Elizabeth Gilbert, author of mega-bestseller Eat, Pray, Love talks about the idea of creative inspiration or genius dwelling outside the human individual. She doesn’t go so far as to say she believes in or expects others to believe in daemons or spirits (though she refers to the sometimes-seemingly-supernatural aspects of creativity), but does suggest that it might be good for our sanity — keeping both ego and anxiety down to manageable size — if we adopted the idea that the human author might not be the only party involved in the making of literature.

As I’ve said, I do believe in those spirits and daemons — or at least, I choose to believe in them because it’s how I experience the writing process, and I don’t think it would help to try not to believe in it. This belief rides along with the caveat that I don’t even know what I am, or what my consciousness really is, or where it is; so that to say “they” seem external is to say that they seem external to something the nature, location and  limits of which are unknown.  So I believe in what seems to be and in what appears to work, while in the background there’s the allowance that I don’t know what really is or how it works.

If they are separate or even half-separate from us, I wonder how they perceive us. When we write about fairies and such we tend to assume they can see our world clearly, get about in it easily, and communicate with us whenever they choose. But perhaps we’re as unclear to most of them as they are to most of us; perhaps only some of them are walkers between worlds — magicians amongst their own kind — and perhaps even those adepts have difficulties from time to time. Gilbert’s anecdote about Tom Waits telling off the muse for sending him music while he was busy driving suggests that if they’re there, they may not all be quite au fait with our human reality as we perceive it. Perhaps they can’t always perceive our physical motion in 3D space; they might only perceive our motion in thought. When we create ritual space we create a particular pattern of motions in thought; perhaps in addition to preparing our own minds it’s like shining the Bat Signal to them.

What I do know is that it’s possible to feel that they — perhaps I should call them fairies — are terribly close, as if they were just on the other side of a glass partition, and the feeling that they are there and the knowing that you can’t get through the partition can be crazy-making. Or if you get torn between the other world and your own — it’s like the scene with Pan in The Wind in the Willows. And unlike Kenneth Grahame’s gentle Pan-Pashupati, you can’t expect them to make you forget, “lest the awful remembrance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure.” Speaking for myself, the awful remembrance fades — but it takes time.

Gilbert talks about the letdown after the visitation, and makes the wise point that you can still go on — you have your own powers to draw on, after all, and they may be greater than you think. (Edit: maybe her example of a North African dancer possessed by God for one night isn’t quite apposite for a presumably secular or near-secular audience, because that guy already has a faith; he may well feel bereft the “morning after”, but he doesn’t have to wonder what it was that possessed him, and he can expect to meet it again at the end of his life, which must be some consolation.) But if the visitation comes before you’ve discovered your abilities, or if it’s very strong, you might need a while to dust off and get back up. For people for whom the external genius feels real, it may not be so much a psychic security blanket as a wild carny-man who takes you to see the strangest things in tents and then has his way with you in a wagon painted with eyes and signs and pulled by a balrog. Or you may at least have to do some negotiating with it, so that you can keep a foot in both worlds. Then it can become a dance, a game, a ludic play — but it begins with acknowledging that while the whole thing may be a joke, it isn’t bullshit.

I don’t know whether, if you really feel your work comes from within, you could talk yourself into believing it comes from without, even for the sake of mental peace, if such would be brought about. I’ve written one or two things that feel a good 95% my own. If something else was helping, it was helping very subtly most of the time. In the event of those stories not working out, it would be hard for me to palm the blame off on a supernatural being. And even when the work feels only half or less than half your own, there’s still the matter that you’re the one turning this inspirational stuff into readable (by at least a few people) stuff. If “they” are the rider, you are the horse, and you, poor dumb animal, might shy at jumps or want to stop and eat grass, or really act up and throw the rider — and since you’re a conscious, thinking horse, you own those mistakes, is how I think of it.

I also wonder how much the high rate of mental health problems and suicide amongst writers can be blamed on ego issues directly related to writing. Virginia Woolf was manic-depressive and heard voices calling her to “do wild things”. Yukio Mishima wanted to create the perfect body and then destroy that body for Japan and the Emperor. These problems are of a different order from performance anxiety, one would think. Or you have Charlotte Perkins Gilman who recovered from serious depression and eventually suicided (self-euthanased might be a better term) because she had cancer — nothing to do, seemingly, with her being a writer. The jury is still out on the nature or even the existence of a link between madness and creativity, and on why writers — or the published writers that have gone on history’s record — are statistically prone to suicide. Perhaps the very act of writing leeches reality from life, transferring the life into the work like the soul of a sorcerer into a magic stone, making suicide a less unthinkable response to suffering. Obviously, it also isn’t hard to see how the self-employed, irregular, work-anywhere life of a writer abets a self-corrosive lifestyle — you can’t be soused at 9 am if you have to be in the office.

That said, I agree entirely with Gilbert that it is probably very healthy not to see yourself as some sort of almighty Author. We all process our culture and experiences into our work; we’re all products of our influences and our genetics. Keeping that in mind might contain the ego and its anxieties just as effectively as believing in gods and daemons. Which isn’t going to help out with the social, financial and physical health problems that may go with the writing life, but at least one area will see improvement. If you actually do experience creative inspiration as something supernatural — and belief may open the door to experience, or to a game that seems very real — there’s no guarantee that feeling yourself haunted by ghosts, ridden by the loa, fucked by a succubus, bitten by a duende or otherwise whirled into the mind’s Waterish Witchland will improve your sanity — though it certainly adds a level of interest to life, and perhaps may be recommended on that score alone.