hypounpalatable

The first thirty minutes of my day are dominated by an acute awareness of temperature disparities between under the covers and the rest of the world. I bask in the sleepy mindstate of clock radio dispatches, vaguely absorbing reports on the latest round of exploding vehicles and the occasional interview with notable citizen of the day.

This morning I learned of a new disease, "hypografia" documented in this interview with neurologist Alice Flaherty, author of the book The Midnight Disease. Apparently this marvelous affliction bestows one with a compulsive and insatiable need to write as much as possible. My first reaction was one of jealousy (and a hankering for some dex) until she continued to elaborate a period of time in her life when, overcoming personal tragedy, she would wake up in the middle of the night and cover the walls with mini post-it notes of incoherent ideas, unable to sleep until she had written everything out. I immediately thought of a drawer full of crumpled paper, including a fair amount of mini post-its, in my bedroom. And a personally embarrassing habit I have of writing terribly emotional and lengthy e-mails in the middle of the night, and even worse, text messages. And then I thought, even worse, of weblogging... how perhaps this whole project is proof that I am a diseased hypografic.

I will report back after reading the book. I tend to avoid scientific analyses of creative motivation. I've always found studies that cite higher instances of depression amongst writers (such as the one Flaherty mentions) to be underhandedly self-congratulatory in some way. As an aspiring writer I took issue with a perception that being depressed was a prerequisite to the task, with anti-depressants serving as some sort of badge of authenticity. Then of course I had to go on them, and I dutifully eat shit. However, my opinion continues to be that depression does nothing for creativity -- unless hating yourself and everyone else and anything you might possibly produce while weeping incessantly can be counted as "motivation." Sylvia Plath, bipolar postergirl, is quoted in the interview as saying "When you're ill that's all you are," and I agree.

But all of this is an interesting consideration, the physiology of motivation. If Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Jekyll and Hyde on a six day cocaine binge and everyone from Jack Kerouac to Sartre to your creative writing workshop uses amphetamines, hypografia is indeed sought after. I can't express exactly how much I love writing when there is a lot of brain chaos, and it is the hope of obtaining that state of mind that motivates the endeavor in the first place. It just seems odd that a *thing* has been made out of it (to use a word other than disorder or disease) that this state of mind is one that could be coalesced into an entity, and one considered "treatable" at that.

At least now I'll have time to read the book. Now that I'm jobless. Again.