I inserted in this post a beautiful story, told by Elisabeth Gilbert during her 18 minute speech at TED, in February 2009. While listening to it, something familiar triggered in my mind. I am one of those believing that credits on creative genius should be taken by the person who has delivered to our society a piece of work, although, I do believe that that there’s a universal energy trend that generates somehow a certain amount of artistic, scientific or other type of occurrences in a certain amount of time, no matter the person who makes them public. I am surrounded by people who certainly believe that credits on creative genius should be owned by an individual. And, maybe, it would be more appropriate to say that there is a minority only who doesn’t.
I do believe that this kind of vision on this matter brings war. Not only war in its political acceptance, but also in its social and psychological senses.
Painting by Patricio Villarroel
My perfect scenario concerning this subject would be 50% love for what we’ve created and 50% gratitude for being able to do this, even if the cause is unknown.
My narcissist friends, my arrogant friends, I dedicate this story to us. Let’s enjoy it together and make our own conclusions!
“In ancient Greece and ancient Rome, people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings. People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, or distant and unknowable reasons. The Greeks famously called these divine attendant spirits of creativity, “daemons”. Socrate, famously, believed that he had a daemon who spoke wisdom to him from afar. The Romans had the same idea, but they called that sort of disembodied creative spirit a genius. Which is great, because the Romans didn’t not actually think that a genius was a particularly clever individual. They believe that a genius was this, sort of magical divine entity, who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist’s studio, kind of like Dobby, the house elf, and who would come out and invisibly assist with their work and would shape the outcome of that work. So brilliant - there it is, right there that distance that I’m talking about - that psychological construct to protect you from the results of your work. And everyone knew that this is how it functioned. So the ancient artist was protected from certain things, like, for example, too much narcissism, right? If your work is brilliant you couldn’t take all the credit for it, everybody knew you had this disembodied genius who had helped you. If your work bombed, not entirely your fault, you know? And this is how people thought about creativity in the West for a really long time.
And then the Renaissance came and everything changed, and we had this big idea, and the big idea was: let’s put the individual human being at the center of the universe, above all gods and mysteries, above mystical creatures who take dictation from the divine. And it’s beginning of rational humanism, and people started to believe that creativity came completely from the self of the individual. And for the first time in history, you start to hear people referring to this or that artist as being a genius, rather than having a genius.
And I got to tell you, I think that was a huge error. I think that allowing somebody, one mere person to believe that he or she is like, the vessel, like the font and the essence, and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery is just like a too much responsibility to put on fragile, human psyche. It’s like asking somebody to swallow the sun. It just completely distorts egos, and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance. And I think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years. And if this is true, and I think it is true, the question becomes, what now?
Can we do this differently? Maybe go back to some ancient understanding about the relationship between humans and the creative mystery. Maybe not. Maybe we can’t just erase 500 years of rational humanistic thought in one 18 minute speech. And there’s probably people in this audience who would raise like really legitimate scientific suspicions about the notion of, basically fairies who follow people around rubbing fairy juice on their project and stuff. I’m not, probably, going to bring you all along with me on this. But the question that I want to pose is - why not? Why not think about it this way? Because it makes as much sense as anything else I have ever heard, in terms of explaining the utter maddening capriciousness of the creative process. A process which, as anybody whoever tried to make something - which is to say basically, everyone here - knows, does not always behave rationally.”
