/lit/ - Literature

Your diary :3

>>13546758
book of disquiet
no longer human
the bible

All of Marx's work
>From the failed 1848 revolution untill the 1860's Marx thought an industrial crisis would cause a revolution in France
The revolution and the crisis never occurred and Marx was subjected to ridicule by his peers.
>Marx thought the recession in 1857 would lead to a revolution
It never did.
>Engels thought a crisis would lead a revolution in England by 1886
A revolution never happened and the economy in Britian recovered by 1888.
>Marx thought Capitalism had the long run tendency to keep real wages at a subsistence level
In reality, real wages have gone up in the long run.
>Marx thought workers' plight would lead to Communism
In reality, modern day plight of workers has not led to a renewed interest in Communism.

Stendhal’s novels to some large extent. This becomes more apparent in his nonfiction works. The entirety of Balzac’s oeuvre, which however does prevent it from being wonderful.

Serious answers though: Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, no doubt about that, and parts of Mervyn Peake’s Titus Alone where he was clearly suffering from dementia

Your diary :3

>>13546784
*does not

>>13546758
Basically everything by Philip K. Dick, especially VALIS, UBIK and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

>>13546765
read capital vol 1, most of it fits well in today the festo is where things get a little bit hmmmm.
marx isn't the all knowing jesus christ

A lot of PKD stuff. VALIS, especially.

VALIS was written as a piece of fiction but it was primarily about his own experiences with regards to his "exegesis" he was writing. The information he "received" for his exegesis was apparently from a pink laser beam from space, directed into his head.

>>13546810
Why does he act like a soothsayer with all his doomsday prophecies then?

>>13546795
>>13546821
Oh, ha, maybe I should have read through the thread before responding.

My diary :3

>>13546758
Dostoevsky
Hamsun's Hunger

>>13546758
Countless poets are probably bipolar, there was literally a study done on the connection between the two at some university because it is so frequent. I can recognize in their poems the symptoms and relate to them a lot, but I can't produce any good poetry myself. I still have the instinct to do it though. Byron and Pushkin are two very obvious examples, Pushkin has a poem that is ostensibly written to a girl but is clearly about the recurrence of mania and the feelings of beauty and wonder it inspires, and then the longs periods of depression, confusion, and unhappiness that follow. Pushkin maybe didnt even realize this and conflated the experience with an idealization of the girl(i did this myself at one time in my life), but it's rather unmistakable. Other probable cases include Coleridge, Blake, Artaud, Baudelaire, Plath, Eliot, Poe, Keats, Pound, Tennyson, Trakl, etc.

It's obvious I think why bipolar people would be associated with poetry, the tendency to have grandiose and mystic beliefs about things, the heightened sensations and the very increased speech of mania, the racing metaphorical thoughts, the huge amounts of energy needed to create, the contrasts between the highs and lows, etc. Most people might not be aware of this but mania is not always debilitating, for a lot of people it actually makes them extremely productive and creative, sometimes charismatic and social as well, you would probably not realize you were interacting with a mentally ill person when a person exhibits this type of mania unless you were quite close to them. Of course most bipolar people are not poets and are just sad faggots like myself, and the majority of poets arent bipolar, but I can see the link. Before I knew that I was bipolar I had already instinctively sought out all these poets because of how much I related to their poetry without knowing they were suspected of having the condition.

btw do not take this post as me reducing the work of these great artists to mere mental illness, the content of their work and lives is very varied and is not just about a mental condition, Im only identifying what I see as a pattern in the subject matter they write about. Art always has a million angles to it, so this is just one, and usually not even a central one, but the condition really has such a massive effect on people's lives that it can't help but colour their artistic expression.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touched_with_Fire
this is the psychologist who compiled the research, it isnt just about poets, but art in general.

>>13546942
quality contribution, thanks for typing this up Anon. Not something I'd ever come across or thought of.

>>13546942
how are you sure you are bipolar?

>>13546760
desu

>>13546758
Confederacy of Dunces

>>13546942
Can confirm this. The last manic episode I had coincided with a burst of poetic activity. The connection is interesting. The way I experienced it was as if my mental pictures had a life of their own. I would imagine situations, people talking, various striking visions, that had the pungency and immediacy of dreams. These images seemed thronged through my head like a violent, urgent electric current. I became incredibly religious, envisioning a grey, mournful Christ, picturing a formless blackened evil rushing through the world to meet me to do battle. Mysterious forces spoke through me and it was as if my voice was double, overlapped by a mighty stranger's voice.

It benefitted my writing in the sense that the imagery was more potent, less inhibited, bleeding with life rather than dead and abstract. Unfortunately I was also spiraling into madness and acting erratically, with devastating mood swings, irritability crossed with horny euphoria and a hunting sadness flecked with terror.

I eventually lost the ability to concentrate and function and would have spiraled into oblivion were it not for medical intervention.

>>13546967
no problem m8
>>13547026
I am about as textbook bipolar as you can be, I was manic for literally 3 months straight, and id type it all up but it deeply saddens and confuses me at this point to have to go through it all. Ive been diagnosed with Bipolar 1 by several psychologists and pyschiatrists, one even wanted to use me as a case study and participant in a drug he was testing, but I couldnt even function enough in that period to get to the meetings or take phone calls. They all decide within like a half hour that that is obviously what I am. Im seriously a cliche of the condition, random people who know about it will ask me if I have it once they get familiar enough that it isn't weird.

It is completely miserable to live with, the aching beauty and meaning of the tiny amount of your life you spend manic is small recompense for the absolute shit your life is otherwise. It's not as bad as being schizophrenic at least, but it's actually rather similar in a lot of ways, at least my version is, there are different types, the mind is extremely poorly understood. I have a fuckload of physical problems that arent commonly associated with the popular understanding of the condition, pains and confusion and madnesses of emotion, the guy who wanted me to participate in the study said that it's about inflammation in the body, especially the head, but I dont know how his research panned out. I work out constantly and am fairly built but I still can barely breathe or focus my eyes normally, because there is this problem in my brain that makes my muscles not behave normally or something, and Im all contorted such that I have laboured breathing and very bad headaches all the time, except when manic and my posture will not align itself unless I do certain very intense exercises.

Ive already started rambling about myself and that will literally never end once I get going, so I will stop it there, but yes I am bipolar and it's fucking terrible.

The thing is though you secretly are still happy you have it no matter how shit things become because of how amazing mania is. It's irrational and retarded, but nothing else can compare, at least to the understanding of your broken mind.

I was nothing like this before this set in when I was around 16, I was a normal happy socially integrated person who applied myself in school, had friends and girlfriends, played sports, I was engaged in art and music and some other stuff. That stuff all sort of continued but it fucked up immensely because of the condition, and I have just gotten worse and worse over the years.

The only way I can try to explain it to people is that it's like a bad acid trip you can't wake up from, you cant think, you cant even move properly, you cant do anything right, everything seems horribly wrong, until you become manic and then it's like the best acid trip ever except you are lucid and functional and not drugged out, even if still a bit afraid of how intense everything is.

>>13547078
I saw a kind of mournful christ as well, a broken god, who couldn't control the suffering and evil in the world. I made a bunch of paintings of this, but I cant really paint so they are dumb.

>>13546758
The Bible
The Quran
The Vedas

>>13547210
>The Holy Ghost isn’t satisfied to write like a man - But as less than one - As a foolish raving madman - But he poses in this way only in eyes of God’s enemies

>>13547234
Look into the concept of divine madness.

>Finnegans Wake
IIRC Joyce was more or less diagnosed Schizophrenic by Carl Jung after he had worked with Joyce's daughter (also Schizophrenic) and observed James. The Wake really often reads like the ravings of a madman, for me it's a kind of simulation of lunacy.

Anything by Garshin

>>13546758
Daniel Paul Screber - Memoirs of My Mental Illness
Barbara o'Brien - Operators and Things
arguably,
Carl Gustav Jung - The Red Book / Liber Novus.

Also, I wouldn't call any of those a particularly good read. Rather, they are just sad.

>>13546758
Tropic of Cancer/Capricorn
Dreams, Memories, Reflections by Jung

>>13547104
>The thing is though you secretly are still happy you have it no matter how shit things become because of how amazing mania is. It's irrational and retarded, but nothing else can compare, at least to the understanding of your broken mind.

>I was nothing like this before this set in when I was around 16, I was a normal happy socially integrated person who applied myself in school, had friends and girlfriends, played sports, I was engaged in art and music and some other stuff. That stuff all sort of continued but it fucked up immensely because of the condition, and I have just gotten worse and worse over the years.

Fellow garden variety bipolar over here. I related to practically everything you said, but this excerpt hit me the most. In high school, I could function well not only despite but as a result of my bipolar disorder, though it was a lot less severe at the time. After my first major episodes, things started spiraling fast. I'm ashamed that you're right about being secretly happy about having bipolar -- I have the same feeling. I know this disease has taken much more than it was given, and that it's robbed me of any chance of having a normal functional life. It hurts the more I compare myself to neurotypicals since I've fallen pretty fall behind compared to them. (Last note: I don't know if you've tried weed to self-medicate or treat your bipolar, but for me it has vastly reduced the physical symptoms I get especially during depressive episodes, something I can also relate to from your post; godspeed anon)

>>13547234
Holy shit, that's deep

>>13546822
All philosophers had an I am right about everything attitude. I personally believe the only reason people know about marx as opposed to other 19th century brains is because marxism is actually beneficial to the bourgeoisie.

bump

>>13546763

>>13548184
>bumping on /lit/

>>13546942
antonin artaud is like the prime example of this thread

>>13546758
I think there's truth to what Orwell says, that is: > “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”

I'm not saying that every author has some form of mental illness, however, anyone who is really into reading or writing, I think, has something wrong with or about them, which might be also why they tend to be nice because they know what the opposite feels like, while at times they might know what it really means to be bad.

Books that I think that are obviously the result of some mental illness (as some or struggle (as some others mentioned), are:
-VALIS by PKD
- Heart of Darkness by Conrad
- Gormenghast by Peake
- The Trial by Kafka
- HP Lovecraft's works
- EA Poe's works
- Anything by Hesse
...