Did You Dream Last Night? Exploring the Shadows of Genius and Fragility

You want to upset someone who works in what is described as a creative profession, talk about the relationship between genius and madness. There are historic reasons for this. First, madness is not a sitting target. Homosexuality was part of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which meant it was seen as a mental disease for decades. And someone who may be seen as a genius at one time may fall out of favour in another age. Here’s one example: John Singer Sargent was born in 1856, Vincent van Gogh in 1853. Sargent could hardly keep up with the demand for his work; van Gogh couldn’t sell more than a couple of paintings. It is now said that van Gogh might have been suffering from xanthopsia, which made him see so many glorious yellows. Doubt has been cast over the story of his suicide. Who would you call a genius? Who would you call a madman?

And yet, and yet. So many poets have committed suicide: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Hart Crane, Paul Celan, Randall Jarrell, Berryman, Mayakovsky… Perhaps it is merely a question of how long you can keep digging deep and excavating your inner self to turn into words before you arrive at a place where you have gone too far. Perhaps it is about the constant balancing act between nudity and the dresscapades of words. Perhaps it is about hope, the hope that one will cure oneself with words, and about the despair of discovering that the dark dolphin undertow is still there the next morning. Or perhaps it is also about the neural chemistry of X, which will allow him to play with world-building but will plunge Y into despair.

This is not to say that words do not have great curative power. They do. Music, art, and all these can affect our moods. But the making of those words may be a different thing altogether. ‘I am not happy when I am painting,’ the artist Mehlli Gobhai would say. ‘I am just a lot less unhappy.’

After my novel, Em and the Big Hoom came out, many people would ask me whether the writing of it had helped me achieve catharsis. This ignored the actual meaning of catharsis, which they, as the audience, were supposed to experience. What they meant was: Are you feeling any better now? I didn’t know how to answer that. Perhaps this is my answer.

To write is to defy silence and simultaneously to define silence.

To write is to extend to an unknown reader an invitation to a conversation, a static and disjunctive conversation, but a conversation nonetheless.

To write is therefore also an act of hope because it intuits the existence of the reader/listener, it dreams of multiple and varied readings/listenings.

To write is an act of resistance against the epidemic of unhearing; to write is also to add to the cacophony that is one of the causes of that epidemic.

To write is a form of self-expression. In that, it is a privilege when it should be a right. When we have the privilege, we forget it is a right. When we do not have the right because we lack the privileges that allow us to access our rights, we see it as central to the experience of being fully human.

To write is to heal. I believe in the therapeutic power of self-expression—whether the chosen medium is words or forms or movement or the artisanal experience. But I also believe that there is something special about words. I believe that words trapped inside us congeal and rot. They turn toxic, and they render us unable to utter words that might heal others, words that might build strong and lasting bonds.

To read is seen as passive when compared with writing. To read is to consume that which has been constructed for consumption. To read, therefore, is the end of the chain of words that began when neurons fired across chemical soup in someone else’s brain.

In all this, we forget that if there is no reading, then writing remains black smears on white. The reader makes the writer into a writer. Otherwise, the writer is a solipsist.

But reading is active too because it now starts other brain cells firing in other heads, and other histories and other vocabularies and other language experiences come into play, and new meanings are excavated in old words. To read, for me, is also active. I find myself in conversation with the characters. I hear myself inside my head, admonishing them (‘No, no, don’t open that door.’) or reminding them (‘He told you about this in the arboretum, remember?’) There are times when I cannot read unless I am pacing about and there are times when my body language gets so expressive that my sister will say something like, ‘It’s only a book, remember?’

To read is to experience another life, and this experience is at its most intense in poetry, at its most expansive in fiction. To read was therefore looked at with suspicion in many middle-class families. It was as if one were mounting a critique of the life one had on offer by seeking to immerse oneself in another life. My mother, who suffered from bipolar disorder, was often told that she had brought it upon herself by too much reading. My sister and I were often told that we might turn out like her if we made the mistake of reading too much. Through my childhood, reading ‘storybooks’ was held to be slightly unhealthy; ‘good children’ played outside, not imaginary inventive games, but those with rules and regulations that had been handed down by use. Or they addressed themselves to their school texts. Reading fiction seemed to be a subversive activity.

Things have changed remarkably in the middle class. New research showed that reading was good for children. Parents now want their children to read. They still want them to read the right kind of books, but they want their children to read. Not because they want their children to develop empathy and see the world through multiple eyes, but because the act of reading is now seen as a development strategy for ambitious parents.

So when my sister says, ‘It’s only a book’, she is right.

It is indeed only a book.

It is.

But it is also much more than that. It is a deep encounter with another human mind. When I wrote that line, I realised I had fallen prey to one of the myths that plagues writing: that the individual writer is a lonely genius whose work springs fully-formed from a unitary mind. I should very much like this to be true. I should very much like to claim this as my own experience. But I know this to be false. Most people skip the ‘Acknowledgements’ section of a book unless they expect to figure there. But this section only represents the tip of the iceberg of human interdependence that makes a writer’s voice audible. To do justice to that iceberg would make that section run to the size of another book.

But then no reader is a lone figure either. The protagonist of this act is also a composite, and his reading is interpellated by other voices, other viewings.

Two communities intersect in every act of reading, and the questions that arise from this act are by their nature intersectional. Though it must also be said here that only a fool would try and talk about the conversations two communities, caught in a single act, might have, and so I shall leave it here.

To write is to perform a private act (thinking) in public (publishing), but it is also to perform a public act in private first. To write is to call into existence a reader. The perfect reader is so chimerical that not even the most demanding writer can anatomise her. If there were a reader who gets every code, recognises every quote, understands every allusion, the writer would feel exposed. The reader who gets none of this leaves the writer alienated. Best to leave the reader as amorphous and to allow oneself the pleasure of being surprised.

All this to say, yes, the writer wants to be read, expects to be read. Yes, the writer wants to start a conversation in your head. But can the writer ever imagine what that conversation is going to be like? I think of the mind-in-reading as one half of a Velcro strip, the one with the tiny hooks. Hen words pass by, some have the right coarse surfaces and stick. Others have no purchase and slip into the void. Perhaps they are indeed stored somewhere in the subconscious, as we are often being told; perhaps they form the compost of ideation. In any case, speaking for myself, I reckon that I remember about one per cent of what I read. Sometimes a book will leave only a trace memory, sometimes a memorable line, sometimes a character.

But in that it has the shaping of you. This article has if you have read it this far. You are a being shaped by words. That really means your mind, but your body will not be far behind. You should really be careful what you read.

Did you dream last night? Well, then, you were scriptwriter and performer and set designer and editor all in one. This then is the link between creativity and mental health. They are so intertwined, and we are so concerned with the morbid states of the mind and the relationship those have that we forget that creativity is part of the very fabric of life.

(Views expressed are personal)

Jerry Pinto is at work on his next novel.

This article appeared in the October 11, 2025, issue of Outlook Magazine, titled "I Have A Lot Left Inside" as "Did You Dream Last Night?"