When she doesn't show up

I liked her book; Jeanne didn’t.

“I found it indulgent,” she said. “I mean, it may just be me, but very few women have the resources to go off to three parts of the world for four months at a time and then come home and write about it….”

So you’ll have guessed, I’m talking about Elizabeth Gilbert, whose book Eat, Pray, Love was a mega hit. How mega, you ask? Well, according to Gilbert’s website, the book sold over 10 million copies, and was translated into over 30 languages. For all of that, Time made her one of the 100 most influential people of the year. Oh, and Julia Roberts starred in the movie.

So that presented a problem: what in God’s name do you write after that? And people started coming up to her and asking, “aren’t you afraid that your next book will flop?”

Which made Gilbert question—what’s with the myth of the fucked-up artist? More, why do we buy in to it so much that many of us are, in fact, fucked up?

Well, you can hear Gilberts thoughts on the subject below—and yes, she’s bright and funny and articulate. More to the point, she may be right.

It comes down to this—anybody who has every done anything creative has felt that chilling feeling: “who’s writing this? Who’s playing this? Am I writing or taking dictation? Am I dancing or being danced?”

I felt it first, and strongest, on 4 January 2011; I had written, or rather rewritten, the epilogue of my book, and I was in a fever of creative sweat. Taí, here at the time, was supervising the computer guy, who needed my MacBook to check about something on my iTunes. I passed the computer over and raced to a spare laptop, repeating the last line I had written so that I could go on.

I felt it various times since then. Some days the muse comes, some days I am a journeyman; the post yesterday was good, today’s less so. OK—it was somebody else’s turn to get the muse—there are other writers, you know.

And I also like what Gilbert says—if we are just scribes, that takes a lot of pressure off. The book bombed? The post stank? Not entirely all my fault….

Curiously, this notion seems to be akin to the preoccupation of another writer, though he may consider himself a singer. Ian Bostridge is fascinated with the hundred years or so when rational, intelligent thinkers went from believing in witches, demons, succubae, and the devil to not believing in any of that. People knew no more than they had previously; there was no test or technology or philosophical argument that had disproved the existence of the paranormal world.

People had simply decided to invest in another theory—the rational world. The cow died in the village—it was no longer a witch who had entered the cow and poisoned her; it was something in the air, something she ate, some physical illness that, if we didn’t know now, one day we would.

Bostridge wonders, first, why? What prompted this sea change of thinking? He also wonders whether it’s rational. And, in fact, not all of us have bought on—it was usual for my Evangelical students to tell me that so-and-so had a demon: that was the reason the guy had shot up the movie house, or blasted the kids into infinity in the school.

Conversely, there are any number of people who are convinced: angels are all around us. And even some very rational people believe in them. Once, my philosopher friend Harry was taking his 18-year old daughter to be interviewed for admission at the Art Institute of Chicago. They were late, they were lost, and they were trying to orient themselves, when a woman showed up, as if out of nowhere.

“Where do you need to go,” she said, and Harry said her speech was pressured, the words spilling out. She was looking at them with a peculiar intensity, her upper body pressed in slightly toward them.

“Here, I’ll take you,” she said rapidly, and grabbed Chris’s hand. She almost ran with them to the Institute, and then disappeared as fast, and as mysteriously, as she had appeared.

“She was an angel,” said Harry to his daughter, and he meant it.

There are also the documented cases of spirit possession in Haiti in the Voodoo (Vodou) rituals. Actually, aren’t there cases of spirit possession in all religions? People whirling into ecstasy, people talking in tongues, people seeing visions—not much normal goes on in the religious world….

Lastly, I think it’s the very randomness of the process that make the case for there being a muse. I was just as rested, just as focused, working just as hard on Sunday, when she came as I was today, when she was off somewhere else. She’s promiscuous, that lady who is now caressing some other writer’s ear, who has chosen another body to dance in. Which may be a good thing. If she stayed all the time, would I get bored with her? Could I sustain the pressure of working non-stop, batting out her words? Isn’t that the definition of mania?

Everybody needs just an average day.