The Muse’s Bare Shoulder
An Erotic Monologue by Dia Felix
and her Dialogue with Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi
I’ve been walking around thinking about the erotic underworld of creative production. Why a certain person might be compelled to complete a major work of art or a scientific investigation, when others might retreat and settle into safer harbors of well-grooved (but less groovy) channels.
The overwhelming desire, the arresting moment, the muse which tantalizes or compels. The ‘artist statement’ on the wall is long and studied, a paper clearly marked in the official format, but I want to dissolve it, flash paper. I am interested in the kernel at the heart of the enterprise–why do you make this film? Because I must. Why did you keep pursuing this investigation? Because I had to know. The lights of the laboratory on all night. The musician peeing in a cup because he doesn’t want to leave the studio. That sort of thing. The world turns on erotic impulse, erotic in the sense of desire. I know it’s true and I’m just here working on substantiating my claim. My methodology is participant observation, auto-ethnography, overeating, and alone-dancing. The sex lives of Nobel laureates. Dig if you will the picture: Two of us riding nowhere, spending someone’s hard-earned pay.
Inspiration. Can it be systematically examined?
Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi is a positive psychologist, distinguished professor, and author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience and Creativity. Czikszentmihalyi is an expert in the ways of inspiration if there ever was one, having studied creativity for over 30 years and conducted extensive research on over one hundred accomplished creative people. After decades heading the psychology department at the University of Chicago, he is now Director of Quality of Life Research Center at Claremont Graduate University. He generously agreed to meet me for an interview. I offer some edited selections of our exchange below.
A kind of change of the tides, (my body at the helm of this ship made of potato chips and guitar picks, let’s all cross ourselves) a return to the non-intellectual pulse of creative work, I want to look at, and make contact with, the inciting moment. (Why try to lay tracks into this swirling mystery? Gravity is null here, calculations are not necessary. Maybe this is an impossible or immature turn. We crawled out of the cave and learned to talk about making and doing in these certain ways that we can segregate and celebrate and collectively know, we all shook hands on this agreement, but I am crawling back in, eating mud. Backing away from the agreement and into the mystery, sneaking. Woman who crawls with the snakes. Blood cosmetics. Do I want to roll back there? Does the mud taste sweet? I spit it out when no one is looking. We are so used to everything being sweetened.) My flashlight throws a light so small it’s silly, a pencil point. Some things can’t be photographed. We built this city on erotic seizure.
Dia Felix (DF): One can get quickly tangled in semantics. What does inspiration mean to you?
Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi (MC): I don’t know exactly the origins of the term, but it has to do with breathing air in, which in the Vedic early Indian tradition was a way of having not only life, but soul. Somehow Atman, the life force, comes through breathing it in. Inspiration meant a kind of nourishing the spirit. Now, in modern psychology we don’t believe much in spirits or Atman or life-giving force, but it’s still the partly the same notion that you need to feel optimism, hope, curiosity. These are all very important parts of our life, and inspiration makes you feel that the world is interesting, fun, or worth communing with, worth being a part of. It’s still necessary and nourishing.
DF: In your 30 years of researching creative people, I wonder what you learned about inspiration.
MC: What I learned is that it works in mysterious ways, in the sense that you can find almost anything as a source of inspiration. Let’s think about somebody like E.O. Wilson, who grew up poor, on a hardscrabble farm in Georgia. He was four or five years old when there was an invasion of fire ants. He was so enthralled by observing how they moved, in these columns, and how they ate, and what they did. He started writing daily observations. At age 7, he sent it to the local newspaper, they published it, and he was on to a life of studying all the insects in the world. His latest volumes of ants have 4000 illustrations that he made himself, of all different species. It was those first experiences he had, of mastery, of knowledge, that was greater than any of the adults around him. That type of thing, but in so many different guises, is what happens to most of these people. Take a musician like Oscar Peterson, he was alone because his father was mostly away on a train that goes from Quebec to Montreal to Vancouver and back, so he’s home alone. The only thing he can do is listen to the radio, so then he starts playing piano. He has some very vivid moments of crystallizing experiences, these are moments when you say, this is it, this is what life really is about. It could be music, it could be ants. It’s a combination of being exposed to an experience that’s elevating, or strange, or challenging, and being able to cope with it, and that gives you a kind of boost in self-esteem, a feeling that you have found your calling in a sense, you have a place in the scheme of things…that is almost always that case, except you can never predict exactly how it happens.
DF: Seems like there are very few people who are as accomplished as those examples, yet everyone has had some window of opportunity like that.
MC: Right, you never know. E.O. Wilson and his ants, something like that could have happened to anyone. Maybe not ants but spiders or fish or asteroids or whatever. The question, I think, is whether such an event can be then contextualized in a way that you can relate to it. A lot of kids are interested in the world simply in terms of what they can get, what they like, how the world impinges on them. How do you get kids to be interested outside of that? This is something Habermas calls ‘disinterested interested’. Interested because you want to know, ‘what is this’? The point is, inspiration is not going to touch you probably if you are only interested in your immediate interests. In positive psychology, there’s this notion of broaden-and-build. When you are scared and hurt, then your attention is focused narrowly, when you are happy and safe, attention broadens. It’s hard to be ‘disinterested interested’ when you are scared and insecure, because then you have to watch out for what hurts and what helps. But if you are safe and attached, and then there is something strange happening you can say, ‘let’s see how this works,’ without immediately trying to assimilate it to your own interest structure.
DF: Do you have words of advice for those who want to be more inspired?
MC: I think inspiration is very important. Who was the Hollywood actor who once said, “the only necessities in life are the luxuries”? If by luxuries you mean diamond necklaces, that’s not a very nice way, but if you think of luxuries as taking the time to have experiences that are moving and rewarding, like taking a pet out of a shelter…that’s a luxury in a sense, it’s not easy to do it, but it’s something that gets you out of the routine of everyday life. So I would say that inspiration is one of the ways in which people get out of the kind of unexamined and unchanged life.
DF: And what about you? Where do you find inspiration?
MC: See, the question we have never faced up is whether there are some personal qualities that make you more prone to inspiration. I know that I am more than usually prone to get arrested by hearing music, or by seeing something in the environment that’s beautiful, and same thing with ideas. There is a lot of these small epiphanies which are happening all the time, they’re not all exciting–occasionally they are, they touch on some for instance an event that would suddenly explain some puzzle that I’ve been having, that’s kind of breathtaking–but mostly I have kind of constant small epiphanies which are more connected to my inner view of the world. They give me a next step, and then I try to do it. Also, talking with people, as a teacher, the one-on-one involvement that is part of graduate teaching gets you to this point where suddenly you see the person opening up, or you discover that this person is not cut out for this, but is for something else. There’s ample opportunity to get kind of inspired to a new way of thinking or teaching or doing research, which is very nice. I also like to cook.
Speaking of eating and the mouth… Ancient teeth rattle in their skulls, laughter at my enterprise. Teeth. The mystery. The word we use, mystery, is from Greek muein, which meant not puzzle, not black spot, not swirl, not ocean, not sky, not space-above, not space-between, not impossible, not knowledge, not spirit, not ecstasy…muein meant lips, mouth, close to the mouth. Lewis Hyde writes, “Dictionaries tend to explain the connection by pointing out that the initiates to ancient mysteries were sworn to silence, but the root may also indicate, it seems to me, that what the initiate learns at a mystery cannot be talked about. It can be shown, it can be witnessed or revealed, it cannot be explained.” (The Gift, 280.) It also suggests to me the body-origin of mystery-encounter, that if we have an experience of mystery, it occurs in our body and resides there. We taste or swallow. Language dissolves and lands helplessly at one’s feet like a pair of stretched-out panties. Smoke gets in your eyes.
Image List
1) and 2) Illustrations by Jake Ramberg.
3) Fluir by Philippe Boukobza. Mental map based on Czikszentmihalyi’s concept of Flow.
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