The crazy thing about mental illness is that it is so often coupled with absolute and incredible genius.

Phil Spector was found guilty of second-degree murder this week. It was a horrible crime, though not inconceivable to some that Spector could have pulled the trigger that killed Lana Clarkson six years ago. It seems that there was not a lack of evidence that Spector was one troubled individual.

RJ Eskow writes about the verdict in the Huffington Post as the death of “madness chic”. It seems that the man whose first hit came from an engraving on his father’s grave had many demons. Family history, perhaps: Spector’s father got things off to a start by committing suicide. The stories pouring out during the trials and before were often–as Eskow notes–the stuff that celebrity insanity is made of.

But still, I doubt that “madness chic” will ever end. When I heard Spector’s name in the news again, the first thing I did was to dig up a Ronettes album. Guilty or not, Spector produced a sound that at its best is simply sublime. After all, I want a “Marshmallow World” when winter comes around. I want to believe in a wall of sound that is as great in the real world as the space it creates in my imagination.

Mental illness besides, it is hard to reconcile these things, the beauty and the terror. I do not know how we make sense of a world that seems damned to have both, and often so intricately entwined. Abusive relationships thrive on this sort of cognitive dissonance. So do all sorts of scams. We so sincerely want to believe that we live in the best of all possible worlds. We want there to be a rhyme and reason for all the bad things that happen to people. Somehow, there are no victims, only people who deserve it–if not in this life, then as punishment from a past life. How in our world could a nice guy hurt his wife unless she provoked him? How could a person who produces an eternal piece of splendor also destroy another person without justification? It simply doesn’t make sense, and we will defend the appearance beyond the facts for as long as we possibly can.

Come to find out, there is a term for this. “Magical thinking” (see Psychology Today’s article by Matthew Hutson on this in the Mar/Apr 2008 issue) may well be our only hope. It turns out that at least to some extent, we need to believe in our good world simply to survive in it. But what then do we make of the incongruities when they slap us in the face?

We are shocked. We do not want to believe. We pray the facts are not true. And then, we grieve.

We seek resolution. In the end, life is nothing if not a paradox. In the world of creativity, then, believing in a sort of “madness chic” can make the bad-behind-the-scenes stuff all okay. Rather than pushing the starving artist and the eccentric musician to the madhouse, they go to detox, and reserve their place in our society. It lets us have our beautiful-beyond-belief, never-ending cake, and the devastation of watching as the artist eats at it himself, and with very bad manners.

The concept itself of “genius” was not celebrated before the age of Romanticism. In the Romantic view of genius, inspiration is not for everyone. Certain people have a gift above and beyond the previous conception of talent acquired through diligent practice. Gifted programs in schools now thrive on this notion of thinking “outside the box,” honoring the spirit of schoolchildren who do not sit quietly and learn, but who are bored and doodling strange pictures and tapping the other students because the classroom is insufficient for their advanced minds.

Pushing the boundaries is good, necessary, and hardly new: our world would have long ago become stagnant without it. In the realm of artistic expression, we cherish this creation of something new from nothing. It is the essence of magic, and it feeds our souls. Pushed to an extreme, in a sort of iconic worship of the creator, we may encourage narcissism. We may sometimes leave room for self-justification of criminality in some people–for some very real people, whose impulses good and bad remain all too human. Ah! but are these creators not greater than ourselves to some extent? Are they not immortal, if by the eternal existence of their creations? We do believe in these gods, if in human form. Perhaps genius trumps mental illness, de-stigmatizes it, at least on some level. At least, until something terrible happens.

In the real world, mental illness truly can be a sort of hell. As much as those who do not live with it on a daily basis may accept the illness of a creative genius, we who love a person with mental illness often grasp onto the rose that grows so improbably from the ashes in this hell. The beauty is sometimes the one thing that reminds us of our love. But it is never the whole story.