The Creative Act (1)

An Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin.

My view of Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act was colored at the start by the appearance of the name on the title page of the otherwise uncredited co-author Neil Strauss. In the early twenty-teens, at the end of my first marriage, the term toxic masculinity started to circulate in earnest. If you were a divorcé in need of a contemporary discussion of masculinity as a positive force in the world, there were almost none available. The exception was the seduction community, which coalesced as a cultural phenomenon when Strauss published The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists in 2005. The irony is that the only alternative at the time to feminism’s “toxic masculinity” framing was a worldview espoused by a community of men that was in fact pretty toxic.¹

I acknowledged that the scene was a moral cesspool even as I familiarized myself with the community and its methods. It even had a cant: sarge, neg, shit-test, and so on. The chief players had almost-cool nicknames; Strauss’s was “Style.” Had something else been available besides embarrassing-even-to-think-about Iron John-inspired drum circles, I would have gotten involved. But fate indifferently tossed me back into the dating pool, and pickup artistry, colloquially known as game, was waiting for me.

Strauss’s book was pretentiously (faux) leatherbound with a ribbon, like a travel bible. The contents were at once instruction manual and cautionary tale. The former aspect provided a wealth of useful insights into human nature. Without exaggeration, game is possibly the truest account since the Stoics of why people behave in the ways they do. It’s not a pretty picture. The Stoics didn’t paint a flattering one either. It was presented as anti-feminist and feminists naturally hated it. But the accurate parts were accurate.

As with the Stoics, the observations came with a praxis. The methods had been discovered and refined by nerds who kept finding out the hard way that they might spend an evening being a perfect gentleman to a woman, but she’d leave the bar on the back of some jackass’s motorcycle. To this day people are still calling game “toxic” and mocking its practitioners, but it’s no more or less than a systematic description of what successful men (and not just sexually successful men) are already doing.

Alas, the figures in Strauss’s book, relentlessly pursuing sex (and nothing more) with “tens,” women whose looks are ten on a ten-scale, all came to grief: destitution, desertion, dissolution, and in the case of the main protagonist, psychiatric hospitalization.

Even amidst a post-divorce existential blowout, I knew that the wounds to my soul would not be healed by bedding models. I took game as far as I needed to, met a series of great people culminating in my beshert, and called a wrap on that chapter of life. I had the good fortune to find Seneca before finding game:

We human beings are fettered and weakened by many vices; we have wallowed in them for a long time and it is hard for us to be cleansed. We are not merely defiled; we are dyed by them. But, to refrain from passing from one figure to another, I will raise this question, which I often consider in my own heart: why is it that folly holds us with such an insistent grasp? It is, primarily, because we do not combat it strongly enough, because we do not struggle towards salvation with all our might; secondly, because we do not put sufficient trust in the discoveries of the wise, and do not drink in their words with open hearts; we approach this great problem in too trifling a spirit.

I bring it all up because The Game and The Creative Act have much in common. Disregard the Buddhistic tone, and The Creative Act is The Game for getting your metaphorical muse into the metaphorical sack.

I as an editor have an analagous book out, Aphorisms for Artists by Walter Darby Bannard, which in my intensely biased opinion is superior in every respect.² One of Darby’s aphorisms is “You can’t learn to be a good artist, but you can learn to be a better artist.” There are stories of seemingly hopeless dweebs who used game to transform themselves into accomplished seducers. Are there fundamentally uncreative people who learned to become creative? Rubin rejects the notion of the fundamentally uncreative person, at the start, in “Everyone is a Creator.”

Creativity is not a rare ability. It is not difficult to access. Creativity is a fundamental aspect of being human. It’s our birthright. And it’s for all of us.

Creativity doesn’t exclusively relate to making art. We all engage in this act on a daily basis.

What’s an artist then?

To live as an artist is a way of being in the world. A way of perceiving. A practice of paying attention. Refining our sensitivity to tune in to the more subtle notes. Looking for what draws us in and what pushes us away. Noticing what feeling tones arise and where they lead.

Attuned choice by attuned choice, your entire life is a form of self-expression. You exist as a creative being in a creative universe. A singular work of art.

I have no objection to this conceptually, though I have to muscle my way through “feeling tones” and other literary choices that raise my editorial hackles. The authors employ a particular style. The sentences are short. Even fragmentary. The words are simple. The tone is lulling. One is reminded of gurus. Or children’s books read at bedtime. On it goes like this, for many pages. I’m exaggerating. But not by much.

What’s missing thus far is what made The Game more than a recipe book—the recognition that you may follow the principles to your doom. High levels of artistry are difficult. You may have to sacrifice comfort and companionship to achieve them. Society usually does not reward the effort. For your labor, history will likely forget you as quickly as it forgets everyone. The people who do it anyway are usually attuned in a certain sense but are oftentimes commensurately damaged. Rubin acknowledges this at one point, in “Self-Doubt”:

One of the reasons so many great artists die of overdoses early in their lives is because they’re using drugs to numb a very painful existence. The reason it’s painful is the reason they became artists in the first place: their incredible sensitivity.

Noting that such sensitivity is “a blessing and a curse,” he does not then explore whether one should, or even could, bring the curse upon himself. The price of art is high. From my New Hampshire Manifesto:

“Art rides in on pleasure,” says one of Darby’s Aphorisms for Artists. Art has been put to many uses, and made for many reasons. But you have to have a taste for pleasure to make art of any lasting value. That invariably accompanies a problematic temperament. The problems run the gamut of vice and are inseparable from the talents. Nowadays too much is made of the artist’s person, for better or worse. If only better people reliably made better art.

This point bears on the other about the Buddhistic tone. One recognizes it from the Mahayana literature, particularly the koan collections. Each chapter offers a short opening claim, an exposition, and in places, a conclusion in the form of a free verse poem, akin to the “capping verses” of the Gateless Gate. Those familiar with modern Buddhist writings may find Rubin’s advice trite. From the chapter “Nothing is Static”:

You can engage in the same awareness practice five days in a row in the same location and have a unique experience each time.

Different sounds and different smells may be present. No two gusts of wind feel quite the same. The tone and quality of sunlight changes from minute to minute and day to day.

He adds, “You can’t step into the same stream twice because it’s always flowing,” without properly name-checking Heraclitus. This is all lovely, and inarguable. But it glosses over the connection of impermanence to dukkha, usually rendered as “suffering,” the baseline unsatisfactory nature of any form of incarnation. No two gusts of wind feel quite the same. Neither do two chemotherapy infusions. Fundamentally, you don’t exist. Awareness practiced with sufficient intensity and duration will prove it. Will you become more creative in the process? Maybe. But the Buddha expounded the teaching so that you could serve all sentient beings and maintain equanimity as you die in agony, not so you could write that novel you think you have in you.

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Game reverse-engineered the Dark Triad: narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. (Why the Dark Triad is key to seduction is beyond the scope of this essay, and you’re probably not going to like the explanation.) The Creative Act reverse-engineers a creative triad, what I would label individualism, courage, and intuition. This is the Dark Triad restated positively. That many of the great artists were also storied Lotharios is no accident.

The exhortations to greater awareness in The Creative Act are instrumental to those ends. You have to exercise awareness to access intuition (“The Source of Creativity”):

This content does not come from inside us. The Source is out there. A wisdom surrounding us, an inexhaustible offering that is always available.

We either sense it, remember it, or tune in to it. Not only through our experiences. It may also be dreams, intuitions, subliminal fragments, or other ways still unknown by which the outside finds its way inside.

…distinguish your genuine enthusiasms from obligations real or imagined (from “Setting”):

It’s not always easy to follow the subtle energetic information the universe broadcasts, especially when your friends, family, coworkers, or those with a business interest in your creativity are offering seemingly rational advice that challenges your intuitive knowing. To the best of my ability, I’ve followed my intuition to make career turns, and been recommended against doing so every time. It helps to realize that it’s better to follow the universe than those around you.

..and put the impulses to create into proper perspective so you can act on them (from the “capping verse” of “Habits”):

Create an environment

where you’re free to express

what you’re afraid to express.

I can confirm that creative people exercise their awareness in this fashion. I am less sure whether the awareness is driving the creativity, or the creativity is driving the awareness. Some people have trashy instincts. When they tune into them they make commensurate choices. Others have phenomenal instincts regarding their artistic vocation but are otherwise human disasters. The Source may be out there, accessible to all, but in my experience it has an edgy sense of humor.

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In 2020 I reviewed Jerry Saltz’s How to Be an Artist and concluded that “Saltz is not an artist and has little business telling us how to become one.” Rubin is the opposite case. He is one of the greatest producers in the history of popular music. He co-founded Def Jam in the 1980s and subsequently shaped the history of hip-hop. He introduced the Beastie Boys and Run-D.M.C. He worked with Johnny Cash, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Adele, Black Sabbath, and Kanye West. Rubin has fostered more creativity than just about anyone. When Saltz trots out exhausted follow-your-bliss bromides, one wants to tell him to shut up. Rubin even at his most trite nevertheless knows what he’s talking about.

Consequently this book is of great interest and has been deservingly well-received. I was excited to pick it up. But I’m not connecting with the “way of being” aspect. My creativity casts deep shadows. The abundant streams of ideas can switch without warning to intrusive thoughts. The sensitivity that allows for joyous visual experiences also drives anger. The taste for the higher pleasures of art conjoins with a taste for several lower ones. Some of my career decisions qualify as self-harm. I have been advised, wisely, to stop talking about politics, but affronts to truth and liberty boil my blood. Boredom makes me want to kill people. I notice things that many don’t; I have also literally glanced away from something to which I’m supposed to be paying attention to look at a squirrel. I study traditions of equanimity—Buddhism, Stoicism, and so on—because my Source-given temperament is so sorely lacking it.

I recently had a conversation with a woman who organizes a cigar club. For all my adventures I have never smoked tobacco, so I asked what cigars do for her.

“They enhance my creativity. When I smoke, the ideas just flow.”

“That’s interesting,” I replied. “I sometimes have to ingest chemicals to slow down the ideas for long enough to get stuff done.”

“I wish I had your problem.”

I looked at the floor and shook my head. “I’m not sure you would like it.”

I’m willing to entertain the possibility that much of The Creative Act is aspirational, just as are the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. The creativity described therein sounds healthier than mine, and mine is far from the craziest one I’ve ever seen. Marcus wrote the Meditations to train himself in the ways of the Stoic, not because he was born a saint. I’m sure it crossed Rubin’s mind more than once in his long studio experience to brain a stuck-up lead singer with a chair, and that The Creative Act reflects how he is on a good day. Too, I’ll bet that his good days far outnumber his bad ones, by dint of a long sitting meditation practice and excellent taste in music and overall better temperament than mine.

I’m sticking with the book. I’m fond of a Zen story in which a layman approaches the master and asks him for the essence of the teaching.

“Avoid evil, practice good,” he replies.

The layman said, “A child of six knows that.”

The master answered, “A child of six knows it, but a man of eighty can’t put it into practice.”

Going forward I’m going to concentrate on letting in Rubin’s advice, rather than challenge it. Since it’s lighter than Totality, I read ahead, nearly to the halfway point. Interesting things by my admittedly skewed standards start to happen around page 150. That said, we’re going to spend two weeks on this book in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club, not the originally allotted four, and the schedule has been updated.

But I’m going forward without clinging to Rubin’s image of the Enlightened Creator. Why is it that folly holds us with such an insistent grasp? I offer a third answer to Seneca’s two: We’re like chocolate bunnies. The chocolate is folly, and the space inside is wisdom. To have form is to have folly. By all means, struggle towards salvation with all your might and drink the words of the wise into your heart. But the reason to do so is to be less of a nuisance to yourself and the people around you. We’re stuck with folly and we have to make the best of it.

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We are in the midst of an Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin. Obtain your copy and jump in. See the ASBC schedule.

Dissident Muse’s first publication, Backseat Driver by James Croak, is available now at Amazon.

Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard is out now at Allworth Press. More information is available at the site for the book. If you own it already, thank you; please consider reviewing the book at Amazon, B&N, or Goodreads.

1. I have a theory that fourth-wave feminism caused the alt-right. The former was a shit-test, the latter was a neg. If you know you know.

2. I didn’t think about it until I started reading, but reviewing this book is egregiously conflicted of interest. I apologize for that.