The Muse's Paradox

The twilight zone between creative urgency and daemonic trust

The following article was written by Matt Cardin, the man and the mind behind the publication The Living Dark.

The Living Dark is Matt’s blog/newsletter on creativity for writers, situated at the intersection of religion, horror, nonduality, apocalypse, dystopia, consciousness, and the numinous unknown. Matt is the author of five books and the editor of four more. His books have been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, long-listed the Bram Stoker Award, and praised by Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and others.

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This article originally appeared here, I’m sharing it with The BoldBrush Letter because I feel it is a topic of interest to all creatives.
Editor’s Note: Matt’s article was for his paid subscribers only, however, he has graciously allowed us to send it as an email-only post for The BoldBrush Letter’s free subscribers. Enjoy!

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The Muse’s Paradox

Dear reader,

Having a system in place—and more importantly, an abiding, disciplined intention—to capture fleeting ideas whenever they arrive can be immensely powerful and helpful, and even necessary. HOWEVER,

you can also trust that if an idea is meant to be realized, it will come back persistently over time.

This dual understanding has been a part of my philosophical and practical approach to creativity, encompassing both my writing and my music, for many years. I mention it today because it was brought to mind again by a recent Substack Note from Gurwinder containing a quotation from Naval Ravikant:

“Inspiration is perishable—act on it immediately.” This is a forthright statement of one end of a dual or dialectical truth. And it’s one with ample support in both our own individual experience and that of prominent writers and artists who have testified to its truth. At the same time, the complementary proposition—that inspiration is instead persistent— has equal support and deserves an equal hearing.

For illustration, I ask you to consider the respective and combined cases of William Burroughs, Tom Waits, Billy Joel, and Ray Bradbury, all jostling up against each other, and all leading toward a convergence and synthesis of ostensible opposites.

William Burroughs: A glimpse may never come again

In a key passage in The Retreat Diaries, Burroughs avers that whereas craftspeople such as carpenters are able to do their work anytime,

a writer has to take it when it comes and a glimpse once lost may never come again, like Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. Writers don’t write, they read and transcribe. They are only allowed access to the books at certain arbitrary times. They have to make the most of these occasions.1

Burroughs said this in connection with a disagreement that he had had with Chögyam Trungpa about the allowability of bringing a typewriter to a meditation retreat. His point resonates warmly and energetically with me, and maybe also with you. Yes, my sensibility says, I need to ensure that I am always ready and prepared to record the promptings of my daemon muse whenever it speaks.

Tom Waits: Ask your muse to come back later

But then, I am also equally charmed by and in agreement with the story of Tom Waits and his relationship to the muse, which makes the exact opposite point. In Elizabeth Gilbert’s well-known telling of the story, Waits

was driving down the freeway one day in Los Angeles, and he heard a little tiny trace of a beautiful melody, and he panicked because he didn’t have his waterproof paper, and he didn’t have his tape recorder, and he didn’t have a pen, he didn’t have a pencil. He had no way to get it. And he thought, “How am I going to catch this song?” And he started to have all that old panic and anxiety that artists have about feeling like you’re going to miss something. And then he just slowed down, and he looked up at the sky, and he said, “Excuse me, can you not see that I’m driving? If you’re serious about wanting to exist, come back and see me in the studio. I spend six hours a day there, you know where to find me, at my piano. Otherwise, go bother somebody else.”2

Again, my sensibility says, “Yes, exactly. That’s just how it is.” I have genuinely benefited in my own creative work from taking the very tack that Waits and Gilbert describe, from trusting that when a creative idea comes to me at an inconvenient moment, I can consciously place responsibility for preserving it on my daemon muse and then return with confidence at a later moment to find it still waiting and available. I would be willing to bet that you have noticed this in your own work as well, or at least that it strikes you with a resonant sense of encouraging rightness.

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Billy Joel: Write it down now

But suddenly another story, a contradictory one that goes back to support the Burroughs approach, comes to mind:

Years ago I heard Billy Joel say in an interview that once when he was walking down a city street, he received an idea for a new melody, and he realized he was in danger of losing it because he had no way to play it, write it down, or otherwise actualize it and save it from oblivion. Looking around in a panic, he saw with surprised delight that he was right near a piano store. So he ran inside and rushed to a piano, where he picked out the melody on the keyboard.

I don’t remember the source of this story, the exact interview where Joel said it. But he said something similar in a 2023 radio interview when he was asked about where his songs come from:

A lot of it happens in dreams. You wake up in the morning [and think], “What was that thing I was dreaming? It was really powerful. It was really good.” And you try to recollect it. Sometimes you can’t, and it’ll drive you crazy. Like “Just the Way You Are.” I dreamed it, and then I forgot it. And it was driving me nuts for weeks. And then one day I was in the middle of a meeting, and it reoccurred to me, and I said, “I got to leave right now. I gotta write this down.” And I’m running home [saying to myself], “Don’t go crazy, don’t forget this.” You know, any kind of words I could think of to just keep the melody in my head.3

Ray Bradbury: The muse, though neglected, persists

But now here comes Ray Bradbury, playing for Team Waits (or did Waits play for Team Bradbury?) as he describes the origin of The Martian Chronicles and explains how it taught him to trust the sometimes long and subtle arc-across-time of the muse’s transmission. In fact, his experience with this seminal book—seminal both for him as a writer and for science fiction and literary culture at large—taught him the very reality of the muse:

What began as an occasional story or “aside” concerning the Red Planet became a pomegranate explosion in July and August [of 1947] when I jumped to my typewriter each morning to find what rare new thing my Muse was willing to deliver.

Did I have such a Muse? And did I always believe in that mythical beast? No. Early on, in and out of high school, and standing on a street corner selling newspapers, I did what most writers do at their beginnings: emulated my elders, imitated my peers, thus turning away from any possibility of discovering truths beneath my skin and behind my eyes.4

Bradbury says it was Sherwood Anderson’s Winesberg, Ohio “that set me free” when his fascination with this book inspired an idea for a similar short story cycle of his own, but one that would be set on Mars. That was when he began to learn about trusting in the inherent intelligence and appropriate timing of the creative force:

I scribbled down a list of possible sites and folks on that distant world, imagined titles, started and stopped a dozen tales, then filed it away and forgot it. Or imagined that I had forgotten it.

Because the Muse persists. It goes on living, though neglected, waiting for you to give it air or die without giving it utterance. My job was to convince myself that the myth was more than ghost, an intuitive substance to be aroused to speak in tongues and move out the ends of my fingers.5

He goes on to relate how he did some more scattered work on the idea over the next few years, until a suggestion from Walter Bradbury, an editor at Doubleday (with no family relation to Bradbury), sparked the specific idea that became The Martian Chronicles. Bradbury delivered an outline of the book literally the next day. It had been gestating and incubating for years, sheltered in the mythic space of his own deep psyche, his own muse. Now the time had arrived for it to be birthed.

Bradbury relates this experience to the words of Federico Fellini, with whom he was friends. Fellini said of his creative process, “Don’t tell me what I’m doing. I don’t want to know!” This referred, Bradbury explains, to Fellini’s practice of refusing to look at each day’s new footage while he was shooting his screenplays. Instead, the great filmmaker insisted that his scenes must “remain mysterious provocateurs to lure him on.” And that, says Bradbury, is a sublimely intelligent and exciting way to lead a creative life:

What a way to live. The only way. For by pretending at ignorance, the intuition, curious at seeming neglect, rears its invisible head and snakes out through your palmprints in mythological forms.6

In other words, your muse may actually thrive on apparent neglect, which allows it the inner space and autonomy to develop an idea on its own schedule and according to its own internal logic, so that the idea can build pressure, gain steam, and then erupt when the time is good and ripe.

The creative twilight zone of the muse

For me, the moral of the story—the story of these opposite/complementary principles of and approaches to the urgency of creative inspiration—is that both are right and true. The truth of the creative relationship between a writer/artist and his or her daimon muse lies in a dialectical synthesis of the two.

Yes, we must always be prepared to act on inspiration when it arrives. Our job in this collaborative relationship is to wait, to be ready, to be like the “ten virgins” in the biblical Jesus’s parable who are tasked with keeping their lamps lit while they wait for the bridegroom’s imminent but obscurely timed arrival.

And equally yes, we can rely confidently on the fact that we relate to creativity as an independent intelligence with which we are in collaboration, and which can thus contain, harbor, and shelter ideas in the sacred space of incubation until we and they are ready to write them down or otherwise record and actualize them.

It is simultaneously true that we are responsible to this force and that we can depend upon this force. This is the muse’s paradox that we live with.

The fertile liminal space between the far ends of this spectrum is the birthplace of transcendent meanings. It’s the creative twilight zone where truths and visions that we don’t own, but that we play a necessary part in realizing (as in making real), come to be born through us.

Warm regards,

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P.S. Just yesterday—several days after I had already written and scheduled this post—I encountered the following from

Jeff Goins

in an essay titled “All the Books I May Never Write.” It seems a fine postscript to add to these reflections on the interplay between creative urgency and creative trust, since it leavens them with an insightful warning that’s articulated right in its subheadline: “The Subtle Distinction between Procrastination and Incubation”:

Don’t force the idea; get to know it. Good things take time. But eventually there comes a point when it has reached maturity; and if you don’t act now, it will expire. Like good wine, once an idea peaks, it starts to degrade quickly. Eventually, if not acted upon, the thing moves on and finds another willing participant in this strange alchemy of writing.

How does this happen, and when? No one knows exactly, but my experience suggests that there is a very real feeling inside of you when it does. You can sense the drift, like that of a disinterested lover: a certain coldness starts to settle in. This is a warning. Act now or resign yourself to later regret....

Don’t confuse incubation for procrastination, and vice versa. Navigating the tension between these two opposites is the stuff that a creative life is made of.

P.P.S. It was also yesterday, with this post already locked and loaded, that I encountered David Perell saying the following during his recent (and really good) interview with Ted Gioia for Perell’s podcast How I Write(which I will say something more about in the future, since Gioia said some insightful things in that interview about writing, art, and the muse). Apparently there’s a coalescence of forces that makes right now a strong moment for writing and talking about the dance of urgency and patient trust in the phenomenon of creative inspiration, because these things are all coming up in a lovely unplanned pattern. Here’s what Perell said:

I had dinner with a musician a few months ago, and he got to be in the studio with Kanye West as they were writing some songs. And I said, “What was that like?” He said they did something really interesting. What they did was they “wrote” by going around [the room], and they would basically throw out different lyrics. And somebody in the room tried to write something down. And they’re like, “Do not write it down! Do not write it down!” And he’s like, “Why?” And it was Kanye or somebody else who said, “We do not write things down in the moment. We let the moment flow, and we let our memories remember, and then we remember only the best lines, and then we write those down after.”

Gioia’s response to this story, by the way, makes for a nice explanation or amplification of the basic point about the inherent tension between trusting the muse and feeling the urgency to capture her potentially fleeting whispers: “This makes perfect sense, and I think a lot of writers are like this. The magic of writing is so uncontrollable. You get an inspiration. Where does it come from? And once you have experiences where these things come to you, you worry: Is it going to go away?”

Footnotes:

1. William Burroughs, introduction to The Retreat Diaries, reprinted in A Modern Buddhist Bible: Essential Readings from East and West, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002; 1976), 155. I also mention this point from Burroughs in A Course in Demonic Creativity, in Chapter 7, “The Art of Active Waiting,” in the subsection “What wants to be said through you.”

2. Gilbert has told this valuable story more than once. For this version, see Maria Popova’s transcription of it from a recorded interview with Gilbert in “Elizabeth Gilbert on Inspiration, What Tom Waits Taught Her About Creativity, and the Most Dangerous Myth for Artists to Believe,” The Marginalian, June 12, 2015.

3. Raised On Radio, “Billy Joel - Talks about Audiences, Songwriting, The Piano, Family & more - Radio Broadcast 10/07/2023,” YouTube video, 20:33, August 3, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urSKpVyqOD4.

4. Ray Bradbury, “Green Town, Somewhere on Mars; Mars, Somewhere in Egypt,” an introduction to The Martian Chronicles (New York: William Morrow, 2006), vii–viii.

5. Bradbury, “Green Town,” viii (second emphasis by me).

6. Bradbury, “Green Town,” xi–xii. I say more about Bradbury’s description of Fellini’s “don’t tell me what I’m doing” in A Course in Demonic Creativity, in Chapter 8, “The Discipline of the Demon Muse,” in the subsection on trusting the coherence of your deep self.

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