UBC: Cameron, The Artist's Way

[truepenny]

The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron




I can't rate this book, since my opinion of it veers wildly between five stars and zero stars.

For those not familiar with it, The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron is a book that claims it can reconnect anyone with their "Inner Artist," via a program modeled openly on AA's Twelve Step Program (it is not a coincidence that Cameron is a recovering alcoholic). As such, it conceptualizes creativity as something inherently spiritual and conceptualizes the artist as a channel for God's will.

So.

PROBLEM NUMBER ONE: For me, creativity is not something that comes from outside the self, but something that comes from deep within the self. (And Cameron isn't actually very consistent, since her model of creativity seems to be something like the Puritans' model of the Elect: it's entirely out of your control, but you have to behave properly in order to be one. So her model goes back and forth between "you have to open yourself to God's will" and "you have to find the ideas that are deep within you and nurture them into bloom.") Also, I admit this freely, I have all the spirituality of a brick, so treating creativity as something spiritual means it's something I'm excluded from, and I think I can be forgiven for not liking that model very much.

PROBLEM NUMBER TWO: Cameron has (I hope unconsciously) reinvented one of Freud's more repellent ideas. Where, in talking about Dora, he postulates that "yes" means yes, and "no" also means yes, Cameron explains that if you don't like any of her teachings, or if they make you angry, that just means you're childishly resisting the thing you need in order to heal. So, basically, if you question or argue with her, that's a sign you're Doing It Wrong.

This idea annoys me more than a little.

PROBLEM NUMBER THREE: Cameron is writing from a position of unconscious privilege. She has the freedom to assume that if you are blocked creatively, it is something you can solve by willpower alone, that it's more or less something you have unconsciously done to yourself because you are scared of being creative. She does not allow for health (either physical or mental) to be something out of your control that may be affecting your creativity, and although she acknowledges that there are people who are creative but who cannot create because they are too busy struggling to survive or to care for their children or whatever other actual and genuine impediment may be in their life that they cannot simply will away by rearranging their schedule a little, she has a serene confidence that none of those people are reading her book.

As someone who has been unable to write, to a greater or lesser degree, for seven years (yes, you did read that correctly; I finished the principal draft of The Goblin Emperor in 2009), I would like to state for the record that if the problem could be solved by willpower alone, I WOULD HAVE SOLVED IT ALREADY. And I resent the condescending attitude that the problem is all my fault, if I would just have enough self-insight to see it.

PROBLEM NUMBER FOUR: Cameron is of the same school of thought as Anne Lamott and Natalie Goldberg, that writing (and other forms of creativity) is basically therapy, that creativity comes from the well of psychic injury. Now, writing can be theraputic, and tremendously so, but this model of writing-as-therapy, as direct one-to-one correspondence stream-of-consciousness therapy, does not work for me and never has.

ROBLEM NUMBER FIVE: Cameron believes "The universe will always support affirmative action" (194), that if you open yourself up to the universe, the universe will send you what you need. Always. Now maybe it's just because I've read too much true crime and it's made me cynical, but I can't help pointing out that sometimes, if you open yourself up to the universe, the universe sends you Ted Bundy. The universe is not inherently benevolent. It is inherently indifferent and does not give a fuck whether you succeed or fail.

Some of these problems are merely annoying; some of them are potentially destructive to writers (and other artists) if they take them as gospel (pardon the pun); some of them are irresponsible and dangerous.

But despite all that, and despite the fact that I did not so much follow the Artist's Way as argue vigorously with it, there are a lot of valuable ideas in what Cameron says. Some of them were things I already knew, but needed to be reminded of, like that, just like any other form of creativity, writing requires continual practice. Even if you can't write a story, you can still write something, and you need to.

"Sloth, apathy, and despair are the enemy," she says on page 62, and I agree with that whole-heartedly. And I love her idea of true north, that two people can have the same goal, but their reasons, the thing pulling them like a lodestone, don't have to be the same. And I would follow that with, if you lose your true north, for whatever reason, you're going to have to find it again before you can get very far. She harmonizes with Csikszentmihalyi in emphasizing that the writer is well-served to value process over product, and she points out something I have, in fact, taken to heart; that when your "sensible" self asks, "Do you know how long it's going to take you to do X? Do you know how old you'll be?" the correct answer is, "Just as old as I'll be if I don't do it."

Cameron also provides a lot of quotes from a lot of people, some of which I found wrong, some inane, some simply not applicable. But some I really liked, like Theodore Roethke's "I learn by going where I have to go." (Which, okay, I'm not going to say "The Waking" is the greatest villanelle of all time, but I am gonna say it's pretty damn close.)

Others:

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues." --Duke Ellington

"Whenever I have to choose between two evils, I always like to try the one I haven't tried before." --Mae West

"It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult." --Seneca

"In a dark time, the eye begins to see." --Roethke again.

"Look and you will find it--what is unsought will go undetected." --Sophocles

"Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark." --Agnes de Mille

"Satisfaction of one's curiosity is one of the greatest sources of happiness in life." --Linus Pauling

"The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth." --Adrienne Rich

"The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery." --Francis Bacon (this one, not that one)

"What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough." --Eugène Delacroix (forgive him his sexism, he's been dead for a hundred and fifty-four years)

"Adventure doesn't begin until you get into the forest." --Mickey Hart

"One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time." --André Gide

"A painting is never finished--it simply stops in interesting places." --Paul Gardner



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Comments

[boxofdelights]

"In a dark time, the eye begins to see." --Roethke again.

"Look and you will find it--what is unsought will go undetected." --Sophocles

The juxtaposition of those two reminds of a quote from a movie I saw in college whose name I can't remember, and it was in translation anyway, but the quote was, "Yes, we are like a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there, but we, we will find the cat!"

[galeni]

Thank you. I just knew I didn't like her system.

UnderArmour had an ad campaign with ballerina Misty Copeland and the catch phrase was, "I will what I want." As someone with brain damage from getting rear ended twice in three weeks, my will was not enough. So I understand.

[owldaughter]

You've pinpointed a lot of my frustration with this book. I haven't been able to put it into words. Thank you.

[larryhammer]

I never got far enough to critique it this thoroughly -- was too repelled by the problems I was seeing -- so thank you.

[ephemera]

I bounced *so hard* off problem#2 with this book (and the reading fast idea in particular) that I never got far enough to really engage with the rest of it!

[clhollandwriter]

Oh yes, the reading fast and her blithe assumption that if you have a job that involves reading of any kind you can get away with just not doing it.