“Poppies Blooming,” by Claude Monet, 1873
Have you met your muse?
“Meeting your muse” is that moment when the creative gears click into place within the fleshy folds of your mind. It’s the lightbulb idea that shocks you awake in the middle of the night. It’s the breakthrough that forces you out of the shower, water streaming onto the floor, just to scribble a thought down before it’s gone.
Some consider the source of their muse to be divine inspiration or creative genius (which, I think, may be the same exact thing). Some call their muse a specific person who acts as the central source of all their creative inspiration (like Julia Fox for Josh Safdie on UnCuT gEmS).
Whatever you call it, there’s no denying that there are unexplainable moments of transcendence that come with creation. It can be downright heavenly. In ancient Greek and Roman cultures, these moments – the muse – were a fundamental part of the creative process. Not just for writers, but for all creative minds: artists, dancers, poets, even mathematicians. Anyone who was interested in creating anything eagerly awaited to be visited by their muse to gain creative clarity.
Then and now, most minds are rarely in the act of creating when the muse strikes. Inspiration comes chronically unannounced. But, when that idea first appears in your mind, it burns brighter and hotter, like a faraway light on the horizon drawing steadily closer, demanding to be felt.
We see great minds throughout history meeting their muse in strange, almost spiritual ways. Archimedes, for instance, met his muse in the public baths, causing him to leap from the water and run home, naked, shouting, “Eureka!” (I found it!”). Ruth Stone, a famous poet, met her muse working in the fields, where she would see poems brewing on the horizon like thunderclouds, and as they barreled towards her, she would turn and sprint towards her house in hopes to capture them on paper before they sped past.
But, what happened to the muse, to these unexplainable moments of transcendence?
Our cultural landscape today now turns up its nose at divine inspiration – and is instead enamored with the self. Creative unlock is no longer viewed as a gift from above, but a place that must be tapped into from within.
At first, this feels liberating and empowering – until the pressure sets in.
Shouldering the weight of genius is hurting our artistry
I recently stumbled upon a TedTalk, The elusive creative genius, by author Elizabeth Gilbert, who explores today’s absence of the muse.
After her book Eat, Pray, Love, became a bestseller, Gilbert was assaulted with alarming questions:
Aren’t you scared your best work is behind you? Aren’t you afraid to look stupid? Aren’t you worried you’ll die with the ash of failure still in your mouth?
Of course Gilbert had worries and doubts and fears about her career – doesn’t everyone? Then why, when Steph Curry got his first championship ring, did no one flinch and say, Well, crap, guess it’s all downhill from here? The reaction for an athlete’s success is actually quite the opposite. Fans share in that exhilarating rush of success: He’s done it! All his hard work has paid off! And now, he’s building a dynasty!
But, for whatever reason, creative work is inundated with intense fear and tarnished by the horizon of existential downfall.
“Why have we collectively accepted the idea that creativity and suffering are inherently linked?” Gilbert asks her audience in her TedTalk. “Are you guys cool with this?”
After the Renaissance, our verbiage around “genius” shifted. Writers no longer “had” a genius; they “were” a genius. This is a nod to the violence of the English language. We don’t say, “I have hunger,” we say “I am hungry.”
Perhaps the pressure to consistently perform like a genius, rather than having moments of genius, is simply too much. If we are only as good as our craft; if we shoulder the weight of genius alone; that means our failures say something deeply intrinsic about us. If we fail (and we will), then that would make us deeply inadequate beings whose “inner selves” will never be sufficient.
Suddenly, tapping into the self doesn’t feel that liberating.
It kind of feels like we’re being held hostage in the shackles of our own minds.
The creative process has never and will never be easy; but shouldering the weight of genius has sucked the joy out of creating and replaced it with the soul-crushing pressure not even to succeed, but simply to not fail.
In ancient cultures, if your muse was a bit lame or didn’t visit you that often, it didn’t suggest you were an existential failure. But today, it does. We believe ourselves to be the sole source of our own creative genius, which means becoming an “existential failure” is a perpetual possibility.
Perhaps tapping into “the self” is the worst thing we could do for our art. Perhaps relieving ourselves from the burden of genius could help us start loving our work again.
Just do your job – and let the muse do hers
There are few things I love like “being in the zone.”
When I’m writing in a flow state, time becomes a lake. My breath slows. The world around me falls away. And I am blissfully unaware of myself.
I’ve found that being aware of myself is the worst possible thing that can happen for my writing. I agonize over every word. I stress myself out with the pressure to be great. I critique my every keystroke. It is only when I acknowledge there are greater forces at play (the muse) that I can relax into the act of creating.
Maybe genius will visit me today. Maybe it won’t. Either way, I’ll sit down and write. I’ll do what’s asked of me. And eventually, the muse will show her face. Eventually, I’ll find that divine flow.
Losing my sense of self is the very thing that allows divine inspiration to flow through me – not the other way around. It’s like when Michelangelo sculpted the statue of David and said:
“I saw the angel in the marble, and I carved until I set him free.”
What a beautifully liberating thought: to be a vessel for what we’re creating, not the source.
When Ruth Stone was out in the fields, watching a poem storm its way past her, she would do the only thing that was asked of her – she would sprint to her desk. Grab a pen. And be a vessel for some divine, unexplainable inspiration that definitely did not come from her.
In her own words, she said:
“I would just run like hell.”
The next time you sit down to write, don’t take yourself so seriously. Try forgetting yourself. And just do your job – run like hell. Eventually, you’ll write like heaven.
writing that resonated with me this week:
The Sanctity of The Rose Reading Room, by Garrett Kincaid
Do the weirdest thing that feels right, by Charlie Becker
Your Circle of Potential, by Haley Brengartner
Shells of Ourselves, by Alex Michael
Thanks for reading The G Word. See you next Saturday.
G
I am thrilled by this kind of exploration of what writing, creativity, and unfettered expression actually is and where it comes from. It reminds of what happens when physicists just keep going with questions about what the universe is made out of and the eventual conclusion after we've exhausted all our prodigious knowledge is that "we don't really know" how the hell this whole thing called creation works, or what it's made of. Both physicists and mystics speak of the same mysteries and so many of us who write seem to share the same passion for being swept up by a random wave of truth and carried away on a eureka moment. I love your thoughts on the intrusion of self upon the writing or creative process, but sometimes I feel as though we suffer when we have a halfway "self" — a kind of pseudo-self we indulge in modern times. My experience is that the muse is enticed by the absence of self-consciousness, or the absolute fullness of it, felt as Presence. The entrapment of identity you describe can be escaped in either direction, by fully forgetting or fully Remembering ourselves. But for sure we have to leave our idea of being the source of anything behind. We are mystery, this is all a mystery, and why should writing or the muse be viewed as anything other than a humbling gift of grace from the great unknown? Be a vessel, indeed! Love this so much. Thank you.
Grace, you handled this topic masterfully! I was listening to a podcast discussing Steven King’s book On Writing. His writing reflected a similar sentiment - write as if it is your job whether the divine inspiration is present or not.
I used to only sit down to write when the muse was present. I realized that most of the time she isn’t, so now I sit down to write anyways.
Thank you for this piece and thank you for sharing my writing ♥️