Creative Genius

Oh, I do love finding a new resource to plunder. This week it’s www.ted.com, which has loads of inspiring talks from people in the fields of technology, entertainment and design – ie creative – people, which grew out of an annual conference of the same name. As they say themselves, TED is “a clearing-house that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world’s most inspired thinkers and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and others”. Get thee to TED post-haste for mucho inspiracion.

Of course the talk that caught my immediate attention was one by Elizabeth Gilbert, writer of Eat, Pray, Love. If you’ve not read it, you’ve missed out on one of the most charming memoirs of the modern age, recounting her haphazard journey - post relationship breakdown - through Italy (to eat), India (to pray) and Indonesia (where she found love). Her book has been an enormous international success, leading her to discover just how fear-based most people’s reaction is to what might come next for her. The question she is now most asked is “Aren’t you afraid you’re never going to top that?”. As she remarks with searing honesty, “It’s exceedingly likely that my greatest success is behind me - that’s the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at nine in the morning”.

As a coping mechanism, Elizabeth decided it was necessary to create some psychological separation between herself and her work, finding inspiration in the creative process as it was viewed in ancient Greece and Rome. As she points out, in those eras creativity “was this divine attendant spirit that came to the artist from a distant and unknowable source”. The Greeks called them daimon and the Romans called them genius. They believed those spirits lived in the walls of the artists studios and gave them the inspiration for their work. The Renaissance shifted the focus of inspiration, making it a human endeavour, thereby endowing artists with genius rather than acknowledging a divine source. With the creative power now attributed to individuals, we have the birthplace of performance anxiety and the tortured artistic temperament. When the weight of inspiration passed from the divine to the human, we created a load far greater than any of us could bear.

Now, thankfully, we are beginning to make a reconnection with the ancient idea of a creative muse. It certainly helps to open the creative floodgates when you’re not torturing yourself with self-doubt and you realise you’re only responsible for part of the equation. You get to show up for the work and the divine gets to do its part with the inspiration. I think that’s a fair exchange.

Elizabeth tells a great story about having interviewed the musician, Tom Waits, who’d spent most of his career wrestling with the creative demons within him, struggling to bring forth what he believed to be springing from inside himself. As he mellowed, he started to take a different viewpoint. One day, as he was driving along the freeway in LA, he heard a fragment of a melody in his head, but had no way to write it down. At that point, feeling the old anxiety, wondering if he was going to lose it and feeling the usual self-doubt, he took a different tack, looking up to the sky and saying “Excuse me, can you not see that I’m driving?”. He thought to himself something like ‘I have no way of writing this down, so if you want it to take shape in the world, either save it for later or give it to another songwriter’. At that point, his focus shifted from tortured artist to caretaker of a divine inspiration.

Elizabeth Gilbert says she felt something similar in writing her follow-up book to Eat, Pray, Love. One day, having a hard time writing – and hating what she’d written – she said to the divine “Listen, you and I both know if this book is not brilliant, it’s not entirely my fault – if you want it to be better, you’ve got to show up. For the record, I showed up for my part of the job”.

Those stories remind me a lot of the best book I’ve ever read on the creative process – The War Of Art, by Steven Pressfield. He covers very similar territory, stressing the importance of showing up at the keyboard, the canvas or whatever is your creative medium. We can’t wait for the muse to strike before we begin our part of the deal – we need to show up and be doing our part of the job for the creative spirits to kick in and do theirs.

So, this week, folks, decide what your art is and do the work. If you’re waiting for divine inspiration before you begin a painting, a novel, a dance, whatever – start showing up and doing it, trusting that the divine will play along with you. Remember that if you want to be creative, you don’t have to be a tortured soul – all art is co-creation and the beauty and success of it is not all entirely in your hands. Take some pressure off and play with the pure fun of exploring your relationship with your fabulous creative genius.

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