Elizabeth Gilbert

Elizabeth Gilbert is the best-selling author of Eat, Pray, Love. She gave a talk at TED that I just saw yesterday. She has wonderful stage presence and high intelligence which made for an arresting presentation.

She examined creativity and stress. Why do we have so many artists who succumb as drunks, suicides, mental cases? What is the link between creativity and stress in our culture? She looked at her own life. She’s now written an international best seller and there is a good chance she will never do anything as good again. People ask her if she is afraid of that, she asks herself, and of course she is. Her father was a chemical engineer and never in his life had these sorts of doubts about himself and no one came to him to ask if he did because we all know chemical engineers don’t have that kind of problem. Why is it so hard for artists?

She looked to history and found that in ancient Greece and Rome the culture did not think that the burden of creation was the artist’s alone. They believed that there were messengers from the gods, sort of invisible fairies or angels, who inspired artists. The Greeks called these demons and the Romans, more tellingly, called them geniuses. The genius is not the artist. The artist is inspired by a genius. So the artist is only part of a team and her success or lack of it is a team problem, not a personal one. These geniuses come arbitrarily, unpredictably, and not to everyone. So a person who creates is at their mercy and no amount of self improvement or fanatic labor can change that. Ms. Gilbert finds this a calming and very attractive belief. It banishes the fear. No need to hide in the bottle or in lunacy.

Her research finds that we in the West lost this in the Renaissance when we adopted a secular outlook. What we lost was the sense of the divine in Art. She tells a story of Arab dancers who performed in the moonlight in the deserts of Morocco over a thousand years ago and when one dancer would have that rare breakthrough and attain to transcendent performance the spectators would chant “Allah, Allah, Allah!” recognizing the hand of God in the performance. When the Arabs conquered Spain and Arabic invaded Spanish this became the “Olé, Olé, Olé!” we hear at bullfights and flamenco dances.

Ms. Gilbert closes by inviting the audience to return to this belief system, as she has, despite their secular heritage. She receives a warm, standing ovation. You can see the whole video yourself here.

Am I the only one laughing out loud?

I can’t hear you and I didn’t hear anyone laughing on the soundtrack. After all, they just attended a revival meeting of the sort that Billy Graham used to run which is generally scorned by the scientists who attend TED. These are the same people who give enthusiastic applause to atheists like Richard Dawkins and certainly defend Science against Religion at every opportunity in their daily lives. What happened? She stroked their egos. We’re all creatives here and we suffer terribly for it, she said to them in so many words.

Then she offered them the balm of superstition. I do admire her originality. Most people come to Religion for fear of death. A few come for fear of wickedness unbound by divine law. Ms. Gilbert will have none of this. She turns to God for fear of writer’s block.

Olé, Olé, Olé!