As 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.
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Dreaming while awake
When we really start creating, something lets go and begins to flow. It’s like something takes over, and all these things that we didn’t know we had inside come pouring out. But this “letting go” can be scary. A lot of people worry that they might go crazy. When we let go of the ego we may feel as if we don’t have any control. But eventually the flow will stop, and the ego will come back. It’s like a cork that bobs down, and then bobs back up. The same thing happens when we dream: the ego goes to sleep, and the unconscious begins to flow. Writers and artists literally dream while they’re awake by diminishing the ego. The only difference between the creative process and insanity is that the ego leaves and never comes back.
– Jungian analyst Lawrence Staples, interviewed by Pythia Peay in “Creativity Analyzed: The Psychology of the Artist,” The Huffington Post, June 16, 2010
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Our unconscious collaborator
In making movies, time is so short — because it is so expensive — that we tend to neglect the place from which the best ideas come, namely that part of ourselves that dreams.
The unconscious is our best collaborator. I try to let the participants have downtime before shooting and after rehearsal, so our secret collaborator can do its work. I have learned to trust and encourage that more.
– Oscar , Tony, and Emmy Award-winning director Mike Nichols, AARP: The Magazine, Jan/Feb 2004
(Thanks to Douglas Eby and his Talent Development Resources for the quote)
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Learning to live with your daimon
When you feel an urge to take a major turn in your life, that is the daimon waking you up. When you find unexpected strength in your voice or in your work, that is the daimon empowering you. When you want to go in one direction, and something in you pushes strongly in a different direction, that other voice is the daimon. It is an ancient idea, but it also lies at the heart of the work of the Greek mystic Heraclitus, C. G. Jung, W. B. Yeats, Rollo May, and James Hillman. You live with your daimon when you take your innermost passions into account, even when they go against your habits and standards. You need dialogue so that you can work out a livable connection with this challenging but ultimately creative power.
In the best of cases, over time you get to know your deep passions. You come to recognize the voices that speak deep in your imagination. You sort out the devils from the angels, the voices of fear from the voices of hope. You may get to the point where you feel in harmony with yourself because you are in dialogue with these other presences. A psychologist might call them fantasy figures and warn against giving them too much reality. But in spite of the dangers, you can bring them into the equation and consider them carefully.
– Archetypal psychologist Thomas Moore, “Spirituality of the Deep,” in Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way through Life’s Ordeals (2004)
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The demon in your pen
What is often criticized as cliché is cliché because it works time and time again. This is not to say that I applaud formula pictures, but there are some fine core themes that return in great stories again and again….The real challenge to the writer is to express these core themes in ways that have not been thought of before….To break the mold you have to be totally convinced that first there is indeed a genius demon in your pen!
– Award-winning animator Tony White, Animation from Pencils to Pixels: Classical Techniques for the Digital Animator (2006)
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You and your muse
I lifted my face up from the manuscript and I directed my comments to an empty corner of the room and I said aloud, “Listen, you thing, you and I both know if this book isn’t brilliant that’s not entirely my fault because you can see that I’m putting everything I have into this. I don’t have any more. So if you want it to be better, you have to show up and do your part of the deal. But if you don’t do that, you know what? The hell with it. I’m going to keep writing anyway because that’s my job. And I would please like the record to reflect today that I showed up for my part of the job.”
– Author Elizabeth Gilbert describing how she decided to address her genius/muse as an external force, as recounted in her February 2009 TED talk
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Ignoring your muse, ignoring who you are
I love that talk by Elizabeth Gilbert and know it well. I also distinctly remember the first time I watched it because I was so bewildered by the notion that creative people are visited by a “muse” and that creativity and inspiration come from outside — indeed beyond — ourselves. In retrospect, I was bewildered because I was on the brink of being visited, so to speak, and I was horrified. Now I understand that there is more to fear by ignoring this muse creature. It’s akin to ignoring who you really are.
– Graphic artist Sunni Brown, in an interview given to Steven Pressfield, June 18, 2010
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Where (when) the muse lives
What I realized when I began to delve deeply into the intimate particulars of my day was that the Muse was not playing coy with me at all. I have known her secret address since childhood — without realizing I knew. She lives in the here and now. In fact, the doorway to her house is usually the narrowest possible slice of reality to which I can attach my undivided attention.
Whenever I get trapped in the rumble of my own thoughts, the mental noise prevents any awareness of her presence. She’s a tiny thing, and extraordinarily soft-spoken, and she can only be heard when it’s peaceful and still, when I give her an opening.
– Writer and photographer Meredith Wickham, “The Muse’s Secret Address,” June 9, 2010
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The artist’s struggle
EDWARD HIRSCH: For me, the demon and the angel become two aspects of our nature, two parts of ourselves. Something inside of us that empowers us. So, I write about moments of artistic possession, and encounters with demons and angels as experienced by various artists and writers, including those who write about angels or paint angels.
“There’s some weird combination of artistic making, and artistic possession, of putting oneself at the service of other forces, other powers, while also controlling one’s art.”
- Edward Hirsch
DONNA SEAMAN: In thinking about how the struggle in the night between Jacob and the angel can be seen to mirror the struggle of the artist with the creative force, it occurs to me that the artist can’t capitulate entirely to this power. he or she needs to stand his or her ground, as Jacob did. The artist needs to maintain what you describe as a spiritual alertness. Artists feel possessed by the angel or demon of artistic inspiration — you discuss writers who have felt as though they were taking dictation from a creative spirit — but they had to be present in some way; they had to remain themselves and control the transaction. They must possess, as Jacob did, the presence of mind to clarify, benefit from, and preserve the experience.
EDWARD HIRSCH: I appreciate that you’re saying this. We don’t know how to think about this experience very clearly. Because it’s not just a question of putting yourself into a trance, of being taken over by other forces, and letting the forces dictate to you what to do. There’s some weird combination of artistic making, and artistic possession, of putting oneself at the service of other forces, other powers, while also controlling one’s art. So I was trying to think about, for example, the way John Keats talks in his letters about “associative drift” but then writes in “Ode to Psyche” about “a working brain.” Somehow the working brain works in tandem with associative drift.
We tend to see the aspect of making on the one hand and the aspect of the seer on the other, as though they’re diametrically opposed. But I think there’s another kind of vocabulary that we can bring to this, to think about the way that the working intellect, what Keats calls the working brain, operates in tandem with this other demonic force. And I love something that the Spanish Sufi poet and thinker Ibn ‘Arabi says, “a person must control one’s thoughts in a dream.” That’s what I’m trying to talk about. That gives me a name for what it is, because it’s both controlling one’s thoughts and it’s also entering the dream state.
– Donna Seaman, “A Conversation with Edward Hirsch,” TriQuarterly, October 1, 2003
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The immortal — and external — creative spirit
Inspiration (Latin “breathing in”) used to be external; and for millennia what we inhaled when inspiration came was the breath of god, divine afflatus. Post-Freud, we think of it as coming from somewhere within ourselves. The subconscious, like dark matter, makes up most of our universes, though we glimpse it only obliquely in dreams, say, or fevers. Milton might have called on the heavenly muse to sing through him, and Berryman might have mined his therapy sessions for the Dream Songs, but the concept of art being created by an agency separate to the rational self has outlived all variations in the origin of such an agency; something is working us.
– Novelist and poet Nick Laird, “Nick Laird on the fitful nature of inspiration,” The Guardian, April 10, 2010
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Image credit: “Inspiration” used under Creative Commons from h.koppdelaney
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