Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark Source of Creativity
The devil always has the best tunes.
We all wonder why sometimes.
Whether you paper your bathroom with rejection letters or hit refresh on unmoving stats, all writers have moments of doubt. The futility of making your voice heard when everyone’s yelling at once. The lonely feeling of being entirely out of step with what other people value. Your boos mean nothing; I’ve seen what makes you cheer.
The Romans didn’t call people geniuses. A genius was a spirit that might temporarily possess someone, using some lucky damned fool to translate the language of the underworld. The act of creation as demonic possession. A supernatural force you can experience, but can never control.
Geese honk when they fly to encourage one another. The wind can be rough, and there’s a long way to go. The tip of your wing is right next to mine.
Adam was crying.
After all, Eden had its snakes. And though our mythical forefather was formed fully grown, adult and navelless and in the full flower of manhood, he was, after all, very young.
God told him to be quiet. He placed a tender finger on Adam’s lips, a finger that sank just a little into the damp clay the first man was made from. The philtrum, that vertical groove that runs from nose to lip, is the fingerprint of the divine.
But what other shadowy figure left its sooty print on your soul? You were born with this mark or else acquired it before you were old enough to remember. A stain that settled on you while the paint was still wet, leaving mirrored whorls and loops that remain to this day. You learned what words were, and you saw that they were magical. Every spell requires an incantation. Nature makes magic in silence, a bright star pulling trees out of wet dirt. But we need words to weave our spells.
In the Garden, Adam and Eve spent their time naming the things around them. They spoke Hebrew or Chinese or Adamic, the original language of humanity. In quest of that first language, Frederick II locked children away from any human contact in an experiment even crueler than it was useless.
He never learned the exact sound Adam made when he named snakes and sharks and kangaroos. He never found out what exact word God used when he told the first humans to go from the Garden and never return. But you know, don’t you?
And once they were gone, the Garden was lonely. Creation was finished with. Even an atheist can imagine what joy a fictional deity might have felt, making tigers and wasps and wolverines. His Word conjured forests out of air and corals out of water. You’ll never create anything as beautiful as a bedbug, as perfect as a pomegranate.
But you know what it feels like to make something. While angels guard the gates with fiery swords, you and I know a low spot in the walls of Eden.
It’s a fanciful notion that you can write your way to paradise.
But why else would you do it? It’s not for the money; there are easier ways to get that. Ways that don’t involve hauling your wriggling heart out of the dark to flash and gasp in too-thin air. Say what you will about prostitutes; the one thing they don’t sell — or rent out, more accurately — is their hearts.
There’s something diabolical in this business. A faint whiff of sulfur. The transformation of one thing into another is the proper province of alchemists, and alchemists are anathema.
But that’s what you do. Inert words on a passive page, or blank beads of light on the screen, kindle and spark when they find the right kind of mind. God made the world only once. You get to make it again and again.
Still, we all know it’s the devil that has the best tunes. Robert Johnson didn’t go to the crossroads at midnight to meet with God. It’s the dark powers that have dominion over the unconscious, the bottomless source of all inspiration. Monsters move down there.
Before writing incomparable masterpieces, Bach would scrawl JJ at the top of the page. Jesu juva. Help me, Jesus. But Bach’s sacred music came not from above, but from below.
Maybe you were cursed with this.
Or it was cursed with you. Either way, there will be nights, endless nights, when you’ll wish you weren’t. When you’ll wonder why you keep banging your head against a door that won’t open, under the impassive eyes of an indifferent guard. Today, you won’t get into the castle. Tomorrow doesn’t look good either.
But every once in a while, you’ll find that low spot in the wall. Giddy as only a fugitive can be, you’ll sing under the trees for as long as you are able. When you finally come home, you won’t recognize yourself in the mirror. Your eyes will shine brighter. Your heart will fill your chest like a candle in a sky lantern.
You’ll tell yourself that’s what keeps you going. Not money. Not accolades. You do it for the light that fills you, that makes you whole. But that’s not the full story. This bubbles up inside you, like oil in a well. It’s the demonic strength of the underworld, the black smudge on your soul. The monsters that reach out, again and again, for the light.
Your stories come to you in the language of hell. It’s your job to write what they say to a tune the angels can sing.
