Suicide.1

Whenever someone commits suicide and an inquest is held, it is common for a verdict to be recorded in terms such as 'death whilst the balance of mind was disturbed'. So suicidal insanity may be said to indicate a lack of balance in the mind, and presumably sanity involves the opposite balance, so that a balanced mind is a sane mind.

If this is correct, it may be worthwhile to point out that art seems to call for imbalance, and in this context is immediately allied against Life, with the risk of 'premature' death significantly elevated. In this sense a balanced mind is content in itself, at rest, unproductive. A mind in imbalance seek to right itself, to escape the pain that such an awkward posture is likely to provoke, and this process has often led to creativity and to what we have decided to call artistic expression. This is what produce remarks such as that all art proceeds from neurosis.

Many artists create whilst mad, then spent, drained of these dangerous impulses, return to the sane world of balance and dinner parties and mundane chores and banal detach to the drear and grey of everyday life. The 'unsuccessful' artist may get trapped on the other side of the mirror, be unable to get back and feel obliged to disappear into the invisible realm, to choose by choosing death over life.

One way of thinking about the balance of mind is to acknowledge that human life is a drama between an invisible interior mindscape and a visible, more measurable, exterior frame of reference that we have come to call the real world. Two sides of a coin: what happens inside our heads and what happens 'out there' in the real world. Art then may be said to be about bringing the interior world into the exterior world in some concrete if not always permanent form. An artist is by this definition someone who dwells, out of balance, in the interior world of his own mind and as he lives in the real world is forced to reconcile the differences of these various of experience in some way.

To ensure you live forever, die a magnificent manner.

^^ hara-kiri