divine transcendence

On the way to Brighton I caught up on some of my podcasts, including the Elizabeth Gilbert TED Talk. Elizabeth wrote eat pray love. eat pray love was a book I discovered at the right time. There were messages in it for me. But that's another story!

What amazed me about the podcast, and it's something that amazes me each time it crops up (and it does regularly), was Elizabeth Gilbert's reference to "an unknowable source". The place where our creativity originates:

And that search has led me to ancient Greece and ancient Rome. So stay with me, because it does circle around and back. But, ancient Greece and ancient Rome -- people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then, OK? People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons. The Greeks famously called these divine attendant spirits of creativity "daemons." Socrates, famously, believed that he had a daemon who spoke wisdom to him from afar. The Romans had the same idea, but they called that sort of disembodied creative spirit a genius. Which is great, because the Romans did not actually think that a genius was a particularly clever individual. They believed that a genius was this, sort of magical divine entity, who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist's studio, kind of like Dobby the house elf, and who would come out and sort of invisibly assist the artist with their work and would shape the outcome of that work.

I particularly loved the story Elizabeth Gilbert tells about Tom Waits and how he deals with his muse:

And for me, the best contemporary example that I have of how to do that is the musician Tom Waits, who I got to interview several years ago on a magazine assignment. And we were talking about this, and you know, Tom, for most of his life he was pretty much the embodiment of the tormented contemporary modern artist, trying to control and manage and dominate these sort of uncontrollable creative impulses that were totally internalized.

But then he got older, he got calmer, and one day he was driving down the freeway in Los Angeles he told me, and this is when it all changed for him. And he's speeding along, and all of a sudden he hears this little fragment of melody, that comes into his head as inspiration often comes, elusive and tantalizing, and he wants it, you know, it's gorgeous, and he longs for it, but he has no way to get it. He doesn't have a piece of paper, he doesn't have a pencil, he doesn't have a tape recorder.

So he starts to feel all of that old anxiety start to rise in him like, "I'm going to lose this thing, and then I'm going to be haunted by this song forever. I'm not good enough, and I can't do it." And instead of panicking, he just stopped. He just stopped that whole mental process and he did something completely novel. He just looked up at the sky, and he said, "Excuse me, can you not see that I'm driving?" (Laughter) "Do I look like I can write down a song right now? If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment when I can take care of you. Otherwise, go bother somebody else today. Go bother Leonard Cohen."

And his whole work process changed after that. Not the work, the work was still oftentimes as dark as ever. But the process, and the heavy anxiety around it was released when he took the genie, the genius out of him where it was causing nothing but trouble, and released it kind of back where it came from, and realized that this didn't have to be this internalized, tormented thing. It could be this peculiar, wondrous, bizarre collaboration kind of conversation between Tom and the strange, external thing that was not quite Tom.

And then this bit. It's all about flow. Being in the zone. And it's that thing that happens to me when I'm all loved up about taking photographs. I connect with that part of me that is still a child, full of wonder and awe and amazement. My camera becomes my magic wand and it makes magic happen. And it's a bit like this:

... centuries ago in the deserts of North Africa, people used to gather for these moonlight dances of sacred dance and music that would go on for hours and hours, until dawn. And they were always magnificent, because the dancers were professionals and they were terrific, right? But every once in a while, very rarely, something would happen, and one of these performers would actually become transcendent. And I know you know what I'm talking about, because I know you've all seen, at some point in your life, a performance like this. It was like time would stop, and the dancer would sort of step through some kind of portal and he wasn't doing anything different than he had ever done, 1,000 nights before, but everything would align. And all of a sudden, he would no longer appear to be merely human. He would be lit from within, and lit from below and all lit up on fire with divinity.

Along the same lines Danielle LaPorte mentions Elizabeth Gilbert and also talks about how to connect with your muse. I like Danielle's point 3. My most creative moments come in the same places. The shower is an obvious one. Cafes with a latte and notebook to hand. Walking in the park. 5 a.m. (My muse gets up early). When I'm lollygagging and goofing off! Danielle recommends we should go looking for our muse in the places where we know she likes to party (I just love the images that conjures up):

Go looking for her.
You know where she likes to party: the art gallery, by the lake, on your morning run, when the stereo is cranked and the lights are low, in the stillness of a church or forest, when you first wake up. Set the stage and chances are she'll take to it.

Gregg Fraley writes:

Creative potential comes from two deep places in my opinion. First, it comes from imagination, the ability to simply envision something new and different. Second it comes from self-expression. Ideas come out when we somehow make them manifest in a written down form, in a drawing, or even just saying it out loud to a friend. Both imagination and self-expression can be encouraged and developed, and they thrive in an environment of love. One can also develop one’s logical mind, one’s critical analytical skills, and our knowledge base – these are important and helpful things. Combined, they are especially powerful - especially when supported by a spiritual base.

It's all about soul. Whether you refer to your source as a muse, a daemon, a genius or just simply soul, it's all one and the same thing. It's that part of your self where your creativity resides. I'm off to party with my muse now, with a latte and a notebook at one of my favourite cafes (and there are many!).