As explained in detail in Part 2 of this series, a focused examination of your life’s trajectory in which you “read” your life in the same way that you would read and interpret a work of art or literature, can reveal enduring themes and motifs that serve as clues to your innate creative leanings. Your unconscious mind — your muse or daimon — is the inner genius that presides over your life and houses the deep patterns of creative energy that want to express themselves in and through you. Discovering these patterns in the unfolding outline of your life over time is a potent means of discovering the type of work and typical themes that you’re innately suited to pursue.

To say the same thing differently: Your purpose it to step out of the way and second the direction that your daimon is wanting to take you.

The question at hand is not only how to do this, but what such an approach to creativity truly, deeply means, on a whole-life level.

A life questionnaire

In the “how to do it” category, for a concrete tool to help you conduct this type of self-examination you might consider composing — and answering — a series of carefully targeted questions about yourself, your life, your talents, your likes and dislikes, your personal history, and so on.

Some of the most important of these might include:

  1. What have you always done well?
  2. What have you always loved to do?
  3. What have you always hated to do?
  4. What do you detest? What things in life are guaranteed to arouse your anger and indignation? What can you not abide?
  5. What drains your energy and leaves you saying with Hamlet, “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world”?
  6. Who have been your mentors and models? Who has inspired and/or helped you to know the life you want to live and the person you want to be?

(Note that the thought process behind this list — such as the explanation for #4 in the fact that your daimon often makes its presence and preferences known in the definite and incontrovertible reaction of “Yes” or “No”  that you feel in response to a given circumstance — can be found in “Getting to Know Your Creative Demon, Part 2.”)

If parts of this sound a little reminiscent of an MBTI personality test or a career aptitude assessment, be advised that this isn’t an accident. Those tests, and indeed all personality and life/career inventories, are intended at least in part to gauge your involuntary temperament and leanings, which are just other ways of describing a central aspect of your daimon. You might well find it valuable to discover your MBTI type, for example, or your Enneagram type, especially if you bear in mind that what these tools give you is, in large part, a typological description not of your ego but of your unconscious mind.

More: Dr. John Eaton provides a  brief and useful self-inventory tool in “Letting your personal genius loose.” Dr. Leslie Owen Wilson provides another in “Identifying and caring for your muse.” There’s a veritable ocean of such resources available, if you’ll just look around.

A personal example

The artistic drive and the aesthetic sensibility are all-encompassing. Works of darkness and gloom are as valid and necessary as their kinder, gentler counterparts.

To illustrate all of the foregoing by using myself as an example, I can recall grabbing a crayon and drawing long, looping lines, vaguely reminiscent of chain links, across the pages of many a coloring book when I was three and four years old. This wasn’t just an idle activity; I was trying to write words and sentences. One time I filled the pages of a Star Trek coloring book with lines that I pretended were computer-type technical explanations. Today I can still vividly remember the palpable sense of craving that possessed me as I strove to write down deep and meaningful things, even though all I could do at the time was to scribble. I was positively desperate to commit words to paper, and to have them mean something important.

Many years later I found those coloring books and remembered that craving. It was at a time when my writing career was starting to take off.

I also remember teaching imaginary classrooms full of people at the same age, and using white pages filled with those same meaningless scribbles (this time in ink pen)  for my “lessons.” A quarter of a century later I became a professional educator, right around the same time that I became a professional writer.

In The Soul’s Code, archetypal psychologist James Hillman counsels us to “read our lives backward” to seek the origins of our life-dominating themes in daimonic tendencies that showed up in childhood. “We must attend very carefully to childhood to catch early glimpses of the daimon in action, to grasp its intentions and not block its way,” he says. My own life has born this out. Perhaps yours has, too.

Daemonyx: Curse of the DaimonKnowing and loving your creative force

“Engaging in an act of art,” says Victoria Nelson in in On Writer’s Block, “is very much like establishing a relationship with a another person. . . . [If] you form a friendship based on mutual respect, then over time, with much love and patience, you can form a secure bond. . . . To function as a writer, one must, above all, love and honor one’s creative force.”

For those like myself whose creativity has led them in decidedly dark directions — see my Dark Awakenings, for example, or my musical work in Curse of the Daimon — it’s heartening to bear in mind that this is the same Victoria Nelson who observed in the same book that whereas authentic creativity only “blossoms in conditions of gentleness and respect,” still, “the conditions of creativity are not synonymous with its results: self-love is not the same as adopting a tone of optimism in one’s work. Gloomy, despairing works of art as well as ‘cheerful’ ones are the product of a positive relationship between conscious and unconscious in the artist’s psyche.”

The artistic drive and the aesthetic sensibility are all-encompassing. Works of darkness and gloom are as valid and necessary as their kinder, gentler counterparts. Your unique genius may be prompting you to produce one type or the other, or perhaps both or something in-between. At the same time,  and as explained by the daimon/genius theory in general, your genius is leading you to relate to the world in a certain way and to encounter certain types of life circumstances and experiences. Your task is to divine the peculiar personality and guiding theme or themes of both your outer life and your inner partner, and to deploy your conscious efforts as wisely and shrewdly as possible for the purpose of birthing whatever it is that wants to be accomplished through you.

Doomed to be artists or, Keep the channel open

Perhaps the nature of the situation is made a little clearer — perhaps starkly so — by a line from Robert Edmond Jones, the influential 20th century stage director, producer, and set designer. Jones liked to tell his classes, “Some of you are doomed to be artists.” This becomes all the more evocative when considered against the etymological backdrop of the word “doom,” which connotes not just an unhappy destruction but a person’s deep destiny.

The legendary dance choreographer Martha Graham liked Jones’s line so much that she became known for repeating it frequently to her own students. Then, in a moment of sheer inspiration, she expanded and deepened it in a conversation with her fellow dancer and choreographer Agnes de Mille (of the famous Hollywood de Milles). The latter was experiencing a season of self-doubt, during which, in her own words, she was “bewildered and worried that my entire scale of values was untrustworthy. . . . I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be.”

As she later recounted, Graham, speaking “very quietly,” said to her,

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.

– Agnes de Mille, Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham (1991)

A better description of the nature and action of the daimon or genius, and also of your responsibility in relation to it, would be difficult to come by. Life and creativity merge in the fact of this inner force.

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Related posts:

  1. Getting to Know Your Creative Demon, Part 1
  2. Getting to Know Your Creative Demon, Part 1
  3. Stoking Your Creative Fire: Embrace Your Creative Demon’s Rhythm (1)