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Ebook now available: “A Course in Demonic Creativity”
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#1 by Michael on January 29, 2012 - 6:10 pm
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Dear Matt,
Thank you for writing this, and thank you for making it available as a free ebook. Is this an offering to your own muse/daemon/secret inner self? If so I hope your creative life has been amply rewarded. It was a terrific read – insightful, authortitative and accessible, pulling together many mysterious threads into a coherent narrative, and one that rang viscerally true. It’s a trail I’ve been following blindly most of my life, but I couldn’t have put it so eloquently into words as you have done here. This is surely essential reading for all creative writers. If it’s okay with you, I’ll make sure I link to your work in a future blog – me being an occasional doe eyed cheerleader for the cause of the unknowable femme fatal of my inner life.
There were many things in your book that touched upon my own experience, names I’ve stumbled across in my search for anwers to the chronic condition that ails me – the singular need to write; Jung, Hillman, Harpur, Wilbur. Each name ringing like a syncronistic bell.
I could go on at length, but this is only supposed to be a comment so I must summon all my unnatural powers of brevity. One of the things that rang especially true here was that I too have struggled with the apparent conflict between the Buddhist path (which I find to be otherwise deeply insightful) and the need of a writer to tune in to the chattering of his muse, or rather to discern between the useless chattering of his monkey brain, and the more emotionally enriching intercourse between a man and his conduit to the anima mundi. It’s an interesting paradox, that the wisest of human beings have safely plotted a course out of reality’s sufferings, while our most deeply insightful and instinctual opposite numbers in the deamonic realm seem intent on plotting a way back in. It makes you wonder if we’re missing something?
But that’s another story.
Once again, my sincere thanks, and my respects.
Michael
#2 by Matt Cardin on February 14, 2012 - 10:24 am
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Thank you for the fine, reflective response, Michael. My decision to publish the book freely in electronic form was/is indeed a kind of offering to my inner partner, in that I was following a distinct inner gravitational leading when I did it.
I can return your gratitude, by the way, because a few months ago I downloaded your commentary on the I Ching and have been finding it quite valuable. I was first introduced to the I Ching two decades ago, and in the past couple of years it has become an increasingly important presence in my life. Your written reflections on it have been a fine addition to the mix.
Interesting to hear that you, too, have consciously grappled with that divide between creativity/the muse and a Buddhist-type liberation. I think you might find much of interest in what Quentin Crisp said when I interviewed him for my Teeming Brain blog. He talked at length about this very issue, and made mention of a book-length essay about it that he had begun to write under the title Fascination and Liberation. I don’t know its current status. I also think of Patrick Harpur’s incisive tracing of this divide in, e.g., his extended characterization of soul vs. spirit to refer to two fundamental and divergent human tendencies and desires. “Spirit,” he writes, “wishes to die literally to the world, shedding all its images and its attachments in the pure, clean, empty air of the desert and mountain-top; soul dies to the literal world, finding truth and meaning in the depths of all images and attachments.” And so on.
Thank you again.