I ended Part 2 of this series with a description of the “realm of infinite inner richness and raw, self-evident meaningfulness” that offers to inform your writing when your unconscious mind acts as muse or genius by speaking to you in mental images, persistent thoughts, and intensified emotions. You tap into the nightside of consciousness when you deliberately seek and allow this guidance from beyond your ego shell.
To circle back around to where we started in Part 1, in order to accomplish that necessary nightside tapping you have to give up the idea that you know what you’re doing and where you’re going with it. The reasons for this should be obvious, but in case not: If you think you know what you’re creating, where it’s headed, how it’s going to turn out, what you’re trying to accomplish, what its overall structure is supposed to be, and so on, then this sense of knowledge will almost inevitably result in an attitude of control and ownership over the results. And this is, bar none, the most surefire way to block out the light, whether of the bright or the dark variety, that your genius is trying to shine through you.
The way to overcome this problem is to sidestep it entirely by embracing conscious ignorance and relying on your daemon to carry you through and inform your work with a deep, organically coherent direction.
Trusting the coherence of one’s self
Relying on your daemon or muse is of course a means of relying on yourself, that is, your deep self, the one that runs deeper than the surface skitterings of your ego.
The following case studies illustrate what this might mean in actual practice.
Marion Milner and learning to paint
One of most compelling illustrations of this principle in action comes from British writer and psychotherapist Marion Milner, who in her classic Freudian study of artistic creativity, On Not Being Able to Paint (1950, published under the pseudonym Joanna Field) recounted and reflected on her experience of learning to produce meaningful drawings and paintings by learning to give in to the subjective pressures within her psyche.
She began by abandoning conventional notions of artistic beauty and aesthetic correctness like those expounded in books and classes, for, as she explained, it occurred to her “that preconceived ideas about beauty in drawing might have a limiting effect on one’s freedom of expression, beauty might be like happiness, something which a too direct striving after destroys.” For a time she dedicated herself to the practice of free-drawing, and soon found that “although the drawings were actually made in an absent-minded mood, as soon as one was finished there was usually a definite ‘story’ in my mind of what it was about.”
She soon progressed to the practice of sitting down to draw whenever she noticed strong emotions — anger or whatever — becoming active within her. Through this, she found that she could start drawing with no idea of what she wanted to draw, and the emotions would somehow be discharged by the very act of it and transferred into the drawings themselves, which would then serve to arouse those same emotions when viewed. (It may go without saying that in this particular endeavor she was consciously and experimentally working to determine the deep nature of art itself.)
Ignorance, not-knowingness, temporary intellectual endarkenment, is the only doorway through which the daimon can effectively enter.
A fascinating incident, and one that brought out the large-scale implications of the whole thing, occurred early in her experiments when she was working in accordance with the idea, gleaned from a book she had read, that in art one should simply “find what the eye seems to like.” Over a span of weeks she produced a series of drawings that she collectively titled “Earth. Only afterward did she realize that what she had drawn — an approaching storm over a dark sea where a mythic snake and a New Mexican Indian drum rose out of the waves; a dove hovering over water; messy, chaotic scribbles; a tree; a sea wall — were united by the theme of chaos encroaching upon order, as in the biblical story of Noah and the great deluge with its waters of primal uncreation that wiped out the world, after which a dove brought back evidence of solidity’s reappearance from beneath the deep.
This was all in accordance with an unsettling recognition about the nature of perception and subjective identity that had been growing out of her experiments in seeing the world’s visual appearance nakedly and truly, without preconception. At the time she made the “Earth” series, she had been noticing for awhile that “the effort needed in order to see the edges of objects as they really look stirred a dim fear, a fear of what might happen if one let go one’s mental hold on the outline which kept everything separate and in its place.”
This was in turn a facet of the wider realization that had begun to grip her as she saw that “original work in painting, if it was ever to get beyond the stage of happy flukes, would demand facing certain facts about oneself as a separate being, facts that could often perhaps be successfully by-passed in ordinary living.”
In short, she found that a thread of order and coherence, stemming out of her overall state of mind and soul, wound its way through her attempts at drawing even, or in fact especially, when she forsook any attempt at a wide or long view, and simply gave in to the impulse of the moment.
William Stafford and a strange inner richness
In the same regard, we may recall the poet William Stafford‘s description, in his very fine essay “A Way of Writing,” of the “strange bonus” that happened to him sometimes when he pursued the act of writing in a consciously chosen attitude of not-knowing-ness, simply setting aside time each morning to write, and then noting down whatever came to him, relying the whole time on the inner “richness” that he had discovered when he first started writing in school. “At times,” he said,
without my insisting on it, my writings become coherent; the successive elements that occur to me are clearly related. They lead by themselves to new connections. Sometimes the language, even the syllables that happen along, may start a trend. Sometimes the materials alert me to something waiting in my mind, ready for sustained attention. At such times, I allow myself to be eloquent, or intentional, or for great swoops (Treacherous! Not to be trusted!) reasonable. But I do not insist on any of that; for I know that back of my activity there will be the coherence of my self, and that indulgence of my impulses will bring recurrent patterns and meanings again.
Ray Bradbury, Federico Fellini, and the value of not knowing what you’re doing
One also thinks of the motto Ray Bradbury said he learned from his friend, the filmmaker Federico Fellini: “Don’t tell me what I’m doing. I don’t want to know.” Fellini apparently said this in reference to the necessity of looking at the daily rushes while shooting a film. He meant he didn’t want to think ahead of time about what he was trying to accomplish, but instead wanted to gather footage in a kind of ecstatic way, and only afterward discover the coherent themes and meanings that wanted to emerge from it.
Commenting on this in a 1997 interview for Bookselling This Week (“People in Books: Creating Something Memorable“), Bradbury said, “Get your work done. Then, after it’s done, you find out what you did. But you can’t know ahead of time. So, therefore, the unconscious act turns into creativity. All of a sudden, you have a book, a novel.”
Matthew Weiner and the daemonic drive behind AMC’s Mad Men
Then there’s television writer Matthew Weiner, whose credits include Becker, The Sopranos, and, in a turn that has seen him not only write but create a show, the entertainment phenomenon that is AMC’s Mad Men. In a 2009 feature story in Vanity Fair, (“Don and Betty’s Paradise Lost“), Weiner and some of the show’s writers and producers talked about the deep place within him that serves as the source of Mad Men‘s hypnotically gripping images and themes. (Here’s a thank you to Douglas Eby of Talent Development Resources for alerting me to this article.)
“To hear the show’s writers discuss Weiner’s creative process,” says Vanity Fair writer Bruce Handy, “it’s almost as if the Mad Men world and its ongoing narratives exist fully formed somewhere deep in the recesses of Weiner’s mind, tangible but elusive, like dreams half remembered upon waking. He retrieves fragments and shards and brings them into the writers’ room, to use as building blocks for larger dramas.”
“I count on my subconscious to be consistent. And how that works I have no fucking idea, and I don’t even want to investigate it. Because if I lose that I have nothing to say.” – MAD MEN creator Matthew Weiner
Handy quotes writer-producer Lisa Albert, who told him some of Weiner’s creative process “is, frankly, mysterious. Like, Matt will have an image in his mind, and he’s not sure why, and we sit around and talk about it and try and figure out why this thing keeps coming in his mind.” (You’ll recall that we looked specifically at the significance of this type of persistent mental imagery in Part 2.)
Weiner himself describes the matter in a way that perfectly illustrates and forcefully caps off our exploration of the interplay between embracing conscious ignorance and following the daemonic thread: “I start with me, like any writer. I start with what I’m feeling, what I identify with. . . . I count on my subconscious to be consistent. And how that works I have no fucking idea, and I don’t even want to investigate it. Because if I lose that I have nothing to say.”
His case also illustrates the balance between the daimonic and its negative twin, the demonic, and the import of this razor’s-edge distinction for energizing us creatively (see Part 1). After describing some of Weiner’s fiery and intense personality traits — he has a temper, for example, and he cries when writing intensely emotional scenes, or even when remembering ones from movies he likes — Handy offers a succinct assessment of the crucial role the man’s inner conflicts play in fueling his creative success: “Whatever Weiner’s demons, they work for him.”
Finding your own way
And now, after all of that, a caveat, if not an outright waffle: Not all advice is equally applicable to everybody, and not all writers and artists can or should work explicitly, at all times, in Weiner’s, Bradbury’s, Fellini’s, Stafford’s, and Milner’s ecstatic or otherwise intuitive way. One thinks here of the advice Bradbury has given to writers about how to take other people’s advice (as I loosely recall it): “Never listen to a damned thing anybody tells you.”
The way of writing in ignorance — of giving into deep feeling, recognizing it as daemonic guidance, and striking out in search of a form and meaning you can’t currently see — isn’t necessarily for everybody. The distinction between intuitive and rational writers is an old and valid one. I myself have had to adopt a systematic approach for much of my career, because this is just the way my creativity has wanted and needed to emerge.
Huston Smith
But having acknowledged this, it’s still necessary to recognize that ignorance, not-knowingness, temporary intellectual endarkenment, is the only doorway through which the daimon can effectively enter. Even within the cycles of a creativity whose expression demands something more systematic and structured than intuitive foraging, there’s a recurrent moment when the ego has to release its stranglehold on a sewn-up sense of knowledge and stability, and let something not of itself spill in through the corners and seams. Otherwise the artist is committing the error that religion scholar Huston Smith, writing in a separate but significantly related context, has identified as the defining ethos of the modern Western mindset with its soul-killing worldview of reductionistic scientism: “An epistemology that aims relentlessly at control rules out the possibility of transcendence in principle.” (See Smith’s brilliant Beyond the Post-Modern Mind for more about this.)
This letting-go isn’t necessarily easy. The fear of loss of identity that Milner sensed as she pursued the goal of authentic art was certainly real, and certainly warranted. To get past its inherent limitations, your ego has to give itself up to daemonic guidance from above/within/below, and this triggers the inherent fear of loss of identity and obliteration of cosmic (as it were) boundaries as you allow your other self to descend from the heights, ascend from the depths, or emerge from the shadows (metaphors are its native idiom).
This is the terrifying and exhilarating situation you’ll have to recognize and willingly face, again and again, if you’re going to submit to the discipline of your demon muse.
BOOKS REFERENCED IN THIS ARTICLE:
IMAGE CREDIT:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/h-k-d/ / CC BY-ND 2.0
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