Hesiod and The Muse by Gustave Moreau 

There was a period right after I graduated from university when I knew I wanted to write, but I wasn’t sure exactly how to start going about that.  To support myself I worked the Saturday shift at an old style Montreal tavern.

There aren’t many of these left anymore.  When they thrived in the early half of the 20th century, they worked like neighborhood men’s clubs. By the time I started working there, they all had signs that read “Bienvenue aux Dames,” which were about as enticing as let’s say a sign in a southern diner that reads “Coloreds Welcome!”

The community of men who showed up to start drinking at 9 am on a Saturday morning was not, fortunately, a big one.  They were usually harmless, but for whatever reason they’d rather not be around the normal drinking crowd. Some were old regulars whose wives thought they were grocery shopping. Some had just left prison, didn’t want to talk much and didn’t have many friends they could legally hang around with. Some were very poor and preferred as few people as possible to see that.  And some were mentally ill, but still felt the need to be in a room with some people, which wasn’t a hospital.
 
Davey fell into this last group.  He was a small, pale red headed man of obviously Irish descent, which he emphasized with an unfortunate preference for bright, but filthy green clothing.  He was skinny with big teeth and a walk that made him look like a demented leprechaun. Davey was a ranter.  He would show up regularly before 10 a.m.  Usually my first customer and always alone.  About halfway through his first quart of Labatt 50 he would start building up a heart full of bile and by the time he was ready for his next one he was usually screaming at a gang of invisible people comprised of politicians, the rich, and whoever happened to fall into a general category of “fuckers.”

He was white noise to most of my Saturday morning regulars. If he started getting to me I’d just turn on the giant sports screen television and watch Pee Wee's Playhouse, which back then was followed by Ralph Bakshi's brilliant version of Mighty Mouse.  All I had to do was pretend I was in a new Jim Jarmusch film until lunchtime, when the weekend construction crews and hockey teams would show up and tip me enough that I hardly had to work for the rest of the week.

But one morning Davey brought a date.  Maybe it was his girlfriend, maybe it was his mother. I’ll never know because she wasn’t actually visible to anyone but Davey.  But I could tell it was a woman by the tone and vocabulary of his abuse.

Finally it was time to order that second quart.   I’d always been able to count on Davey to snap out of his rant long enough to pay me.   But this was the most hotheaded I’d ever seen him.  This time when I put the beer down, he just pointed across the table and said, “she’ll pay.”

I was stunned and silent, until fortunately he returned to something closer to mutual reality.  He reached into his pocket, pulled out some crumpled bills, threw them down and muttered viciously  “she’ll pay in the long run.”
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A few years after I quit, I had a conversation with somebody who worried about the fact that she had developed a habit of muttering to herself.  “Do you think I’m going crazy?” she asked me.  “No” I answered. Thanks to Davey I knew difference between a moderately disturbing habit of self-muttering, and crazy.

But I’ve been thinking about Davey these days because I’ve been struggling with a way to talk about a subject I find incredibly uncomfortable, The Muse. Some creative people feel fine talking about the disassociative process many of them experience when in a creative groove. I’m not one of them.  And it’s never been because I’m afraid that people will think I’m crazy. I know I’m not. It’s more from fear that I will be taken less seriously as a writer.

To turn your creative drive over to a power that feels to you to be outside  yourself, or to confess that you do that, feels, in our era of enlightened scientific materialism, unevolved.  Just writing this, I can feel Stephen Pinker and Richard Dawkins silently scoffing, not at me because I don’t run in their circles, but my “type.” 

In our society, or at least among the elite intellectuals of our society, disassociation that is not pathological is, at best, regressive.  You can say that this “presence” feels alien.  But if you actually believe that it’s alien, you keep that to yourself. Mature intellectuals  take responsibility for everything, their failures and their successes. They don’t blame their lack of creativity on society, and they certainly don’t credit it to forces outside society. They don’t believe there’s an invisible presence that will repay their attention with units of inspiration, which they will be able to convert into a reasonable living, either now or in the long run.

Artists who do seriously nurture their sense of inspiration as a force outside of themselves are caught in a double bind. On the one hand there is  a very deep desire to function happily in reality in a dignified way with other professional people. On the other hand there is the artist's empirical experience, at least to them, that the creativity flows better when they surrender to it as an "it", and not as a serendipitous and occasional experience. 

Sometimes a writer is so successful she’s invited out in the open to talk honestly about this process. But no matter how many people watched Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk, and no matter how much money she’s made writing about her transformative mystical experiences, she’s paid the price in terms of critical respect. Especially amongst her peers who’ve been doing their very best recently to distance themselves.

Read this week's reviews of her new book, Committed. This is Gilbert’s fifth book, her first three made her a finalist for almost every major American literature award there is: PEN/Faulkner, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award.  No mention of those accomplishments in this New Yorker review by Ariel Levy.  She is now, forevermore, a neurotic blonde who once had a breakdown in her bathroom and uses research as a “coping mechanism.”  Katie Roiphe’s review in Slate, makes Levy look supportive.  According to Roiphe, Eat, Pray, Love was not a writer’s honest and very vulnerable spiritual quest and recovery of creative and psychic strength. It was "a highly structured nervous breakdown set on three continents."

  Gilbert had what once looked like a promising literary career.  Then she wrote a book that is considered not just chick lit, but spiritual chick lit.  As long as her ambitions are mostly financial, I’m not sure this will matter.  But she’s smart enough that it probably will.

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So why would I want to write about this?  Because a couple of years ago I started becoming obsessed with the possibility that there was some helpful solid materialist explanation for this process that would help better manage my intellectual dignity.

I’m not alone. In the last half decade, titles on the neurology of creativity and spirituality like The Creative Brain and Rational Mysticism have been trickling into the bookstores and they’ve been selling well.  With the advent of neuroimaging, scientists no longer have to rely on pathological subjects to research how the brain works.  Now they can study healthy brains, and brains that are considered extraordinary.  And so we have an increasing number of studies looking at the outlier left pre frontal cortex activity of Buddhist monks.   One day perhaps, a scan of Philip Roth’s brain will explain everything we need to know about how to build the kind of brain that can expect a long respected, lucrative writing career.

 Or will it?  I’ve searched for this credible neuroscientific theory behind inspiration, really I have.  But from what I’ve read so far, it’s just not there. Whenever there’s been a theory, whether it be the “temporal lobe personality”, or the God Helmet, it’s been pretty effectively debunked or impossible to replicate. I’m going to keep reading over the next year.  And my plan is to keep writing about this. But to be honest, I’m not hopeful. Creativity seems still to be as much a mystery to science as it is to anyone, and if it turns out that Roth has an impressively large hippocampus, I'm skeptical that this will teach us much.

Why does it matter?  Well, it’s kind of like we’re sitting here in a culture that we sense is running on empty, and we have this sign on the door that reads “inspiration welcome.”  And yet we don’t really believe in inspiration, we believe in goals and hard, hard, hard verifiable work.  Science stays mostly away from this problem, and anyone that takes the leap and treats creativity as a palpable energy to be nurtured, cultivated and trusted is subtly marginalized. Tolerated more than welcome.

Which leaves me, far too often these days, ranting quietly. Sometimes at the “fuckers." Sometimes at my muse, who I trust on good days, and not on bad days, and who may very well end up sticking me with the bill.

But for whatever reason, right  now, I'm still not ready to quit.