This is nonsense. Recently a number of painters have been
"explained" by the suggestion that they suffered from this,
that, or the other impairment of vision. But whatever the
neurological details of a painter's vision, the painting is on
the canvas. I have written on the ways in which commodity
production in general and capitalist commodity production
in particular separates motive and act, the Reality of an
act being determined not by the act itself (the making of
a sandwich) but by whether or not in the future someone
purchases the sandwich, the meaning of that purchase in
turn (for the seller) depending on the power of exchange
*in the future* of the price of the sandwich -- the "meaning"
of that making of the sandwich being the proportion of the
maker's rent that it pays.

The relevance of this little excursion into historical materialism
is that I suffer, severely at times, from clinical depression --
and the severe anxiety that accompanies (or at times
constitutes) depression gives special sharpness to one's
awareness of an abstract future. But men and women who
do *not* suffer from depression have similar or identical
analyses. It neither adds to nor subtracts from the correctness
of the argument that, in my case, it may have had its origins
in my mental illness.

                And not to lose life for bad temper.
                                (Canto 98 / pg. 713)

Bad temper can certainly accompany either unipolar or bipolar
affective disorder -- but the reader is wasting her/his time trying
to decide whether Pound wrote that line because his mental
illness occasioned outbursts of temper.

Carrol Cox

Ahsan Ali wrote:

> People,
>  read this:
> "On the other hand, it is just as clear that much of his work was the
> result of mental illness, and that it is often difficult to distinguish
> what was and what was not."
> at
>   http://www.geocities.com/~bblair/1030_f.htm
>
> Would you agree?
>
> Ahsan