Remember Elizabeth Gilbert‘s anecdote about the time Tom Waits was struck with a brilliant musical idea while driving? He spontaneously entered a new stage of his artistic life when he addressed the creative impulse as a separate, living spirit and asked it to visit him again later, since he wasn’t in a position to heed it at the moment.

Currently I’m exercising the same option, after a fashion. Relocation to a new house, combined with a couple of other pressing circumstances, have briefly put Demon Muse on pause. Posting will resume on Monday, April 12.

In the meantime, here’s a brilliant passage from Jung’s “Psychology and Literature” to pass the time. I recently reread the essay and was bowled over even more than when I first encountered it some years ago. I consider it a crucial corrective for anybody who takes the artistic vocation lightly:

Every creative person is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory aptitudes. On the one side he is a human being with a personal life, while on the other side he is an impersonal, creative process. . . . The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is “man” in a higher sense — he is “collective man” — one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic life of mankind. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.

. . . . There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of the creative fire. It is as though each of us were endowed at birth with a certain capital of energy. The strongest force in our make-up will seize and all but monopolize this energy, leaving so little over that nothing of value can come of it. In this way the creative force can drain the human impulses to such a degree that the personal ego must develop all sorts of bad qualities. . . in order to maintain the spark of life and to keep itself from being wholly bereft.

. . . . How can we doubt that it is his art that explains the artist, and not the insufficiencies and conflicts of his personal life? These are nothing but the regrettable results of the fact that he is an artist — that is to say, a man who from his very birth has been called to a greater task than the ordinary mortal. A special ability means a heavy expenditure of energy in a particular direction, with a consequent drain from some other side of life.

. . . . Whenever the creative force predominates, human life is ruled and molded by the unconscious as against the active will, and the conscious ego is swept along on a subterranean current, being nothing more than a helpless observer of events. The work in process becomes the poet’s fate and determines his psychic development. It is not Goethe who creates Faust, but Faust which creates Goethe.

– Carl Jung, “Psychology and Literature,” in Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933)

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dreama/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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