Once you have a working understanding of the daimonic or muse-based model of creativity, which holds that creative inspiration can effectively be regarded as an external influence with which you cooperate instead of a personal achievement that you generate through effort, a valuable next step is to get acquainted with the specific inclinations of your own creative daimon/muse/genius. After all, you are personifying your creativity when you take this approach. You’re viewing it as a force with a mind of its own. Taking the attitude that you need to learn its peculiar motives, tastes, style, and preferences is simply the reasonable thing to do.
You would never collaborate with another person on any project without first gauging your respective goals and temperaments. The same reasoning applies directly to the process of artistic creation, except the collaborative relationship in this case is an inner one between you and your creative unconscious. “To maintain the delicate equilibrium between ego and unconscious,” writes Victoria Nelson in On Writer’s Block, “each writer needs to give attention to the unique ‘personality’ of his creative nature.”
An aside: spiritual vs. secular
The available techniques for getting to know the character of your unique genius fall along two general lines. I’ll call them spiritual and secular. On the spiritual side are all of the occult- or pseudo-occult-oriented recommendations and practices involving such things as breathwork, ritual magic or magick (especially theurgy), and so on. One can also make a strong case for the idea that the indigenous spiritual disciplines of the world’s major religious traditions are highly relevant here. On the secular side are less flashy techniques such as guided introspection, journaling, and certain intra-psychic exercises of a more muted sort than those in the former category. Then there are some that occupy a middle ground, such as a number of the techniques recommended by creativity expert Dr. Leslie Owen Wilson.
Here I’ll be focusing on the secular category, since these techniques are available to everybody, whereas the spiritual ones can be off-putting to those who view such things as irredeemably flaky. But if they’re your cup of tea, then by all means, investigate them. You’ll find no end of books, websites, gurus, and teachers to guide you.
The first technique: morning writing
One tried and true technique for discovering your unconscious mind in its uniqueness and particularity is to engage in the regular practice of morning writing. This means something quite specific; it’s more than just sitting down to ramble on paper over a light breakfast.
The trick with this technique is to have everything ready — pen and paper laid out if you’re going to write by hand, typewriter or computer standing ready if you’re planning to type — and then to get up a little earlier than normal and head straight to your writing station, where you immediately and unreflectively start writing. You write absolutely anything that comes to mind. A memory of last night’s dream, if one is present. Thoughts about what you’ll be doing that day. A rehashing of some event from the previous day. A nursery rhyme. Complaints about how tired you are and how you’d rather be lying in bed. A stream-of-consciousness flow of relative nonsense. In other words, absolutely anything that arises in your mindspace. Keep doing this for ten minutes. Over time, gradually build up to longer sessions.
When you do this correctly, you effectively tap into your unconscious mind before your ego has had a chance to wake up completely. Your normal mental defenses and filters are down. Things just come out that you’re later shocked to find you’ve written.
You would never collaborate with another person on any project without first gauging your respective goals and temperaments. The same reasoning applies directly to the process of artistic creation, except the collaborative relationship in this case is an inner one between you and your creative unconscious.
This element of revelatory self-discovery is, naturally, the whole point. It’s built into the very nature of the exercise, but you’ll need to commit to the practice for it to work. Make at least a two-week commitment, and preferably a longer one. A month is good. Solemnly vow not to reread what you’ve written until the whole period is over. Then let your work cool off for another week after that. If you do this, when you finally pick your work up and read back over it, you’ll be astonished at the things you wrote with absolutely no memory of having done so, and/or you’ll be struck by the significance of things that didn’t seem all that striking when you wrote them. Yes, you’ll have to wade through a lot of muddy junk to find the diamonds, and you’ll cringe at a few things here and there. But the upside will far outweigh the downside. If you will deliberately look at these writings with a critical and objective eye, as if they were written by somebody else whose personality and passions, interests and abilities, voice and style you’re trying to discover, you’ll make great headway in finding out the native bent of your inner genius.
Be advised that Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer and Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way contain wonderfully detailed instructions for using this technique. Brande includes particularly valuable information on extending the exercise into the daylight hours, so that you coax your unconscious to speak freely at any time, not just in the early morning. For that matter, Natalie Goldberg in her modern classic Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within offers all kinds of useful advice, both practical and attitudinal, for coaxing a free flow of words from the unconscious in all sorts of circumstances and surroundings.
The second technique: a dialogue between your ego and unconscious mind
This one is more of a direct attempt to personify your genius by giving it a voice and interacting with it as a separate entity. I can’t describe it better than Nelson does, so I’ll cede the floor to her:
You must begin to make a conscious acquaintance with what lies within. One way to begin is to compose a completely spontaneous dialogue between your conscious self (“I”) and your unconscious (give it a separate identity and name, or let one emerge from the dialogue). When you finish your dialogue, describe the personalities of the two speakers. What kind of person is the “I”? What kind of person is the unconscious? (Individuals are highly variable; you may find creatures other than topdogs and underdogs.). Are they opposites or are they kindred spirits? Are they at loggerheads, or do they achieve resolution? (Don’t try to force a resolution; that is your ego taking charge. Be absolutely honest about where you are at this moment.)
- Victoria Nelson, On Writer’s Block: A New Approach to Creativity (1993)
The kinship between this technique and the first should be obvious. In both cases you are trying to divine the peculiar character of your unconscious mind by letting it speak on paper, but in the first you do so by writing at a time when the ego is relatively subdued, so that the unconscious can speak through you with little interference, while in the second you deliberately inhabit your fully-awake ego space and generate the sense of talking with your unconscious as an outside entity.
I can tell you from having practiced both techniques numerous times that both of them really do work. Both can yield crucial information about yourself, information that is relevant not just to your life as a writer or artist but to your life in general. Both are equivalent to self-psychotherapy, since the primary goal of all forms of psychotherapy, regardless of their specific schools, is to achieve a harmonious relationship between the conscious and unconscious minds by airing the contents of the unconscious. It’s axiomatic that whatever is unconscious has the power to dominate you in ways you cannot and do not recognize. Establishing a clear channel of self-aware exchange between your two selves reduced the unconscious mind’s demonic-daimonic potential to induce possessed-type behavior in the form of violently uncontrollable fantasies and impulses.
Of course, you may well want to be a violently impulsive writer, somebody who creates in accord with Wordworth’s dictum that poetry is “emotion recollected in tranquillity” and then manages through his writing to discharge and recreate that original flaming emotion within the reader. This often describes my own daimonic urge whenever I’m gripped by the creative impulse. But take it from me, even this approach works better when you’re working with your daimon instead of blindly flailing or, worse, actively and unwittingly subverting it. Think of yourself in your conscious aspect as a kind of conduit or channel for the unconscious energies that are wanting to come through you. In coming to know your unconscious mind, your daimon, your personal genius, you are unblocking the channel by learning to step aside and lightly direct and shape the torrent as it flows into the world.
Continued in “Getting to Know Your Creative Demon, Part 2“
Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/alicepopkorn/ / CC BY-SA 2.0
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