LONG BEACH, California -- Author Elizabeth Gilbert, famous for her bestseller Eat, Pray, Love, suggested Thursday that we kill geniuses by demanding super-human powers from them.
The problem, she says, lies in how we attribute the qualities of geniusness.
Instead of seeing the individual as a genius, we should view the brilliance as a gift from an unknowable outside source -- some might call it a muse, others a fairy or god force -- that visits us on occasion to participate in an act of creation, and then leaves to help someone else. Gilbert was referring primarily to those in the arts, but her talk applied to anyone who creates something sublime, whether it's a painting in the Sistine Chapel or a quantum equation.
Gilbert received a full standing ovation for her talk from an audience of people who generally don't give in to beliefs about muses, fairies and god forces. So let me back up to explain how she reached this point.
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Gilbert achieved unexpected attention when her book was published a couple of years ago. And this was all very nice, except, since then, everyone has been wondering how she'll ever top her achievement, as if it's all downhill from here.
"Everywhere I go now people treat me like I'm doomed," she said. She thought about how creative people have a reputation for being mentally unstable, which she attributes to pressure to perform and live up to expectations for brilliance from themselves as well as the world.
She looked at other societies to see how they regard this pressure on artists and found an answer in ancient Greece and Rome. In these places, people didn't believe that creativity came from inside. They believed it was an attentive spirit that came to someone from a distant, unknowable source, she said.
"[It was] a magical divine entity that was believed to live literally in the walls of an artist's studio and would come out and invisibly assist the artist with the work and shape the outcome of the work," she said.
This view served the artist's mental health, she suggested, because by attributing the artist's talent to an outside force, the artist was relieved of some of the pressure to perform, and was not narcissistic. If an artist's work was brilliant, the outside force got the credit.
All that changed with the Renaissance when mysticism was replaced by a belief that creativity came from the self. For the first time, people started referring to an artist as being a genius rather than having a genius.
"Allowing somebody ... to believe that he or she is ... the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, internal mystery is just like a smidge of too much responsibility to put on one fragile human psyche," she said. "It's like asking somebody to swallow the sun. It just completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all of these unnatural expectations about performance. I think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years."
She acknowledged that there were people in the rational-minded audience (which was filled with scientists) who would balk at the idea of creativity as a kind of "mystical fairy juice" that's bestowed on someone. But she said it made as much sense as anything ever posited to explain the "utter, maddening, capriciousness of the creative process."
(As a side note, a good book on the creative process edited by Brewster Ghiselin includes contributions from mathematicians and other rational-minded scientists, who talk about their creativity as a force that comes to them in dreams and other unexpected moments to inspire them.)
So what's Gilbert getting at?
She relayed a story that musician Tom Waits told her years ago. One day he was driving on a Los Angeles freeway when a fragment of a melody popped into his head. He looked around for something to capture the tune -- a pencil or pen -- but had nothing to record it.
He started to panic that he'd lose the melody and be haunted by it forever and his talent would be gone. In the midst of this anxiety attack, he suddenly stopped, looked at the sky, and said to whatever force it was that was trying to create itself through the melody, "Excuse me. Can you not see I'm driving? Do I look like I can write down a song right now? If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment ... otherwise go bother somebody else today. Go bother Leonard Cohen."
Waits said his creative process, and the heavy anxiety that permeated it, changed that day. In releasing the creative force, he realized that creativity "could be a peculiar, wondrous, bizarre collaboration and conversation between Tom and the strange external genius that was not Tom," Gilbert said.
She recalled his story when she was in the midst of writing Eat, Pray Love and fell into a pit of despair when she felt blocked. She said aloud to whatever entity it was that usually helped her but was on furlough that day that if the book didn't turn out to be good it wasn't going to be entirely her fault since she was putting everything she had into the project. "So if you want [the book] to be better, then you've got to show up and do your part of the deal," she told it. "But I'll keep writing anyway, because that's my job. And I'd like the record to report today that I showed up."
The audience applauded.
Then she went on to describe how centuries ago in the deserts of North Africa, people used to get together for moonlight dances celebrating sacred entities that would go on for hours and hours. Every once in a while, very rarely, something would happen and one of the performers would be imbued with something transcendent.
"And I know you know what I'm talking about," she said. "Because I know you've all seen at some point in your life a performance like this."
It's as if time stopped, and the dancer stepped through a portal. He wasn't doing anything different than he'd done a thousand times before, but for some reason everything was aligned and he no longer appeared to just move. Instead, he seemed to be lifted from within and below.
"And when this happened, people knew it for what it was," she said. "They called it by its name. They'd put their hands together and would start to chant Allah, Allah. 'God, God.'"
As an aside, she noted that when the Moors invaded southern Spain they brought this custom with them, but the pronunciation changed over the centuries from chanting Allah, Allah, Allah to chanting Ole, Ole, Ole, which is now heard at bullfights and flamenco dances when a performer does something incredible.
So what does all this mean for Gilbert?
"If you never happen to believe in the first place that the most extraordinary aspects of your being [were created by you]," she said, you'd be better off. "Maybe if you just believe that they were on loan to you from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life, which you pass along when you're finished to somebody else," it would change everything.
She acknowledged that in her story of the North African dancer, there's still a moment of letdown the morning after the dance when the dancer wakes up and discovers it's Tuesday. He's back to being an aging mortal with really bad knees wondering if he'll ever experience a transcendent moment again.
Nonetheless, when she now feels pressure to produce she just tells herself to forge ahead and do her part and let go of the expectation that it has to be brilliant.
"Just do your job," she told the audience. "Continue to show up for your piece of it. If your job is to dance, then do your dance. If the divine, cockeyed genius assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed for just one moment for your efforts, then Ole. And if not, do your dance anyhow. Ole to you, nonetheless, just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up."
Photo: TED/Asa Mathat
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