The Muse's Paradox

The twilight zone between creative urgency and daemonic trust

Dear Living Dark reader,

1. Having a system in place—and more importantly, an abiding, disciplined intention—to capture fleeting ideas whenever they arrive can be immensely powerful and helpful, and even necessary. HOWEVER,

2. you can also trust that if an idea is meant to be realized, it will come back persistently over time.

This dual understanding has been a part of my philosophical and practical approach to creativity, encompassing both my writing and my music, for many years. I mention it today because it was brought to mind again by a recent Substack Note from

Gurwinder

containing a quotation from Naval Ravikant:

“Inspiration is perishable—act on it immediately.” This is a forthright statement of one end of a dual or dialectical truth. And it’s one with ample support in both our own individual experience and that of prominent writers and artists who have testified to its truth. At the same time, the complementary proposition—that inspiration is instead persistent— has equal support and deserves an equal hearing.

For illustration, I ask you to consider the respective and combined cases of William Burroughs, Tom Waits, Billy Joel, and Ray Bradbury, all jostling up against each other, and all leading toward a convergence and synthesis of ostensible opposites.

William Burroughs: A glimpse may never come again

In a key passage in The Retreat Diaries, Burroughs avers that whereas craftspeople such as carpenters are able to do their work anytime,

a writer has to take it when it comes and a glimpse once lost may never come again, like Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. Writers don’t write, they read and transcribe. They are only allowed access to the books at certain arbitrary times. They have to make the most of these occasions.¹

Burroughs said this in connection with a disagreement that he had had with Chögyam Trungpa about the allowability of bringing a typewriter to a meditation retreat. His point resonates warmly and energetically with me, and maybe also with you. Yes, my sensibility says, I need to ensure that I am always ready and prepared to record the promptings of my daemon muse whenever it speaks.

Tom Waits: Ask your muse to come back later

But then, I am also equally charmed by and in agreement with the story of Tom Waits and his relationship to the muse, which makes the exact opposite point. In Elizabeth Gilbert’s well-known telling of the story, Waits

was driving down the freeway one day in Los Angeles, and he heard a little tiny trace of a beautiful melody, and he panicked because he didn’t have his waterproof paper, and he didn’t have his tape recorder, and he didn’t have a pen, he didn’t have a pencil. He had no way to get it. And he thought, “How am I going to catch this song?” And he started to have all that old panic and anxiety that artists have about feeling like you’re going to miss something. And then he just slowed down, and he looked up at the sky, and he said, “Excuse me, can you not see that I’m driving? If you’re serious about wanting to exist, come back and see me in the studio. I spend six hours a day there, you know where to find me, at my piano. Otherwise, go bother somebody else.”²

Again, my sensibility says, “Yes, exactly. That’s just how it is.” I have genuinely benefited in my own creative work from taking the very tack that Waits and Gilbert describe, from trusting that when a creative idea comes to me at an inconvenient moment, I can consciously place responsibility for preserving it on my daemon muse and then return with confidence at a later moment to find it still waiting and available. I would be willing to bet that you have noticed this in your own work as well, or at least that it strikes you with a resonant sense of encouraging rightness.

Billy Joel: Write it down now

But suddenly another story, a contradictory one that goes back to support the Burroughs approach, comes to mind:

Years ago I heard Billy Joel say in an interview that once when he was walking down a city street, he received an idea for a new melody, and he realized he was in danger of losing it because he had no way to play it, write it down, or otherwise actualize it and save it from oblivion. Looking around in a panic, he saw with surprised delight that he was right near a piano store. So he ran inside and rushed to a piano, where he picked out the melody on the keyboard.

I don’t remember the source of this story, the exact interview where Joel said it. But he said something similar in a 2023 radio interview when he was asked about where his songs come from:

A lot of it happens in dreams. You wake up in the morning [and think], “What was that thing I was dreaming? It was really powerful. It was really good.” And you try to recollect it. Sometimes you can’t, and it’ll drive you crazy. Like “Just the Way You Are.” I dreamed it, and then I forgot it. And it was driving me nuts for weeks. And then one day I was in the middle of a meeting, and it reoccurred to me, and I said, “I got to leave right now. I gotta write this down.” And I’m running home [saying to myself], “Don’t go crazy, don’t forget this.” You know, any kind of words I could think of to just keep the melody in my head.³

Ray Bradbury: The muse, though neglected, persists

But now here comes Ray Bradbury, playing for Team Waits (or did Waits play for Team Bradbury?) as he describes the origin of The Martian Chronicles and explains how it taught him to trust the sometimes long and subtle arc-across-time of the muse’s transmission. In fact, his experience with this seminal book—seminal both for him as a writer and for science fiction and literary culture at large—taught him the very reality of the muse: