Demon Muse

In Part 1, “Muses, Demons, and Egos,” we looked at the basic structure of the human psyche and boiled things down to a simple but profound insight for writers and other creators: You are psychologically divided into two selves, the conscious and unconscious minds, but you feel yourself to be only the conscious part — a statement that’s basically a tautology, since to feel implies to feel consciously — and this means your inner life is characterized by a strange doubleness.  Simply as a given, as a brute fact of irreducible psychological reality, you carry around with you the sense of being accompanied by an external presence that resides “behind” your conscious thoughts and sense of self.

Once you have a grasp on this fairly wondrous, bizarre, and universal situation, the natural question that arises is the concrete and ever-popular, “Now what?” What do we as writers actually do with this insight? How do we put it to practical and productive use?

As hinted in Part 1, the answer is found in the very nature of the differences between the dual aspects of your psyche. Each of these aspects works in its own way, and each has a proper and crucial role to play in the creative process. We put our knowledge of the psyche to practical use by learning and capitalizing on these roles.

The inner division of labor: you and your demon muse

In a nutshell, the unconscious mind supplies the content of what we write, while the ego, the voluntary conscious self, channels and shapes this unconscious material. In an even smaller nutshell — and to quote a famous pronouncement by the poet Stanley Kunitz — “the unconscious creates, the ego edits.” The ideas that you work with, the chains of thought and impression that appear in your mind as if from nowhere and seem to take on a life of their own as you race to record and refine them — these all carry that perceived quality of independence and spontaneity precisely because they’re emerging into consciousness from your unconscious mind. When you enter this “inspired” state, you are literally engaged in a psychologically collaborative effort between your two selves.

Getting to know this aspect of yourself is getting to know the permanent visitor in your psyche and the deep life pattern it wants to actualize through you.

So this is all to say that for purposes of developing a working psychology of creativity, we can equate the unconscious mind with both the muse and the daimon. In Western history the muse is the classical symbol of creative inspiration. The word “inspiration” in its root sense connotes a state of being filled with a divine presence (“in” + “spire” means both the act of physical inhalation and the act of infusing someone with spirit). The daimon is the keeper of a person’s deep character, life pattern, and destiny (see “A Brief History of the Daimon (and the Genius).” Pairing the two figures yields the idea of the demon muse, the spirit that inspires a person to do the work for which he or she is uniquely gifted and intended. Getting to know this aspect of yourself is getting to know the permanent visitor in your psyche and the deep life pattern it wants to actualize through you.

Thus, one of the most powerful acts you can take to develop a rich creative life is to deliberately give up conscious control over the ultimate shape, nature, and direction of your work. Hand over the responsibility for those things to your deep self, your unconscious mind, your demon muse, and recognize that your role as ego is simply to midwife and refine the material that wants to be written.

The demon muse as inner reservoir and guiding spirit

But what exactly is the unconscious material that wants to be written? What is it that your demon muse wants to create through you? On this point, Ray Bradbury is enormously helpful. In his wonderful Zen in the Art of Writing, he offers a vibrant description of the inner source of each person’s creative uniqueness:

In a lifetime, we stuff ourselves with sounds, sights, smells, tastes, and textures of people, animals, landscapes, events, large and small. We stuff ourselves with these impressions and experiences and our reaction to them. Into our subconscious go not only factual data but reactive data, our movement toward or away from the sensed events.

These are the stuffs, the foods, on which The Muse grows. This is the storehouse, the file. . . . What is The Subconscious to every other man, in its creative aspect becomes, for writers, The Muse. They are two names for one thing. . . . Here is the stuff of originality. For it is in the totality of experience reckoned with, filed, and forgotten, that each man is truly different from all others in the world.

– “How to Keep and Feed a Muse,” in Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius within You (1992)

Students of all things Bradburyan know quite well that the above explanation is drawn from Bradbury’s actual, ongoing experience as a writer. The story of — for instance — Bradbury’s unhappy stay in Ireland when he was writing the screenplay for director John Huston’s Hollywood adaptation of Moby Dick (as recounted in his 1998 autobiographical novel Green Shadows, White Whale) is legendary. So is the fact that many years later Bradbury was surprised to find stories set in Ireland erupting spontaneously from his typewriter. He had thought he thoroughly hated the place and gained nothing from it in the way of authorial inspiration. But in fact his demon muse had treasured up countless impressions of Ireland and its inhabitants, and after many years of secretly processing them, began to present them to his conscious awareness. He could have ignored this inner event. He could have suppressed it. But a lifetime of learning the wisdom and discipline of creative midwifery had taught him to pay attention to his inner voice, and so he followed the muse and wrote several stories set in a vibrantly realized Ireland. Moreover, his experiences with Huston and Moby Dick emerged as a major part of his personal mythic life journey that he has retold many times in books, essays, and lectures.

Think of this when recalling his previously quoted words (from Part 1): “I don’t write my stories. They write themselves. So out of my imagination I create these wonderful things, and I look at them and say, ‘My God, did I write that?’ . . . Everything comes to me. Everything is my demon muse.”

Then think of this, too: Bradbury isn’t the only one with a demon muse, an inner spirit that transforms experience into creative inspiration in the service of an overall life theme. You, too, have just such an inner guide, and so do I, and we can both access a creatively inspired state of flow and fulfillment by first coming to terms with the very existence of our inner partner and then “tuning in” to its innate tropes and rhythms.

Training both sides of your nature

As for exactly how to accomplish this feat of self-knowledge, the above-described act of renunciation, in which you decide to let your work be driven by your creative unconscious, is an excellent first step. One of Bradbury’s own writing gurus stated the matter with exquisite clarity in her masterwork about the training of authorial genius:

It is possible to train both sides of the character to work in harmony, and the first step in that education is to consider that you must teach yourself not as though you were one person, but two. . . . By isolating as far as possible the functions of these two sides of the mind, even by considering them not merely as aspects of the same mind but as separate personalities, we can arrive at a kind of working metaphor, impossible to confuse with reality, but infinitely helpful in self-education. . . . If you are to write well you must come to terms with the enormous and powerful part of your nature which lies behind the threshold of immediate knowledge.

– Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer (1934)

As a useful experiment, you might consider paying attention to your own mind and the interplay of conscious awareness with unconscious processes, since you have to learn the difference between them before you can take action to train them. Whenever memories pop up from nowhere, thoughts and ideas take off on wild and spontaneous tangents, and/or you find yourself helplessly fascinated by a person, idea, scene, situation, or circumstance, you’re probably experiencing the interplay of your two natures. You-as-ego are receiving deliveries from the unconscious mind, which are recognizable as such by the fact of their psychologically involuntary character. These deliveries are in turn the product of your unconscious mind’s interpretive and transformative action upon the things you have encountered and experienced in the world around you. This same synergistic process is the root of all authentic creativity. Learn the deep workings of your own mind, and you learn the key to cooperating with psychological reality and thereby realizing (making real) what’s wanting to be said through you.

Image credits:
- “Dream of the Poet or, The Kiss of the Muse,” by Paul Cezanne, 1859-60, public domain
- Ireland, Connemara, http://www.flickr.com/photos/8168775@N02/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Related posts:

1. A Writers’s Guide to the Psyche, Part 1: Muses, Demons, and Egos
2. The Daimonic Insight: Creativity is a Force Separate from You
3. Getting to Know Your Creative Demon, Part 2