Posts Tagged creativity

Seven Perspectives on Living with a Muse

Image:  L'Artiste et sa MuseIn your life as a muse-driven writer, there’s a great deal of help and gratification, not to mention pure pleasure, to be gained from reading the accounts of other artists who have consciously experienced their creativity to some degree as an autonomous force, entity, or process. Equally valuable are statements of general creative principles that have been abstracted from such accounts. Learning the various ways in which writers have conceived, related to, and referred to their inner collaborators can go a long way toward helping you to clarify your relationship with your own muse or genius. And of course such statements often shade into speculations about the general meaning and purpose of human life, both individually and collectively — a subject that’s always worth considering.

You’ll find quotes to this effect scattered throughout the library of articles housed here at Demon Muse. Right now, to reinforce the point, here are a few more. By way of a disclaimer, please note that not all of the individuals quoted below make explicit mention of the muse, daimon, or genius. Some of them might well quibble with the use of such terminology. But all talk about the ins and outs, both practical and philosophical, of living and working with the realization that creativity comes to us as a seemingly autonomous force that demands an attitude not of control, but of relationship and respect. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: creative process, creativity, daimon, don delillo, george blair-west, james lee burke, lisa a riley, maxie van roye, muse, robert louis stevenson, Steven Pressfield

When the Muse Becomes Monstrous: The Demonic Modern History of the West

Image: Solitude - Dark MuseThis isn’t even close to what I originally intended when I sat down to write this week’s post, but it’s what came out. As always, such occurrences make for a nice illustration of the main point around here (which, as you’ll note, is conveniently restated in the first couple of sentences below.)

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Abandoning the muse: from the Renaissance to Freud

The muse model of creativity, a.k.a. the daemonic or genius-based model, holds that it’s eminently reasonable and helpful to regard creativity as an independent force that emerges through you, as opposed to a quality or power that you possess or a mere feat that you’re able to perform. This ancient model of creativity is also a model of consciousness in general. It’s a model of the nature and status of the conscious self within the wider context of psychological life as a whole, human life in general, and the world at large.

As such, it underwent a drastic change over the course of several recent centuries in the West, beginning with the Renaissance and culminating in the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment and the 19th-century Age of Science (the latter of which, as we can now see in retrospect, might be more accurately termed the Age of Scientism). This was a period of enormous and energetic change in fundamental cultural understandings of what it means to be human, so the idea of the muse couldn’t help but be affected. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: A.M. Rosenthal, Age of Enlightenment, creativity, daimon, demon, Frankenstein, Freud, genius, genocide, horror, kierkegaard, Mary Shelley, monsters, muse, Nazis, Nietzsche, ray bradbury, Renaissance, Romantics, scientism, World War II

The Muse in the News

inspirationAs recounted in part two of “Embrace Your Creative Demon’s Rhythm,” the poet Amy Lowell once compared poets to radio antennas. The poet, she said, is someone who “is capable of receiving messages on waves of some sort; but he is more than an aërial, for he is capable of transmuting these messages into those patterns of words we call poems.”

Lately, if you consciously fashion yourself into a different kind of antenna — specifically, one that’s set to detect references to the daimon/daemon, the genius, and the creative muse in current cultural discourse — you’ll find that you receive a lot of signals indeed. There’s a diffuse conversation afoot about this ancient view of creativity and selfhood, and paying attention to it can reap some serious rewards in terms of clarifying your crucial relationship to your own inner partner.

Here are some choice items from the past few weeks, months, and years. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: amy lowell, creativity, daimon, demon, edward hirsch, Elizabeth Gilbert, lawrence staples, meredith wickham, mike nichols, muse, nick laird, Steven Pressfield, sunni brown, thomas moore, tony white, unconscious mind

An Unleashed Imagination: T.M. Wright on Creativity, the Muse, and Finding Your Writer’s Voice

Today we kick off what will become an ongoing series of occasional interviews with writers and artists. The series launches with a just-finished conversation between me and contemporary novelist, poet, and painter T.M. Wright.

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T.M. Wright

T.M. Wright

I first became acquainted with T.M. Wright via his sterling reputation. Amid the flood of books, most of them quite awful, that made up the 1970s and 80s horror publishing boom, Wright was one of the few authors who rose above the murky waters to produce work of authentic and lasting quality. Some readers and critics called him a new master of ghost fiction, even placing him in the company of M.R. James.

His 1978 debut novel, Strange Seed — about a newlywed couple who escape the urban din of New York City by moving to a farm house in upstate New York, where they’re confronted by a shattering supernatural presence in the woods — is a bona fide modern classic that prompted Stephen King to dub it “the best supernatural novel since Interview with the Vampire,” and to describe the author as “a rare and blazing talent.” King ended up including the book on his list of essential modern horror novels in Danse Macabre. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: brian keene, creative writing, creativity, ghosts, horror, inspiration, Interviews, joe lansdale, matt cardin, muse, t.m. wright

Ignorance, Faith, and the Discipline of the Demon Muse, Part 2

As explored in Part 1 of this series, communications from your unconscious mind are recognizable as such by the fact that they occur spontaneously. From your point of view — that is, the viewpoint of you-as-conscious-ego — the voice of the unconscious arrives in the form of involuntary promptings from a separate, independent, autonomous source within your subjectivity. This source — to restate the fundamental insight that animates this blog — is, or is equivalent to, the muse, daimon/daemon, and personal genius of classical antiquity.

(It’s also equivalent to a few additional and equally potent metaphors that we haven’t talked about yet, such as the Spanish duende as described by Federico Garcia Lorca. See “A Writer’s Guide to the Psyche, Part 1” and Part 2 for more detail about the daimon and such.)

Learning the specific “language” of your unconscious mind is therefore crucial to the cultivation of an empowered creative life. It doesn’t do you much good if your genius is trying to speak to you but you can’t understand it, or if you don’t even recognize the sound of its voice.

What you have to do is figure out, via careful attentiveness to your inner states of mind and emotion, the form(s) and the channel(s) by which and in which your inner partner wants to communicate and collaborate. We’ve already explored the general idea and some specific techniques by which you can get to know your daemon’s character (see “Getting to Know Your Creative Demon, Part 1,” Part 2, and Part 3). Now it’s time to take a look at what’s effectively the converse side of things by considering the specific ways in which your daemon tries to make itself and its wishes known to you. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: brewster ghiselin, buddhism, carl jung, creative unconscious, creativity, daemon, daimon, dorothea brande, dorothy canfield, duende, eckhart tolle, federico garcia lorca, fourth way, genius, gurdjieff, h.p. lovecraft, james bonnet, john gardner, mindfulness, morning pages, muse, Muse and Psyche: Tapping Your Deep Self, religion, sandra lee dennis, unconscious mind, zen

Ignorance, Faith, and the Discipline of the Demon Muse, Part 1

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: carl jung, creative process, creative psychology, creativity, daemon, daimon, daimonic, james hillman, muse, stephen diamond, unconscious mind

Patience, the Muse, and Real Life

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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Tags: art, carl jung, creativity, muse

Stoking Your Creative Fire: Identify Your Daemon’s Work Habits

Have you gotten to know your creative demon? (If not, see “Getting to Know Your Creative Demon, Part 1,” and also parts 2 and 3.) Have you begun to learn the specific personality of the deep psychological force that organically motivates you to be passionate about, fascinated with, and energized by this instead of that and some things instead of other things? Have you experimented with reading your life’s trajectory, both inner and outer, as a work of art or literature that embodies central, recurrent motifs and themes, and have you recognized these as clues to the natural direction your creativity would like to take you?

If so, then you’re way ahead of the game. Many people never do these things, and you, by contrast, may be experiencing a new or renewed sense of creative potency and possibility. This is a heady and alternately (or reciprocally) frightening and exhilarating development.

It’s also an ongoing one. You can never exhaust the depth of discovery in your muse or genius. This is built into the very structure of human consciousness, since the unconscious genius lies perpetually “behind” the conscious ego. The harmonizing and integrating of these two selves in a quasi-Jungian process of individuation — which is really what we’re about here: individuation as experienced in or applied to artistic creativity — represents not a discrete, one-time accomplishment, like a finish line to be reached, but an ongoing, ever-deepening relationship in which communication flows with increasing freedom between you and your daimon.

In this process, getting familiar with your creative demon’s general nature is only the beginning: a (very) necessary step, but not a sufficient one. This is because you’ll soon discover that in addition to a general direction, your demon muse has specific habits and desires. These can sometimes pertain to things so seemingly prosaic and trivial that you’ll be tempted to dismiss them as meaningless. But that would be a mistake.

The experience of creative diminishment or full-blown creative block often arises from your unwitting attempt to force your genius to deliver through channels or means that it simply doesn’t like and refuses to comply with. Conversely, you can stoke your creative fire by finding and using the right approach for your genius.

In short, through trial and error you can learn exactly how your creative demon likes to work, right down to the most humdrum daily details of method and material. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: creative process, creative writing, creativity, daemon, daimon, genius, nick cave, rudyard kipling

Getting to Know Your Creative Demon, Part 3

As explained in detail in Part 2 of this series, a focused examination of your life’s trajectory in which you “read” your life in the same way that you would read and interpret a work of art or literature, can reveal enduring themes and motifs that serve as clues to your innate creative leanings. Your unconscious mind — your muse or daimon — is the inner genius that presides over your life and houses the deep patterns of creative energy that want to express themselves in and through you. Discovering these patterns in the unfolding outline of your life over time is a potent means of discovering the type of work and typical themes that you’re innately suited to pursue.

To say the same thing differently: Your purpose it to step out of the way and second the direction that your daimon is wanting to take you.

The question at hand is not only how to do this, but what such an approach to creativity truly, deeply means, on a whole-life level. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: artistic creativity, creative psychology, creative unconscious, creativity, daimon, genius, james hillman, muse, unconscious mind, victoria nelson

Getting to Know Your Creative Demon, Part 2

As explained in Part 1, the deep recognition of yourself as a dual being, a conscious ego accompanied by a constant alien companion in the form of your unconscious mind or personal genius, is necessary but not sufficient. Once you’ve begun to grasp the reality of the situation, you’ll need to start learning the highly distinctive and idiosyncratic personality of your inner companion in order to activate that knowledge and make it more than just an idle insight.

After all, you’re living in a permanent inner partnership with a being that you can only glimpse indirectly, and whose existence you are free to take as a metaphor, a literal reality, or some combination thereof. Getting familiar with its ways is crucial for success in life and art. What follows is equally applicable to both.

The third technique: examine your life and self

The two techniques described in Part One — practicing morning writing and composing a dialogue between your ego and unconscious mind, and analyzing the specific character traits that are revealed about your unconscious — are aimed at engaging your genius directly and trying to channel its “voice” onto paper. By contrast, the one to be described here consists of several parts and counsels you to search for clues about your deep nature by reflecting on the overall outline of your life and personal character. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: creativity, daimon, genius, james hillman, muse, psychology, ray bradbury, the secret, theodore roszak

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