The muse is more interesting than your brain chemistry

  • Post category:Creativity
  • Reading time:2 mins read

Why is it that every time a headline says something like, “Study reveals fascinating new information about creativity,” the article proves to be not fascinating at all, but the most boring thing anyone ever thought to write?

“Researchers at XYZ Institute of Research into the BrainMind have published a new paper in the Journal of Creative Biological Studies of Brain and Mind that indicates the Ganglior Network in the basal singular portion of the brain is implicated in stochastular effusions of concatenated electrical impulses throughout the anterior dingalum. Lead researcher Dr. ABC, speaking for a ninety-seven person team distributed across twelve universities in six countries, stated, ‘These findings represent an astounding leap forward in our understanding of how creativity works. Because the concatenated electrical impulses have now been observed to be pervasive throughout the anterior dingalum, we know the Ganglior Network communicates continuously with the Markoff Parietal Network in a different region of the brain, suggesting that creativity is the result of these internal communications within the human nervous system. To put it in lay terms, whenever you receive a new idea, your brain is literally about to explode out the top of your skull.’”

Okay, I suppose that last part about a potential cranial eruption would qualify as interesting. But for some reason, the rest of it just doesn’t grab me. Call me weird or blinkered or out of touch, but I’m more interested in the muse or daemon itself, and in what it feels like to commune and collaborate with this intelligence, this force, this presence that arrives with the felt sense of a discrete entity with whom you’re partnered and allied. And I think such an interest, and such a communion, is far more exhilarating, and far more conducive to an actual experience of creative emergence and flow, than all those dry-bones attempts to explain the whole thing in terms of its possible neurobiological correlates and underpinnings.

Two interviews

Horror, Cosmic and Personal

Back in August, I was a guest on the Against Everyone with Conner Habib podcast. The episode kicked off a multi-episode series on horror. Here is a portion of Conner’s introduction to our conversation, which was also his introduction to the series:

We’ll be asking the deep questions and seeing what unlit paths they lead us down. What is horror for? Whay do we condemn it even as we flock to it? What is the horror-nature of being? What happens when the imagination explores the violence, the darkness, and the screaming in the inner landscape and when we conjure it into art?

You don’t have to know much horror or even like horror to follow along with these episodes; each one will reveal a horror of life, of being human. Horror remains the best tool to investigate evil and to overcome it.

To kick off this series, I’ll start with the tension between the horrors of the cosmos and the horrors of the personal, with horror scholar and writer, Matt Cardin. Matt first came to my attention via his appearances on the Weird Studies podcast (first on WS 41, then on WS 126), where he spoke with such frightening depth about horror that I knew the horrifying must have, across his life, shocked him into new avenues of being. He’s the author of many books, including the story collection, To Rouse Leviathan, and also What the Daemon Said: Essays on Horror Fiction, Film, and Philosophy.

You can listen to the entire episode HERE.

The Daemon Muse

Last week I was interviewed by Mycelium Signal, the podcast of the Finnish visionary artist collective Tuonnen Portti. Here is the official episode description:

We’re excited to welcome our esteemed guest today, the accomplished author Matt Cardin, hailing from Arkansas, USA. In our conversation, we delve into a diverse range of topics including the concept of the daemon muse, the differences of science and scientism, explorations of pessimism and nihilism, insights into nonduality, and discussions on supernatural horror. We also touch upon the influences and thoughts of Robert Anton Wilson, Thomas Ligotti, H. P. Lovecraft, Carl Jung, James Hillman, and Stan Gooch. Additionally, we explore the harrowing concept of Chapel Perilous and discuss Matt’s very first published horror story, “Teeth.”

You can listen to the entire episode HERE.

I have also published a transcription of several portions of the interview at my newsletter under the title “Beyond the Veil: Religion, Scientism, and the Supernatural.”