Musings on the Muse

I have often had the experience of working on a piece of art, or writing, and feeling as if sliding on sand paper. It was resisting, it was dry and dead, and then, as if by a miracle, I was suddenly in the flow, in the zone, and creating came effortlessly, as if guided by a muse, or divine intervention, as if I were no longer in control. But Seth Godin, in his book The Practice: Shipping Creative Work, suggests that there’s no such thing, and that instead, it’s the self. The self is the source. He writes:

“I have a hundred examples. Here’s one from Nobel winner Bob Dylan: ‘It’s like a ghost is writing a song like that. It gives you the song and it goes away, it goes away. You don’t know what it means. Except the ghost picked me to write the song.’ This is nonsense. There is no ghost. Dylan is either fooling us or fooling himself. In the many conversations I’ve had with successful creatives, it sometimes gets a bit uncomfortable. Sometimes they wonder if looking directly at their source of inspiration will make it disappear. The source is simple: It’s the self. It’s us when we get out of our way. It’s us when we put our self on the hook. No ghost. You. Us.”

Seen through the lens of such perspective, I am the muse. Well, maybe not my ego-self, my limited finite and localized mind, but rather, what could be described as my inherent “quantum entanglement” with a universal reservoir, where all wisdom, all inspiration, and all creative ideas reside and accumulate through history. Or the "collective unconscious," a concept introduced by Carl Jung, referring to a shared, inherited unconscious mind that all humans possess, containing universal, primordial images and ideas. 

We have access to this resource but often don’t go deep enough to experience it. It’s like pumping water from a well that hasn’t been used in a while. At first the water is rusty and undrinkable, but if we keep pumping, the water will come clear. Waiting or wishing for the muse to come can easily become an excuse not to commit to the practice, not to pump for clear water. It can become an escape from having to do the actual work. But if we instead learn to trust the process, then our creative work can become deliberate and intentional, as opposed to being left to the whims of a muse that may or may not show up. 

(Photo from the Art Institute of Chicago, courtesy of Unsplash)