How Mircea Eliade delivered his Snake

I love finding out how other writers do their thing. It's fascinating to learn how the great Romanian scholar and fiction writer Mircea Eliade – prolific in so many genres – sustained and generated his creative production under almost all circumstances. He wrote stories in a secret police prison. He hammered out books under the shadow of his wife’s terminal illness and of the Red Army occupation of his country. He went on writing in conditions of penury and exile and raw terror (the terror of History, he called it again and again). He started early, publishing in a popular science magazine at fourteen (when he aspired to become an ichthyologist) and basically kept it up till the end of his life.
    Some of his larger projects he had to put down and take up again over many years  This was the case with his huge autobiographical novel Noaptea de Sanziene (published in English as The Forbidden Forest) and with his pioneer study Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, an enduring inspiration to the neo-shamanic movement in the West since its first publication French in 1953.

     Then there are the books that Eliade wrote in a frenzy, abetted by both the demons of necessity and his greater creative daimon. I am thrilled by his account of how Șarpele (The Snake) streamed out of him over ten nights:.

I wrote the book in the course of ten nights, working between 11 and 3 or 4 a.m., in the spring of 1937.

He had to deliver the completed work on “Book Day”, otherwise the publisher would not pay him. But at the same time he was teaching at the university and proofreading a scholarly book that had to be ready by the same deadline.

I was overworked, exhausted, and in order to stay awake I drank coffee; then, so I could sleep in the mornings I took sleeping powders. Every morning Ciornei [his publisher] sent a boy to pick up the 15 or 20 pages I had written during the night and take them directly to the printer. I did not reread a single page of the two hundred which comprise the book; nevertheless, Șarpele is one of my most successful writings.

He had plenty of ethnographic and folklore material relevant to his theme. He did not consult it. “The writer in me refused any conscious collaboration with the scholar and interpreter of symbols.” He discovered in this way that “the free act of literary creation can…reveal certain theoretical meanings.”

Indeed, only after I read Șarpele in book form did I understand that in this book I had resolved, without knowing it, a problem which had preoccupied me for a long time.

Naturally, after reading this I was eager to read the novel that emerged from these nocturnal frenzies. There is no English translation, and my Romanian is hardly enough to order coffee, but I found an edition in French, titled. Andronic et le serpent and devoured it in one night. Strange, sexy, wild and feverish, a remarkable birth from those ten incandescent nights.
    The story of how Eliade produced this novel  deepens my conviction that for some of us the all-but-impossible deadline is a great prompt to commit the creative act. This has often worked for me.

Source: Mircea Eliade, “Autobiographical Fragment” in Norman J. Giradot and Mac Linscott Ricketts, Imagination & Meaning: The Scholarly and Literary Worlds of Mircea Eliade  (New York: The Seabury Press, 1982) 123

I want my new book in my arms

For me, the genesis of a creative work is both tactile and magical. It involves the urgent desire to touch and caress, and the sense of bringing something into manifestation from the imaginal plane where it already exists. I want to share the feelings, keen as the desire for a perfect lover, that helped to bring one of my most adventurous books (Dreamgates) into my hands, and then into the hands of its readers.

The feeling comes in strong. I want to touch it, stroke it, leaf back and forth through the pages, linger over details of typesetting, the pleasure of rereading an especially felicitous passage. Stroking my previous books, reading over drafts, letters, journal entries, won’t hack it. I want the real thing, the finished thing, bound and sewn.

     I know it’s there.

I have known for quite a time (well over a year) that my new book already exists. This is confirmed when I go through my journal and commonplace book. A paragraph here — and here, and here — a page or two there, are leaves from the finished product. Sure, I have recorded them out of sequence and need to figure out how to shuffle them to match the pagination of the actual book. There are big gaps where material had been left out in transmission. But these are not drafts, despite garbles, typos, and screwups by the filing clerk in my brain. They are the book — the actual, finished book — coming through. 

     I think of a bronze by Ipoustéguy in a sculpture garden in Washington, D.C., that shows a man moving through a solid door. An arm is coming through, up to the elbow. A leg is jutting through, up to the knee. A face bulges round as a moon, penetrating the membrane that only impersonates a solid barrier. My book has been coming through like that.

     Now I want its whole body in my hands.

     I could pause and give myself a lecture on the laws of manifestation, of bringing things into the surface world from the imaginal realm in which they are born. But I am not in the mood for a dissertation on Platonic forms or the Mundus Imaginalis of the Persian philosophers.

     My need lives in my body — in my loins, in my gut, in my nerve endings. I want to cradle and caress, to touch and be touched.

     Can I write from this?

     I can do better. I can deliver.

     My naysayer has nothing to say. My brakeman can’t stop the train. (The brakeman lives in the logical mind, as anyone knows who remembers his Greek; phren, “logic,” is related to phrenon, which means “brakes” — and “damper.”) Coming through!

     You could call my condition relaxed attention, or attentive relaxation, as my fingers trip and skirl across the keyboard. I don’t mind what you call it. As the screen fills and refills, as pages spill from the printer, I am simply bringing a book from my dream library into my physical space, to enjoy it with all of my physical senses.

Text adapted from Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life beyond Death by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photo at top: "Man Passing through Door" by Jean-Robert Ipoustéguy in the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.

Nine Keys to Creative Flow

The springs of creation are mysterious. Goethe said that not only were the roots of his creative power veiled from him, but that he did not want to know the source of his tremendous gifts. But what can be said is that creative flow comes in a state of relaxed attention. Looking over my own experiences as a writer and occasional artist, and at the lives of creative people in many fields who have shared their experiences with me, I would suggest the following maxims as keys to opening to creative flow. Though I have written these with writers especially in mind, I think you will find that they apply in many areas.

1. Play first, work later. Do you ever give more of yourself than when it’s all for fun? On a book tour, I was once asked by a left-brain type, “What can you tell me about becoming a writer?” I told him, “Remember to play.” As he solemnly recorded my advice in his notebook, I added, “I don’t think you’ve gotten the message.” It is not about scheduling an hour for play! It’s about giving yourself to what you love, and letting the work flow from that unnoticed.

2. Sidle toward your story. Australian Aborigines say that the big stories — the stories worth telling and retelling, the ones in which you may find the meaning of your life — are forever stalking the right teller, sniffing and tracking like predators hunting their prey in the bush. Or like dreams. You don’t want to startle them away. So, if you want to write, start by writing something other than what you are “supposed” to be writing — anything but your writing assignment. Letter writing and journaling are ideal; but even a grocery list will do.

3. Every force develops a form. Don’t worry about structure! The structure will reveal itself organically when you follow the energy.

4. Keep your hand moving. Work at increasing speed. Let the flow of associations carry you along.

5.   Release the consequences. The best things you will ever create or perform are things you do for their own sake, the things you would do if you never got published and never received a check.

6.   Don’t ask for permission. There is a time to check in with editors and producers — or simply to share with friends — but that time is after you have released what is trying to be born through you, not in the midst of conception and gestation. Never ask permission when you don’t need it!

7.   Your real story is hunting you. Use peripheral vision. Be attentive to what is bobbing up on the margins of your awareness. Be canny as a traveler in the wood: don’t turn abruptly to stare at these new creatures directly. They’ll come closer if you let them. These might be the stories, or story elements, that will make your day/month/year. Remember that they may be hunting you. You made yourself easier to find by entering these thickets, by going down the writer’s trail without following a route map.

8.   It’s as natural as breathing. In the language of the Tewa Indians, the three-syllable terms that is translated as “art” or “creativity” actually means “water-wind-breath.” This is a beautiful evocation of the creative process. It’s about catching the current, about breathing in and breathing out. In-spiration is literally breathing in spirit; exhalation is releasing it into the world.

9. Spread cornmeal for butterflies. Many years ago, I dreamed that a wise Native American woman told me, “It’s okay to make money, but remember to spread cornmeal.” The last phrase was a mystery to me until I learned, during a visit to the Southwest, that the Pueblo Indians spread cornmeal to feed the butterflies in some of their rituals. Cross-culturally, the butterfly is a symbol of the soul. Indeed, the Greek word psyche means both “soul” and “butterfly.” It’s all about feeding soul.

Text adapted from Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.



Lake sunrise photo (c) Robert Moss