“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”

That quote comes to us from Scott Adams. Creator of Dilbert, among other savoury things.

First, some context. You'll need to view the following Ted Talks video by Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat Pray Love Author on "Nurturing Creativity".

Watching this vignette left me rather argumentative and irritable.  While Gilbert is very likable, and a pleasing, engaging speaker, what she has to say is just a retread on the same old song and dance mankind has been seesawing with for eons -- passing the buck.  We (collectively) cannot cope with the dark and light of things; we can't accept that certain skills have steep prices, that certain choices lead to outcomes we never intended, so we talk about "fate/ Fate" and console ourselves with the stories we tell ourselves (and each other). We just seem allergic to responsibility, as a species.

Which, you should notice, Gilbert mentions herself about five minutes in, when she said she realized she might have written her best thing and it's all downhill from here. THIS talk, this mindset she espouses, appears to be the coping mechanism she uses now with some efficacy -- that her gift is not her own, but that of the divine ("Divine" with a capital D? It is not clear, really).  That all of it is somehow something separate from herself, and she can pass the buck on owning it. As long as she can hold something else accountible for the success/failure of her attempts, she can survive (I suppose). This is her "protective psychological construct." (Cue the Imaginary Friend banter, please.)

She suggests that art and its creation is full of anguish because it is too much pressure to own genius. Instead, I wonder if it is "too much pressure" to trade in the fickle and mercurial world of "what people like." Art has no subjective ruler; it's not financial accounting, with standards. It's not even management, with laws, or farming, with metrics and bushels. It's amorphous by its nature (the proverbial, unanswerable "what IS art?"). Trying to create in a world that demands currency for sustenance, and trying to create a consumable art in such a world (just as Gilbert did, before she hit pay dirt with Eat Pray Love) is surely maddening. To me her complaint is more castigation of the economics of the modern world, and less of the framing/perspective of the "gift" with which she plies her trade.

Why is not sufficient to say she was merely lucky? Lucky ... that she ever got a publication contract at all, pre-Eat Pray Love. That she was ever able to make any living at all as a writer. Why isn't it enough to just say that she had great timing, and she wrote the right self-help book for the right affluent market, pre-economy tank, when any frustrated middle-class wife could envision herself ditching the deadbeat husband and taking the alimony and finding herself in various countries around the world. Why does she conclude, instead, that somehow this book is somehow more blessed (my word, not hers, altho she manages to say "divine" five times during her talk) than those that came before? And in assigning her ability in writing Eat Pray Love as some event by which she merely channels something outside herself, how does she suppose she will EVER again master that "how the fuck did I do that?" How is that at ALL empowering to ascribe it to asupices outside herself? Weird. It's so contradictory.

Also -- I found the title Bait/Switch. Her talk (to me) seemed more "self-help," in the vein that Eat Pray Love was self-help, and less about truly "nurturing creativity." Yes, we lose great artists to suicide. I fail to see how believing in a higher power helped any of the suicidal artists who believed in something outside themselves (statistically, most humans are not nontheistic) managed to leverage that into a "Ok, I won't stick my head in the oven" outcome. Making it MORE overtly "not my bag, baby, it's a divine genuis thing" seems to place the artist even farther from control, and last time I checked, feeling out of control was one of the big Nasties of depression and stress. I fell for the hook, though; had the Ted Talk been entitled "Olé to God and His (His? Her? Its? Their?) Gift to Me," I would never have given her 19 minutes and 32 seconds of my precious, finite, only-this-one life.

Ultimately I found her commentary vaguely tragic, that her conclusion to so much nuance and surprising ability among what humans can do and how they experience the world and then translate that into massly-digestible "art" was to say "they saw it for what it was (talking about the dancers) -- god." Such credulous conclusions just scream "pathetic" to me. It's such a failure of curiosity and creative explanation. Such a failure of imagination. We've been saying for too long that something we couldn't see or prove makes the lightning and steals away the breath from our beloved companions. This coping mechanism is not appreciably different from Jeremy Lin's ascription of his talent to "not his" (Jeremy Lin and God's Game) or Tebow's endzone prayers (Tebow's Biblically Blessed) or the Muslim's Qu'ran admonishments about letting go (Let Go, Let Allah). I could crosshairs other "spiritual" belief systems as well, since they are all coping mechanisms of some degree, but I'll stop here. (In truth, I believe most every action I take as a human animal is about coping and comforting myself, so do not suppose I view religious and spirital beliefs only as the most heinous of human crutches.)

Gilbert is not advocating truth. Or even nurturing. She's advocating belief as a coping mechanism. And that's what I object most to -- the assignation of coping to something outside ourselves. The tendency is too deep to pass on everything to some omniscient sky daddy or collective invisible sense of "what's right," and in releasing it all to the unseen, we remove ourselves from the equation of solution, or correction, or improvement. Or responsibility.

I suppose I resent her misuse of her fame to further spread fatuous approaches. It's regressive. Maybe she's a Republican. (LOL, wink wink) I'm with Carl Sagan: "It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."