It turns out I’ve known about Elizabeth Gilbert for some months now, well before the movie of Eat, Pray, Love came out. She’d give a talk at TED back in early 2009 and I watched it online sometime early this year or late last year. Her talk was about creativity, natch, and about how the notion of the lone genius is just getting old, has always been destructive, and can’t we just get rid of it?
Yes, by all means, let’s do so.
Her general idea is to go back to an older sense of ‘genius,’ its original Roman sense, where it mean “this, sort of magical divine entity, who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist’s studio, kind of like Dobby the house elf, and who would come out and sort of invisibly assist the artist with their work and would shape the outcome of that work.” That is, it’s not YOU, you creatin’ fool, its some other thing working through, or at least with, you.
OK, well, I’m not exactly sure that’s a step forward, but at least it’s no longer the lone genius individual dredging it up from the bowels of his – and, traditionally, it’s mostly been HIS – soul: the pain! the agony! the ecstasy! And so she goes on, first talking how the poet Ruth Stone would chase a poem in her youth, grab it by the tail and “pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. And in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwards, from the last word to the first.”
Strange are the ways of creativity. And then there was a story about Tom Waits, and how a song once came to him at an inconvenient time, while he was driving his car. So he told to the song to back off, either visit him at a more convenient time or “go bother somebody else today. Go bother Leonard Cohen.”
I like that: Go bother Leonard Cohen.
So she goes on a bit more, talks about how she gave a similar admonition to the house elf who was not cooperating on Eat, Pray, Love and then she reaches the climax of her talk.
Centuries ago in the deserts of North Africa, people used to gather for these moonlight dances of sacred dance and music that would go on for hours and hours, until dawn. And 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 performers would actually become transcendent. . . . It was like time would stop, and the dancer would sort of step through 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 would no 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 it’s name. They would put their hands together and they would start to chant, “Allah, Allah, Allah, God, God, God.”
In time, in Moorish Spain, “Allah” became “Ole.” The tricky thing, says our Liz, is the day after, when the dancer “wakes up and discovers that it’s Tuesday at 11 a.m., and he’s no longer a glimpse of God . . . and maybe he’s never going to ascend to that height again.”
Ain’t that the truth, Ruth.
Her point, then, is that maybe that’s not so bad “if you just believed that [the powers to transcend] were on loan to you from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life to be passed along when you’re finished.”
And so I do think there’s more to Elizabeth Gilbert than made it into that movie, Eat Pray Love.
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