I grew up in an Independent Christian Church, one of those conservative evangelical Protestant congregations that represent the right-leaning doctrinal divergence of some Restoration Movement churches from the über-liberal Disciples of Christ denomination circa the early and middle parts of the 20th century. One of the mottos of my childhood church, which I learned directly from the lips of my father, is this: “Where the scriptures speak, we speak; where the scriptures are silent, we are silent.”
Anybody who scents in this saying a close analog to the muse/daemon/genius-based approach to artistic creativity is surely onto something. As I said in a past post (“Embrace Your Creative Demon’s Rhythm, Part 2“), in a discussion of how important it is to find your natural creative condition, you simply can’t know your innate creative rhythm — occasional, erratic, or prolific — until you actually do the work of finding out who you are by making friends with your daemonic genius, and then by approaching your work openly and experimentally in order to discover the pace and volume at which your creativity wants to emerge. I illustrated this with examples, excerpts, and insights from the lives and works of Philip Larkin, Alice Flaherty, Joe Hill, Amy Lowell, and Victoria Nelson.
Here I present a few more examples to illustrate the point — which, to repeat, is that there’s a wide variation among people in how their creative demons consent to being accessed and how their muses consent to being courted. The crucial thing is to get in touch, and then to stay in touch, with your own demon muse, so that when your it speaks, you speak, and when it’s silent, you remain silent.
But bear in mind that this doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t be writing the whole time. This is not a contradiction but a subtle distinction. For more such seeming contradictions, wade into the following choppy sea of advice from well-known authors. Read the rest of this entry »
