Creative Rebellion Essays: The care & feeding of your inner daemon
“Daemon” – painting by John S. Couch, photo by JC Caldwell
I believe each of us is born innately creative, as I’ve written many times before. We are born with an inner genius that is within us and it is up to us to find it, honor it, and allow it to express itself. What we often do instead, is suppress that voice, and conform over time into a state of survival. During these times of seismic change, just getting through the day is hard enough but I would argue that it is exactly during these times that we are afforded the ability to “reset” our priorities and reconnect to our inner creative core. In times of desperation and anxiety, our inner state tends towards the conservation of energy, towards sadness and depression, staying in bed, binging on bad news on our phones. However, humans are capable of great things and in order to become change agents, we need to activate ourselves into a state of action and this can happen by reconnecting to our inner daemon. (I even named the protagonist of my novel, LUMINAL: The Cosmic Misadventures of an Existential, Intergalactic Assassin, “Daemon.”)
I was recently listening to Tim Ferris interview the brilliant Chuck Palahniuk (author of Fight Club and most recently, The Invention of Sound) and during their discussion about creativity, the notion of the “daemon” came up. The notion of a daemon is ancient and goes back to Socrates, during whose time it was considered a sort of intermediary between the gods and humans.
Palahniuk and Ferris both referred to the concept of the daemon or genius as Lewis Hyde wrote about it in The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World. I excerpted what I feel are the most relevant passages below.
“...The task of setting free one’s gifts was a recognized labor in the ancient world. The Romans called a person’s tutelar spirit his genius. In Greece it was called a daemon. Ancient authors tell us that Socrates, for example, had a daemon who would speak up when he was about to do something that did not accord with his true nature. It was believed that each man had his idios daemon, his personal spirit which could be cultivated and developed. Apuleius, the Roman author of The Golden Ass, wrote a treatise on the daemon/genius, and one of the things he says is that in Rome it was the custom on one’s birthday to offer a sacrifice to one’s own genius. A man didn’t just receive gifts on his birthday, he would also give something to his guiding spirit. Respected in this way the genius made one ‘genial’— sexually potent, artistically creative, and spiritually fertile.
According to Apuleius, if a man cultivated his genius through such sacrifice, it would become a lar, a protective household god, when he died. But if a man ignored his genius, it became a larva or a lemur when he died, a troublesome, restless spook that preys on the living. The genius or daemon comes to us at birth. It carries with it the fullness of our undeveloped powers. These it offers to us as we grow, and we choose whether or not to accept, which means we choose whether or not to labor in its service. For, again, the genius has need of us. As with the elves, the spirit that brings us our gifts finds its eventual freedom only through our sacrifice, and those who do not reciprocate the gifts of their genius will leave it in bondage when they die…”
Creativity has many forms, ranging from the genius or muse (as exemplified by Elizabeth Gilbert’s famous TED Talk) as well as the duende, as I wrote about in my book.
“...Federico García Lorca famously wrote about this in ‘Theory and Play of the Duende’:
. . . Angel and Muse come from outside us: the angel brings light, the Muse form (Hesiod learnt from her). Golden bread or fold of tunic, it is her norm that the poet receives in his laurel grove. While the duende has to be roused from the furthest habitations of the blood.
Reject the angel, and give the Muse a kick, and forget our fear of the scent of violets that eighteenth-century poetry breathes out, and of the great telescope in whose lenses the Muse, made ill by limitation, sleeps.
The true struggle is with the duende . . .”
The Art of Creative Rebellion: How to champion creativity, change culture and save your soul – by John S. Couch
The genius, the daemon, the duende all are states of active creative engagement. And this alone allows one to move from a lower energy state of desperation into a higher-vibrational state of possibility and engagement.
Last Tuesday, I did a live interview with a good friend, the extraordinary artist Cryptik, for a creativity webinar. I was sitting outside, on my balcony and we were speaking about the origin of art as a sacred medium – from the cave paintings of Lascaux to the religious paintings of the Renaissance. But over time, art became diversified into representation (portraits and landscapes) and the wealthy could afford them. Then, with the advent of photography, there was the ability to “capture” reality. This led to various movements – the abstraction of Jackson Pollock, the representation of the everyday/banal with the pop art of Warhol to the minimalism of Agnes Martin, the expressionism of Jean-Michel Basquiat and finally the postmodernism of Yayoi Kusama to Jeff Koons. We are far away from the sacred but Cryptik is able to embrace spirituality while also taking in both representation and abstraction, as well as bridging street art and fine art.
Cryptik mentioned that in his most recent works, he has incorporated actual, physical seeds into his paintings, gluing them onto the canvas, with the notion that over time the paintings would go back into the earth and give birth once again. As we were speaking about this, helicopters were starting to fly overhead and my phone was blowing up with push notifications and it was becoming harder and harder to hear what Cryptik was saying. I looked up through the kitchen window and saw that my wife and daughter appeared distressed. I finally looked down at my phone and saw that there were fires around us, set off by a disturbed individual driving a Ford F-350, dragging a trailer behind him that was throwing sparks and pieces of melted metal across the dry expanse of the chaparral of the Santa Monica Mountains as he was being pursued by the police. I apologized to Cryptik and the people listening in that I had to jump due to the fires but that interestingly enough, it was apropos to the notion of the seeming permanence of art but that not only will all things return to the Earth but perhaps, in this moment the transience of reality was exemplified by fires which could not only destroy my paintings but my house and all of our material possessions.
Fortunately, the fires were put out in short order by the brave first responders but it was a reminder of the impermanence of, well, everything. And it made me consider again the need for myself, for all of us, to allow the inner daemon/genius that we all contain to be let out and expressed. Cryptik truly is in alignment with his inner daemon and he expresses it with every painting he makes – for him the work is meditation and the work records the state of mind he’s in at the moment. The work is a record of his creative state and the painting will reverberate long beyond his life so his state of mind must be harmonious or else it will reflect something he didn’t intend.
Our states of mind are reflected in everything we do, whether it’s cooking or cleaning or working. We are often in a state of rote movement, answering emails, buying groceries, dealing with the multitudes of daily challenges. And this is reality. But in addition to this reality, we always have access to a higher state of being. And it is literally within us.
Take care of your daemon. Allow it to be expressed and you will be protected in that state of creativity.
John
Where I’m speaking:
The Rotman School of Management | The University of Toronto – I’ll be speaking about principles from The Art of Creative Rebellion: How to champion creativity, change culture and save your soul, focusing on creative culture within the corporate workplace.
Creative Bravery Festival – I’ll be doing a Q&A about creative courage (appropriate for the title of the festival) with Vanessa Dewey.
What I’m reading:
Trickster Makes this World: Mischief, Myth and Art – by Lewis Hyde (author of the aforementioned The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World) about the concept of the Trickster – a universal disruptor/creative archetype as exemplified by Coyote or Raven in Native American lore or Hermes in Greek mythology.
What I’m watching:
From Cradle to Grave – I’m a big fan of Pieces of Japan which is a company run by Tina Koyama who has been preserving, supporting and documenting the indigenous crafts and arts of Japan, which are, unfortunately, disappearing.
Supersonic – I watched this because Oasis was able to harness and express their inner daemon during the 90’s in a way that was supersonic, poetic, raw and powerful. There are these moments in time when an artist or group of people “catch fire” but alas, they didn’t honor their own genius and eventually, the group fell apart due to sibling rivalry between the brothers Gallagher.
Please visit my website to sign up for my blog/newsletter as well as downloading the first chapter from my book, The Art of Creative Rebellion.
If you like what you are reading, please order The Art of Creative Rebellion, in stores. On Audiobook and Kindle.
Follow me:
Twitter: @titaniumsky
Instagram: @theartofcreativerebellion