Fencing Bear at Prayer

Elizabeth Gilbert gave a very interesting talk a few months ago about changing the way in which we think about creativity and genius. Rather than, as we have since the Renaissance, insisting that creativity is something that comes from within, as the personal responsibility of its human author, it would be much healthier, she suggests, to think of it in the way in which the ancient Greeks and Romans did, as something that comes from outside, inspired, as it were, by the gods. Or, rather, not exactly the gods (or God), but instead something at once more personal and yet still not ourselves: our "genius." And what is a genius? Gilbert suggests something "rather like Dobby, the House-Elf." Okay, maybe not the image I would have chosen, but it makes the point: not everybody's genius is, well, a genius. As authors and artists, we are dependent upon the inspiration we are given and sometimes, our genius isn't really up to it. So, Gilbert argues, it's r...

I've been struggling more this past week thinking of things to blog about than I ever have in the (brief!) history of this blog. It's an important discipline, writing. You have to be willing to write even when you have nothing to say or, rather, feel like you have nothing to say, like doing your scales or rolling that yoga mat out or settling in for just a few minutes to say Morning Prayer even when you don't really want to. If you're not there, nothing can happen. Nor does it help to wait for the right mood. If you wait, the mood never comes; being there even when you aren't in the mood is the trick. But neither do I want this blog to become a stream of consciousness record of what I've been thinking. I'm not sure you're really interested nor do I think you really should be. Stream of consciousness is---as C.S. Lewis put it so well in his A Preface to Paradise Lost (at work, so I can't check the passage right now)--a fiction, an artifice hav...