Muse & Mycelium
Muse me - mycelium flow - cracks, creativity, and confounding factors
Muse me
You've mistaken me for your masterpiece
Gilding me
So I try
Frame me fallen, take me as I come
Or face the night alone
These idle arms that know- Celeste, ‘Not Your Muse’
Before becoming Salvador Dalí’s muse and wife, Gala Dalí was Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, married to (and musing for) French poet Paul Éluard. She also inspired German artist Max Ernst, and two other French poets, Louis Aragon and André Breton.
But she is not alone. Many famous (male) artists had (female) muses.
Elizabeth Siddal inspired several 19th-century painters, Camille Claudin sculpted Rodin’s artistic career, Dora Maar directly inspired Picasso’s cubism (including the famous Guernica), Emilie Louise Flöge did the same for Gustav Klimt’s art nouveau…
Did you know all of these women were talented artists themselves1?
Elizabeth was a poet and painter whose works still grace the Ashmolean Museum. The few sculptures of Camille that remain are now considered expressions of genius. Without Dora’s photography, Picasso may have never experimented with cubism. Emilie was a feminist fashion designer whose dresses made plenty of appearances in Klimt’s paintings, as did she.
Great musing is mutual, interactive, and connected. Or it should be. Not that some of the male artists above would agree. Picasso physically abused Dora for years until he moved on to a younger lover. Rodin refused to make his relationship with Camille more than an affair, culminating in an abortion for her. She destroyed most of her works2 and spent the last decades of her life in an asylum.
Luckily we have Gustav and Salvador — they stayed together with their muse/artist life companions for the rest of their lives. Gustav introduced and extolled Emilie to many of his famous (and prosperous) clients. Following a stroke, his last words were, “Get Emilie”. Salvador signed many of his paintings with both his and Gala’s names3. He even bought her a castle, which he only entered when invited.
Because we are all sneakily selfish in a way, I wonder what that means for me. I am reduced to a thing that wants to find out where my rare and attenuated flashes of creativity come from. Hear me, oh muses4.
First, fungus fireworks. Obviously.
Mycelium flow
I can be bold
Decorate me, adore me, baby
But I can't be owned
It's not part of my design
I'll let you know
When I need you to liberate me- Celeste, ‘Not Your Muse’
Perhaps it’s my (potential) druid ancestry, but there is something powerful about standing among trees in a forest. The big ones - gnarled, knobby, quiet giants - stood tall when your great-great-great grandparents were wee babes. The shafts of sunlight that pierce their canopy light up the forest floor and wildflowers turn the light into an explosion of vibrant color. Birds singing, pollinators buzzing, and the scuttling of critters in the undergrowth combine into a soundtrack written in the key of life.
And yet, we’d be foolish to ignore what happens in the soil.
Let’s dig.
Dirt, dark and humid. A lot of creepy crawlers. More micro-organisms than we can count. Threads, fine and silvery as an angel’s hair — meet the mycelium, or the underground portion of a fungus.
This network of fungal filaments weaves through the soil and builds adaptive trade routes with plants, provides highways for bacteria (with payment), and manages the underground nutrient economy with complex trading strategies. Mycelia exhibit behaviors that look like problem-solving, decision-making, and adaptive responses to environmental stimuli, to the extent that some researchers argue in favor of using mycelium as a model system for animal behavior5. Some researchers take it further and draw parallels between a mycelium’s response to different off environments and how our brains process visual stimuli.
A mycelium is an adaptive network that connects many species, much like how creative ideas spread and evolve. Creativity, in my quick-and-dirty incomplete definition, involves the ability to connect disparate ideas and think in a way that branches beyond the usual.
Creativity, like mycelium, connects ideas, experiences, and thoughts in intricate, unpredictable patterns. Just as mycelium grows and adapts to its environment, creativity finds its way through cracks in the creation, linking what once seemed separate into patterns both original and familiar. A single spark, an initial thread of inspiration, branches out into new pathways — unexpected connections form, and the network deepens and transforms, hunting for brain or fungal food and interactions.
Consider the previous paragraph. It is written to feel a little odd. The sentences are complex and compound. Certain elements repeat and then branch out in a different direction. The flow of it, the rhythm, is akin to a thought that begins relatively simple but grows along the way as it encounters new nutritional nuggets. It is a mental mycelium, probing its boundaries and responding to what it finds.
But to find my muse, we need to talk about more than mycelium.
We need to talk about the cracks in creation.
Cracks, creativity, and confounding factors
Only I can steal the god you've made of me
Anyone else could see
It's in my palms
Gets easier to grieve the morning sun
To face the night alone
These idle arms I hold- Celeste, ‘Not Your Muse’
Does a muse create creativity? Or does a muse unleash or enhance what is already there?
Those are difficult questions, because creativity itself is tricky. It’s one of those things that we know when we see it, but actually putting our inquisitive fingers on it proves challenging. Defining creativity is an exercise in, well, creativity. Many available definitions include the production of original ideas, new solutions to a problem, or the novel combination of existing ideas.
Okay, if creativity is (suitably) tricky to define, can we at least get a grip on the factors that encourage or discourage it? Identify, perhaps, the muse, even if her ways remain mysterious.
In the early 1960s, education professor Mel Rhodes shuffled the factors affecting a person’s creativity into the four P model: person (internal traits, like openness to experience), process (how the ‘input’ is processed, learning style, motivation…), press (how the person relates to the environment), and product (how the creativity is translated to other people). In the age of brain imaging, some researchers argue we should add the P of physiology. There’s also a proposal to rewrite the four P model into the 5 A model: actor, action, artifact, audience, and affordance. The A’s and P’s are roughly aligned (with press being separated into audience and affordance), with the A’s being more sensitive to cultural context.
What all this means is that creativity is partially about the traits of the creative person, but also partially about the world and the people around them, and, importantly, how this all interacts.
Or, how everything breaks.
The idea that creativity requires a tortured soul is a cliché on par with the male artist/female muse one. You need cracks, the cliché says, because that’s how the light gets in (or out). The claimed necessity of cracks is not fully wrong, but certainly not right either. I’ve written before on what science says about the link between creativity and mental health. That link exists6, but is tenuous and context-sensitive. My conclusion then was,
Genetics and upbringing tweak the sensitivity of the brain to ex- and internal stimuli. The quality, quantity, and nature of those stimuli feed back to the brain and provide the raw materials for creativity. But, depending on the stimuli and/or the brain’s settings, this might lead to an overload with negative effects.
The link between creativity and mental health issues, in science-speak, is muddled by confounding factors: upbringing, environment, exposure to others’ creativity, and a specific type of mind.
Albert Rothenberg, who spent most of his psychiatric career performing long-term experiments on creativity with burgeoning artists, prize-winning authors, and several Nobel laureates, identified three cognitive processes that sparkle in creative minds:
Articulation: pulling apart ideas and recombining them
Janusian processes: keeping different perspectives (including opposites) in mind at the same time.
Homospatial processes: holding different entities in the same mental space, as a kind of ‘idea superposition’.
Rothenberg says that,
Creativity of all types is a premier form of psychological adaptation, the effect of a healthy muse, because it involves the ability to change and improve all features of the environment.
My muse does not hide in the cracks and callouses I have collected. It is the opposite. Perhaps I once believed that I needed pain or discomfort to write, but I was fooling myself. I write both when trapped by beauty and when drowned in despair. All I need is a sparkle and they can come from anywhere at any time.
My writing is mycelium; it learns and adapts, feels and connects. It finds a word and builds a world around it. It sees beauty in the curve of a shoulder and constructs a dancing sentence in worship. It tastes the slightly fizzy sweetness of a new concept and reconfigures its network.
It hears a song and pulls disparate ideas into an essay that evolves as it is written.
It hungers, always.
To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child.
— Ray Bradbury
Thanks for entering my mycelium and musing me. What a pleasure to have you here and trade ideas.
In science, the dismissal of female contributions is called the Matilda effect.
This is ‘L'Age mûr’ (Maturity) by Camille Claudel, one of her few remaining pieces, which I recently saw at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. You can see Camille on the right, trying to hold on to Rodin, who refuses to acknowledge her and leaves with his wife clutching him.
Here is an example. I saw this Dalí piece a little while ago at an exhibition in Bruges. Notice the signature in the bottom left.
Fun story about me. After being examined for my PhD, one of the examiners, an experienced professor, told me I was the first student he’d ever encountered who wrote a prologue to his (science) thesis that called on the muses. Here are the first words of my PhD:
… Hear me, dear muses…
Science is beautiful. And yet, many of those who hope to pursue this beauty are taught to bury the kernel of awe and wonder under heavy, unimaginative boulders of convention. Inchoate scientists are encouraged to keep their heads down, follow trodden paths, and respect tradition. While there is value in established routes, it can be found beyond those routes too. This, at least, is my conviction. Therefore, kind muses, give me the strength and ability to produce a work that encompasses solid scientific efforts but includes less conventional sidesteps as well. Allow me to forego burying like a hedgehog lest I forget how to jump like a fox.
No, I was not on psychedelics at the time.
As an illustration of my former academic cheekiness… I once wrote a paper making a similar claim for bacteria.
This link seems to be strongest for writers.
Although we find few associations between creative professions overall and being diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, professional authors were prominent in having increased risk for most of the studied disorders.
Oof, I really resonate with this. It’s interesting, though, because in my experience, I think writing began as both a curiosity and a coping mechanism for me. Being able to write from a place that isn’t pain has taken a lot more effort to develop than writing as an emergency response. But I think you’re right to point out that mental health is indeed a good thing for creatives to focus on, as well.
Really fun write up, Gunnar!
Great job with this fascinating subject