not a geographical continent or series of islands these European authors describe. The “New World” was also a continent of the mind, an alien world of imagination, a creation of fiction itself and a means for projecting and understanding our desired dreams.

The New World was not this soil, but it was very much real. Stories may incarnate as fiction, but that does not mean they are not fact. History is not dead, and it is mute without imagination. Fact is inert without fiction; the soul of mankind is not contained in flesh and bone. Magic cannot be reduced to data. Art is the mother, not the servant of, her daughter, Science.

History and myth are inexplicably intertwined, for such is the nature of human experience — such is the wonderful mind of man to produce all the art in the world. We could argue for centuries about what it is “real,” whether this is fiction and that is fact. Such a question is cruel, dismissive, and sells the soul short of its birthright. Perhaps a better question is, does it matter? There is no “fact” or “fiction” alone. If we are to be human, we must have both.

Works Cited

 Brehn, Aphra. Oroonoko. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997.Originally published 1688.

 Raleigh, Walter. “The Discovery of Guinea.” 1595.

Alice Minium

The Intervening Variable of Here and There

I write to you equipped with the story of a phenomenon of nature that I will share with you — it is a keyhole through which we may peer into the nature of the human psyche, the nature of our minds, the nature of art and aesthetics, the nature of reality, and the truth about transcending the ordinary limitations of human consciousness.  It is a story that has cyclically endured throughout history, from the era of Aristotle to the drastically different era in which we live today.  It is a truth indicative of human nature, and it bequeaths unto us an essential, largely untapped understanding of psychology.  It is a circumstance of nature that it is vital for you to know, so that you may fully understand and know yourself.  Understand the nature of your mind and why things are the way they are.  Allow your thought processes to flow as fluid, flexible, and unrestrained, and allow yourself to be enlightened — but don’t get too lost in yourself.  Don’t lose touch with the outside world.  Think too much and you might go crazy … or maybe you already were.  Maybe you know what it feels like.  Maybe it’s always lingering in the back of your mind, in that dark corner into which you shove all the ugly things you cannot let the world see.  You loathe the lurid black hole monster that has taken up residence in your brain like a tumor that is not a tumor, but a finger — a natural part of you from which you cannot escape.  You loathe that black hole monster.  But it is he who sweeps you up in his storm of intoxicating emotion that leaves beautiful, elegantly-crafted sonnets behind as the rubble.  It is his provocation that inspires the intricate sketches that fill your notebook.  You lose yourself in him, or perhaps you truly know yourself, or perhaps you truly know some things about life that people were just not supposed to know.  There is so much in your head, and it secretes as art.  Maybe creation is the only tactic you know to help you stay sane.  Creation is dangerously similar to destruction.

Creativity is dangerously similar to madness.

As the human race, one thing we are most classically ignorant about is ourselves — and what it means to be a human.  This is a topic on which most of us know very little.  The relationship between creative genius and psychological instability is obvious, but not completely understood by us at all.  We find ourselves in a chicken or the egg scenario.  Here I will explain both that the chicken and egg are of the same nature and exactly how they are related to one another.  I will be exploring many different theories upheld by many different individuals, but I will not present you with my own personal speculation as a means of hopefully convincing you this is true.  The case I present here will rely fully and completely on logical deductions and factual evidence, including over ten clinical studies conducted by highly educated, highly reputed psychological experts.  Ultimately, I encourage you to view the case I will present with objective, unpresuming eyes, and take from it what you will.  The verdict is yours, but I will lay the evidence before you, encourage you to trace the validity of my arguments, and I stand here fully confident that you will reach the same conclusion that I did myself.

Personally, I find any standard dictionary to be habitually ineffective at encompassing the full essence of a concept with its overly formal and unspecific definitions.  I have drawn upon a few other sources that will give us a more complete grasp of the meanings of the two essential words I would like to clearly define for you — the first is “creativity,” or, in other words, “creative genius.”  Dr. C. E. Shalley, author of the psychological journal article “Effects of Productive Goals, Creativity Goals, and Personal Discretion on Individual Creativity,” defined creativity as “comprised of three major components: the required ability or expertise in a particular field, the innate or intrinsic motivation towards further exploration and development, and the cognitive processes to conceive and synthesize novel ideas.”  Dr. Prentky, a fellow psychiatrist featured in the same psychiatric journal, elaborated by saying that “the main primary traits of creativity are fluency and flexibility of thinking, originality, redefinition, and elaboration.”  When he says “elaboration,” he is referring to the unconscious process of expanding, embellishing, and simultaneously extrapolating a minute detail, usually one of the repressed psyche.  There are many components to creativity, but these two definitions are an accurate basic skeleton on which we may rely.  I will expand more on its nature, its features, and its origins when I present my major points of argument.

The second term that it is essential we define is “madness.”  In this presentation, “madness” may be interchangeable with the term “psychological abnormalities” or “mental illness.”  These words can mean many different things, so I would like to define them for you as clearly as possible.  Dr. Caroline Koh from the National Institute of Education at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore is an expert at research on this topic, and she conjured up a very accurate and efficient explanation of these terms: “Madness is commonly described as an altered, abnormal, deviant state of mind or consciousness.  The various forms of mental disorder are generally of two kinds. The first being the condition of neurosis, which describes the milder forms of mental disorders such as phobias, depressions, obsessions, compulsions and hypochondria.  The second type of aberrant mental condition, psychosis, includes severe forms of mental illnesses, whereby the patient loses contact with reality and shows irrational and irresponsible behavior.  Psychotic afflictions include delirium tremens, manic depressive disorder and schizophrenia.”  In this presentation, we will be dealing more with psychotic afflictions than neurotic afflictions.  However, both branches of psychological abnormalities are relevant and applicable to this case.

The relationship between creativity and psychopathology is tied together by artistic temperament, or, in other words, the moods, personality, and the way artists see the world.  The artistic temperament, or condition of the artist, is what determines the psychological risk.  You could call the artistic temperament the intervening variable of the relationship.  An intervening variable is a hypothetical internal state that is used to explain the relationship between observed variables when they do not appear to have a definite connection, but simultaneously have no existence apart.  In other words, we cannot say for sure whether creativity drives you crazy or if madness inspires you to be creative, but we can acknowledge the two are connected in a certain way based on the condition of the artistic temperament — if the artist is very mentally ill, she may also find herself bursting with creativity, or vice-versa, depending on other situational and circumstantial determinants in addition to her brain chemistry.  The concept of an intervening variable is difficult to understand at first — a few other examples are intelligence, motivation, and intention, if that helps you to grasp the concept any better.  Either way, the nature of this relationship will become clearer as we progress.

The correlation between madness and mental illness actually has a name: the Sylvia Plath effect.  Psychologist Dr. James C. Kaufman coined this term in 2001 to refer to the phenomenon that creative writers suffer disproportionately from severe mental illness — more so than other types of writers, and more so than any other types of people.  2001 is fairly recent, but Kaufman was not the first to acknowledge this pattern in human psychology.  Plutarch, Greek historian who lived from 46 to 120ad, described in his annals the Greek hero Archimedes from an intriguing perspective: “Archimedes was a combination of natural endowment, hard work, and divine inspiration — a personality which indulges in behavior which is distinctly unusual … in anyone else, we would be rather tempted to call it mad.”  A fellow Greek, the great Aristotle, seemed to agree with Plutarch, writing, thousands of years ago, that “No great genius has ever been without some divine madness.”  Almost two thousand years later, William Shakespeare echoes their tune: “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact.”

Enough with the quotations.  It is simply a fact that a remarkably great percentage of our favorite innovative artistic geniuses have been afflicted with dark psychological pain.  No expert on the topic will deny that.  But now let’s get to the important part — why?

The first point of argument I will make is that the thought processes of exceptional artists and the mentally ill are similar in their operations and appear to be of a similar origin.  I will prove this point by explaining  the ideas of translogical thinking, conceptual overinclusiveness, Janusian thought processes, and homospatial thought processes.  I will also touch on the influence of Dr. Albert Rothenberg, a psychiatrist who has published books on the topic and is considered an expert, and his colleague, Dr. Prentky.  Finally, I will elaborate on a neurological study conducted at Harvard University and the University of Toronto in September 2003 that gives us a concrete biological basis for the connection of creativity to mental illness by testing something called Latent Inhibition.  I will explain what Latent Inhibition is, how it works, and why it is incredibly significant to this case.

Dr. Prentky is one of many psychologists who has devoted his career to the understanding of this topic.  Like the others, he postulates that the creative and the mad operate the same way on a neurological level.  “Creativity and psychopathology share a similar origin,” he explains, “hence the biological link; that creative individuals and psychotics have some common personality traits and thinking reflecting a predisposition to psychosis.  One of them is vague, highly intuitive thought processes, and imprecise and inappropriate speech.”  Other common personality traits Prentky could have mentioned are peculiarity, introversion and an inclination to solitude, rejection of common cultural standards, a tolerance for irrationality, oft-disturbed moods, and the tendency to connect concepts in an unusual or unexpected manner.

Prentky declares that the most significant similarity between creatives and psychopaths is the loose, unrestricted boundaries of their thought processes.  In other words, their perception of the world is not restrained by the limitations of cultural prejudices that intellectually suppress most people in any given period of time.  You could say our creatives and psychopaths think “outside the box.”  This could be for many reasons.  Prominent among possible reasons is the fact that both of these people groups are comprised of individuals very different from their peers in very important ways.  Even if they manage to have healthy social relationships, they are still, always, unlike everybody else in their psychological tendencies and the way they think (or, brain chemistry).  When one feels like an outsider, one is not sucked up into the blindness afflicting everyone who has bought into the massive ruse.  Many “crazy” artists in the past have had ideas way beyond their time (for one example, Leonardo da Vinci), because, abstinent from the habitual worldviews and mindless conditioning of their neighbors, they were more in touch with their inner consciousnesses and were capable of perceiving truth and concocting ideas that others could not comprehend and would have, in no way, dreamed of.

A more technical and precise term for this unique cognitive process they have in common is the term “translogical thinking.”  Dr. Albert Rothenberg concluded from years of studies that this is definitely a psychological trait creatives and psychopaths share.  Translogical thinking, as you may have deduced from its name, is a type of conceptualizing in which thinking processes transcend the ordinary mode of logical thinking.  It involves two different thought processes, the first being the Janusian and the second being homospatial.

Janusian thinking is the process of combining paradoxical or antagonistic objects into a single entity.  The homospatial process is, in Rothenberg’s words, “the essence of a good metaphor.”  It involves superimposing or uniting multiple, discrete objects.  These two processes constitute the method of creative thinking.

Although the creative and the psychopathological share these significant traits, obviously, there are characteristics to distinguish them from one another, and they are important to note.  The fundamental difference between the creative and the mentally ill is the amount of control the individual has over his or her thought processes.  The creative thinker is deliberate with her thought processes and is capable of deftly managing them.  The psychotic thinker’s thought processes are sometimes inexplicably capricious, and she is incapable of controlling them; rather, they can easily overpower her at any time.

This might sound like a dramatic difference, and it is, but creatives and psychotics have more fundamental similarities than incompatibilities.  Perhaps the most compelling chunk of evidence for this argument is the 2003 Harvard-Toronto study involving Latent Inhibition.

Latent Inhibition is defined (by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) as an animal’s unconscious capacity to screen from conscious awareness stimuli previously experienced as irrelevant to its needs.  You are surrounded by a near-infinite amount of stimuli at all times, and there is no way you could consciously take notice of all of those things.  Toronto Psychology Professor Jordan Peterson says, “This means that creative individuals remain in contact with the extra information constantly streaming in from the environment.  The normal person classifies an object, and then forgets about it, even though that object is much more complex and interesting than he or she thinks.  The creative person, by contrast, is always open to new possibilities.”  The lower one’s LI is, the lower the ability to filter out irrelevant stimuli that interfere with focused thought processes.  Consequently, the study showed, the lower one’s LI is, the more exceptional cognitive flexibility he or she displays, which leads to creative achievement.  This study was groundbreaking, because, for the first time, the scientists were able to conclude that highly creatives and people suffering from psychotic illness both were characterized by very low levels of Latent Inhibition.  Instead of connecting thoughts by basic logic, translogical thinking comes into play, and their neurons transmit signals to several other neurons people would not normally associate with one another, and they interpret information a different way.

The low level of Latent Inhibition is a concept that explains so much about the relationship between creativity and psychological abnormalities.  Low LI can also be a characteristic of many forms of psychoses, including the early stages of schizophrenia.  As one’s LI decreases, one may become fixated on meaningless ideas that feel almost religiously important, and one starts to slip away from reality.

Harvard researcher Shelley Carson thinks this makes perfect sense.  “Scientists have wondered for a long time why madness and creativity seem linked.  Many of us hypothesize that Latent Inhibition may be positive when combined with high intelligence and good working memory, but negative otherwise.  It seems likely that low levels of Latent Inhibition and exceptional flexibility in thought could predispose to mental illness under some conditions and to creative accomplishments under others.”

Low LI could explain someone’s unique ability to discover something beautiful or spectacular within what most people consider unremarkable or potentially not even notice.  It explains the ability to perceive the world with intensified acuity, the ability to transcend the mental or psychological inhibitions of a culture or time, and the ability to interpret stimuli differently to extract unique abstractions from seemingly dissimilar concepts.

Pablo Picasso, the legendary Spanish artist from the early twentieth century, preferred to live amongst chaos rather than a clean, organized home environment.  He attested his reason to be that objects, when strewn about, appeared to have unusual visual relationships to each other.  Picasso considered this artistically stimulating, as he did not perceive his surroundings in a typical manner — a clock as a clock, or a shoe as a shoe, but instead, his brain interpreted the objects as they appeared to him at that time in color and form, not as objects purely related to the functionality of his everyday life.

One of his most well-known sculptures, Bull’s Head, was an arrangement of the seat and handlebars of a bicycle that Picasso envisioned as shaped like the head of a bull.  He was able to transcend his mind’s human instinct to interpret handlebars as “rods upon which you exert force in order to control the direction or maintain stability of a vehicle,” and uninhibited by that instinct he was able to see the essence of handlebars for what they were — elongated cylinders.  Out of their ordinary context, he equated them to the existence of other similar objects, such as a bull’s horns.  This example parallels the science behind a low Latent Inhibition and a high creative ability to see the world in an abnormal way.

Anne Sexton, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, practiced a similar albeit more abstract approach to transcending our natural instinct to overpass and not analyze stimuli that are not relevant for survival.  Dr. Mary Baures, a psychologist who personally spent time with Sexton, recalls her methodology.  “She taught us about images and metaphors.  They were more powerful when you found connections between unlike things — a fist and a fetus, eyelids and riding boots, a tongue and a fish, flies and small black shoes, a girl curled like a snail.  She showed us how to ‘image-monger’ by spewing out a torrent of metaphors in a process she called ‘storming the image.’  We would ‘unrepress’ by creating an unconscious for an object, like a can of Coke.  The more we ‘unrepressed,’ the more rapid our associations became.”

Creativity is fundamentally dependent on communication with the inner psyche, although it is usually not conscious unrepressing.  It brings you, in an artistic sense, to intelligence with your deepest, most unacknowledged, most primitive thoughts and feelings.  Abandoning thought-association patterns ingrained by your environment simplifies and, in a way, purifies the way you experience the essence of a thing.  Raw simplicity and awareness like this brings you back to the most basic, fundamental brain activity, to which every person can relate.  The catharsis of connecting with and unrepressing these deeply repressed elements is what might make one feel “moved” by a particularly effective specimen of art or music.

This is also the idea behind the form of expressive psychotherapy called art therapy, in which the emotionally damaged patient will draw, paint, sculpt, write, or compose his own creative art to begin to heal and indirectly address the patient’s deeply repressed psychological tensions.  Art therapy shows us that creative thought and emotional pain are deeply intertwined, which brings me to my second major argument.

Art and creativity require utterly consuming devotion and deeply personal contact with one’s primitive self (cravings, feelings, and emotions), which naturally puts one at the constant risk of walking the edge of sanity and insanity — because inner turmoils breed excellent, passionate art.

The twentieth-century poet John Berryman said it exceptionally well: “I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, but mostly you need ordeal.  My idea is this: The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him.  At that point, he’s in business.  Beethoven’s deafness, Goya’s deafness, Milton’s blindness, that kind of thing.  And I think that what happens in my poetic work in the future will probably largely depend not on my sitting calmly on my ass as I think, ‘Hmm, hmm, a long poem again?  Hmm,’ but on kinds of other things short of senile dementia.  At that point, I’m out, but short of that, I don’t know; I hope to be nearly crucified.”

This is a fact all creative individuals know very well.  Tragedy results in excellent creative output.  Even any amateur writer would admit that his writing is more poignant and powerful when he has been through an emotional disaster, or just had a bad day.  Anne Sexton said, “Poetry led me by the hand out of madness.”  Creativity is very healing for the mentally ill and is often a coping mechanism, but constant contact with one’s inner psyche and the total  immersion in one’s work that is characteristic of both the creative and the psychopathological when involved in projects, produces an increased chance for one to slip out of touch with reality and into disillusion.  Dr. Maureen Neihart elaborates, “Creativity involves a regression to more primitive mental processes, that to be creative requires a willingness to cross and recross the lines between rational and irrational thought.  Inspiration always requires regression and dipping into irrationality in order to access unconscious symbols and thought.”

By nature, individuals in artistically creative professions must be more sensitive, unlike scientists, who work with logic.  Art, on the other hand, is raw humanity.  Creative individuals are more susceptible to a greater spectrum of emotions and perceptions, which makes them more susceptible to all emotions, especially the violent ones, because they are the ones that fuel artistic inspiration.

Skill is one part talent and ninety-nine parts blood, sweat, and tears.  People who wholeheartedly devote their lives to creative endeavors might sacrifice just as much as people who devote their lives to Olympic sports.  With creative work, it’s not obvious when you over-exert yourself or drive yourself crazy from isolation, pressure, and immersion in the fantasy world you are forced to inhabit.  For child prodigies, or any adults who throw themselves into their work, it is easy to lose touch with the real world.  If you are straining yourself mentally, your risk for danger is even more glaring than that of the Olympic athletes.  If you damage yourself mentally, the consequences will be so much more detrimental.  It’s all the same thing, except in this instance, the game is inside your head.

I would now like to refute an alleged objection to my thesis: the argument that creativity is a product of logic, and mental illness, by definition, is characterized by a lack of rationality.

At first glance, this argument looks like a reputable objection — until you stop and think about it.  First of all, creativity does not come directly from logic.  Logic leads to practicality, and if creativity was based on logic, it would be a function of practicality, which is incompatible with its primary concern being not survival, but innovation and aesthetics.  Creativity is the ability to transcend the ordinary.  Also, in complete contradiction to this point, it could be said that artistic creativity, in a way, actually stems from illogic — it is characterized by a disconnect with reality, and its lack of concern for logical things and greater interest in creating beauty serves no survival purpose whatsoever, which supposedly goes against our evolutionary nature as humans, which makes it perfectly compatible with mental illness.

Or, if you want to approach it in a slightly less brash manner, you could refute the statement “creativity is a product of logic” with the already affirmed statement “creativity is a product of translogic.”  Therefore, even if mental illness does encompass irrationality, it also encompasses translogic, what is needed for creativity and what truly matters.  You have to look at it from a broader perspective.

Another objection to my thesis that has been raised by many is this: “Not all creative prodigies are crazy, so there is not necessarily a correlation between creativity and being crazy.”

I would like to respond to this objection with the results of a scientific study performed by a certain Dr. J. Eysenck in the 1980s.  After testing 21 males for a correlation between their level of creativity and their level of psychological abnormality, he found a mostly positive correlation, except not an exclusively positive correlation.  Dr. Eysenck concluded that creativity and psychosis have a greater probability of being connected, but not in all circumstances.

“Psychosis” is the condition of being psychotic, but “psychotism” is the ability to potentially develop psychosis under certain situations.  While psychosis and creativity were not always linked, psychotism and creativity absolutely were.  Eysenck’s final word was that creative individuals are naturally predisposed to insanity, but they are not necessarily insane.  Today this is known as “Eysenck’s P-factor.”

Obviously not all creative geniuses are mad, but that does not change the fact that a great percentage are, and the rest of them are at least genetically predisposed to it as a result of their exceptional creativity, whether it is active or not.  Famous Impressionist Salvador Dalí knew this indeed when he said, and I quote, “The only difference between me and a madman is I am not mad.”

There is no consistent pattern of which one induces the other.  Creativity and madness mutually reinforce each other, according to their natures as inherently related essences.  Now, we have established that the processing styles of creative and psychotic brains are methodically similar and similar in origin, as understood by conceptual overinclusiveness, translogical thinking, and the evidence of the Latent Inhibition effect.  We have also affirmed that the nature of art puts one in danger of intense emotional experiences, because that enhances art, so psychological vulnerability is and always will be an associated risk.  I have refuted the objection that creativity and madness are not related because creativity is logical and madness is illogic by firstly explaining that creativity is not a product of logic, and by secondly explaining that creativity does not require logic but translogic.  I also refuted the allegation that creativity and madness are not related because not all creative people are crazy, and not all crazy people are creative, so they cannot be intrinsically tied together.  I shared the results of a scientific study in which they determined that creativity and madness, if you suffer from one, make you highly likely to be predisposed to the other, and that all the creative are not necessarily actively psychotic, but all of the creative are psychotismic — capable of developing psychosis under the right given circumstances.  Therefore, the connection holds irrefutable and strong.

I would like to say I understand every aspect of this phenomenon, but the truth is, we actually only know so very little.  And if these creative geniuses, these exceptional and elite, are of a higher consciousness than us average humans — who are we to judge the estate of their psychological health?  We know so very little.  But at most, we can cherish what we have learned about art, about suffering, and about humanity itself.  And we can constantly strive to learn more.  Not everyone gets to be exceptional, and you will never be the most beautiful poet, the most talented pianist, the most up-and-coming graffiti artist, and for a moment, that kills you inside.  But, actually, maybe being a prodigy entails a whole lot more than I imagined.  Marcel Proust said, “Everything great in the world is created by neurotics.  They have composed our masterpieces, but we don’t consider what they have cost their creators in sleepless nights….”

The almost-prophetic whisper of the gifted novelist Janet Fitch reminds us, “Nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.”  Yet each one of us secretly yearns to venture out into the sea of darkness, to explore what it might contain…

Be an artist.  Fear no pain.

Alice Minium

The twentieth century is arguably the chronological home to more significant advancements by mankind than any era before it.  It was an era of evolution in every way — evolution of war, evolution of science, evolution of arts, evolution of medicine, evolution of consciousness, and evolution of technology.  When confronted with the question of which of these monumental advances was the most instrumental in the evolution of history — which of these discoveries is the one that will change the course of the history books — one is almost taken back at the enormity of the events to choose from.  However, when one removes oneself from his immediate mindset and looks at these events in light of the grand scheme of time, the answer is blatant and simple — the invention of the Internet.

The ease of communicating information affects everything, primarily the speed, agility, and encompassment of the development of modern thought.  If all the great minds of the present day can collaborate their ideas and work together to expand and elaborate on them with the instantaneous exchange of facts, research, data, theories, and evidence, progress will accelerate at lightning speed.  If open sharing and universal access to an infinitely vast library of intellectual property is a fact of life for everyone, and we all have access to everyone else’s ideas, new aspects of the universe, science, math, and invention will be discovered daily.  With this ability, the collective mind of the present day will reach a consciousness and complexity it never has before.  Technology will advance rapidly, and mankind will become universally more informed.  Free thinking is now an option for anyone, as a database comprised of billions of diverse opinions and taboo information are available at the click of a mouse.  Real-life activity also becomes sub-relevant to survival as opposed to the way that it was — you can watch movies, do your homework, shop for groceries, read the news, plan a vacation, listen to music, talk to your friends, pay your bills, and fulfill the duties of your job all without abandoning your couch.  The invention that makes all this possible has changed absolutely everything, including the direction of mankind itself.  With free sharing via the Internet, we are all connected.  Your mind is not completely your own.  Yet, simultaneously, more of the world belongs to you than has ever belonged to a generation before us.

In 1950, the first portable digital computer is invented.  In 1960, work on hypertext and the related sharing of war-related information via technology is deeply in progress in an operation called Project Xanadu.  In 1962, JCR Licklider fantasizes a global network of inter-connected computers, and he and his colleagues introduce ArpaNet — the prescursor to the Internet.  In 1971, Ray Tomlison makes the sending, receiving, and forwarding of data messages on ArpaNet a reality — he calls this exchange of information “e-mail.”  In 1973, Ethernet is developed at Xerox PARC technologies.  A “bulletin board”-like program for companies to exchange information is born in 1979 — it is available in most large corporate environments by 1982.  In 1984, Jim Thatcher develops the IBM screen reader and letters and names can now be translated into IP numbers and addresses.  In 1991, World Wide Web files become publicly available on the Internet.  In 1993, the Internet is declared free for anyone to use.  The first popular web browser, Mosaic, was released.  In 2011, it is estimated that there are approximately 2 billion people accessing the Internet at any given second.  From a Yahoo-attempted index in August 2007, it is estimated that there are currently 29.7 billion Web pages active on the Internet today.

There have been thousands of monumental events in the twentieth century, but pause and consider which ones truly changed your life.  The Internet transformed not only the extent of what we are capable of as the human race, but also the way we see the world as a whole, and the way our children will see the world.  The Internet changed everything.  One might argue that the Internet is not as significant as an invention that might demolish man’s existence, like the atomic bomb.  However, consider the wise words of modern-day physicist Richard Dawkins: “We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us — through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology — that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space.”  The Internet is our atomic bomb, and we don’t know where it’s taking us next.