The Genius

I usually resist talk of divine intervention in creative work or of the existence of supernatural genius. But this talk by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, I found inspiring, worth giving a listen. I particularly like that Ms Gilbert gives the speech in the context of her own struggles completing her second book following the resounding success of her first book. So the talk ends being one artist giving some sage counsel to another artist.

When I was in the middle of writing Eat Pray Love and I fell into one of those pits of despair that we will fall into when we’re working on something that’s not coming and we think ‘this is going to be a disaster, this is going to be the worst book I’ve ever written — not just that but the worst book ever written … So I just lifted my face up from the manuscript and I directed my comments to an empty corner of the room and I said aloud ‘ Listen you, thing! You and I both know that if this book isn’t brilliant that is not entirely my fault, right? Because you can see I am putting everything I have into this, I don’t have any more than this, so if you want it to be better then you’ve got to show up and do your part of the deal, OK? But you know what? If you don’t do that then I’m going to keep writing because that’s my job and I would please like the record to reflect today that I showed up and did my part of the job!



Here is a summary of more of what Ms Gilbert has to say:
* There is no need to feel pressure to create a masterpiece, to come up with your magnum opus, because we are just an instrument of the Genius or the Daemon.
* There is a distinct difference between HAVING a genius and BEING a genius. When you put your emphasis on the latter experience, there is too much focus placed on the artist and not on the art.
In ancient Greece and ancient Rome people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then. 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 to him from afar. The Romans had the same idea but they called that sort of disembodied spirit a ‘Genius’, which was 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 … and who would come out and invisibly assist the artist with their work and who would shape the outcome of that work.
* Creative endeavors involve hard work, showing up everyday, investing lots of time and energy in a project. But sometimes, the work speaks back to you. Or, as in the case of the poet Ruth Stone, the work chases you:

When she was growing up in rural Virginia she would be out working in the fields and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape and she said it was like a thunderous train of air and it would come barrelling down at her over the landscape. And she said that when she felt it coming - because it would shake the earth under her feet - she knew that she had only one thing to do at that point and that was to, in her words, ‘run like hell’ and she would run like hell to the house, being chased by this poem. And the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and pencil fast enough so when it thundered through her she could collect it and grab it on the page.