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ON BEING ECCENTRIC
MARCH 22, 1996
TRANSCRIPT
David Gergen, editor-at-large of "U.S. News & World Report," engages David Weeks, a clinical neuro-psychologist and co-author of Eccentrics: A Study of Sanity and Strangeness.
DAVID GERGEN, U.S. News & World Report: David, anybody who's been to San Francisco, has looked at Telegraph Hill, remembers Coyt Tower. I think very few people know the story behind that. And yet's it's a very important part of your book on eccentrics.
DAVID WEEKS, Author, Eccentrics: Yes. Lily Hitchcock Coyt was, I guess, you could call her a serial firefighter chaser, and she was much devoted to the firemen, and she went out in a Knickerbocker Engine Company No. 5 for something like the better part of 30 years at most of their fires, and she'd treat them all to a big meal at a famous restaurant after the fire was, was sufficiently put out.
DAVID GERGEN: Right.
DAVID WEEKS: And they erected that on her behalf. They said it actually looks like a fire hat.
DAVID GERGEN: Or a fire nozzle.
DAVID WEEKS: Yeah. A fire nozzle.
DAVID GERGEN: One wasn't quite sure, but she was--she was very devoted to--when she was married, her husband tried to dissuade her from it.
DAVID WEEKS: And her father before that.
DAVID GERGEN: And her father before that. Her husband took her up to Napa Valley to live, and I gather that's when she met Robert Louis Stevenson. He was writing the Silverado Book--
DAVID WEEKS: Yes, indeed.
DAVID GERGEN: And--
DAVID WEEKS: And his wife, Fannie, who was a good model for her, because they're both liberated women far ahead of their time, and like many modern-day eccentric women, they were very assertive, far more assertive, so whenever they objected to anything that was coming down from the men, they'd just get their Six-Shooters out and blow holes in the ceiling.
DAVID GERGEN: (laughing) Don't encourage that anymore than you have to.
DAVID WEEKS: No.
DAVID GERGEN: What I found interesting about your book was not only fun, of course, but the fact that you studied about a thousand eccentrics, mostly in Great Britain and here in the United States, and, and then tried to determine what characteristics they had. It was interesting what characteristics you came up with.
DAVID WEEKS: Yes. They're permanently non-conforming from a very early age, and there's a great overlap between eccentric children and gifted children. They develop differently, though. The eccentrics become very, very creative but they're motivated primarily by curiosity. They have extreme degrees of curiosity, and they're very independent-minded. Their other motivation is fairly idealistic. They want to make the world a better place, and they want to make other people happy. They have these happy obsessive preoccupations, and a wonderful, unusual sense of humor, and this gives them a significant meaning in life. And they are far healthier than most people because of that. They have very low stress. They're not worried about conforming to the rest of society, low stress, high happiness equates with psychological health. They use their solitude very constructively, and physical health, because of that. They only visit their doctors perhaps once every eight or nine years, which is about twenty times less than most of us do.
DAVID GERGEN: You essentially come to the conclusion that eccentrics, people who are non- conforming, are healthy, and they're joyful, and it's your argument that essentially creatively and eccentricity and good health go together.
DAVID WEEKS: Definitely. I think there has been probably a mistaken notion, a kind of myth, about the influence of mental illness on creativity. From what I've seen in my clinical practice, severe mental illness actually interferes with creativity, and the people who are creative are creative, despite having those mental illnesses, but if you look at their ongoing personality, what they've been like from a very early age, as early as seven or eight, you find that the very--they're struggling to produce works of arts or their scientific ideas.
DAVID GERGEN: Right.
DAVID WEEKS: And that gives them this great happiness, because it's almost--there's a mystical element to it, there's a humorous element to it, and it's connected in the sense that humor and originality are--both have a similar source, and that source is because it's the clash of incongruous ideas makes people laugh, it also creates wonderful ideas.
DAVID GERGEN: Well, I'm interested in that because there's Kay Jamieson here in the United States, who is highly respected, Johns Hopkins, in the Department of Psychiatry, has written and her books have been well received, and her other writings in "Scientific American" and elsewhere, about manic depression and how that is linked and other mental disorders and mental moods that do not suggest mental health, how they've been linked to creativity, and for example, she writes about Walt Whitman or Edgar Allen Poe. I think most people think Poe was, was--had mental disorders--or Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Georgia O'Keefe, Vincent Van Gogh, whom you write about as an eccentric and describe as being healthier, Ann Sexton, Cole Porter of Virginia Wolf, and, of course, the list is longer. There is a--there is a school that she is the leading thinker of that argues, in fact, it's mental disorder and manic depression which, which leads to creativity.
DAVID WEEKS: There's an alternative school from the social sciences, though. They don't have an ax to grind about psychiatric disorder, and they've actually found that the evidence is neither way, that it's very neutral, and I think myself from my studies that they ongoing creativity of the eccentric is far more enduring and permanent and they draw from their inner wealth of experience, and actually it's the people who are eccentric who have the most vivid dreams who turn out to be the most original thinkers, and they're the only people in the world that I know of who have both vivid dreams at night, when they're asleep, and also a vivid visual imagination by day, much like Albert Einstein, whose--
DAVID GERGEN: Right.
DAVID WEEKS: --initial ideas about relativity were really precipitated by this unique vision of someone walking forward while a train is moving forward. And he took it from there.
DAVID GERGEN: Is it possible that people could be both eccentric and suffer from manic depression at the same time?
DAVID WEEKS: Oh, yes. It doesn't make you immune from it.
DAVID GERGEN: So it's impossible to--
DAVID WEEKS: Yes. I mean, the element of mania actually is that it gives a person a feeling of false elatedness, but I mean, really, they become so elated that they wear themselves out very quickly. They burn out and become depressed, and when they're depressed, they can do practically nothing. But I would say that it's the personality that underlies that. I think the two things are different. Personality is a different thing than mental illness.
DAVID GERGEN: One's a personality trait. The other is a mental disorder.
DAVID WEEKS: That's right.
DAVID GERGEN: Her argument, Jamieson's argument is it's the mental disorder that helps to produce the vision say of William Blake's visions came from mental disorders more than they did from personality traits. He certainly wasn't, you know--
DAVID WEEKS: Yeah
DAVID GERGEN: --not a political person.
DAVID WEEKS: Creative people have very weird, very vivid dreams which they're able to then apply the very next day into their works of art. I think there is something to be said for the idea that people have a very unusual notion about the idea that they--they say that there's a gray area between--
DAVID GERGEN: Right.
DAVID WEEKS: --eccentricity and mental illness. Actually, they're two different, entirely different things. One has to do with personality. Mental illness is actually having terrible symptoms, a person, and I think, you know, I agree with Rosalyn Carter, who says that the biggest problem of mental illness is ignorance, the social stigma that attaches to it.
DAVID GERGEN: Right.
DAVID WEEKS: When a person has marked delusions and hallucinations, when they're seeing things that aren't there and hearing voices, they can't really function that well. And that's why doctors and my colleagues are so anxious to actually give them treatment. You know, they don't want to clip these creative people's wings, but they do want to make them better, to help them.
DAVID GERGEN: I can't help asking you about Salvador Dali and Camembert cheese. Is it true that Salvador Dali ate lots and lots of ripe Camembert cheese so he would dream more vividly and dream more weirdly and that from his dreams, he could paint more?
DAVID WEEKS: That's absolutely true.
DAVID GERGEN: That's true.
DAVID WEEKS: And other modern day eccentrics have actually modeled themselves on that behavior and done exactly that, themselves.
DAVID GERGEN: Finally, I have to ask you because you've talked about some great artists who've been eccentrics but there was another one, William the Great McGongagle, is that his name?
DAVID WEEKS: Yes, indeed.
DAVID GERGEN: Who you called the worst versifier that the English language has ever produced. I love the story about his performance in Macbeth.
DAVID WEEKS: Yes.
DAVID GERGEN: And his eccentricity.
DAVID WEEKS: Well, he was actually improvising extra--he added to Shakespeare at the end of it, and he just kept on going. He was getting a bit of applause, enthusiasm from the audience.
DAVID GERGEN: He bribed his way into the theater too.
DAVID WEEKS: Yes.
DAVID GERGEN: To play Macbeth?
DAVID WEEKS: Oh, definitely. In numerous theaters, and this particular night, he just kept going and he was run through by McDuff, but he didn't want to expire, so he just jumped back up again and started reciting some of his own poetry and finally after oh, 15 minutes of this wild behavior, McDuff actually floored him with a kick in the butt, and that was that, that night.
DAVID GERGEN: So we ought to welcome eccentrics. If I might close with a quote you have from Thoreau that I think captures it so well, "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears."
DAVID WEEKS: I'd agree to that wholeheartedly.
DAVID GERGEN: Thank you very much.
DAVID WEEKS: Thank you.
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