This 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.
Specifically, the consolidation of the rational ego that occurred during this epoch — the “discovery,” as it were, of the inalienable human rights enumerated in, for example, the Declaration of Independence, and more fundamentally of the autonomous conscious subject to which they pertained; and the pressing of the point in the 19th century’s ruthless squeezing-out of everything from human psychic life but the cold eye of the rational mind — effectively booted the muse and the daemon/daimon out of public discourse and respectable society. Human nature was now infinitely perfectible and all that, because what we are, under this still-new (historically speaking) model, is solely and exclusively what we consciously are. Genius was allowed to stick around, but in the greatly modified form of a quality inherent in certain extraordinary individuals — a far cry indeed from the autonomous genius spirit that was formerly recognized as the visiting presence that empowered the work of artists and thinkers.
Genius was allowed to stick around, but in the greatly modified form of a quality inherent in certain extraordinary individuals — a far cry indeed from the autonomous genius spirit that was formerly recognized as the visiting presence that empowered the work of artists and thinkers.
Yes, people like the Romantics, and Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, and — especially — Freud, helped to keep alive a recognition that our psyche is home to lots of non-rational stuff. But Freud’s case was not only typical but virtually archetypal (if one can forgive the use of that Jungian term in connection with Jung’s former master), in that he built his psychological system firmly on a foundation of Victorian scientism, so that his glowing recognition of the non-rational region of the psyche inevitably portrayed that region as the home of monstrous and rapacious forces, and human life itself as existing in a permanent and tragic state of warfare between the Apollonian forces of civilization and the Dionysian forces of our repressed ids. Our only choice, as he saw it, and as he taught an entire generation or three to believe, was between a drab and rigid life of civilized unfulfillment and a reversion to a dark night of primal savagery. We can either be civilized and enjoy the benefits of safety and security that come with this, or we can give in and freely pursue the satisfaction of our primary cravings. Either choice results in misery. This is the cul-de-sac Freud reached and identified for us at the end of the egoic road.
How to make a monster: the muse amok in the 20th century
One only has to review the history of the 20th century to see the effects of such attitudes on human life. Yes, life in pre-Enlightenment times was in large measure nasty, brutish, and short, and violence and ignorance regularly reinforced each other in daily life in ways that most of us denizens of the modern-day first world can scarcely conceive. But the 20th century was the era when the Enlightenment ideal of rationally self-interested selves pursuing their respective happinesses was epically enabled by the birth of the first truly technological society. And it was marked by violence on a scale never before seen in human history.
The “Great War” or World War of 1914-1918 was so-called because it was, hands down, both qualitatively and quantatively speaking, the bloodiest and deadliest war ever fought, thanks to momentous technological innovations — tanks, airplanes, howitzers, mustard gas, radios, telephones — and their effects, some of which, as in the case of new communications technologies, were exerted not only on the battlefield but on the scale and patterns of human life leading up to the war. Then, astonishingly, a new and even bloodier war broke out only two decades later, thus demoting the Great War to the status of World War I. (Even though the history of the naming of these wars is known, we might speculate that one reason World War II didn’t inherit the Great War label was simply that people were now too afraid to apply the superlative term for fear that it would again be superseded by a still-worse conflict.)
And almost before the horrors of the Third Reich, the Final Solution, and the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had subsided — although, as A.M. Rosenthal suggested in his grim and moving “No News from Auschwitz” (The New York Times, Aug. 31, 1958), not long after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps it appeared the Western public was making a valiant attempt at forgetting all about them — there came (to look at it from a U.S.-centric view alone) the Korean War, and Vietnam, and the ongoing history of geopolitical nuttery and savagery that has yet to subside or reach a head in these early years of the 21st century.
Skulls found at Choeun Ek, the best known of the "Killing Fields" in Cambodia
And this is not even to mention the other great genocides of the 20th century that complemented the Nazis’ attempted extermination of the Jews: 1.5 Armenians killed in Turkey, Stalin’s starvation of 7 million of his own people in Russia, the Rape of Nanking, 2 million Cambodians slaughtered under Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime, the 800,000 Tutsis slaughtered by Hutu militia in Rwanda, 200,000 Muslims slaughtered by Serbs in Bosnia. And these are only the numbers killed in explicitly genocidal operations; the actual number of people who died from various violences and oppressions in the 20th century reaches into the tens or even hundreds of millions. Compare this to those two favorite Western historical touchstones of human cruelty, the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades, which in tandem killed far fewer than two million people. The disparity is not merely a function of lower absolute population numbers during those historical periods; the greater violence of the 20th century is proportional as well as absolute.
One way of reading the meaning of the awful century we’ve just left behind is to read it as a period when our collective non-rational aspect was deformed by violent repression and abandonment and then let loose via our deliberate ignore-ance of it to wreak havoc on a scale we had never seen. The psychological principle which holds that you can only be, and in fact will inevitably be, dominated and manipulated by inner forces when you are unaware of them, and that you’re therefore tasked with establishing an inner harmony by bringing your unconscious mental contents into conscious awareness, holds true in collective human culture as well. We turned our muse, our guiding daimon, into a raging demon by denying its existence, significance, and/or true nature, and then abandoning it to do whatever the hell it wanted.
Hideous progeny and hidden wholeness: we’re all Frankenstein now
Illustration from the frontispiece to the 1831 edition of 'Frankenstein'
There’s a notable literary parable about this very thing. Its title is Frankenstein and it was written by a very young Mary Shelley (with help, yes, from her husband Percy), and it wasn’t just the first science fiction novel but the first full-on symbolic psychological exploration of the ominous meaning of the Western world’s infatuation with ego consciousness to the detriment of the poetic and visionary powers. As a very influential and convincing reading of the novel has long maintained, Victor Frankenstein with his obsessive attempt to discover and then manipulate the secret of life’s creation clearly embodies the Promethean excesses of the heedless rational ego as it forgets its deep roots in primal sources of being that are not at all egoic but are no less human. His monster isn’t just a machine-like automaton that represents the dangers of scientific experimentation, but is an externalization, a kind of theurgic “drawing down,” of his own deeper nature, which inevitably becomes a murderous force — to its own wrenching grief — that destroys everyone and everything Victor has ever loved, purely and simply because Victor refuses to acknowledge his responsibility to it.
Victor is horrified by what he himself, has done, and by the monster’s hideous physical appearance. Both are inevitable effects of his attempt to become nothing but a rational ego, a perfect scientist in the 18th-19th century mode. The monster, his rejected visionary and poetic powers, his rejected unconscious mind or muse, seems to him the epitome of everything loathsome and hate-worthy. And, in the manner common to this subtle and shady-seeming part of our psyches, the monster helplessly obliges this perception by becoming, well, a monster.
That “mad scientist” is each of us when we fail to take into account the reality, autonomy, integrity, and needs of our deep muse-self, not only in creative artistic work but in life at large. That “monster” is our muse/daemon/genius become overtly demonic because we have severed it from our attentions and affections and thereby let it become a force that can affect us as an afflicting “other,” outside of our ability to control or commune with it. There’s a reason the idea of “creating a Frankenstein’s monster” has become idiomatically entrenched in our collective consciousness.
Compound this problem several billion times over in the communal life of several billion people inhabiting our planet, and you have a picture of the world we’ve built by denying our muse. We are Victor Frankenstein, and our “dark side” is only appearing as such because we’ve made it be that way.
Monsters and angels at play in the fields of the Lord
What’s the ultimate, the final, benefit of embracing your genius, meeting your muse, aligning with your daemon? It’s simply that you heal this epic rift by owning up to what’s really true of your own experience, what’s really true in a deeply human sense. You account for a missing part of yourself that you, if you’re at all a typical member of the culture in which and to which I’m writing, you haven’t been given an adequate set of attitudes and concepts for recognizing.
That “mad scientist” is each of us when we fail to take into account the reality, autonomy, integrity, and needs of our deep muse-self, not only in creative artistic work but in life at large.
The polar opposite of the demon-haunted, Frankenstein monster-afflicted life we’ve been living together for over a century is expressed by Ray Bradbury in a recent article at CNN.com (“Sci-fi legend Ray Bradbury on God, ‘monsters and angels,’” August 2, 2010). The venerable author will turn 90 this month — only a few days before my own birthday, as I’ve long been fond of noting — and CNN reports that he told his biographer Sam Weller that “he will sometimes open one of his books late at night and cry out thanks to God.” Why does he do this? “I sit there and cry,” he says, “because I haven’t done any of this. It’s a God-given thing, and I’m so grateful, so, so grateful. The best description of my career as a writer is, ‘At play in the fields of the Lord.’”
The fact that, as stated in the CNN piece, Bradbury refers to his act of writing as summoning “the monsters and angels” of his imagination, and that, as discussed in many posts at this blog, he explicitly views his creativity as a muse — or, as he has also called it, a demon muse — shows that he has definitely gotten the point, and has used it as the guiding star in his life.
The question at hand for us is: Can we?
OVER TO YOU:
- Do you personally experience the cultural pressure to demonize the non-rational, visionary side of your psyche? If so, how do you see it playing out in your own work, relationships, and life in general?
- Have you discovered any helpful practices or techniques for helping to heal this rift and reembrace your “dark side”?
- What benefits do you see in healing this rift? What dangers?
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Image credits:
- “Solitude – Dark Muse” used under Creative Commons from h.koppdelaney
- “Killing Fields” used under Creative Commons from Lorna87
- Illustration from Frankenstein: Public domain
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