wand mit eigenen fotos gestalten
i am a writer. writing books is my professionbut it's more than that, of course. it is also my great lifelonglove and fascination. and i don't expectthat that's ever going to change. but, that said, somethingkind of peculiar has happened recently in my life and in my career, which has caused me to have to recalibratemy whole relationship with this work. and the peculiar thingis that i recently wrote this book, this memoir called "eat, pray, love"
which, decidedlyunlike any of my previous books, went out in the worldfor some reason, and became this big, mega-sensation, internationalbestseller thing. the result of whichis that everywhere i go now, people treat me like i'm doomed. seriously -- doomed, doomed! like, they come up to me now,all worried, and they say, "aren't you afraid you're nevergoing to be able to top that? aren't you afraid you're goingto keep writing for your whole life
and you're never againgoing to create a book that anybody in the worldcares about at all, ever again?" so that's reassuring, you know. but it would be worse,except for that i happen to remember that over 20 years ago,when i was a teenager, when i first started telling peoplethat i wanted to be a writer, i was met with this samesort of fear-based reaction. and people would say, "aren't you afraidyou're never going to have any success?
aren't you afraid the humiliationof rejection will kill you? aren't you afraid that you're goingto work your whole life at this craft and nothing's ever going to come of it and you're going to dieon a scrap heap of broken dreams with your mouth filledwith bitter ash of failure?" (laughter) like that, you know. the answer -- the short answerto all those questions is, "yes." yes, i'm afraid of all those things.
and i always have been. and i'm afraid of many,many more things besides that people can't even guess at, like seaweed and otherthings that are scary. but, when it comes to writing, the thing that i've been sort of thinkingabout lately, and wondering about lately, is why? you know, is it rational? is it logical that anybodyshould be expected
to be afraid of the work that they feelthey were put on this earth to do. and what is it specificallyabout creative ventures that seems to make us really nervousabout each other's mental health in a way that other careerskind of don't do, you know? like my dad, for example,was a chemical engineer and i don't recall once in his 40 yearsof chemical engineering anybody asking him if he was afraidto be a chemical engineer, you know? "that chemical-engineering block,john, how's it going?" it just didn't come uplike that, you know?
but to be fair,chemical engineers as a group haven't really earneda reputation over the centuries for being alcoholic manic-depressives. we writers, we kind of do havethat reputation, and not just writers,but creative people across all genres, it seems, have this reputationfor being enormously mentally unstable. and all you have to do is lookat the very grim death count in the 20th century alone,of really magnificent creative minds who died young and oftenat their own hands, you know?
and even the oneswho didn't literally commit suicide seem to be really undoneby their gifts, you know. norman mailer, just before he died,last interview, he said, "every one of my bookshas killed me a little more." an extraordinary statementto make about your life's work. but we don't even blinkwhen we hear somebody say this, because we've heardthat kind of stuff for so long and somehow we've completelyinternalized and accepted collectively this notion that creativity and sufferingare somehow inherently linked
and that artistry, in the end,will always ultimately lead to anguish. and the question that i wantto ask everybody here today is are you guys all cool with that idea? are you comfortable with that? because you look at iteven from an inch away and, you know -- i'm not at all comfortablewith that assumption. i think it's odious. and i also think it's dangerous, and i don't want to see itperpetuated into the next century.
i think it's better if we encourageour great creative minds to live. and i definitely know that,in my case -- in my situation -- it would be very dangerous for me to startsort of leaking down that dark path of assumption, particularly given the circumstancethat i'm in right now in my career. which is -- you know, like check it out, i'm pretty young,i'm only about 40 years old. i still have maybe another fourdecades of work left in me. and it's exceedingly likely that anythingi write from this point forward
is going to be judged by the worldas the work that came after the freakish successof my last book, right? i should just put it bluntly, becausewe're all sort of friends here now -- it's exceedingly likelythat my greatest success is behind me. so jesus, what a thought! that's the kind of thoughtthat could lead a person to start drinking ginat nine o'clock in the morning, and i don't want to go there. i would prefer to keep doingthis work that i love.
and so, the question becomes, how? and so, it seems to me,upon a lot of reflection, that the way that i have to work now,in order to continue writing, is that i have to create some sort ofprotective psychological construct, right? i have to sort of find some wayto have a safe distance between me, as i am writing,and my very natural anxiety about what the reaction to that writingis going to be, from now on. and, as i've been looking,over the last year, for models for how to do that,
i've been sort of looking across time, and i've been tryingto find other societies to see if they might have hadbetter and saner ideas than we have about how to help creative people sort of manage the inherentemotional risks of creativity. and that search has led meto ancient greece and ancient rome. so stay with me, becauseit does circle around and back. but, ancient greece and ancient rome -- people did not happento believe that creativity
came from human beings back then, ok? people believed that creativitywas this divine attendant spirit that came to human beingsfrom some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons. the greeks famously called these divineattendant spirits of creativity "daemons." socrates, famously, believedthat he had a daemon who spoke wisdom to him from afar. the romans had the same idea, but they called that sort of disembodiedcreative spirit a genius.
which is great, because the romansdid not actually think that a genius was a particularlyclever individual. they believed that a genius was this,sort of magical divine entity, who was believed to literallylive in the walls of an artist's studio, kind of like dobby the house elf, and who would come out and sort of invisibly assistthe artist 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 protectyou from the results of your work. and everyone knew that thisis how it functioned, right? so the ancient artist was protectedfrom certain things, like, for example,too much narcissism, right? if your work was brilliant,you couldn't take all the credit for it, everybody knew that you had thisdisembodied genius who had helped you. if your work bombed,not entirely your fault, you know? everyone knew your geniuswas kind of lame. and this is how peoplethought about creativity in the west
for a really long time. and then the renaissance cameand everything changed, and we had this big idea,and the big idea was, let's put the individual human beingat the center of the universe above all gods and mysteries, and there's no more roomfor mystical creatures who take dictation from the divine. and it's the beginningof rational humanism, and people startedto believe that creativity
came completely from the selfof the individual. and for the first time in history, you start to hear people referringto 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. you know, i think that allowingsomebody, one mere person to believe that he or she is like,the vessel, you know, like the fontand the essence and the source of all divine, creative,unknowable, eternal mystery
is just a smidge too much responsibilityto put on one fragile, human psyche. it's like asking somebodyto swallow the sun. it just completely warpsand distorts egos, and it creates all these unmanageableexpectations about performance. and i think the pressure of that has been killing off our artistsfor 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 moreancient understanding about the relationship between humansand the creative mystery. maybe not. maybe we can't just erase 500 yearsof rational humanistic thought in one 18 minute speech. and there's probablypeople in this audience who would raise reallylegitimate scientific suspicions about the notion of, basically, fairies
who follow people around rubbing fairyjuice on their projects and stuff. i'm not, probably, going to bringyou all along with me on this. but the questionthat i kind of want to pose is -- you know, why not? why not think about it this way? because it makes as much senseas anything else i have ever heard in terms of explainingthe utter maddening capriciousness of the creative process. a process which, as anybodywho has ever tried to make something --
which is to say basicallyeveryone here --- knows does not always behave rationally. and, in fact, can sometimesfeel downright paranormal. i had this encounter recently where i met the extraordinaryamerican poet ruth stone, who's now in her 90s,but she's been a poet her entire life and she told me that whenshe was growing up in rural virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feeland hear a poem
coming at her from over the landscape. and she said it was likea thunderous train of air. and it would come barreling downat her over the landscape. and she felt it coming, because itwould shake the earth under her feet. she knew that she hadonly one thing to do at that point, and that was to,in her words, "run like hell." and she would run like hell to the house and she would be gettingchased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she hadto get to a piece of paper and a pencil
fast enough so that when it thunderedthrough her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. and other timesshe wouldn't be fast enough, so she'd be running and running,and she wouldn't get to the house and the poem would barrelthrough her and she would miss it and she said it would continueon across the landscape, looking, as she put it "for another poet." and then there were these times -- this is the piece i never forgot --
she said that there were momentswhere she would almost miss it, right? so, she's running to the houseand she's looking for the paper and the poem passes through her, and she grabs a pencil justas it's going through her, and then she said, it was likeshe would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. she would catch the poem by its tail, and she would pull itbackwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page.
and in these instances, the poem wouldcome up on the page perfect and intact but backwards, from the lastword to the first. so when i heard that i was like --that's uncanny, that's exactly what my creativeprocess is like. that's not at all what my creativeprocess is -- i'm not the pipeline! i'm a mule, and the waythat i have to work is i have to get upat the same time every day, and sweat and labor and barrelthrough it really awkwardly. but even i, in my mulishness,
even i have brushedup against that thing, at times. and i would imaginethat a lot of you have too. you know, even i have had workor ideas come through me from a source that i honestly cannot identify. and what is that thing? and how are we to relate to it in a waythat will not make us lose our minds, but, in fact, might actually keep us sane? and for me, the best contemporaryexample that i have of how to do that is the musician tom waits,
who i got to interview several years agoon a magazine assignment. and we were talking about this, and you know, tom, for most of his life,he was pretty much the embodiment of the tormentedcontemporary modern artist, trying to control and manage and dominate these sort of uncontrollablecreative impulses that were totally internalized. but then he got older, he got calmer, and one day he was driving downthe freeway in los angeles,
and this is when it all changed for him. and he's speeding along,and all of a sudden he hears this little fragment of melody, that comes into his head as inspirationoften comes, elusive and tantalizing, and he wants it, it's gorgeous, and he longs for it,but he has no way to get it. he doesn't have a piece of paper,or a pencil, or a tape recorder. so he starts to feel all of that oldanxiety start to rise in him like, "i'm going to lose this thing,
and i'll be be hauntedby this song forever. i'm not good enough, and i can't do it." and instead of panicking, he just stopped. he just stopped that whole mental processand he did something completely novel. he just looked up at the sky, and he said, "excuse me, can you notsee that i'm driving?" "do i look like i can writedown a song right now? if you really want to exist,come back at a more opportune moment when i can take care of you.
otherwise, go bother somebody else today. go bother leonard cohen." and his whole work processchanged after that. not the work, the work was stilloftentimes as dark as ever. but the process, and the heavyanxiety around it was released when he tookthe genie, the genius out of him where it was causing nothing but trouble,and released it back where it came from, and realized that this didn't have to bethis internalized, tormented thing. it could be this peculiar,wondrous, bizarre collaboration,
kind of conversation betweentom and the strange, external thing that was not quite tom. when i heard that story,it started to shift a little bit the way that i worked too,and this idea already saved me once. it saved me when i was in the middleof writing "eat, pray, love," and i fell into one of thosesort of pits of despair that we all fall into when we're workingon something and it's not coming and you start to think this is going to bea disaster, the worst book ever written. not just bad, but the worstbook ever written.
and i started to think i shouldjust dump this project. but then i remembered tomtalking to the open air and i tried it. so i just lifted my faceup from the manuscript and i directed my commentsto an empty corner of the room. and i said aloud, "listen you, thing, you and i both knowthat if this book isn't brilliant that is not entirely my fault, right? because you can see that i am puttingeverything i have into this,
i don't have any more than this. if you want it to be better, you've gotto show up and do your part of the deal. but if you don't do that,you know what, the hell with it. i'm going to keep writing anywaybecause that's my job. and i would pleaselike the record to reflect today that i showed up for my part of the job." because -- (applause) because in the end it's like this, ok --
centuries ago in the desertsof north africa, people used to gather for these moonlightdances of sacred dance and music that would go on for hoursand hours, until dawn. they were always magnificent,because the dancers were professionals and they were terrific, right? but every once in a while, very rarely,something would happen, and one of these performerswould actually become transcendent. and i know you knowwhat i'm talking about, because i know you've all seen,at some point in your life,
a performance like this. it was like time would stop, and the dancer would sort of stepthrough some kind of portal and he wasn't doing anything different than he had ever done,1,000 nights before, but everything would align. and all of a sudden, he wouldno longer appear to be merely human. he would be lit from within,and lit from below and all lit up on fire with divinity.
and when this happened, back then, people knew it for what it was,you know, they called it by its name. they would put their hands togetherand they would start to chant, "allah, allah, allah, god, god, god." that's god, you know. curious historical footnote: when the moors invaded southern spain,they took this custom with them and the pronunciationchanged over the centuries from "allah, allah, allah,"to "olã©, olã©, olã©,"
which you still hear in bullfightsand in flamenco dances. in spain, when a performer has donesomething impossible and magic, "allah, olã©, olã©, allah,magnificent, bravo," incomprehensible, there it is-- a glimpse of god. which is great, because we need that. but, the tricky bitcomes the next morning, for the dancer himself,when he wakes up and discovers that it's tuesday at 11 a.m.,and he's no longer a glimpse of god. he's just an aging mortalwith really bad knees,
and maybe he's never goingto ascend to that height again. and maybe nobody will ever chantgod's name again as he spins, and what is he then to dowith the rest of his life? this is hard. this is one of the most painfulreconciliations to make in a creative life. but maybe it doesn't have to bequite so full of anguish if you never happenedto believe, in the first place, that the most extraordinary aspectsof your being came from you.
but maybe if you just believedthat they were on loan to you from some unimaginable sourcefor some exquisite portion of your life to be passed along when you're finished, with somebody else. and, you know, if we think about itthis way, it starts to change everything. this is how i've started to think, and this is certainly how i've beenthinking in the last few months as i've been working on the bookthat will soon be published, as the dangerously, frighteninglyover-anticipated follow up
to my freakish success. and what i have tosort of keep telling myself when i get really psyched outabout that is don't be afraid. don't be daunted. just do your job. continue to show up for your piece of it,whatever that might be. if your job is to dance, do your dance. if the divine, cockeyed geniusassigned to your case decides to let some sort of wondermentbe glimpsed, for just one moment through your efforts, then "olã©!"
and if not, do your dance anyhow. and "olã©!" to you, nonetheless. i believe this and i feelthat we must teach it. "olã©!" to you, nonetheless, just for having the sheerhuman love and stubbornness to keep showing up. thank you. june cohen: olã©!
