Here’s a necessary passage from George P. Hansen’s 1994 opus The Trickster and the Paranormal, which is a flatly necessary book (though one that’s oddly semi-obscure, for reasons that have long eluded me): [Anthropologist Larry] Peters recognized that the idea of creative illness, advanced by Henri Ellenberger in 1964, can be understood as a liminal…
Tag: Creativity
The Myth of Persephone and the Cycle of Creativity
Rembrandt, The Rape of Proserpina, 1632 (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons) In typing up my life journal from 1993 to the present, I’ve been coming across hundreds of thousands of words that I forgot I ever wrote. Some of these take the form of excursive, semi-extemporaneous mini-essays. Here’s one of them. I won’t be including…
A Blessed Silence: On Solving Writer’s Block by Accepting It
Victoria Nelson’s On Writer’s Block: A New Approach to Creativity has long been one of the core entries in my library of books on writing and the creative process. Now I’m fascinated to see Brandon Taylor, author of the widely acclaimed novel Real Life and the just-released fiction collection Filthy Animals, talking about his own…
When Artificial Intelligence Hacks the Muse
Stephen Marche in The New Yorker: Sudowrite uses, as its base, GPT-3, the latest version of a deep-learning neural network that can auto-generate text. The organization that created GPT-3, OpenAI, was founded as a nonprofit with a mission “to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole,…
Art, creativity, and what Google doesn’t know
From an essay by Ed Finn, founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University: We are all centaurs now, our aesthetics continuously enhanced by computation. Every photograph I take on my smartphone is silently improved by algorithms the second after I take it. Every document autocorrected, every digital file optimised….
Magical Thinking, Part 1
Why do we, as a species, create things? What is it to “create”? What is the purpose of such activity? Other questions of interest to humanity — and to creators, especially in our science-driven, technologically dependent age — present themselves upon analysis: What is the fundamental nature of reality? Why are we alive? Are we alone in the universe? When does consciousness become non-artificial?
Looking for a still point amid our digital cacophony? Consider writing in longhand.
From the late 1980s to the early 2000s, I kept a longhand journal. It was where I learned the sound of my own inner voice and the rhythm of my own thoughts, and where I gained a more conscious awareness and understanding of the ideas, subjects, emotions, and themes that are, through sheer force of gravitational…
Nightmares: Dark Crossroads of Creativity and Vulnerability
From the perspective of cognitive psychology and clinical neuroscience, when it comes to treatment, a good nightmare is a dead nightmare. Since the days of Freud, we have been hell-bent on eliminating all varieties of bad dreams equally without discrimination and as a result, we know surprisingly little about ordinary nightmares. That’s a problem that…
Shirley Jackson: Witchcraft, madness, and the uncanny dangers of writing
From a long and uncommonly engrossing essay by Victoria Best at Open Letters Monthly about the relationship between life, art, madness, and the occult in the work and person of Shirley Jackson: She believed [writing] had a protective function, too, a kind of mental hygiene that allowed her to be herself: “The very nicest thing…
Meditation, the daimon muse, and the I Ching
Several thousand people have now downloaded my free e-book A Course in Demonic Creativity: A Writer’s Guide to the Inner Genius (formerly available at Demon Muse, which I have now shut down because of repeated hacks and security breaches). There’s obviously a widespread interest in the idea, experience, and practice of what feels like inner…