Pressfield’s War of Art, and the Muse

  

I was sent a copy of a little book on creativity by Steven Pressfield, the author of The Legend of Bagger Vance, and found it so delicious I devoured it in a single sitting. Some readers may have trouble with the military metaphor suggested by the title, The War of Art but no writer will fail to recognize those days when the forces resisting the creative process seem to have laid minefields and blown up bridges.

Pressfield divides his little book into three even smaller books.

Book One is devoted to what blocks and derails the creative process. Pressfield itemizes many ways of self-sabotage, from booze to procrastination, from giving in to family needs to confusing the urgent with the important (for which the remedy is always to do the important stuff first). These are all activities of what he calls Resistance. I rather wish he had picked a different name (Sabotage could work) since, with the great big capital R, the word Resistance brings up thoughts of the French Resistance and we surely do not want to go to war with anything like that. But let’s soldier on.. Pressfield offers a provocative list of the ambitions and endeavors that stir up the strongest Resistance from the little everyday self. These include any creative undertaking in any field, any action that requires moral courage, any entrepreneurial venture, and any effort to embark on new learning or clean out old habits and addictions.

Pressfield is absolutely correct when he says that for writers the problem is not writing but sitting down to write. He insists that the project we most resist is the one we most need to do. I suspect he is right about this too. Our deepest fears (to paraphrase Rilke) are the dragons guarding our deepest treasures.

If it’s really helpful to see the War of Art as a military campaign (Pressfield insists on this to the point of urging us to become Marines, with a calling to “miserable” conditions) let’s observe that frontal assault, as in war, can be self-defeating or suicidal. Flank attacks and diversionary tactics may work better, if there is indeed an enemy on the field of battle. Get around him, divide his forces, distract him, and then press your attack. In tackling a book project, I find I often do best by appearing to ride off in a completely different direction – for example, by devoting hours to seemingly unrelated research or posting at my online forums - only to change course and take the enemy from behind.

Book Two is devoted to becoming a pro, and contains much good stuff. Amateurs play for the game, pros play for keeps. Pressfield gives very practical counsel on bringing to the creative project some of the same habits that are required in workaday life: you turn up, you spend the necessary hours at the workplace, you don’t call in sick or depressed or with a family emergency or a need to bar crawl every day. You make a date with your muse and you keep it. He has a lovely quote from Somerset Maugham, who was asked whether he waited until he was inspired before he wrote, or wrote according to schedule. Maugham replied that he was fortunate to be inspired at precisely nine o’clock every morning.

Book Three is about how bringing through a creative project involves engaging the muse, the daimon, the genius. Pressfield describes how he borrowed from a friend the practice of saying aloud the opening words of Homer’s Odyssey. It’s a great idea, but there are better versions than the old T.E.Lawrence (yes, Lawrence of Arabia) translation that Pressfield quotes. I’m going to borrow his idea, but recast it with the aid of the 1961 Robert Fitzgerald translation (you may wish to compare the fine 1996 translation by Robert Fagles).

The poet begins the Odyssey by invoking the creative spirit: 

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story 

It is the story of a wanderer, a “man of many ways” (polytropos) who was “harried for years on end” after he plundered the sacred places of Troy. His homecoming was delayed, within sight of Ithaca, when his men killed and feasted on the sacred cattle of the sun. We read in this that we must do the work for a higher purpose than filling our bellies.The key thing is to engage a larger power.

Borrowing from the Fitzgerald version, Homer’s invocation of the Muse could be simplified as follows: 

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story.

Tell us in our time, lift the great song again. 

Note that the Muse here (mousa) is not yet job-specific; the early Greeks did not divide up musing functions between the nine nymphs familiar to the Renaissance. At the oldest level of the Muse cult, there appear to have been three, not nine, Muses and their names (as preserved in Pausanias) mean Voice, Practice, and Memory. Who would not want those allies in pursuit of a creative project? They are irresistible.

Art: Edmond Aman-Jean, "Hesiod Listening to the Muse", c.1890