When you get into a serious study of creativity like the one we’re pursuing here at Demon Muse, it’s all too easy to lose sight of the forest among the trees. That is, it’s easy to get caught up in the attractions of ideas and theories, to the point where you forget what the whole thing is really about. This can dampen your enthusiasm for actually performing creative work, whereas recalibrating your attitude can have the opposite effect of inflaming your muse.
What it’s all about, this daimonic or daemonic approach to creativity, this muse-based theory of inspiration, this discipline of embracing your inner genius, is the alignment of your creative act with your deep creative intent. It’s about divining your daemonic passion and then letting this be your guide when you write (or compose, paint, perform, etc.).
The thing is, you can only get it right when you’re not self-conscious about it. During the act of creation itself, you can only ride the daemonic wave by focusing your attention exclusively and intensively on your sense of rightness — or, as a corrective, your sense of wrongness — as you seek to follow the thread of your passion.
So this is all to say that when you come to the actual moment of putting down words on paper, the way to unleash your demon is to forget all about it. The moment of creation isn’t the time to be reflecting on — or, God help you, deliberately trying to follow or implement — psychological theories or concepts about creativity or anything else. Rather, it’s the moment when you should abandon all reflectiveness about what you’re doing, willingly embrace a sense of ignorance (and therefore openness) about where you’re headed and how you’ll get there, and simply heed the impulse of what wants to be said.
And how, exactly, are you supposed to do that? Simple: You find and follow what feels right, for this is the irrefutable and infallible voice of your creative demon speaking.
Daemonic guidance: the voice of the beyond within
It’s an obvious enough concept, really, but it took years for me to learn it: Guidance from the unconscious, or indeed any sort of communication from the unconscious at all, is recognizable by the fact that it feels like an involuntary and external influence on consciousness, even though it’s clearly arising from an inner instead of an outer source: an objective presence within subjectivity, the “beyond within” of Jungian psychology and mystical philosophy.
Naturally, this entails a host of implications. Here’s how I phrased it to myself in a journal entry in the summer of 2005, when the whole thing finally became articulable:
The foolproof way to recognize when something has emerged from the unconscious is to notice that it exerts what feels like an involuntary pull on the ego. All my innate passions and obsessions can be recognized as arising from the unconscious by the mere fact that they’re innate, the mere fact that I have no control over them. This is why following the path of wholeness and self-integration requires following one’s deepest impulses: because these are sparks emitted by the flame of the deep self.
Therefore, as a writer I should and must follow what truly obsesses me, because this is what I am truly “meant” to write. And of course the decision to do this, if entered into in the wrong spirit, i.e. one of master-slave control wherein I order the unconscious to produce, can result in creative blockage.
Like Burroughs said in the introduction to the Retreat Diaries, one must write when and what the unconscious says to write. The very decision of when to begin producing must, to a great (although not an absolute) extent, be dictated by the unconscious itself. When an idea or when the impulse to write presents itself to consciousness out of nowhere, as a mysterious and spontaneous inclination, this is the time to get to work.
Daimonic vs. demonic
I hasten to qualify my own journaled thoughts by pointing out that not all involuntary impulses are created equal. Anybody afflicted by obsessive-compulsive disorder can testify to this. So can that arch-human-monster of late 20th and early 21st century entertainment culture, the serial killer. A bit of discrimination is required, since giving in to OCD, not to mention serial killing, can be counterproductive to the pursuit of art. Following the daemon doesn’t necessarily mean refusing to recognize psychopathology for what it is.
Then again, even in the case of a bona fide psychological disorder, the proper response may not be to reject and try to “cure” it, but instead to recognize and work with it as a part of our daimonic nature, and therefore a major facet of our creativity. As James Hillman has pointed out, the things that emerge as symptoms in our lives are the very things we need to observe and work with most closely, since these are likely expressions of our daimon: “Soul enters only via symptoms, via outcast phenomena like the imagination of artists or alchemy or ‘primitives,’ or of course, disguised as psychopathology. That’s what Jung meant when he said the Gods have become diseases.”
Clinical and forensic psychologist Stephen A. Diamond, author of the the blog Evil Deeds for Psychology Today and the book Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and Creativity (1996), offers some further and extremely helpful thoughts in an interview for Talent Development Resources:
The more conflict, the more rage, the more anxiety there is, the more the inner necessity to create. We must also bear in mind that gifted individuals, those with a genius (incidentally, genius was the Latin word for daimon, the basis of the daimonic concept) for certain things, feel this inner necessity even more intensely, and in some respects experience and give voice not only to their own demons but the collective daimonic as well.
So they are kind of like little oracles of Delphi, or canaries in a coal mine, sensing the dangers, the conflicts, the cultural shadow, and trying to give it some meaningful expression.
….Creativity, then, can in part be thought of as the capacity to express the daimonic constructively. This is what all great artists do.
- Stephen A. Diamond, “The Psychology of Creativity“
The very idea of the daimonic in its specifically psychological context, as developed throughout the 20th century in the work of Jung, Rollo May, Hillman, Diamond, and several others, is bound up with the dark, id-flavored impulses of rage and such. But as May points out in the foreword to Diamond’s book, there’s an important distinction to be made between the daimonic and its purely negative cousin, the demonic:
[T]he daimonic (unlike the demonic, which is merely destructive) is as much concerned with creativity as with negative reactions.
A special characteristic of the daimonic model is that it considers both creativity on one side, and anger and rage on the other side, as coming from the same source. That is, constructiveness and destructiveness have the same source in human personality. The source is simply human potential.
Distinguishing between the daimonic and demonic in yourself is, therefore, a necessary skill to acquire as you attune to your involuntary promptings from within, and seek to channel these in your art.
Actors, artists, mass murderers, and tapping the daimonic
In accordance with May’s observation, discriminating between your own daimonic and demonic impulses requires considerable astuteness as you observe and listen to yourself, since the daimonic and the demonic are simply the same raw reality channeled and manifested in different ways. The actor Terence Stamp once claimed — and I’m paraphrasing from a long-ago memory of something he said when I was a child, in an interview in connection with his portrayal of the villanous General Zod in director Richard Donner’s Superman (1978) and Superman II (1980) – that if he hadn’t been an actor, he probably would have been a mass murderer.
In the above-quoted interview, Diamond claims that most mature artists “realize the relationship between rage and creativity. It is their rage that, when redirected and channeled into their work, gives it the intensity and passion that performing artists such as actors and actresses seek.” He cites Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, and Jessica Lange as examples of “artists [who] have learned how to harness the power and intensity of their own rage (among other daimonic emotions), deliberately tapping into their personal demons to animate and intensify their acting.”
That’s as good a description of the goal we’re pursuing here as any we could ask for. What is potentially demonic within us is the very source of our creative power, and when we listen to it by attending to our deepest impulses, including, especially, the “negative” ones, we’re looking to harness the power and intensity of our daimonic self, and to deliberately tap this reservoir of deep selfhood in order to animate and intensify our art — whose ultimate motivation and direction, let us not forget, resides right there in our daimon/daemon/muse/genius to begin with.
Continued in Part 2
Image Credits:
Dreaming: http://www.flickr.com/photos/h-k-d/ / CC BY-ND 2.0
personal demon: http://www.flickr.com/photos/daphid/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Related posts:
#1 by neighbor on April 27, 2010 - 1:58 pm
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Matt,
I’d be interested to know, in light of this post’s differentiation between daimon (or daemon) and demon, by using spelling as a differentiator between positive/creative and negative/destructive tendencies and forces, why you’ve named your site Demon Muse. I wonder if, with the usual conception of demon being such a negative one, references to demons wouldn’t be really offputting to many.
The concept (and name) of Muse seems to be considered familiar and benign enough that some can utilize it in spite of the sense that it’s kind of quirky to refer in conversation to , “My Muse….” but I don’t think the same can be said of Demon – no matter how creative the spelling nor how old the pedigree.
Personally, I’m not involved in a monotheistic, and hence, dualistic, religious tradition – several of which are known for disliking the shadow side of any equation – and yet I doubt that at any time soon I’ll be thinking of my subconscious creative spring as being anywhere near demonic. It’s too laden with creepiness and mal-intent.
Perhaps that’s just me – I don’t do horror – but my sense is that there’s a huge prejudice against the term that may not be altogether unfounded. Demons and djinns and evil spirits abound in myth and story, and warnings to avoid their attention exist for probably good reason.
Though it’s obvious what you mean, as one reads your posts, how do you plan to deal with this dichotomy, and why have you chosen the word Demon over other old or new options?
#2 by admin on May 11, 2010 - 9:54 am
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That’s an excellent question. I appreciate your bringing it up.
This may sound like a silly distinction, but there’s a difference between talking about the (or a) demon and talking about the demonic. “Demon,” as a matter of historical and linguistic/connotational fact, can refer either to a purely evil spirit or to the type of thing we’re investigating here at Demon Muse. The latter use, while somewhat less common in regular cultural discourse, is definitely there. John Updike, in talking about his authorial drive, talked about his demon. Ray Bradbury talks about his demon, muse, or demon muse. Many of the Romantics talked about the demon that drove them. Examples could be multiplied at length, reaching far back into history. When used this way, the word carries both of the connotations that I want to emphasize at this blog: that of a muse-like inspirer or driver of creativity, and that of a mysterious something-or-other within the soul that always carries a whiff of darkness, but that isn’t purely demonic or devilish, but is somewhat ambiguous, largely because of its inherent combination of elusiveness, mysteriousness, and psychological or spiritual intimacy to us. This is a vein of positively frightening, electrifying, and exhilarating power for mining in creative work, and also in thinking about creative work like I’m doing here. In explaining it this way, I think I’m talking about exactly what Lorca was getting at when he passionately exalted the Spanish concept of the duende (which I haven’t written about here at Demon Muse yet, but which I plan to bring up in the future). The inherent earthy darkness and semi-sinister, semi-divine nature of that spirit from earth that empowers dancers and artists is what I’m chasing after.
Relatedly but distinctly, there’s also the fact that the demon is just the counterpart to the angel, as explained in my post here about the history of the daimon and the genius. Our modern-day idea of both figures becomes blurred the farther one looks back into history, especially back to the early Christian and, before that, Hellenistic periods. The demon and the angel merge into the genius and the daemon/daimon, which thus carries and embodies the same heady combination of divine guidance and dark or sinister-feeling mystery that inheres in the duende.
So by using the fusion of “demon” with “muse” as my overarching rubric and title, I’m deliberately courting, or at least opening the whole thing up to, the various possible reactions of confusion, suspicion, and fascination that have always accompanied such things, because, as I said, there’s real power there. The ambiguity embodied in such a formulation is precisely analogous to the inherent ambiguity involved in your, my, and everybody’s ongoing, present-moment experience of the interplay between the conscious and unconscious minds, our ego and daimon, self and genius. Foregrounding it, while it may well drive some people away, is true to the idea of the whole thing, and will also, I hope and suspect, attract as many people as it repels.
#3 by A.M on May 18, 2010 - 10:02 pm
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In Greek mythology the perception of the muse is represented by 9 goddesses- how does this relate to the concept of the daemon?
You seam to refer to daemon-muse-genius as one? how do you see the muse differing from daemon? thanks
#4 by neighbor on May 19, 2010 - 4:32 pm
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Matt,
That’s a great exposition on your conscious use of “demon,” and recognition of the the assorted ways the term has been used. I have to admit, I’m coming around to it, even with that spelling
I’m reading Hillman’s “Healing Fiction” (was that recommended by you? I don’t recall who steered me there, but I’m glad for it, it’s yummy!) and in the second chapter, “The Pandaemonium of Images” he says, “But the dogmatic crystallization of our religious culture demonized the daimons. As a fundamental component of polytheistic paganism, they had to be negated and denied by Christian theology which projected its repressions upon the daimons, calling them the forces of denial and negation. Thus Jung’s move which turned directly to the images and figures of the middle realm was a heretical, demonic move. His move into the imagination, which had been forced upon him by his fantasies and emotions, had already been prejudged in our religious language as demonic and in our clinical language as multiple personality or as schizophrenia. Yet, this radical activation of imagination was Jung’s method to Know Thyself.”
So I’m in agreement that it’s necessary to dig back through the layers of meaning ascribed to the term – back to the archetypal truths the demon muse expresses – and time to be aware of that which was appended later, with adverse effects.
Thanks for your continued work here!
#5 by admin on May 27, 2010 - 12:25 pm
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Your comments somehow slipped past me unnoticed, A.M. and neighbor. Apologies for taking a few days to respond.
A.M. — That’s a wonderful question, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized there’s more to say about it than what’s reasonable to write in the comment section here. I’ll be working it up for a full post in the future, so please watch for it. For now, the short version is that I’m deliberately using the more generic modern idea of the inspiring spirit that simply refers to it as “the muse” instead of dividing and enumerating it into the nine muses (or actually there were different numbers named by different writers in different periods) of classical Greek thought. As for the distinction between the muse and the daimon/daemon/genius, I’m deliberately fusing all of them into a single master concept, but if I had to call them out and identify their functions, I’d identify the muse as the source of the content that arrives to fill us during inspiration, and the daimon or demon as the thing that goads us to want to do something with it and take it in some particular direction. Further — and here I’m just riffing on what seems organically appropriate to me — I would consider the genius, perhaps, to be the master spirit that stands above the two and unites them in a common purpose.
As I said, I’ll write something in the future, a kind of taxonomy of the creative unconscious as I’m using it here, to say more about this.
neighbor — Many thanks for the continued support. And thanks you for the Hillman quote. The man’s writings have affected me deeply.