An ever-increasing segment of the population is becoming aware of and interested in the muse-based or genius-based model of creativity. More and more people are discovering the idea that creativity can rightly and fruitfully be viewed as an external or independent force that influences and works through a person in the manner of the classical muse, that divine spirit — or, for the ancient Greeks, the several divine spirits — whose function is to whisper inspiration directly into the human mind and soul.

And this all leads, eventually, to a crucial question: What exactly are we talking about? Is it more correct to say that creativity really is an independent and autonomous force, or that it can be viewed as such?

In short, is the muse real?

A brief review

Before addressing the question directly, let’s have a brief review of just how we got to this point.

The muse-view received a major publicity boost last year when Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the galactic best-seller Eat, Pray, Love — which is right now receiving a major publicity boost of its own, thanks to the release of the movie adaptation starring Julia Roberts as Gilbert — gave a wildly popular TED talk in which she explained this ancient view of human creativity and commended it to our collective attention as a viable alternative to the modern tendency, born of historical-cultural transformations flowing out of the Renaissance and Enlightenment eras, to view genius as a quality that certain extraordinary people possess. In the ancient view, she reminded us, the word “genius” referred to an invisible and independent spirit that gave artists and thinkers their inspiration. Instead of being a genius, an artist or thinker had a genius. The distinction is crucial.

Gilbert’s talk went viral and is (obviously) still being talked about today. Umpteen bloggers responded with enthusiastic links and comments. Every week sees one or more mentions of muse-ish creativity cropping up in the blogosphere and elsewhere. Excitement is obviously high. People continue to express new delight at being introduced to the notion that they can relate to their creativity as an indepenent force with which they work in collaboration. I launched Demon Muse seven months ago and have seen interest in it catapult ever upward with each passing week. This is all part of a cresting or still-swelling wave that I talked briefly about in my article for Talent Development Resources, “Perspiration Meets Inspiration or, The Return of the Muse.”

So that’s how we arrived at this this situation where the question of the muse’s ontological status is a pressing one. To repeat: What exactly are we talking about when we talk about the muse, the daimon, the genius? Are we using such terminology as a metaphor for the unconscious mind? Or are we referring to something that’s “really real,” actually external and self-existent?

If we say it’s a nothing more than a metaphor for the unconscious mind, then we’re just opening another can of worms and skirting the real question, because hardly any of us give any real thought to what we mean by “the unconscious.” We have fooled ourselves into thinking we know what that word refers to, simply because we have a word for it.

If we say the muse is objectively real, then we end up against the age-old and very real problem of establishing how we could truly know such a thing, and could prove definitively that such knowing isn’t just a subjective fantasy or delusion.

This demands some serious, precise, and level-headed reflection. Without presuming to wrap what follows into a necessarily codified exposition with a straight line of thought cutting through it, here are several considerations from a variety of thinkers and writers whose observations and ideas, taken piecemeal or collectively, may reward your rumination. Consider it a meandering route through a landscape marked by various signposts, all of which speak in one way or another about a common theme. At the end, I’ll present my own answer to the question — which, as you’ll see, may well stand as an anti-answer.

“The Enlightenment changed the senses”

The muse/daimon/genius is of course deeply associated with the sense of hearing — whether outer, as in a voice perceived by the physical ear, or inner, as in a voice perceived within a person’s mind or soul. Hold that thought as you consider the following.

In his highly regarded 2000 study Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment, Princeton religion scholar Leigh Schmidt examined the perceptual changes that were wrought upon the human psyche by the well-known and much-discussed program of disenchantment that was effected by the American enlightenment in the 18th century.

The Princeton Weekly Bulletin summarized Schmidt’s findings in researching his book:

Schmidt found that hearing has long been marked as a spiritual and emotional sense. However, experiences like hearing heavenly or demonic voices came under particular attack during the Enlightenment, a philosophical movement of the 18th century marked by a rejection of traditional social, religious and political ideas, and the embracing of rationalism instead. To men like Thomas Jefferson and Ethan Allen, reason was the only trustworthy oracle.

The thinkers of the Enlightenment were threatened by the unstable power that immediate revelation possessed, especially when combined with the unruly passions and proclamations of the devout. In order to establish a civil society governed by reason and not religious authorities, it was necessary for the natural philosophers to place sharp limits on divine speech.

In many ways, the campaign succeeded. Schmidt traces the ascendancy of sight and the fall of hearing as a reliable source of information, a process that produced phrases like “seeing is believing.” Hearing voices increasingly became associated with trickery or insanity.

– “Book explores hearing as a spiritual sense,” Princeton Weekly Bulletin 90.8 (Nov. 6, 2000)

Note well that Schmidt’s point wasn’t that the Enlightenment actually contained those “disruptive” voices, but instead that the voices continued to break through in ways that eluded, and that continue to elude, the new mainstream cultural filters built upon this reeducation of the ear. “What I wanted to do,” he told Princeton Weekly Bulletin, “is take seriously the myth that the Enlightenment destroyed the enchantment of the divine world but also to critique it. We can’t keep saying we live in a world in which the angels, prophets and oracles are dead quiet when one of the fastest growing religious movements is Pentecostalism. In that movement, people speak in tongues and receive special gifts to interpret the Spirit’s utterances. God speaks among them as a regular part of worship.”

Here’s a key passage from the introduction to his book itself, where Schmidt explains in compressed detail the motivation and implications of the Enlightenment project’s focus on hearing:

The Enlightenment changed the senses. Like any regimen of perception, it dulled and sharpened simultaneously. The honing was perhaps most apparent: it took, after all, a well-trained ear to know what to listen for through the stethescope, to diagnose pulmonary or respiratory disease from the subtly different sounds heard through this resonant device. In the advancing Baconian, Lockean, and Common-Sense enterprises, the external senses were to be constantly improved, corrected, and extended; the “good management” of them, the steady cultivation of their precision and delicacy, was a crucial part of establishing and preserving the right habits of mind. Hearing shared keenly in that reeducation of perception.

. . . . Natural philosophers dreamed as well of an exquisite purification of listening — the end of the credulous acceptance of all the hearsay about the miraculous, the marvelous, the revelatory. This, then, is the dulling: the quieting of all those heavenly and demonic voices by which “superstition” had for so long impeded the advancement of knowledge. Shamefully, the disease had often infected the learned themselves: witness Socrates, who followed the voice of a guiding spirit of daemon; or Augustine, whose conversion was sparked when he took a child’s singsong utterance as a divine command to open the Bible and read it; or even Edward Herbert, deistic progenitor, who heard a clear heavenly prompt to publish his streamlined credo. To spare themselves such embarrassments and to tame the endless effusions of religious enthusiasm, enlightened literati — whether Christian Baconians or freethinking anticlericalists — cultivated a markedly new acoustics.

– Hearing Things (2000)

In case you missed it, a clear implication of Schmidt’s research is that “hearing things” — divine voices and such — is normal in the overall scheme of human history (at least as gauged by the psychology and experience of historical Americans). The fact that it’s currently booted out of respectability in American public life is the result of a clear cultural-political agenda on the part of those who did the booting, not an inherent factor in the experience itself.

So how does this relate to the question of the muse’s reality or unreality? Up next: Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, and Aleister Crowley, via Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger.

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART TWO on MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2010

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Image credit: Angel of Fate used under Creative Commons from h.koppdelaney

Related posts:

1. Patience, the Muse, and Real Life
2. The Muse in the News
3. Ignorance, Faith, and the Discipline of the Demon Muse, Part 1

One of the posts that consistently draws the most traffic here at Demon Muse is “A Brief History of the Daimon and the Genius.” This confirms what I already knew when I launched this project: that interest in the subject of the “inner other” — the sensed presence of another mind, an autonomous/independent force that each of us carries in his or her psyche, and that came to be known as “the unconscious” with the advent of psychoanalytic theory in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — is running high these days, and that this is leading to an increased interest in the deep cultural history of the subject.

This runs entirely in tandem with the wider phenomenon of a steadily increasing interest among the mainstream of consumer-technological society in matters related to consciousness, reality, metaphysics, and so on. In a recent post at my other blog, The Teeming Brain, I described the whole thing as follows:

[In the 1960s] it seemed as if the collective cranium of Western and global civilization was primed to erupt in a psychedelic expansion into new realms of thought, experience, and being that would inevitably lead to new patterns of social, political, religious, and cultural arrangement.

. . . . Now fast forward to the first decade of the 21st century, and what do we find? As in the sixties, everything seems apocalyptic. Everything seems poised to melt away and reveal an ugly truth lurking beneath the facade of what we have collectively agreed to call a normal way of life. For Americans especially, what primed us for this was the Y2K non-event. Then 9/11 deflowered us. After that, successive waves of tentative financial calamity, followed by our current and ongoing full-blown financial-economic collapse, erased our (illusionary) innocence entirely. Additionally, fears about serious and calamitous climate change have made significant attitudinal contributions, along with other ecological portents, fears about peak oil and 2012, and the first-ever wide-open recognition, by pretty much the entire public at large, of the entrenched and seemingly incurable corruption of our most prominent political and business institutions, as illustrated most recently by the collusion of BP and the U.S. federal government in creating a total fustercluck in the Gulf of Mexico.

And running neck in neck with this — again as in the 60s — we’re seeing a concomitant explosion of new discourse, expressed in books (including those by the likes of, e.g., Anthony Peake and Deborah Wells), films, music, and more, that appears to pick right back up where the original consciousness revolution left off. This formerly esoteric and marginal realm of investigation and experience, which deals with a true upending of conventional notions about selfhood, identity, time, space, and reality, presently appears to be snowballing into a major cultural force with transformative and mainstream-invading potential.

– Matt Cardin, “The 1960s Redux: In our new age of apocalypse, is the consciousness revolution back on?” The Teeming Brain, August 18, 2010

In light of all this, when I sat down to write this week’s Demon Muse post, I realized it would be valuable and worthwhile to say more about the daimon, because this concept, or tropes and themes closely akin to it, lurks behind and figures into most if not all aspects of this ongoing cultural metamorphosis, which in turn is deeply linked to our shared focus here on recognizing the reality of, and then cultivating a harmonious relationship with, your muse/daimon/genius/unconscious mind in order to empower your creative work with an organic and deeply meaningful sense of inspiration and direction.

(Need examples of the way the daimon is involved in our current cultural fermentation of consciousness exploration?

• Read Victoria Nelson’s The Secret Life of Puppets with its examination of the way the repressed Platonic-mystical impulse of Western civilization has crept back into cultural discourse over the centuries through popular entertainments about monsters, demons, consciousness expansion, virtual worlds, etc. Nelson also wrote On Writer’s Block, one of the books that I quote most frequently here at Demon Muse, since it offers one of the best explorations of creativity as an inner collaboration between you and your unconscious muse.
• Read Daniel Pinchbeck’s 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, in which a successful and respected American journalist (with, yes, a venerable pedigree and lifelong steeping in countercultural philosophy) claims to have entered a kind of metaphysical-philosophical funhouse while studying the 2012 meme, and to have received an apparently “transmitted” prophecy from an apparent “higher intelligence” that was/is none other than the Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl himself.
• Read Tony Peake’s Is There Life After Death? and, most pointedly, The Daemon: A Guide to Your Extraordinary Secret Self, both of which advance a scientifically-based theory of subjective immortality erected on the notion that each of us is living a virtual replay of a life that we’ve already lived, as experienced within a metamind that he terms “the daemon,” drawing the term from the ancient Greeks.
• Consider the idea of selves projected into dream worlds, or psyches projected into other bodies, or other, similar scenarios, as presented by the likes of massively popular mainstream entertainments like The Matrix, Avatar,  and Inception, in an entertainment culture wave that appears to be doing nothing but swelling.

Additional examples are ubiquitous.)

Interest in the subject of the “inner other” — the sensed presence of another mind, an autonomous force that each of us carries in his or her psyche, and that came to be known as “the unconscious” with the advent of psychoanalytic theory in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — is running high these days.

What follows is the complete text of one key section of my essay/article “Icons of Supernatural Horror: A Brief History of the Angel and the Demon,” which appears in my recently published horror fiction-and-nonfiction collection Dark Awakenings. The same article was published in shorter form in the 2006 reference work Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares. One of the passages that was considerably foreshortened there was this one, which offers a consideration of the crucial role that daimons played in the cultural history of the ancient Greeks, and also, therefore, in the Hellenistic and Roman civilizations that drew upon their legacy — and from which we today inherit, through a direct and potent line of cultural descent, a host of deeply formative notions of self and society.

The thing is, some aspects of this influence show up overtly, in the explicit architecture of our shared assumptions and our social, political, economic, and psychological institutions. Others are more subtle, less obvious, perhaps even subliminal — and therefore all the more potentially subversive.

I leave it up to you to ferret out which are which as you imbibe the following information from a living stream in our contemporary and collective religious-spiritual-psychological-metaphysical landscape. I also leave it up to you intuit how and whether your creative process is enhanced or affected when informed by these things.

The Greeks and their daimones

Although most reasonably educated moderns are familiar with the Olympian gods and goddesses of classical Greek mythology, decidedly fewer are aware that long before the Greeks developed their beliefs about the humanlike gods of Olympus, they believed in vague and mysterious spirits called daimones that exerted a ubiquitous influence over people and events.  Using the alternative form “daemon” to refer to these spirits, E.R. Dodds writes in his classic The Greeks and the Irrational that the “daemonic, as distinct from the divine, has at all periods played a large part in Greek popular belief (and still does).” Indeed, as psychologist Stephen A. Diamond points out in Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and Creativity, while some classical scholars maintain that Greek writers such as Homer, Hesiod, and Plato did use daimon as a synonym for theos (god), others “point to a definite distinction between these terms.  The term ‘daimon’ referred to something indeterminate, invisible, incorporeal, amorphous, and unknown, whereas ‘theos’ was the personification of a god, such as Zeus or Apollo.”

If we are to believe classical scholar Reginald Barrow, modern ignorance of the daimons must be counted among the many ironies of history; Barrow argues provocatively that belief in them was so powerful, important, and prevalent that it actually formed a kind of underground mainstream in ancient Greek religion:

Because the daemons have left few memorials of themselves in architecture and literature, their importance tends to be overlooked. . . . They are omnipresent and all-powerful, they are embedded deep in the religious memories of the peoples, for they go back to days long before the days of Greek philosophy and religion. The cults of the Greek states, recognised and officially sanctioned, were only one-tenth of the iceberg; the rest, the submerged nine-tenths, were the daemons (quoted in Diamond).

Like so many religious beliefs throughout history, the idea of the daimones took many different and sometimes contradictory forms.  In the beginning they were conceived as abstract forces in the neuter gender.  Hesiod and others described them as “invisible and wrapped in mist” (Diamond).  Much farther back, Mycenaean and Minoan daimons, in a period ranging from 1100 to 3000 B.C.E., were regarded as servants or attendants to deities and were pictured in the form of animal-human hybrids, much like their Egyptian and Mesopotamian analogs.  Barrow offers a concise summary of the evolution of beliefs about these daimons over half a millennium, and also, again, of their vaguely shadowy and underground nature as they lurked perpetually in the background of orthodox Greek religious thought:

[T]he histories of Greek religion or philosophy do not usually say much, if anything, about daemons.  Though the idea occurs as early as Homer, it plays little or no part in recognized cults; for it had no mythology of its own; rather it attached itself to existing beliefs.  In philosophy it lurks in the background from Thales, to whom “the universe is alive and full of daemons,” through Heraclitus and Xenophanes, to Plato and his pupil Xenocrates, who elaborated it in detail. . . . In Hesiod the daemons are the souls of heroes or past ages now kindly to men; in Aeschylus the dead become daemons; in Theognis and Menander the daemon is the guardian angel of the individual man and sometimes a family.

In their most ancient forms, the daimons were neither good nor evil, or rather were potentially both.  In Homer’s time (around the eighth century B.C.E.) people commonly believed that daimons caused all human ailments but at the same time also believed they could cure disease and give blessings such as health and happiness.  Several centuries later the Hellenistic Greeks developed the more concrete categories of eudaimones (good daimons) and kakodaimones (evil daimons).

Arguably the most famous description or definition of daimons and the daimonic comes from a “canonical” source: Plato’s Symposium, wherein Plato has the old wise woman Diotima describe the daimonic realm as a kind of bridge or intermediary between the human and divine worlds:

All that is daemonic lies between the mortal and the immortal.  Its functions are to interpret to men communications from the gods—commandments and favours from the gods in return for men’s attentions—and to convey prayers and offerings from men to the gods.  Being thus between men and gods the daemon fills up the gap and so acts as a link joining up the whole.  Through it as intermediary pass all forms of divination and sorcery.  God does not mix with man; the daemonic is the agency through which intercourse and converse take place between men and gods, whether in waking visions or in dreams.

It is also Plato who provides probably the most familiar example of specific daimonic influence when he writes of Socrates’ famous daimonion (the gender-neutral form of daimon, which is either male or female).  This has often been translated into English as the “sign” that Socrates claimed had visited him frequently since childhood in the form of an audible voice that warned him when he was about to commit an error.

Socrates conversing with a muse

Socrates’ experience of daimonic communication highlights what is in fact the most significant aspect of the matter:  The Greeks understood their daimons to have not only objective but also subjective existence.  That is, they believed the daimons were objectively real presences that made themselves known through their influence upon and within the human psyche.  This tension between the objective and subjective seems to have existed on a kind of continuum.  On the one hand, there were the more typically animistic conceptions of daimons, which associated them with particular places, natural occurrences, circumstances, or souls of the dead.  On the other hand were the more subtle, psychologically oriented conceptions that gained preeminence over time, and that regarded the daimons as inner influences upon human thoughts and emotions, and even as arbitrators, keepers, conductors, and emblems of individual character and destiny.

This second type of understanding can be seen in the fact that the characters in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, which were probably composed around the eighth century B.C.E. and represented an inherited oral tradition extending several centuries earlier, attributed many of the events of their lives — not only outer, physical events but also, and especially, inner psychological ones such as moods, emotions, sudden insights, and bursts of motivation to say or do something or to refrain from speaking or acting — to the influence of daimons.  Although Homer’s characters seemed to take this idea relatively lightly — “[W]e get the impression,” writes Dodds, “that they do not always mean it very seriously” — in the three centuries between Homer’s epics and Aeschylus’ Oresteia “the daemons seem to draw closer: they grow more persistent, more insidious, more sinister.”

By “sinister” Dodds may have meant not that the daimons came to be regarded as predominantly evil but that they became progressively more entangled with human interiority, and also progressively more mysterious and autonomous.  He calls attention to the fact that many Greek writers after Homer drew a connection between the daimons and “those irrational impulses which arise in a man against his will to tempt him,” and says that “behind [this] lies the old Homeric feeling that these things are not truly part of the self; since they are endowed with a life and energy of their own, and so can force a man, as it were from the outside, into conduct foreign to him.”

The twentieth century existential psychologist Rollo May, who resurrected the concept of the daimon and the daimonic for use in modern depth psychotherapy, gave definitive statement to this idea of strange internal influence in his masterwork, Love and Will:  “The daimonic is any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person.  Sex and eros, anger and rage, and the craving for power are examples.  The daimonic can be either creative or destructive and is normally both” (123).  Although May wrote about the daimonic in metaphorical terms, his description is still effective for giving an impression of what it must have felt like to the ancients when they found themselves thinking, feeling, saying, and doing things that were outside of their voluntary control.  Modern peoples are of course still quite familiar with this experience.  We can thus reasonably imagine that ancient peoples must have been all the more awed and disturbed when popular belief attributed these involuntary behaviors to the influence of the mysterious mediators of divine reality, especially since, in more dramatic cases of daimonic influence, the internal power might take control completely.  “When this power goes awry,” May wrote, “and one element usurps control over the total personality, we have ‘daimon possession,’ the traditional name through history for psychosis.”

It was Plato (again) who gave definitive voice to this newly developing view of the daimonic as primarily an inner force.  He closed his most famous work, the Republic, with the “myth of Er,” which teaches that prior to being born, each human being voluntarily chooses its own daimon, understood in this case to be a combination of guardian angel, spiritual double, and life pattern.  The daimon accompanies a person throughout his or her life and constantly recalls him or her to the pre-chosen plan.  It guides a person inevitably to evince a certain character, make certain choices, feel certain predilections, and encounter certain experiences, all in the service of fulfilling the fate chosen beforehand.

“The cults of the Greek states, recognised and officially sanctioned, were only one-tenth of the iceberg; the rest, the submerged nine-tenths, were the daemons.” – Classical scholar Reginald Barrow

Thus it is that the Greek word eudaimonia, which in later times came to mean “happiness” or “well being,” in its earliest sense literally meant “having a good daimon.”  A person with a good daimon was happy and blessed, while a person with a bad daimon was inevitably miserable.  The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus encapsulated this idea in a cryptic statement that has puzzled and fascinated scholars for the past twenty-five hundred years: Ethos anthropoi daimon.  The statement translates literally as “A man’s character is his daimon,” but nobody knows for certain what Heraclitus really meant to convey, although various translations and glosses have been offered, as listed by James Hillman in his modern guide to daimonic psychology, The Soul’s Code: “Man’s character is his Genius.  A man’s character is his guardian divinity.  A man’s character is his fate.  Character is fate.  A man’s character is the immortal and potentially divine portion of him,  Character for man is destiny.”

The bottom line is that it is impossible to overstress the prevalence and significance of beliefs about daimons to the ancient world, and especially to ancient popular understandings of human selfhood and its relation to the divine.  For Greek culture, including its underground tradition of daimonism, was destined to become the common coinage, as it were, of the entire ancient world.  When first Alexander and then the Romans succeeded in exporting all things Greek to the farthest corners of their respective empires, the resulting cultural matrix was rife with daimons in the Greek mold.  According to Dodds in Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety: Some Aspects of Religious Experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine, although the Symposium’s “precise definition of the vague terms ‘daemon’ and ‘daemonios’ was something of a novelty in Plato’s day,” by “the second century after Christ it was the expression of a truism.  Virtually everyone, pagan, Jewish, Christian or Gnostic, believed in the existence of these beings and in their function as mediators, whether he called them daemons or angels or aions or simply ‘spirits.’”

OVER TO YOU:

• Does the Greek concept of the daimon seem helpful to your own creative process?
• Do you agree that a culture-wide swell of interest in consciousness, creativity, and related subjects seems to be underway right now?
• How does it affect your experience not only of creative work, but of life in general, if you recognize the reality and significance of “the irrational” in your actual first-person experience of things?

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Image credits:

• Cosmic Eye used under Creative Commons from hkoppdelaney
• Socrates conversing with a muse — detail from Sarcophage des Muses (the Sarcophagus of the Muses), Musee du Louvre, Paris

Related posts:

1. Muse, Daimon, and Creativity Links for 7-22-10

In your life as a muse-driven writer, there’s a great deal of help and gratification, not to mention pure pleasure, to be gained from reading the accounts of other artists who have consciously experienced their creativity to some degree as an autonomous force, entity, or process. Equally valuable are statements of general creative principles that have been abstracted from such accounts. Learning the various ways in which writers have conceived, related to, and referred to their inner collaborators can go a long way toward helping you to clarify your relationship with your own muse or genius. And of course such statements often shade into speculations about the general meaning and purpose of human life, both individually and collectively — a subject that’s always worth considering.

You’ll find quotes to this effect scattered throughout the library of articles housed here at Demon Muse. Right now, to reinforce the point, here are a few more. By way of a disclaimer, please note that not all of the individuals quoted below make explicit mention of the muse, daimon, or genius. Some of them might well quibble with the use of such terminology. But all talk about the ins and outs, both practical and philosophical, of living and working with the realization that creativity comes to us as a seemingly autonomous force that demands an attitude not of control, but of relationship and respect.

1. Robert Louis Stevenson and his “Brownies,” a.k.a. his “Familiar” or “unseen collaborator”

[The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde] originally came to its author in a dream. Robert Louis Stevenson had always trusted to “brownies” — meaning his daydreams and nightmares. He felt that stories and characters were being channelled to him from elsewhere.

….Stevenson suffered ill-health all his life, and was being dosed with an experimental drug at the time when his “brownies” assailed him with the story of the good doctor and his evil other self.

–Ian Rankin on The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, guardian.co.uk, August 16, 2010

* * *

And for the Little People [who deliver the vivid dreams from which I write my stories], what shall I say they are but just my Brownies, God bless them! who do one-half my work for me while I am fast asleep, and in all human likelihood, do the rest for me as well, when I am awake and fondly suppose that I do it for myself. The part that is done while I am sleeping is the Brownies’ part beyond contention; but that which is done when I am up and about is by no means necessarily mine, since all goes to show the Brownies have a hand in it even then. Here is a doubt that much concerns my conscience. For myself — what I call I, my conscious ego, the denizen of the pineal gland unless he has changed his residence since Descartes, the man with the conscience and the variable bank-account, the man with the hat and the boots, and the privilege of voting and not carrying his candidate at the general elections — I am sometimes tempted to suppose he is no story-teller at all, but a creature as matter of fact as any cheesemonger or any cheese, and a realist bemired up to the ears in actuality; so that, by that account, the whole of my published fiction should be the single-handed product of some Brownie, some Familiar, some unseen collaborator, whom I keep locked in a back garret, while I get all the praise and he but a share (which I cannot prevent him getting) of the pudding. I am an excellent adviser, something like Moliere’s servant; I pull back and I cut down; and I dress the whole in the best words and sentences that I can find and make; I hold the pen, too; and I do the sitting at the table, which is about the worst of it; and when all is done, I make up the manuscript and pay for the registration; so that, on the whole, I have some claim to share, though not so largely as I do, in the profits of our common enterprise.

– Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Chapter on Dreams,” in Across the Plains (1892)

2. Don DeLillo on honoring a story’s inherent mandate and deepest meaning

So how, I wonder, getting down to it, does [DeLillo] usually go about collecting the materials for his fiction? “I’m always keeping random notes on scraps of paper,” he replies. “I always carry a pencil and a notebook. Coming on the train today I had an idea for a story I’m writing and jotted it down — on just a little scrap of paper. Then I clip these together. I’ll look at them in, say, three weeks’ time, and see what I’ve got. You know,” he adds defiantly, “I’ve never made an outline for any novel that I’ve written. Never.”

This is something of an artistic credo. DeLillo is at pains to suggest he is in no hurry with his work. The material must come to him. When it comes, he believes that “it has its own mandate”, and cannot, he says, be wrenched into a narrative at odds with its deepest meaning.

– Robert McCrum, “Don DeLillo: ‘I’m not trying to manipulate reality – this is what I see and hear,’” The Observer, August 8, 2010

3. James Lee Burke on the artist’s gift as an external power

At a certain point [you reach] what a Franciscan friend of mine, a theologian, once referred to as the fundamental option, when someone chooses good over evil in his life. That’s the key decision that people make. The same applies in one’s art. You’re just in it for the whole nine innings or you’re not.

“The truth is, and the truth that every artist comes to know, is that his talent, his gift is from some power outside of himself.” – James Lee Burke

Humility is not a virtue in an artist. The truth is, and the truth that every artist comes to know, is that his talent, his gift is from some power outside of himself. When you see an artist on television, it doesn’t matter what kind of medium he or she is in, and you hear that person speak in a grandiose way, and you begin to hear the first person pronoun — I, me, my mind and myself — that person is not at the apex of his career. He had already gone over it, and we’re not going to be seeing a whole lot more from him. The talent is always taken from him and it is given to someone else. I have never seen the exception.

Grandiosity is one vice that no artist can afford. Because every artist knows it, he knows it came from somewhere else. He did not go out and acquire it.

– Greg Langley, “James Lee Burke: Author’s home state a major character in his novels, his career, and his life,” 2theadvocate.com, April 18, 2010

4. Steven Pressfield on humility, ambition, and the muse

There’s a wonderful quote from John Gardner or somebody that, alas, I can’t find. The bad paraphrase goes something like this:

I make my living tapping a source that I cannot name or control, a force that appears and disappears based on factors that are unknown to and unknowable by me and that cannot be managed or manipulated, no matter how hard I try. I am at its mercy.

The author is talking about the Muse, the unconscious, whatever you want to call the mysterious source and wellspring of creativity.

The author’s world is a pretty scary place, if you think about it. To be dependent utterly on something that you can’t see, smell, taste, measure, summon, govern or control. No wonder artists and entrepreneurs act so crazy. What, then, is the proper attitude of mortal man and woman toward this weird and unknowable, uncontrollable source?

….Ambition is the artist’s foundation. Dynamis in Greek: the drive to seek, to discover, to become. The Muse approves of ambition. Ambition gives the artist the passion to start and the tenacity to finish. But ambition must never be allowed to rise to the level of hubris. The minute we believe that we are the source of that which comes through us…that’s when the gods start dusting off their thunderbolts.

At the same time, humility must not become passivity. You and I may only be mortals, with all the foolishness and fallibility that that state implies, but we’re mortals made in the image of heaven. The gods can’t do their work without us. So let’s be bold, in their cause and in our own. It’s our job, we humans, to make manifest that which is unmanifest–and to raise into consciousness, in this material dimension, that which had been known before only in heaven.

– Steven Pressfield, “Humility,” Steven Pressfield Online, August 4, 2010.

5. Maxie van Roye on living and working with a temperamental muse

When I first began writing, I assumed that the Muse and I would maintain a certain professional relationship. My job would be to write, and hers to provide the story behind the story. She would remain my devoted assistant, the inspiration behind my big plans, the hardworking backbone that would give my writing strength and stamina.

Unfortunately, my Muse is highly ambitious. From very early on, she made it clear who should be running the show. I was ten typing fingers doomed to anonymity; any talent was her exclusive domain.

….It gets worse. The Muse is fickle, fragile, and prone to sulks. If I neglect or insult her, she’ll give me the silent treatment, and my computer screen will remain empty while my frustration level elevates and the Muse snickers over my shoulder at my predicament. Experts call it “writer’s block,” but it’s more like “writer’s blank.” For a delicate creature, the Muse is very talented in the art of revenge.

We certainly have our problems. Despite our differences, though, I’ve secretly grown to enjoy the vigorous back-and-forth arguments that form the core of our writing sessions. And although she usually navigates my reluctant tap-tapping fingers down vague paths and along uncharted waters, the Muse’s sense of direction is keen. I might disagree with the route she’s chosen, or even the destination, but I have to hand it to her. For all her inconsistencies and mind games, the Muse seems to know what she wants and where she’s going with it.

– Maxie van Roye, “Battling Your Muse,” The Voice Magazine Vol. 18, Issue 32, August 13, 2010

6. Dr. George Blair-West on finding your life’s meaning by discovering your daimon

The first day is the one on which we fully realise that we came into this life for a reason. We realise that we have what Aristotle called our ‘Daimon’ — our unique mix of abilities and talents, however small or unvalued by the world at large — and our job is to express them. This expression is accompanied by the highest emotional state of ‘happiness’ that humans can experience — what Aristotle called ‘Eudaimonia’.

“We realise that we have what Aristotle called our ‘Daimon’ — our unique mix of abilities and talents, however small or unvalued by the world at large — and our job is to express them.” – Dr. George Blair-West

Which brings us to the second day, often months or years after the first. This is the day when you truly meet your Daimon — its birthday — and you begin to dance with your Daimon. You start to live your life around doing what has meaning for you. It might be the day you finally start to confront the anxiety of putting pen to paper (or these days finger to keyboard!) or brush to canvas. It might be the day you enroll in the first subject that will ultimately allow you to study what really turns you on. It might be the day you do something just for you and the people around you and the world be damned for a few hours! (You have given them way too much of your precious life anyway!)

Life is inherently meaningless — until we find our meaning. Only one person can give it meaning. If you look for a meaning outside you, if you look to others, you will find nothing. If you do not bring meaning to your life, if you do not go looking for your Daimon, you will be confronted by its meaninglessness.

– Dr. George Blair-West, “The two most important days in your life,” August 2010

7. Lisa A. Riley on transmuting creative “madness” into a powerful ally

Many creative individuals have experienced sudden surges, flooded with creative intensity as if an arrow laced with their muse struck them. The cycle accelerates productivity with their art lasting for days, even weeks at a time. Engrossed in the moment saturated with ideas, some will work viciously, with little sleep or food. It’s as if creative energy is what fuels them during this interlude producing a temporary state of immortality. Commonly following such a ride is a retreat back into their cave, often in seclusion, as if to recover and hibernate. However, during this down time the creative process is not completely dormant. Instead the artist is regrouping, reorganizing and ideas are incubating for the next eruption.

….When the artist is able to know him or her self well enough to accept these cycles without judgment and learn the skills to create a healthy environment that will tame what is tempestuous, it becomes an ally in the creative process. The artist transforms what was once perceived as madness and into a powerful force that can help them reach levels in their creativity they never predicted.

– Lisa A. Riley, MA, LMFT, “Creative Intensity or Madness,” The Art of Mind, July 22, 2010

OVER TO YOU:

• Which of the above excerpts best lines up with your personal experience of the creative process?
• How do you symbolize the autonomous aspect of your own creativity? As the action of a muse, daimon, genius, “Brownies,” or something else?
• Do you agree with Stevenson that those autonomous unconscious forces are responsible not only for the the ideas that show up by involuntary inspiration, but also for the work that we do “when we are awake and fondly suppose that we do it for ourselves”?

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Image credit: “L’Artiste et sa Muse” used under Creative Commons from Luzal

Related posts:

1. Ignorance, Faith, and the Discipline of the Demon Muse, Part 1
2. Ignorance, Faith, and the Discipline of the Demon Muse, Part 2
3. Welcome to Demon Muse

This isn’t even close to what I originally intended when I sat down to write this week’s post, but it’s what came out. As always, such occurrences make for a nice illustration of the main point around here (which, as you’ll note, is conveniently restated in the first couple of sentences below.)

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Abandoning the muse: from the Renaissance to Freud

The muse model of creativity, a.k.a. the daemonic or genius-based model, holds that it’s eminently reasonable and helpful to regard creativity as an independent force that emerges through you, as opposed to a quality or power that you possess or a mere feat that you’re able to perform. This ancient model of creativity is also a model of consciousness in general. It’s a model of the nature and status of the conscious self within the wider context of psychological life as a whole, human life in general, and the world at large.

As such, it underwent a drastic change over the course of several recent centuries in the West, beginning with the Renaissance and culminating in the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment and the 19th-century Age of Science (the latter of which, as we can now see in retrospect, might be more accurately termed the Age of Scientism). This was a period of enormous and energetic change in fundamental cultural understandings of what it means to be human, so the idea of the muse couldn’t help but be affected.

Specifically, the consolidation of the rational ego that occurred during this epoch — the “discovery,” as it were, of the inalienable human rights enumerated in, for example, the Declaration of Independence, and more fundamentally of the autonomous conscious subject to which they pertained; and the pressing of the point in the 19th century’s ruthless squeezing-out of everything from human psychic life but the cold eye of the rational mind — effectively booted the muse and the daemon/daimon out of public discourse and respectable society. Human nature was now infinitely perfectible and all that, because what we are, under this still-new (historically speaking) model, is solely and exclusively what we consciously are. Genius was allowed to stick around, but in the greatly modified form of a quality inherent in certain extraordinary individuals — a far cry indeed from the autonomous genius spirit that was formerly recognized as the visiting presence that empowered the work of artists and thinkers.

Genius was allowed to stick around, but in the greatly modified form of a quality inherent in certain extraordinary individuals — a far cry indeed from the autonomous genius spirit that was formerly recognized as the visiting presence that empowered the work of artists and thinkers.

Yes, people like the Romantics, and Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, and — especially — Freud, helped to keep alive a recognition that our psyche is home to lots of non-rational stuff. But Freud’s case was not only typical but virtually archetypal (if one can forgive the use of that Jungian term in connection with Jung’s former master), in that he built his psychological system firmly on a foundation of Victorian scientism, so that his glowing recognition of the non-rational region of the psyche inevitably portrayed that region as the home of monstrous and rapacious forces, and human life itself as existing in a permanent and tragic state of warfare between the Apollonian forces of civilization and the Dionysian forces of our repressed ids. Our only choice, as he saw it, and as he taught an entire generation or three to believe, was between a drab and rigid life of civilized unfulfillment and a reversion to a dark night of primal savagery. We can either be civilized and enjoy the benefits of safety and security that come with this, or we can give in and freely pursue the satisfaction of our primary cravings. Either choice results in misery. This is the cul-de-sac Freud reached and identified for us at the end of the egoic road.

How to make a monster: the muse amok in the 20th century

One only has to review the history of the 20th century to see the effects of such attitudes on human life. Yes, life in pre-Enlightenment times was in large measure nasty, brutish, and short, and violence and ignorance regularly reinforced each other in daily life in ways that most of us denizens of the modern-day first world can scarcely conceive. But the 20th century was the era when the Enlightenment ideal of rationally self-interested selves pursuing their respective happinesses was epically enabled by the birth of the first truly technological society. And it was marked by violence on a scale never before seen in human history.

The “Great War” or World War of 1914-1918 was so-called because it was, hands down, both qualitatively and quantatively speaking, the bloodiest and deadliest war ever fought, thanks to momentous technological innovations — tanks, airplanes, howitzers, mustard gas, radios, telephones — and their effects, some of which, as in the case of new communications technologies, were exerted not only on the battlefield but on the scale and patterns of human life leading up to the war. Then, astonishingly, a new and even bloodier war broke out only two decades later, thus demoting the Great War to the status of World War I. (Even though the history of the naming of these wars is known, we might speculate that one reason World War II didn’t inherit the Great War label was simply that people were now too afraid to apply the superlative term for fear that it would again be superseded by a still-worse conflict.)

And almost before the horrors of the Third Reich, the Final Solution, and the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had subsided — although, as A.M. Rosenthal suggested in his grim and moving “No News from Auschwitz” (The New York Times, Aug. 31, 1958), not long after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps it appeared the Western public was making a valiant attempt at forgetting all about them — there came (to look at it from a U.S.-centric view alone) the Korean War, and Vietnam, and the ongoing history of geopolitical nuttery and savagery that has yet to subside or reach a head in these early years of the 21st century.

Skulls found at Choeun Ek, the best known of the "Killing Fields" in Cambodia

And this is not even to mention the other great genocides of the 20th century that complemented the Nazis’ attempted extermination of the Jews: 1.5 Armenians killed in Turkey, Stalin’s starvation of 7 million of his own people in Russia, the Rape of Nanking, 2 million Cambodians slaughtered under Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime, the 800,000 Tutsis slaughtered by Hutu militia in Rwanda, 200,000 Muslims slaughtered by Serbs in Bosnia. And these are only the numbers killed in explicitly genocidal operations; the actual number of people who died from various violences and oppressions in the 20th century reaches into the tens or even hundreds of millions. Compare this to those two favorite Western historical touchstones of human cruelty, the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades, which in tandem killed far fewer than two million people. The disparity is not merely a function of lower absolute population numbers during those historical periods; the greater violence of the 20th century is proportional as well as absolute.

One way of reading the meaning of the awful century we’ve just left behind is to read it as a period when our collective non-rational aspect was deformed by violent repression and abandonment and then let loose via our deliberate ignore-ance of it to wreak havoc on a scale we had never seen. The psychological principle which holds that you can only be, and in fact will inevitably be, dominated and manipulated by inner forces when you are unaware of them, and that you’re therefore tasked with establishing an inner harmony by bringing your unconscious mental contents into conscious awareness, holds true in collective human culture as well. We turned our muse, our guiding daimon, into a raging demon by denying its existence, significance, and/or true nature, and then abandoning it to do whatever the hell it wanted.

Hideous progeny and hidden wholeness: we’re all Frankenstein now

Illustration from the frontispiece to the 1831 edition of 'Frankenstein'

There’s a notable literary parable about this very thing. Its title is Frankenstein and it was written by a very young Mary Shelley (with help, yes, from her husband Percy), and it wasn’t just the first science fiction novel but the first full-on symbolic psychological exploration of the ominous meaning of the Western world’s infatuation with ego consciousness to the detriment of the poetic and visionary powers. As a very influential and convincing reading of the novel has long maintained, Victor Frankenstein with his obsessive attempt to discover and then manipulate the secret of life’s creation clearly embodies the Promethean excesses of the heedless rational ego as it forgets its deep roots in primal sources of being that are not at all egoic but are no less human. His monster isn’t just a machine-like automaton that represents the dangers of scientific experimentation, but is an externalization, a kind of theurgic “drawing down,” of his own deeper nature, which inevitably becomes a murderous force — to its own wrenching grief — that destroys everyone and everything Victor has ever loved, purely and simply because Victor refuses to acknowledge his responsibility to it.

Victor is horrified by what he himself, has done, and by the monster’s hideous physical appearance. Both are inevitable effects of his attempt to become nothing but a rational ego, a perfect scientist in the 18th-19th century mode. The monster, his rejected visionary and poetic powers, his rejected unconscious mind or muse, seems to him the epitome of everything loathsome and hate-worthy. And, in the manner common to this subtle and shady-seeming part of our psyches, the monster helplessly obliges this perception by becoming, well, a monster.

That “mad scientist” is each of us when we fail to take into account the reality, autonomy, integrity, and needs of our deep muse-self, not only in creative artistic work but in life at large. That “monster” is our muse/daemon/genius become overtly demonic because we have severed it from our attentions and affections and thereby let it become a force that can affect us as an afflicting “other,” outside of our ability to control or commune with it. There’s a reason the idea of “creating a Frankenstein’s monster” has become idiomatically entrenched in our collective consciousness.

Compound this problem several billion times over in the communal life of several billion people inhabiting our planet, and you have a picture of the world we’ve built by denying our muse. We are Victor Frankenstein, and our “dark side” is only appearing as such because we’ve made it be that way.

Monsters and angels at play in the fields of the Lord

What’s the ultimate, the final, benefit of embracing your genius, meeting your muse, aligning with your daemon? It’s simply that you heal this epic rift by owning up to what’s really true of your own experience, what’s really true in a deeply human sense. You account for a missing part of yourself that you, if you’re at all a typical member of the culture in which and to which I’m writing, you haven’t been given an adequate set of attitudes and concepts for recognizing.

That “mad scientist” is each of us when we fail to take into account the reality, autonomy, integrity, and needs of our deep muse-self, not only in creative artistic work but in life at large.

The polar opposite of the demon-haunted, Frankenstein monster-afflicted life we’ve been living together for over a century is expressed by Ray Bradbury in a recent article at CNN.com (“Sci-fi legend Ray Bradbury on God, ‘monsters and angels,’” August 2, 2010). The venerable author will turn 90 this month — only a few days before my own birthday, as I’ve long been fond of noting — and CNN reports that he told his biographer Sam Weller that “he will sometimes open one of his books late at night and cry out thanks to God.” Why does he do this? “I sit there and cry,” he says, “because I haven’t done any of this. It’s a God-given thing, and I’m so grateful, so, so grateful. The best description of my career as a writer is, ‘At play in the fields of the Lord.’”

The fact that, as stated in the CNN piece, Bradbury refers to his act of writing as summoning “the monsters and angels” of his imagination, and that, as discussed in many posts at this blog, he explicitly views his creativity as a muse — or, as he has also called it, a demon muse — shows that he has definitely gotten the point, and has used it as the guiding star in his life.

The question at hand for us is: Can we?

OVER TO YOU:

• Do you personally experience the cultural pressure to demonize the non-rational, visionary side of your psyche? If so, how do you see it playing out in your own work, relationships, and life in general?
• Have you discovered any helpful practices or techniques for helping to heal this rift and reembrace your “dark side”?
• What benefits do you see in healing this rift? What dangers?

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Image credits:

• “Solitude – Dark Muse” used under Creative Commons from h.koppdelaney
• “Killing Fields” used under Creative Commons from Lorna87
• Illustration from Frankenstein: Public domain

Related posts:

1. The Muse in the News
2. Ignorance, Faith, and the Discipline of the Demon Muse, Part 1
3. Patience, the Muse, and Real Life

This is the second in the Demon Muse series of conversations with notable writers and artists about their experiences of the creative process. The first was with T.M. Wright. In this latest installment, I talk with horror writer and SUNY writing instructor John Langan.

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John Langan

I’m almost inclined to preface the following conversation with a blatantly hyperbolic claim, to wit: If you haven’t heard of John Langan, then you soon will. That’s how strongly I feel about the quality and importance of the man’s writing. And although it’s true that he may, like many horror writers, end up being known not to a general audience but only to those who actively seek out such stories, this doesn’t mean he shouldn’t have a mainstream breakthrough. Because he’s writing some really stunning stuff.

I first heard of John maybe five or six years ago when a friend, the fantasy and horror artist Jason Van Hollander, directed me to John’s story “On Skua Island,” which had been published in 2001 in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I found out somewhere, maybe from Jason, that John is a creative writing teacher at SUNY New Paltz. He also teaches classes in gothic fiction and film. This interested me greatly.

In keeping with my usual mercurial reading habits (dictated by weird inner pressures and impulses that I’ll never manage to map out), I examined the story, found it hugely exciting, and then put off reading it for several years. When I finally did read it, I was positively enraptured by its thoroughly delicious deployment of classic supernatural-horrific literary tropes — all of them used quite consciously — in the service of a really fine and wholly original tale.

This was in 2009, only a few months after John’s first book, the fiction collection Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, had been published (in December 2008) to an enthusiastic reception that included a starred review in Publishers Weekly. The book consists of five stories that demonstrate more of what the author had demonstrated in “On Skua Island,” which is included in its contents. I read it  and was again enraptured.

Then John’s first novel, House of Windows — a thoroughly literary exploration of the haunted house theme, as played against the family curse theme, as played out in a parable about the power of language, as played out in the lives of two career academics — came out in late 2009. I reviewed it for Dead Reckonings. Here’s a snippet of what I said: “House of Windows is a scarifyingly assured debut. It’s one of those wonderful books where you realize only a few pages in that you can relax into it and trust yourself fully to the author, since he obviously knows what he’s doing.” A host of other critics and reviewers agreed.

The story continues: His work has now been featured in editor Ellen Datlow’s The Best Horror of the Year, Volume 2, and editor Paula Guran’s The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror. He has been a judge for the Shirley Jackson Awards for the past three years. Most interesting of all — to a person like me, at least — he’s currently working on a Ph.D. through the CUNY Graduate Center, with his dissertation to be titled Lovecraft’s Progeny. It offers “a consideration of Lovecraft’s influence on Fritz Leiber, Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Ligotti, and Caitlin Kiernan.”

Somewhere along the way, I became Internet acquaintances with John, and that led to my inviting him to sit down in virtual space for an interview. Well, that, and the fact that his stories were pinging right and left on some of the major themes that I’ve pursued here at Demon Muse: the question of creative inspiration’s true nature, the experience of being dominated by autonomous psychic forces, and so on. I wanted to ask John about the origin of these strands in his work, and about his interesting fusion of academic themes with supernatural ones, and about the implications of these things not only for his own literary creative life but for the creative lives of anybody else who might benefit from hearing what he’s learned.

So that’s what I did.

THE SECRET TO WRITING IS WRITING
A Conversation with John Langan

MATT CARDIN: Welcome to Demon Muse, John. Let’s jump right into the heart of the matter: You’ve begun to establish an interesting new authorial niche for yourself by writing fiction that combines supernatural horror with academia. Explicitly academic characters, settings, situations, and/or conversations frequently show up in your stories, not just as window dressing but as something central to the horrific supernatural goings on. This is especially true of House of Windows, with its professorial protagonists, SUNY settings, and heady literary and philosophical discussions all interwoven in a tale of hell realms, alternate dimensions, quasi-Lovecraftian monstrous entities, supernatural curses, and one whale of a haunted house. To put the question bluntly, what’s up with this? Why are you taking this approach? Obviously, the answer is that you’re personally interested and invested in both areas, supernatural horror and the academic world. But what I’m asking is how come? What’s the magnetic attraction of these things for you, and how or why do you think they intersect so deeply in your writer’s sensibility?

JOHN LANGAN: It’s been my ambition to work in the vein of weird fiction that you’ve referred to elsewhere as “supernatural realism,” which is to say, narrative in which the tradition of mimetic naturalism is brought together with the tradition of supernatural horror. It’s the kind of fiction I grew up reading in the nineteen eighties with the stories and novels of Stephen King, Peter Straub, T.E.D. Klein, Charles Grant, Karl Edward Wagner, etc. If your interest is in pursuing this variety of weird fiction, then it’s a good idea to invent from what you know (thank you, Ernest Hemingway), which for me means academia. Since I first went to college at age eighteen, higher education has been part of my life to a greater or lesser degree. It’s how I met my wife, as well as many of my oldest and dearest friends; it’s how I’ve earned what passes for my living for about a decade. With so much raw material at my disposal, it would be silly to pass it up.

That said, of course there’s more to my decision than mere proximity. There’s a long association between academia and the weird tale, going back at least to that original bad professor, Faust, and running up through Victor Frankenstein, Abraham Van Helsing, and the assorted faculty of Miskatonic University who appear in H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction. As a writer who’s interested in mining the traditions of the weird tale, how can I resist the traditions that converge with my own real-life experience?

Beyond such a fortunate coincidence, however, the appearance of academic characters in weird narratives seems to me to serve a couple of ends. There’s the obvious device of furthering the plot in terms of exposition of crucial information. There’s also the less obvious — I’d almost call it a symptom of the weird narrative’s vexed relationship to knowledge. As I see it, weird fiction is shot through with a deep ambivalence about human knowledge, which may well encode a kind of skepticism towards the Enlightenment’s general faith in rationality. After all, the figures of learning in these narratives are just as likely to unleash the supernatural threat as they are to contain or expel it. The anxiety over epistemology that lies at the heart of what may be my favorite Lovecraft story, “The Call of Cthulhu,” is something that the academy has been struggling with for the better part of the last four or five decades, in the wake of Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, etc. So it’s another level of convergence that I’m only too happy to exploit.

MC: Does this “vexed relationship to knowledge” play any part in your experience of birthing a fictional story? What’s the genesis of a story or novel like for you? How does the initial idea first intimate itself to you, and how do you then elaborate it and bring it to fruition? You’ve actually gone a long way toward answering these questions with the extremely generous and detailed story notes that you provided at the end of your Mr. Gaunt collection, but I’m wondering if you can maybe abstract something general to explain how you personally tend to experience the literary creative process.

JL: For some years, now, I’ve been describing the process by which a story presents itself to me in terms of an experiment from my high-school chemistry class. In this experiment, you stir sugar into a beaker full of water until the water cannot absorb any more of it. Then, you heat the beaker over a Bunsen burner, as a result of which you learn that, in its heated state, the water can receive still more sugar. Finally, you insert a plastic rod into the supersaturated solution and watch as the sugar crystallizes up its length.

That moment of crystallization is my preferred trope for the way I experience the creative process. A seemingly random bit of information — perhaps an anecdote, perhaps an idea, perhaps a phrase — will cause other details floating in my mind to come together and cohere into the beginnings, sometimes more, of a narrative. This tends to result in a first line bobbing to the surface of my consciousness that, once I write it down, turns out to be attached to several subsequent lines, sometimes as much as a page. I try to aid and abet the beginnings of this process by keeping an open mind, so to speak, remaining aware of details from my life, the lives of those around me, the things I’ve read and seen, that might contribute to a story.

What I’m describing, however, is only the beginning. Once I’m inside a story, the writing process itself becomes productive of new sentences, ideas, actions, characters. As I tell my Creative Writing students, “The secret to writing is writing.” While I write, I’m also editing: sometimes during the actual writing process, sometimes during whatever else it is I’m doing during the other parts of the day. Once I’ve reached the end of a story, it’s back through it for a couple of edits, and then, if I have time, I’ll leave it a week or two before returning toot for one more edit. In an ideal situation, I’m sharing my work with my wife as go; I can’t estimate how much I’ve learned about writing from her feedback. That doesn’t happen as much as I’d like, these days, the responsibilities of family and work being what they are for both of us.

MC: I find this all quite interesting, not least because the two pieces of yours that most particularly made me want to interview you for Demon Muse are “Laocöon, or The Singularity” and House of Windows. Both of them explicitly highlight the issue of psychic domination by a perceived external source. The protagonists of both stories are obsessed and driven to pursue their respective works. Most pointedly, in “Laocöon” the protag is an artist (and academic) who starts feeling that he’s channeling some sort of divine — or monstrous — force that’s bigger than he is, a force that’s charging his creative work. I suppose I might also call out your story “Tutorial,” which elaborates a similar theme in a distinctly different direction, and in which the protagonist feels that his writing hand driven by a force beyond him. I could also name “Episode Seven: Last Stand against the Pack in the Kingdom of the Purple Flowers,” where the character of Wayne appears to serve as a kind of conduit for a dark and powerful force within his own psyche.

As you know, the focus here at Demon Muse is on the muse/daemon/genius model of creativity, the idea that the ancient models of the muse, the genius, and the personal demon can be fruitfully equated with the perceived independence of the unconscious mind from the ego, and that this very understanding is something to be capitalized on and developed for living an integrated, productive, and satisfying creative life. Your description of feeling out the early shape of a story by fishing your unconscious mind for what sticks to a conscious idea really resonates with this.

So, does the repeated appearance of these seemingly independent forces within the psyches of your characters have any crossover value with any of this? Do you personally experience and/or have you reflected on anything like this in your own life as a writer?  Basically, what I’m asking is: Does inspiration in the really technical sense of the term have anything to do with how you live and write? Is this perhaps reflected in the aspects of your stories that I’m highlighting? And if so, how do you work it? What’s the fulcrum point between spontaneous inspiration and conscious effort for you?

JL: One of my favorite quotations about human consciousness comes from D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature; in it, Lawrence, arguing with Ben Franklin, asserts that his self is a clearing in a dark forest into which strange gods come and go. I can remember sharing this with a particularly brilliant friend who said that if you could live as if this were true, your life would be remarkable.

I can’t say that I’ve succeeded in living such a life, but I’ve remained convinced of the importance of that occulted part of ourselves; it’s resulted in a continuing layman’s interest in Freud, Lacan, and very recently, James Hillman. In part, this interest has led me to consider the significance of those parts of ourselves we can’t change in determining the way our stories unfold. Speaking about her own first novel, Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor asked if our integrity ever lay in that which we could not do. She answered her own question by saying that she thought sometimes it did. That’s a quotation I had very much in mind while writing House of Windows. I suppose it’s no surprise that a writer of weird fiction should be interested in the recalcitrant aspects of human character, especially when those aspects cause and complicate the drama.

As far as the relation of such ideas to my own creativity — or my understanding of my creativity — like many writers drawn to genre materials, I tended to avoid them for fear that they weren’t literary — which was to say, respectable — enough. It was only once I accepted that the kind of writer I was drawn to be was a writer of weird fiction that I was able to move ahead creatively. To quote something Terry Brooks once said to me: As a writer, you have to write what you can write. I can understand how such advice might seem to be a recipe for artistic stagnation, for remaining stuck in your rut, but what I’ve experienced is that, since I decided to find out what weird fiction had to offer me as a writer, its possibilities have continued to expand for me.

However, having decided to embrace my muse or daimon or fornit — an invention of Stephen King’s that’s stuck with me since I read it — I’ve found that my relationship with her/him/them is best served by regular, (reasonably) disciplined activity on my part.

MC: What you’re describing, this symbiotic relationship between disciplined effort and muse/daimon-given inspiration, is a topic to which I’ve circled back repeatedly at this blog. This being the case, do you have any thoughts or advice to pass on to writers and other creative types about how to receive and develop ideas? Any advice on the specifically inspiration-driven end of things about ways to identify and develop their own unique passions and directions? I ask because this is exactly what you appear to be doing in your own work.

JL: Aside from the obvious, i.e. read and write a lot: I encourage my Creative Writing students to write out of their passions and obsessions because, from what I’ve seen of other writers, not to mention my own work, that seems the surest way to proceed. I think a lot of our passions/obsessions are already known to us, but in case they’re not, I ask my students what topics their friends are afraid to mention to them, because it’s going to result in a three-hour conversation. Any subject to which you keep returning is likely to yield some kind of interesting writing. I also think that any subject of which you find yourself habitually averse may be a place you need to go. In addition, because the people and places in our lives are so familiar to us, there’s a tendency not to recognize how idiosyncratic, even strange, they can be to others. Start with what’s familiar to you, and invent outwards from there.

MC: Thanks for all of this, John. I appreciate your taking the time to respond to my questions, and I wish you the best of luck with all of your current projects.

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Image credit: John Langan, photo courtesy of Ellen Datlow

Related posts:

1. How to Make Writing Easy: The Transformative Power of Daily Output plus Lowered Expectations
2. Stoking Your Creative Fire: Embrace Your Creative Demon’s Rhythm (1)
3. An Unleashed Imagination: T.M. Wright on Creativity, the Muse, and Finding Your Writer’s Voice

Honoring the Creative Process

Insights from creativity expert Eric Maisel about the need for persistence and courage in pursuing creative work and the need for trusting the process itself by recognizing and accepting that you will indeed make messes and mistakes — which will prove in the end to have been necessary.

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The Key to ‘Inception’: It’s a Movie about Making Movies – The Awl – July 21, 2010

Is Inception a movie about the creative process? A parable about the artistic danger of being so uncritically addicted to your muse that you follow her into a black pit of solipsism?

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Christopher Nolan Never Created a ‘Bible’ for Inception – MTV – July 16, 2010

Director Christopher Nolan on the creative artistic experience of conceiving and realizing the world of the movie: “You feel like you’re uncovering something that already exists”

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The Benefits of Losing Control – Mark McGuinness – Lateral Action – July 19, 2010

To bring your muse or unconscious mind into creative work, learn the benefits of losing control and letting things just happen.

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Creativity in the 21st Century – Psychologist and Harvard lecturer Shelley Carson, Ph.D. – Huffington Post – July 20, 2010

Creativity is important for artists, writers and musicians, but it’s also crucial for societies, businesses and individuals who need to juggle fulfillment with the demands of the rapid-change culture.

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Imagination, Creativity, and Confidence – Creativity Matters – July 18, 2010

It is the perfect triad: imagination, creativity and confidence. Imagination is the cognitive state of dreaming up new ideas or solutions, creativity is the process of developing those innovative thoughts to action and confidence happens as a result of making those dreams a reality. Trust the creative process.

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On Mozart’s creative process – Joon Report – July 20, 2010

Mozart described how he would get relaxed, receive a spontaneous flow of ideas, and then gently work with them.

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Feeding Your Muse – American Horror Blog (blog of horror writer Scott A. Johnson) – July 15, 2010

Complacency and letting yourself get into a rut is the surest way to drive your muse away.  Indulgent curiosity will keep her well fed and happy, and when she’s happy, she’ll visit more often.

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Creativity, dreams, premonitions, and quantum reality – Rod Dreher – Science, religion, markets, and morals (BeliefNet blog) – July 15, 2010

It started when my son Matthew told me he thought that “morphic fields”  — a concept he picked up from reading a book from the heretical scientist Rupert Sheldrake — might be responsible for human creativity.

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Artists of World Change – Artist, illustrator and writer Cat Bennett – The Huffington Post – July 21, 2010

How can we create a new world when so few of us understand the creative process? When we don’t know how to be creative, we tend to be passive and expect governments to solve problems. To address our mounting global problems, we must learn to enhance individual and collective creativity, and we must recognize the importance of creative thinking as a complement to analytical thinking.

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The Creativity Crisis – Newsweek – July 10, 2010

Research shows that American creativity is declining for the first time, but science can tell us the steps that leads the elusive muse right to our doors.

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Humility and the Creative Moment – The Fate PROJECT – July 12, 2010

Creativity belongs to the realm of the daimon — but it doesn’t belong just to artists.

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Freeing the Muse – Red Room – July 12, 2010

It’s hard to judge how inspiration comes. I find myself stuck to certain sets of ideas, but there’s a letting go of spirit that begets new ideas, new moments and new senses. It’s a fine balance. While dealing with the muses of inspiration, with their passions and their cycles,  things can get tricky.

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Book: The Zen of Creativity: Cultivating Your Artistic Life by John Daido Loori (2005)

Excerpt at The Zen Community, July 20, 2010:

Before engaging the creative process it is helpful to understand some of the basic elements that are functioning in it. The first of these elements is the muse, a sense of inspiration that initiates the process of creation. The second is the hara, a place within us that is still and grounded. Then there is chi, the energy contained both in us and in the subject. Out of chi emerges resonance, a feeling of recognition between the artist and subject. Finally, there is the act of expression itself, where the expression is allowed to flow unhindered from the artist to the creation. The artist steps out of the way and lets the art happen by itself.

Review at Spirituality & Practice:

After a career as a research scientist and a professional photographer, John Daido Loori embarked upon full-time Zen training under Maezumi Roshi, which would eventually lead him to become a Zen priest. He opened the Zen Arts Center in Mount Tremper in 1980 as a place where “Zen training would be used as a vehicle for studying, enhancing, and cultivating a creative life.” In this illuminating resource, Loori presents practices that can help us develop new ways of seeing and creating. He then discusses how the truths of the Zen arts can assist us in our quest to live more freely and generously.

Related posts:

1. An Unleashed Imagination: T.M. Wright on Creativity, the Muse, and Finding Your Writer’s Voice
2. The Daimonic Insight: Creativity is a Force Separate from You
3. Creativity, the Greek Daimons, and the New Consciousness Revolution

This post doesn’t relate directly to Demon Muse’s guiding theme of creativity as a muse/daemon/genius-powered phenomenon, but it does add to the advice I gave in “Advice for Writers: Dig Deep into Your Passion.” Someone recently posted a message to one of my favorite online hangouts for writers, editors, and readers to ask about 1) what sort of output, in terms of length, most writers aim for or achieve on a regular basis, 2) the degree of difference between the first drafts and final drafts produced by most working writers, and 3) advice for overcoming the “inner editor” that can lock down the creative drive by emasculating it at the inception point. This elicited a flow of words from me that’s reprinted below.

Which — as I add before turning you over to said flow of words — means there is indeed a crossover value with this blog, because my demon muse was clearly involved in the writing of this advice. When I clicked the “reply” button to contribute to that online conversation, I was expecting to write two or three sentences. Roughly a thousand words and 25 minutes later, I realized that I had slipped quietly into a flow state. Something had wanted to be said, and I was in the right place at the right time with the right attitude of receptivity. This is one manifestation of the inspired creativity we’ve been exploring here for the past several months. To be gripped by a sudden upsurge and outpouring of unexpected words and ideas is definitely a genius/muse driven experience. So is the sense of A) not knowing exactly and consciously where it’s all going, even as b) you’re intensely aware that it’s all guided by a coherent overarching energy that will make it all make sense in the end.

Yes, the writing of a single blog post or message board response is a rather minuscule example upon which to hang the principle. But it works the same in both microcosmic and macrocosmic fashions — in both short and long works, and in seemingly minor and seemingly major ones. As above, so below, and so on.

For a longer — and quite rambling — and thoroughly fascinating — look at the ins and outs of living a muse-driven life, see Jonathan Zap’s uber-essay “The Path of the Numinous: Living and Working with the Creative Muse.”

In the meantime, consider this combination of practical and attitudinal advice about the writing life:

Setting your output goal

It is indeed important to set some sort of minimum goal for daily output if you’re going to write a long (book-length) project — unless you find that doing this makes you freeze up, in which case ignore the idea of a minimum regular output completely, and simply proceed on the power of pure inspiration, since this means you’ll at least produce something. That’s the underlying principle: Discover and do whatever works for you, and immediately and unhesitatingly drop what doesn’t. The only proper rule is the one that works.

The important thing when deciding your minimum output goal is to pick a length, whether a word count or a minimum number of pages, that you know you’ll feel comfortable producing consistently. For me, that’s 500 words per day — which of course comes out to roughly two pages, if I want to count them that way.

Discover and do whatever works for you, and immediately and unhesitatingly drop what doesn’t.

For me, recognizing this has been an act of self-affirmation in my creative maturation. I absolutely love reading Ray Bradbury’s writings about writing, for example, but if I tried to follow his advice to produce 2000 words a day, I’d never write, because I wouldn’t be able to stand the feeling of regular self-failure. Many times — a great many of them — I have in fact written 2000 words per day, and even considerably more than that. But I can produce 500 words per day every day, even when I’m not particularly feeling like writing. For me, for some reason, 500 words just conforms to a kind of natural rhythmical wave in my writing process. I can get there without exhausting myself, and in fact any single unit of progression on any project I’m currently working on — whatever idea, project section, etc., that I set out to tackle on any given day — will almost invariably and organically come out to 500 word or more on its own, simply because that’s the minimum space I find necessary to express it. And in fact I almost always overshoot that mark by a little or a lot. Or if, as sometimes happens — very seldom, but sometimes — I finish saying what I had set out to say, and then discover that it has come in at less than 500 words, it’s quite easy for me to dig back down and find something else to add, or to find some part of what I’ve written that could stand some expansion. In other words, the 500-word marker can be a great indicator that I haven’t sufficiently expressed what I set out to express.

So in sum, for me 500 words is a good choice. For other people that number might be ridiculously small, or, I suppose, ridiculously huge. But I think the principles involved in my choice of that length are valid for other writers who are seeking to discover their own natural production goal.

The only standard you can rationally have

Regarding the attempt to silence the inner critic, I’ve long found a lot of help in William Stafford’s wonderful essay “A Way of Writing,” which I might well choose if I were allowed only a single essay about writing and creativity to read and reread for the rest of my life. Among the mountain of additional shining insights contained in it, there’s Stafford’s pointing out of a crucial self-attitude and self-understanding that allowed him to continue writing for many years:

Most of what I write, like most of what I say in casual conversation, will not amount to much. Even I will realize, and even at the time, that it is not negotiable. It will be like practice. In conversation I allow myself random remarks — in fact, as I recall, that is the way I learned to talk — so in writing I launch many expendable efforts. A result of this free way of writing is that I am not writing for others, mostly; they will not see the product at all unless the activity eventuates in something that later appears to be worthy.

Then there are Stafford’s oft-quoted, life-transforming, print-them-on-vellum-and-mount-them-above-your-writing-desk comments about writer’s block, which are included in one of the essays reprinted in his Writing the Australian Crawl (which also reprints “A Way of Writing”):

I believe that the so-called “writing block” is a product of some kind of disproportion between your standards and your performance….One should lower his standards until there is no felt threshold to go over in writing. It’s easy to write. You just shouldn’t have standards that inhibit you from writing….I can imagine a person beginning to feel he’s not able to write up to that standard he imagines the world has set for him. But to me that’s surrealistic. The only standard I can rationally have is the standard I’m meeting right now….You should be more willing to forgive yourself. It doesn’t make any difference if you are good or bad today. The assessment of the product is something that happens after you’ve done it.

This idea of “lowering your standards until there’s no felt threshold to go over in writing” is positively alchemical in its ability to transmute a mass of formless thoughts, insights, and urges into the honest-to-God act of writing. And I say that as somebody who suffered from writer’s block for a six- or seven-year stretch.

On revision

Regarding the amount of difference between my first and final drafts, I’m somebody who actually enjoys revising, because that’s the stage of the process when what I’m writing becomes what I wanted it to be when I set out. The old dictum that “all first drafts are shit” isn’t absolutely true, but for me it helps to keep thinking that it is, especially when a first draft is feeling intolerably awful (at which point the “lower your standards” advice reenters as crucial).

My final drafts sometimes turn out to be virtually unrecognizable in comparison to their first drafts. The level of revision that’s necessary to make them be what they’re asking to be is just that extensive. But I’ve also discovered that I’m one of those writers who’s liable to get far too wrapped up in the nitpicky end of improving the specific language of my writing, probably because I enjoy wonderful language as both a writer and a reader (as in the work of Thomas Ligotti, for example). So I have to reign this in, and that’s where I find help in, e.g., Stephen King’s advice in On Writing about being aware of and avoiding this type of thing. I heartily recommend it.

The bottom line

Again, it all boils down to the fact that you need to write a lot and then use this experience to take stock of exactly where and how you’ll have to calibrate your efforts, as the writer and person that you uniquely are, in order to make sure that you actually get something done.

Writing, especially in the long term, is a continual process of self-discovery, and this is nowhere more apparent than in the mundane act of establishing wholesome work habits. For a discussion of how such things are directly related to ongoing goal of making friends with your deep daemonic self, see “Stoking Your Creative Fire: Identify Your Daemon’s Work Habits.”

OVER TO YOU:

• Do you thrive on a regimen of regular output? Or do you find that your creativity flows better when you turn your practical schedule over to the impulsiveness of your muse?
• Does Stafford’s idea of “lowering your standards until there is no felt threshold to go over” sound like it would work for you? Have you actually experienced its effects?
• What techniques — the ones listed here or any others — have you found effective for helping you to lower your inhibitions and achieve a rich creative flow?

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Image credit: “to my chicago pen pal,” used under Creative Commons from aye_shamus

Related posts:

1. The Secret to Writing Is Writing: A Conversation with John Langan

I grew up in an Independent Christian Church, one of those conservative evangelical Protestant congregations that represent the right-leaning doctrinal divergence of some Restoration Movement churches from the über-liberal Disciples of Christ denomination circa the early and middle parts of the 20th century. One of the mottos of my childhood church, which I learned directly from the lips of my father, is this: “Where the scriptures speak, we speak; where the scriptures are silent, we are silent.”

Anybody who scents in this saying a close analog to the muse/daemon/genius-based approach to artistic creativity is surely onto something. As I said in a past post (“Embrace Your Creative Demon’s Rhythm, Part 2“), in a discussion of how important it is to find your natural creative condition, you simply can’t know your innate creative rhythm — occasional, erratic, or prolific — until you actually do the work of finding out who you are by making friends with your daemonic genius, and then by approaching your work openly and experimentally in order to discover the pace and volume at which your creativity wants to emerge. I illustrated this with examples, excerpts, and insights from the lives and works of  Philip Larkin, Alice Flaherty, Joe Hill, Amy Lowell, and Victoria Nelson.

Here I present a few more examples to illustrate the point — which, to repeat, is that there’s a wide variation among people in how their creative demons consent to being accessed and how their muses consent to being courted. The crucial thing is to get in touch, and then to stay in touch, with your own demon muse, so that when your it speaks, you speak, and when it’s silent, you remain silent.

But bear in mind that this doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t be writing the whole time. This is not a contradiction but a subtle distinction. For more such seeming contradictions, wade into the following choppy sea of advice from well-known authors.

Flannery O’Connor: “Three hours every morning”

Flannery O’Connor was a firm believer in the value of discipline in a writer’s life. She famously suffered from lupus, which was both a help and a hindrance in her attempt to maintain the discipline of a strict writer’s routine, since the severe pain of the condition took away her ability to perform many daily activities, which left her free to sit and write. But then, as any sufferer of rheumatic illnesses can tell you, sitting for long periods can produce as much discomfort as moving.

Her recommendation that writers ought to sit for several hours and do nothing else but write has become the stuff of legend. When her friend Cecil Dawkins talked in a letter about a dry spell she was experiencing, and said she sometimes used reading as a way to distract herself from the tedium, O’Connor responded with this:

You ought to set aside three hours every morning in which you write or do nothing else; no reading, no talking, no cooking, no nothing, but you sit there. If you write all right and if you don’t all right, but you do not read; whether you start something different every day and finish nothing makes no difference; you sit there. It’s the only way, I’m telling you. If inspiration comes you are there to receive it, you are not reading.”

As seen in editor Rosemary Magee’s 1987 anthology Conversations with Flannery O’Connor, O’Connor returned repeatedly to this point, stating it in various ways that, taken together, leave no doubt about her meaning:

“People seem to surround being-a-writer with a kind of false mystique, as if what is required to be a writer is a writer’s temperament,” she says. “Most of the people I know with writer’s temperaments aren’t doing any writing.”

Miss O’Connor is writing steadily three hours a day, regardless of her mood. “If I waited on inspiration, I’d still be waiting,” she says.”

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“I do try to write at least three hours every morning, since discipline is so important.”

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“I sit there before the typewriter three hours every day and if anything comes I am there waiting to receive it.“

Dani Shapiro: Attracting the muse through hard labor

Best-selling novelist and memoirist Dani Shapiro described her experiences with the reality behind the idea of inspiration in a 2010 blog post in which she sounded a lot like O’Connor. After stating that if she had given in to the notion that she ought to wait for inspiration before she started writing, she probably would have written few if any of her seven books, she clarified:

Don’t get me wrong. Inspiration has come.  It has tiptoed into my writing room when I’ve least expected it.  It has shown up mid-sentence, mid-thought, mid-idea.  But it generally doesn’t precede me to the desk.  Inspiration comes out of doing the work: the hard labor of laying each brick on top of the next, one at a time, until what you’ve done begins to resemble a wall.  Often, it doesn’t resemble a wall, or it’s come out crooked, or in some way less than you’d hoped, and you have to smash the thing up and start all over again.  Inside this painstaking labor is where inspiration lies.  Only when you’re up to your eyeballs, covered in dust, hopeless and bordering on despair, does the muse even consider paying a visit.

– “On Inspiration,” June 25, 2010

Stephen King: The muse is a cigar-smoking guy in the basement

In his 2000 best-seller On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King characterizes the muse as a rough-hewn guy in the basement of the psyche. I’ll just let him speak without preface, since he is, as always, matchless in his ability to elucidate his own points:

There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you.

Do you think this is fair? I think it’s fair. He may not be much to look at, that muse-guy, and he may not be much of a conversationalist (what I get out of mine is mostly surly grunts, unless he’s on duty), but he’s got the inspiration. It’s right that you should do all the work and burn all the midnight oil, because the guy with the cigar and the little wings has got a bag of magic. There’s stuff in there that can change your life. Believe me, I know.

….Don’t wait for the muse. As I’ve said, he’s a hardheaded guy who’s not susceptible to a lot of creative fluttering. This isn’t the Ouija board or the spirit-world we’re talking about here, but just another job like laying pipe or driving long-haul trucks. Your job is to make sure the muse knows where you’re going to be every day from nine ’til noon or seven ’til three. If he does know, I assure you that sooner or later he’ll start showing up, chomping his cigar and making his magic.

Gayle Brandeis: Indiscipline, non-writing, and filling up the well

In a 2010 interview for Psychology Today‘s “Creating in Flow” blog, novelist, poet, and essayist Gayle Brandeis fessed up to a total lack of discipline in her life as an author. Read carefully:

Q: Can you share your writing schedule or process with us? Because I know you have had a really challenging year and you also have a new baby. And two blogs!

A: I am a completely undisciplined writer. I have no schedule, other than writing when I find slivers of time. My tendency in the past has been to write in big sloppy bursts — I sometimes go for weeks without writing, and then I’m consumed by the need to write and it will gush out quite abundantly (plus I’m a big fan of writing a quick first draft and then using subsequent drafts to shape and hone the work).

The non-writing times have been fertile, percolating times, filling the well so it can spill over again. I haven’t been writing much lately, but this feels a bit different — I’m getting used to life with a baby again (my older kids are 19 and 16) and am still processing my mother’s suicide last November and the sudden death of my mother-in-law this March, and all of those things have deeply impacted my writing life as well as my daily life. I don’t blog as often as I’d like to, and when I have a moment to write, I often just need to take that time to decompress and not do much of anything.

I’m trying to be gentle with myself and not push myself too hard, but I do want to find a better rhythm that creates more space (especially inside myself) for my creative work. And I’m returning to teaching soon.

– “How a Writer Turned One Rejection into Two Novels,” June 21, 2010

Writer, teacher, and creativity expert Jurgen Wolff, who alerted me to this interview with a post at his Time to Write blog (“So you don’t write every day? Read This!“, July 8, 2010), draws out the implication of Brandeis’s experience for other writers: “She’s so ‘undisciplined’ that she’s managed to write three novels. In the interview she talks about how her book ‘My Life With the Lincolns’ was rejected as an adult novel and she re-worked it as a Young Adult book, which also required energy and commitment. So here’s to us ‘undisciplined’ writers, it turns out we’re not impostors after all!”

The point: To thine own deep self be true

If you’ve been trying to ferret out a running theme in all of the above, you may have felt confident that you had it until you ran into Brandeis’s words, at which point you may have heard the archetypal sound of a needle scratching on a record. Flannery O’Connor, Dani Shapiro, and Stephen King all say you have to work hard, put in long hours, shed blood, dig deep, get covered in mud and filth, in order to attract the attention of the muse. Only when you’ve reached your own farthest extremity and exhausted all of your own strength, they say, will the muse pay attention. This echoes wisdom from other writers whose words you’ve seen me quote previously, e.g., Steven Pressfield, who in his March 2010 blog post “Habit” (quoted in “Learn the Art of Active Waiting“), asserted that “The Muse is like any other boss; she values talent, yes, but what she favors even more is devotion, dedication, perseverance. When she sees our butts in our seats, she can’t help herself; ‘Okay, okay, I’ll give this poor sucker a couple of ideas today.’”

Your purpose is to find out the best way in which your creative demon needs to have a space cleared for it, and then to execute that particular action (or non-action, as the case may be).

But then here comes Brandeis, who says, “I write when I feel like it.” And she makes a great career out of it. And even when she talks about trying to improve her creative rhythm, she talks about doing it gently, in a way that creates more space not primarily in her outer schedule but within herself.

So what, then, is the overall point? It’s none other than what we started with: To thine own daemonic self be true. Your purpose is to find out the best way in which your creative demon needs to have a space cleared for it, and then to execute that particular action (or non-action, as the case may be). If writing every day and zealously guarding that carved-out span of time is the way that you and your demon muse need to work, then run with it, and run hard. If, on the other hand, you find through trial and error that you really need to wait until your daemon asserts itself spontaneously by filling you with the desire to write, then run with that instead.

In my own experience, I’ve found that both of these possibilities require serious dedication and self-clarification. It may sound at first blush as if the O’Connor-Shapiro-King-Pressfield approach is the one that’s all about discipline, and that it’s diametrically opposed to the Brandeis approach, which is all about indiscipline. But in fact it constitutes a serious discipline in its own right to keep yourself attuned to your inner states and motivations as you’re waiting for a ripe time to begin writing.

In both cases, the ultimate point is the same: The muse/daimon/genius possesses its own will and its own ways, and it visits you as and when it desires. Inspiration comes and goes. Your task is not to generate it, and certainly not to control it, but to channel it, and to do so by whatever means necessary, so that when it shows up, you’re there for it.

OVER TO YOU:

• Under what conditions does your own muse/daimon/genius most readily consent to working with you?
• On the flipside, have you found any working conditions that you religiously have to avoid, since they make your inner partner clam up?
• In what ways have you seen your muse actually teaching you, if you’re willing to listen, exactly when and how it wants to work?

–

Image credit: “Gothica” used under Creative Commons from raffaelbrustia at Flickr

No related posts.

I’ve just been interviewed by a publisher of dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction for a feature at their blog. Along with questions about my writing career — how I got hooked up with Ash-Tree Press for Divinations of the Deep and Mythos Books for Dark Awakenings, how I came to my overriding focus on the combination of horror with religion and spirituality, what my writing process is like, etc. — the interviewer asked me if I had any advice for aspiring writers.

It was only after I had answered the question that I realized I had ramped up into a state of heady intensity as I tried to distill my best advice to writers into the span of a few sentences. Since I know this type of thing is of interest to Demon Muse’s audience, I figured I’d reprint it here, with a few slight expansions.

Here’s what I said:

1. Find and cultivate your passion.

Figure out what you’re really interested in, the ideas and themes that naturally excite you and obsess you and keep you spiritually alive. Then find the books and authors (and music and movies and other art) that deal with these things, and absorb them with wild abandon, like you’re a starving man who’s been thrown into a banquet hall. Know that often these stages — the discovering of your passions and the reading about them — happen in reverse, so just enjoy it. Let them feed into each other and enhance each other. By doing this, and by letting it interact with your wider life, you’re figuring out what you are uniquely meant to write.

2. Write like your life depends on it.

Write like crazy. Throw yourself fully into it. Try your hardest to produce something excellent, even as you forgive yourself instantly and unhesitatingly and completely for producing crap — which you inevitably will. Figure out through experience whether you’re more of an intuitive or a structured/plan-based writer, then develop that orientation with a vengeance. Work hard, shedding blood if necessary, to come to a complete MASTERY of grammatical and other technical rules so that you never have to think or worry about them again for even the briefest of instants. Make them part of your blood and bone. Likewise, make the incorporation of your deep passions into your writing be a natural and organic thing. Don’t think, “I have to channel my passions onto the page!” That way lies paralysis by a too-heavy burden of self-consciousness and self-expectation. Just write what’s natural, what wants to be written, and the passion part will take care of itself.

3. Follow your muse by following your changing loves.

Know that some of your passions may remain constant while others will evolve over time, just like you do. When you realize a shift like this has happened, run with it eagerly, since it opens new vistas. As Ray Bradbury famously said, the keeping and cultivating of a muse consists of continually running after your loves. What you loved when you were 10 years old won’t be identical to what you’ll love at 20, 30, or 40. You’ll need more complex and textured things over time, and maybe even totally different things. But whatever you’re passionate about right now is valid, is what’s meant to be. And it’s the key to using and being used by your creativity.

4.Collaborate with your unconscious.

Make friends with your unconscious mind. Consider personifying it as your muse, daimon, or genius, and adopting the viewpoint that in your creative work you’re collaborating with an autonomous force that lives in your self. For help, read this blog and other relevant things.

5. Learn your own process and be true to yourself.

Find out what works for you — the procedures, habits, styles, literary forms, writing schedule, and overall approach that consistently result in your best creative work. Then use them fully and ignore outside advice, including what you’re reading right here. The only one whose guidance and approval you really need to worry about is your inner partner. External advice is primarily useful for revealing how you are innately meant, and not meant, to work. Don’t worry, your daimon will let you know.

OVER TO YOU:

• How have your innate passions made themselves known through the circumstances of your life, both inner and outer?
• When and how have you become aware of it when your muse is leading you to move from old loves to new ones?
• Are you personally helped or hindered by the idea of creativity as an autonomous force that you collaborate with instead of a private function of your own mind and brain?

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Image credit: “rhızomıng εmεrgεncε▲submεrgεncε plεats” used under creative commons from jef_safi

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As recounted in part two of “Embrace Your Creative Demon’s Rhythm,” the poet Amy Lowell once compared poets to radio antennas. The poet, she said, is someone who “is capable of receiving messages on waves of some sort; but he is more than an aërial, for he is capable of transmuting these messages into those patterns of words we call poems.”

Lately, if you consciously fashion yourself into a different kind of antenna — specifically, one that’s set to detect references to the daimon/daemon, the genius, and the creative muse in current cultural discourse — you’ll find that you receive a lot of signals indeed. There’s a diffuse conversation afoot about this ancient view of creativity and selfhood, and paying attention to it can reap some serious rewards in terms of clarifying your crucial relationship to your own inner partner.

Here are some choice items from the past few weeks, months, and years.

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Dreaming while awake

When we really start creating, something lets go and begins to flow. It’s like something takes over, and all these things that we didn’t know we had inside come pouring out. But this “letting go” can be scary. A lot of people worry that they might go crazy. When we let go of the ego we may feel as if we don’t have any control. But eventually the flow will stop, and the ego will come back. It’s like a cork that bobs down, and then bobs back up. The same thing happens when we dream: the ego goes to sleep, and the unconscious begins to flow. Writers and artists literally dream while they’re awake by diminishing the ego. The only difference between the creative process and insanity is that the ego leaves and never comes back.

– Jungian analyst Lawrence Staples, interviewed by Pythia Peay in “Creativity Analyzed: The Psychology of the Artist,” The Huffington Post, June 16, 2010

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Our unconscious collaborator

In making movies, time is so short — because it is so expensive — that we tend to neglect the place from which the best ideas come, namely that part of ourselves that dreams.

The unconscious is our best collaborator. I try to let the participants have downtime before shooting and after rehearsal, so our secret collaborator can do its work. I have learned to trust and encourage that more.

– Oscar , Tony, and Emmy Award-winning director Mike Nichols, AARP: The Magazine, Jan/Feb 2004
(Thanks to Douglas Eby and his Talent Development Resources for the quote)

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Learning to live with your daimon

When you feel an urge to take a major turn in your life, that is the daimon waking you up. When you find unexpected strength in your voice or in your work, that is the daimon empowering you. When you want to go in one direction, and something in you pushes strongly in a different direction, that other voice is the daimon. It is an ancient idea, but it also lies at the heart of the work of the Greek mystic Heraclitus, C. G. Jung, W. B. Yeats, Rollo May, and James Hillman. You live with your daimon when you take your innermost passions into account, even when they go against your habits and standards. You need dialogue so that you can work out a livable connection with this challenging but ultimately creative power.

In the best of cases, over time you get to know your deep passions. You come to recognize the voices that speak deep in your imagination. You sort out the devils from the angels, the voices of fear from the voices of hope. You may get to the point where you feel in harmony with yourself because you are in dialogue with these other presences. A psychologist might call them fantasy figures and warn against giving them too much reality. But in spite of the dangers, you can bring them into the equation and consider them carefully.

– Archetypal psychologist Thomas Moore, “Spirituality of the Deep,” in Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way through Life’s Ordeals (2004)

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The demon in your pen

What is often criticized as cliché is cliché because it works time and time again. This is not to say that I applaud formula pictures, but there are some fine core themes that return in great stories again and again….The real challenge to the writer is to express these core themes in ways that have not been thought of before….To break the mold you have to be totally convinced that first there is indeed a genius demon in your pen!

– Award-winning animator Tony White, Animation from Pencils to Pixels: Classical Techniques for the Digital Animator (2006)

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You and your muse

I lifted my face up from the manuscript and I directed my comments to an empty corner of the room and I said aloud, “Listen, you thing, you and I both know if this book isn’t brilliant that’s not entirely my fault because you can see that I’m putting everything I have into this. I don’t have any more. So if you want it to be better, you have to show up and do your part of the deal. But if you don’t do that, you know what? The hell with it. I’m going to keep writing anyway because that’s my job. And I would please like the record to reflect today that I showed up for my part of the job.”

– Author Elizabeth Gilbert describing how she decided to address her genius/muse as an external force, as recounted in her February 2009 TED talk

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Ignoring your muse, ignoring who you are

I love that talk by Elizabeth Gilbert and know it well. I also distinctly remember the first time I watched it because I was so bewildered by the notion that creative people are visited by a “muse” and that creativity and inspiration come from outside — indeed beyond — ourselves. In retrospect, I was bewildered because I was on the brink of being visited, so to speak, and I was horrified. Now I understand that there is more to fear by ignoring this muse creature. It’s akin to ignoring who you really are.

– Graphic artist Sunni Brown, in an interview given to Steven Pressfield, June 18, 2010

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Where (when) the muse lives

What I realized when I began to delve deeply into the intimate particulars of my day was that the Muse was not playing coy with me at all. I have known her secret address since childhood — without realizing I knew. She lives in the here and now. In fact, the doorway to her house is usually the narrowest possible slice of reality to which I can attach my undivided attention.

Whenever I get trapped in the rumble of my own thoughts, the mental noise prevents any awareness of her presence. She’s a tiny thing, and extraordinarily soft-spoken, and she can only be heard when it’s peaceful and still, when I give her an opening.

– Writer and photographer Meredith Wickham, “The Muse’s Secret Address,” June 9, 2010

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The artist’s struggle

EDWARD HIRSCH: For me, the demon and the angel become two aspects of our nature, two parts of ourselves. Something inside of us that empowers us. So, I write about moments of artistic possession, and encounters with demons and angels as experienced by various artists and writers, including those who write about angels or paint angels.

“There’s some weird combination of artistic making, and artistic possession, of putting oneself at the service of other forces, other powers, while also controlling one’s art.”
- Edward Hirsch

DONNA SEAMAN: In thinking about how the struggle in the night between Jacob and the angel can be seen to mirror the struggle of the artist with the creative force, it occurs to me that the artist can’t capitulate entirely to this power. he or she needs to stand his or her ground, as Jacob did. The artist needs to maintain what you describe as a spiritual alertness. Artists feel possessed by the angel or demon of artistic inspiration — you discuss writers who have felt as though they were taking dictation from a creative spirit — but they had to be present in some way; they had to remain themselves and control the transaction. They must possess, as Jacob did, the presence of mind to clarify, benefit from, and preserve the experience.

EDWARD HIRSCH: I appreciate that you’re saying this. We don’t know how to think about this experience very clearly. Because it’s not just a question of putting yourself into a trance, of being taken over by other forces, and letting the forces dictate to you what to do. There’s some weird combination of artistic making, and artistic possession, of putting oneself at the service of other forces, other powers, while also controlling one’s art. So I was trying to think about, for example, the way John Keats talks in his letters about “associative drift” but then writes in “Ode to Psyche” about “a working brain.” Somehow the working brain works in tandem with associative drift.

We tend to see the aspect of making on the one hand and the aspect of the seer on the other, as though they’re diametrically opposed. But I think there’s another kind of vocabulary that we can bring to this, to think about the way that the working intellect, what Keats calls the working brain, operates in tandem with this other demonic force. And I love something that the Spanish Sufi poet and thinker Ibn ‘Arabi says, “a person must control one’s thoughts in a dream.” That’s what I’m trying to talk about. That gives me a name for what it is, because it’s both controlling one’s thoughts and it’s also entering the dream state.

– Donna Seaman, “A Conversation with Edward Hirsch,” TriQuarterly, October 1, 2003

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The immortal — and external — creative spirit

Inspiration (Latin “breathing in”) used to be external; and for millennia what we inhaled when inspiration came was the breath of god, divine afflatus. Post-Freud, we think of it as coming from somewhere within ourselves. The subconscious, like dark matter, makes up most of our universes, though we glimpse it only obliquely in dreams, say, or fevers. Milton might have called on the heavenly muse to sing through him, and Berryman might have mined his therapy sessions for the Dream Songs, but the concept of art being created by an agency separate to the rational self has outlived all variations in the origin of such an agency; something is working us.

– Novelist and poet Nick Laird, “Nick Laird on the fitful nature of inspiration,” The Guardian, April 10, 2010

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Image credit: “Inspiration” used under Creative Commons from h.koppdelaney

Related posts:

1. Ignorance, Faith, and the Discipline of the Demon Muse, Part 1
2. When the Muse Becomes Monstrous: The Demonic Modern History of the West
3. Divinity, Psychology, Neurology: Is the Muse Real? (Part One)