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Steven Pressfield and Seth Godin

What’s the role, purpose, and/or value of artists in today’s uber-complex society with its growing population of apathetic citizen dropouts? Best-selling business author and marketing force of nature Seth Godin (Linchpin, What Matters Now) recently addressed this question in an interview he gave to novelist Steven Pressfield (The Legend of Bagger Vance, Gates of Fire, The Afghan Campaign). The general topic was Godin’s thoughts on the creative process, and the result is well worth reading, not only for the conversation’s inherent interest but because of its tangential relationship to some vibrant thoughts about the deep nature of muse-based creativity that Pressfield has articulated elsewhere.

Artists as rebels against the New Dark Age

After asking Godin about his work habits and general creative process, and receiving very pithy and energetic replies, Pressfield finished with what he termed a “bonus question” about the roles of artists, innovators, and entrepreneurs in the context of society’s “big picture.” Godin responded with a life-level challenge to all such people:

PRESSFIELD: Seth, a lot of your work is inspiring people to lead, to follow their emotional hearts, to be heretics and to make their unique presence felt as artists and innovators. In your view, where does the artist/innovator/entrepreneur fit into society? What is her role in the greater scheme of things?

GODIN: We’re the heretics, the agents of change and the court jesters. Without us, it turns into 1984 or Windows 7. Not good.

As our society gets more complex and our people get more complacent, the role of the jester is more vital than ever before. Please stop sitting around. We need you to make a ruckus.

If you, like me and so many other people, have been looking around for the past few years and detecting ominous Dark Age and dystopian trends, then you’ll surely appreciate Godin’s point.

The cosmic creative principle in the unconscious mind

Of special note because of our major topic here at Demon Muse — the daimonic model of creativity — is that Pressfield is also the author of The War of Art (2003), a book about “identifying, defeating, and unlocking the barriers to creativity,” which the author has described as a stylistic hybrid of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. Pressfield confronts the question of daimonic or muse-based creative inspiration head-on, and expresses an actual belief in a spiritual level of existence from whence artistic inspiration flows through invisible “agents of evolution,” which he openly refers to as angels or muses. He also throws in daimons and geniuses for good measure. It’s a gratifyingly heady performance, stocked with all sorts of rich references to Kabbalism and other spiritual and esoteric belief systems. (This is, after all, the man who wrote Bagger Vance).

The following excerpts provide plenty of fodder for productive reflection on your own relationship to these invisible forces, regardless of whether or not you regard them as “really real” in a spiritual sense. Also notice how they loop back to provide a significant coda to Godin’s comments above.

What does it tell us about the architecture of our psyches that, without our exerting effort of even thinking about it, some voice in our head pipes up to counsel us (and counsel us wisely) on how to do our work and live our lives? Whose voice is it? What software is grinding away, scanning gigabytes, while we, our mainstream selves, are otherwise occupied?

Are these angels?

Are they Muses?

Is this the unconscious?

The Self?

Whatever it is, it’s smarter than we. A lot smarter. It doesn’t need us to tell it what to do. It goes to work all by itself. It seems to want to work. It seems to enjoy it.

What exactly is it doing?

It’s organizing.

The principle of organization is built into nature. Chaos itself is self-organizing. Out of primordial disorder, stars find their orbits; rivers find their way to the sea.

When we, like God, set out to create a universe — a book, an opera, a new business venture — the same principle kicks in.

….Clearly some intelligence is at work, independent of our conscious mind and yet in alliance with it, processing our material for us and alongside us.

This is why artists are modest. They know they’re not doing the work; they’re just taking dictation. It’s also why “noncreative people” hate “creative people.” Because they’re jealous. They sense that artists and writers are tapped into some grid of energy and inspiration that they themselves cannot connect with.

Of course, this is nonsense. We’re all creative. We all have the same psyche. The same everyday miracles are happening in all our heads, day by day, minute by minute.

The muse is hardcore

For more in the same vein, but tending toward the starker and darker corridors of the creative life, consider Pressfield’s blog post “Personal Anguish” (Sept. 9, 2009), in which he references Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2009 TED Conference speech about the glorious ministrations of the daimon and the personal genius but then  “tilt[s] the concept into a slightly darker channel” by explaining how in his own experience “the muse is hardcore.” That is, she often shows up and delivers her best goods with full, scintillating force when you’re laid low by a life situation that has gone off the rails and thrust you into personal anguish. “In a way,” he says, “it’s kind of scary — the relentless, impersonal, almost inhuman nature of creativity and inspiration.”

Also see his post “What the Muse Wants” (September 16, 2009), in which he describes the muse as a harsh taskmistress who demands total commitment: “The goddess wants focus. Concentration. When she sees mental ‘scatter,’ that is a major turn-off. She wants us to unplug the phone. Deadbolt the door. Banish all distraction. The Muse is a jealous goddess. She demands our full attention. No competition. No other suitors. And we can’t cheat her. She sees right through us.” But what she doesn’t demand, he says, is unattainably huge time commitments. Regularity, not marathon sprints, is what she requires in return for her gifts. And all of us without exception can find a way to offer her that.

The upshot: a planet full of holy heretics

For my money, the obvious takeaway from reading Pressfield’s and Godin’s combined thoughts includes the following:

  1. “Tuning in” to your daimon, muse, genius, angel, higher self, unconscious mind, is energizing, terrifying, exhilarating, and a necessary step if you want to enter a state of creative flow and express the truth/do the work that’s wanting to come through you.
  2. A culture-wide explosion of authentic creativity would address Godin’s and my — and your? — concerns about creeping Orwellian or other dystopian developments in society at large. For if, as Godin suggests, artists and innovators in their roles as jesters, provocateurs, and change agents can act as living antibodies to ward off incipient culture death, and if, as Pressfield asserts, the deep and transcendent root of authentic creativity exists not just in a privileged few but in every human being — well, you get the idea. We’re all potential heretics and court jesters. It’s damned difficult for a society to live itself into a 1984 situation — or a Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, V for Vendetta, or other dystopian scenario — if the forces of oppression, conformity, apathy, and mass dumbing are being undermined by a spreading eruption of deep creative vitality among individuals everywhere.
For further reading

About the idea of an encroaching Dark Age:

About Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art:

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