Myth and Images of Creativity (Beginning with the new Apple ad)

Apple's ad for the new iPad has evoked some very strong reactions, reactions that illuminate old links between image, metaphor, myth, and our collective notions about creativity and the creative process. The current cultural conversation is a good starting point for reflection on  some commonly held images of creativity and the way these images shape our creative process and the value we place upon it.

This is the first in a series of episodes that will explore the central importance of image and imagination in all of life. How we imagine our lives is how we live them.

Thanks for listening and keep the mystery in your life alive...

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Myth Matters an exploration at the intersection of mythology, creativity and consciousness. I’m your host Dr. Catherine Svehla. Wherever you may be in this wide beautiful crazy world of ours, I’m glad that you decided to join me here today.

Have you seen or heard about Apple's ad for the new iPad? The ad has gone viral, but not for the reasons that Apple intended, I suspect. It has really created an interesting conversation online, mostly very critical. The ad aired on X, formerly Twitter, and I'm going to post a link to the ad that also allows you to see some of the comment stream with the transcript of this episode. I really encourage you to watch it and see what kind of a reaction it elicits from you. 

Now in this ad, a hydraulic press crushes paint, musical instruments, all kinds of tools and materials that people use to create to make various forms of what we call art. And yes, you get a sense of what they're trying to say about the creative capacities of the iPad. 

But the ad is communicating much more than what Apple intended to many viewers. Actor Hugh Grant said that the ad "promotes the destruction of the human experience." So that gives you an idea about the controversy here, and this ad is a great jumping off point for the topic that I want to explore with you today and something that I want to talk about in further episodes this summer. 

Now, the specific focus for today is creativity and images of the creative process. The link between images, imagination, how these appear in our myths and stories, and the creative process, how we understand and experience it.

This is part of a larger theme, something that I want to take further in other episodes this summer---that how we imagine our lives is how we live them. How we imagine our lives is how we live them. 

The core understanding guiding this exploration and future episodes is the realization that human beings bring imagination to everything: situations, people, places, events, ideas, processes, a quality, you name it, humans are imaginatively engaged with it. And how you imagine, the image that you hold, the" image" at the heart of the words "imagine" and "imagination," well, these give rise to your experience of it, to your reality of it. Our myths and our stories, all of our narratives, are built around these images, this imagining. 

So today, again, I'm going to think about the creative process. And in future episodes I want to take this understanding and this formulation, and invest investigate some other aspects of life and commonly held images. There are infinite possibilities here. I'm going to try and limit myself to just a couple more. But before I go further, I want to say a few words about why I am sharing this with you. 

I put a significant amount of energy into creating this Myth Matters podcast and I've been at it for a while. And one of the reasons that I do this is that I want to give you a regular opportunity to imagine and to explore this idea that that's what you're doing, to awaken the life of soul. And I also want you to be more comfortable with uncertainty and change. I want to help you avoid the tempting security of having the answer, or of listening to other people who claim that they do. I'd like to support you in embracing the creative freedom and the ethical responsibility that comes with the quest, the quest at the heart of your life, whether that's a quest for awareness, or aliveness, authenticity, connection, the mystery, creativity, all of it.

I first came across this formulation--- how we imagine our lives is how we will live them--- in the work of James Hillman. And he actually put it a little bit differently. Hillman wrote, "The way we imagine our lives is the way we'll go on living our lives." In his discussion, he was placing the emphasis on our lack of ideas, our lack of psychological ideas. And what he meant by a lack of psychological ideas was a lack of animating images. According to Hillman, and I agree with this, if you don't have very many psychological ideas, if your images of yourself and your life in your world are limited, then you very easily become a victim, or you get trapped, you get stuck.

It's a form of oppression because the way you imagine, and the wealth and quality of the images that you have, become the wealth and quality of your narratives, your myths, and so therefore, your world, your reality, and your options. 

So that's my long-winded way of saying that in this episode and others, I certainly hope to be informative and even entertaining around the particular topic at hand, and I also intend to demonstrate the power and the ubiquity of this insight and to set you up to make use of it. This notion of imagination and how we live really is the cornerstone of "myth matters" and "myth matters."

So, back to this Apple ad. In the dominant culture, the Western or European-derived cultures that many of us operate within, the imagination is relegated to activities that are defined as "creative." The other commonly recognized realm of the imagination is the fantastic, that is fantasy, daydreams, delusions. And as a result, it has been very easy to devalue the arts and our creative impulse, to put what we commonly define as practical over the poetic. 

Apple, as a company, has played an historically interesting role in this conversation because they made a powerful and at the time, revolutionary argument, one that became their niche. And that is that this dull business machine, a computer, was actually a tool for individual creativity. That it was a key to unlock your imagination. That if you had the right computer, that is, an Apple, you could make all kinds of stuff and no one could stop you. And furthermore, this particular computer was itself an elegant object, a work of art. 

So as we have been for the last-- I don't know how many-- years, reframing our notion of "creativity" and what is creative, and looking at the role that technologies play in all of this, Apple has arguably been part of a very positive extension and expansion of our notion of the value of creativity, and who has it, and what we can do with it. In fact, I think one of the reasons that people are responding so strongly to the Apple ad is because Apple played the role that it has in this cultural conversation about the value of creativity and who is creative.

The world changing potential in this conversation is embedded in the Apple logo. Think about, think about that apple and Newton, and that tree in the garden. An image of creativity, right? One embedded in our myths.

The fact that this ad has gone viral is in my mind, evidence of the importance and the value that we place on this conversation, on the ongoing debate about the value of creativity and who we are as creative human beings, and whether or not our creative expression is valuable and essential to us. I haven't seen a commentator using my words for it, talking about like I am here. But the presentation of this image, the introduction of this metaphor (the crushing of traditional artistic tools), has catalyzed concerns and conversation that are very resonant with what I'm sharing here. 

And it has also provoked some interesting creativity, a certain mythopoesis. There's a brilliant reworking of Apple's ad in that X feed. If you use the link that I offer and you scroll down the comment feed, look for the person who remade the ad in reverse, and check it out. 

Now, let's turn to some of our inherited myths and old stories and look at some of the ways that creativity and the creative process have been imagined and woven into them. There are so many examples, I couldn't possibly cover them all. I'm going to walk through a few possibilities and I invite you to reflect on your relationship to them. Where do these images reside in your life? Where are they in your imagination?

Creativity. Creativity often begins with inspiration. And we often imagine this specific instance of inspiration as sudden, a flash or a spark, an epiphany. Which gives rise to the question of what is the source? Where does this spark of inspiration come from? Very important question and often a central preoccupation for people who are creating regularly, constantly, or would like to do so. 

The idea that we get a spark from something right away says we are in in some kind of engagement with an Other out there, that the source is beyond the boundaries of the conscious ego. You might think of this as a being, as the experience of being infused, as some kind of an exchange, as a conversation, a dialogue. 

All of these are metaphors for the part of the process that involves inspiration and having material come through and the image of the Muses from Greek mythology is very impactful here. Both Hesiod and Homer invoke the Muses at the beginning of their very long poems or myths. The Muses were the inspiration for all storytelling. which includes poetry, song, myth, and history. Whether you were a seasoned and accomplished bard or someone just starting out, the first step was to cultivate your relationship to the Muse.

In the myths as we received them from Hesiod, the Muses were among the many early daughters of Zeus, and their mother was Mnemosyne, the Titan Goddess of memory. The Muses were among the first of their progeny and among the first then, of the ordering principles, so to speak, that Zeus and the Olympians brought into the world. 

According to Hesiod, the Muses were one of Zeus his greatest gifts to humanity. And you might think that he was talking about the beauty and the elegance and our capacity to record, you know, to create a record of memory. But what he meant was that the arts, the products of the Muses, were this great gift because they enable us to forget our cares. And today you still see this, people talk about escaping into books and movies, and the necessity of being are able to remove ourselves from our present reality or problems, the refreshment of the soul that this brings. 

The Muses, according to Hesiod, lived on Mount Helicon and people would go there to court them, to try and make their acquaintance. Now, Hesiod was really attached to Zeus and the Olympians and he built his whole account of the early mythologies around them. There are others who said that the Muses were much older, that they were perhaps the progeny of Ouranos and Gaia, Heaven and Earth. And there are mythic links between the Muses and Delphi, originally a spot sacred to Gaia, to the primal Mother Earth, and then later on Apollo and the prophetesses at the famous oracle of Delphi.

So, if the notion of the Muse is part of your mythology, your imagining about creativity, and it is honestly rather difficult for most of us to avoid, then you see creative inspiration as coming from a source outside of yourself, and that this source is a primal and deep mystery. Furthermore, you probably hold some version of the dominant image of the Muses, which is that there's a group of them, they're female, they're beautiful, they're otherworldly, they're elusive and guided by their own logic, and they play favorites. In other words, they're unreliable.

Now, in ancient times this meant that you had to appeal to the Muse, you had to serve the Muse, you had to honor the Muse as a goddess. This idea is still present today and at the same time, over the centuries the distinction between the gods and the human has broken down in many ways. And human beings have placed themselves more and more and more in the center of things, and taken on more and more of these attributes for themselves. I'm going to talk about that a little bit more in a moment. One of the effects of this in terms of the Muse is that now we also talk about the artist finding this divine quality in another, in a person or a place who becomes their muse, small "m," and we have a psychological term for this phenomenon called "projection."

It's usually been a man projecting or finding his muse in or onto a woman who embodies it for him. Sometimes, I dare say often, to the detriment of her well-being, autonomy, and creative work. The ubiquity and power in this idea in the Western art tradition was deconstructed and played with very effectively, I feel, in "I Love Dick," a series that ran for one season on Amazon Prime back in 2016, I believe. You may have seen it. As you may have guessed, the muse is a man named Dick and the artist is a female filmmaker, Chris Kraus.

The muses are a huge topic and there's a lot to unpack here. My invitation to you today is to reflect on the image of the Greek Muses. What comes to mind? Where are the Muses present in your life? What is your relationship to them? How do they influence your activities and also your ideas about culture?

In addition to myths of figures like the Muses, we also have myths about creation, about Gods and Goddesses making worlds and creatures and everything basically, which gives us some clues to the creative process, images of the Creator, and of the materials or the method of creation, for example, words, using words to create. We have the Christian God who does this in seven days. And there are other traditions and myths that point to the creative power of language. The Hopi Spider Woman, for example, thinks and then speaks and sings to create the world. 

So, in our myths about gods or goddesses, we have some who create the world, we have some who offer creative inspiration, or give us some creative power, I just mentioned the creative power of words, of language. Another set of images or stories involving gods or goddesses has them bestowing certain creative gifts, crafts and skills on human beings. 

If I stay within the realm of Greek mythology, we have the example of Athena who gave humans and women in particular, the gift of weaving. Weaving is a very powerful metaphor for thought and storytelling, structure and logic, for the beauty in the well woven, and strength and durability in a tight weave. A related metaphor for thought and creating is "following the thread." There are many ways to play around with this image of weaving as it relates to creating in the creative process.

The link between the divine, between figures of gods and goddesses and the act of creation, and creative powers and processes, tells us something about the nature of creation and the value that we place on it. Creative inspiration that comes to us from the gods has any eternal quality, a lasting wisdom or beauty, a form of perfection. It can be too big for us, because the gods are limitless and we are, alas, limited. This is something that sometimes shows up in our creative process. We have a vision of something and once we try to start realizing it, bringing it down to our plane, the idea suddenly seems shabby or simply unattainable.

In some stories, humans take on this divine quality. It is, in Jungian terms, "inflationary." Going back to Athena and the weaving, you may be familiar with the myth of Arachne. It's a good example of this pitfall. Arachne is a very fine weaver and she challenges the goddess to a contest. Let's find out who is the better weaver. And Athena ultimately turns her into a spider. 

Now, it's interesting that she's a spider because you could look at that and say, okay, so she did become the master weaver. And I think wrapped into that story is this longing that we have for the eternal quality, to be engaged with this level of inspiration and create something of lasting beauty. I think the story of Arachne and that inflation may be the shadow side of other stories like the myth of Gilgamesh, for example, in which Gilgamesh's quest for immortality is resolved by his realizing that it is only through telling his story, as best he can, that he will attain any immortality.

What type of longings and aspirations and dreams do we bring to our creative process? With what do we invest our creations? I think the Apple ad touched a nerve for some people, generated the outrage and the rhetoric about the destruction of humanity, because in a denigration of our creative impulse and of our creative products, whether or not we call them "art," there is a denigration of the human and of this compact or dialogue that we have, with the source of inspiration, whether we locate that in ourselves or in an outer figure of the divine called the Muse.

Now, so far I've been talking about the creative capacities of the gods or creative capacities that come from the gods. But we do also have stories in which a person, a regular person, makes something and in this making, performs a powerful act. Either reverses a curse or rights a wrong or facilitates some form of transformation. This is a pretty common theme in fairy tales. Today, we often view the creative acts in these stories through multiple lenses: as a commentary on the creative process and on the nature of what's made, as a response to problems and suffering, and as a making of the self. So, I want to spend a little time with one of those stories before I leave you today. 

It's an interesting synchronicity that last May I told the fairy tale The Wild Swans, and in that episode, I talked about the creative power of words. I guess it's this time, spring in Colorado, that brings me to the creativity theme. In this story, The Wild Swans, a wicked queen curses her stepsons and they turn into Wild Swans, and their younger sister saves them. First she has to go out searching, and she wanders around for a long time and eventually meets an old woman who says that she has seen a group of swans by a river. The sister goes to the river, she's reunited with her brothers, and she travels with them. 

She goes to a magical land with the swan brothers and one night in a dream, she is visited by an old woman who tells her, "Hey, if you make each of them a shirt out of stinging nettles, you can reverse the curse." And when she wakes up, she decides she's going to do this. So, very daunting task. For one thing, the nettles, the stinging nettles are a burning plant, they are going to cause her a lot of physical suffering. And also, the old woman told her that she can only use nettles that she collects in graveyards so she's got that extra wrinkle to contend with. 

Furthermore, she has to make one for each of her 11 brothers and as the old woman tells her, once she begins this task, she can't stop. She can't make three or four and then decide it's too hard, she has to make all 11. And she has to work in total silence. Yikes, right. Thinking about a creative process through this lens reminds me a little bit of the years that I spent writing my dissertation. And yet she succeeds. Success is possible.

The purpose of the sister's creative act and the process that she goes through is different from the image of a Muse, you know, touching your forehead and having magical and poetic words that will be remembered for millennia, stream from your lips. And yet, in the difficulty of these images there are some really beautiful guides and further insights, I think, into other dimensions of the creative process and of the purpose of creativity. We see the commitment born of devotion, of a deep love for the brothers, and the strength that this lends. We see the need for patience. And we see the way that a personal power can be cultivated in the self, in the metaphor of her self-imposed silence.

Through all of this, the sister transforms herself and her brothers. The effort involved here makes this a very human version of the act of creation, quite different from the God who utters a few words.

Now, I have only touched the tip, not even the tip, of the iceberg and I have used stories that literally involve creativity in some way. But this experiment of reflecting on the images of creativity, of the source and the process, is not limited to stories that are overtly about creativity. Any moments or details in stories that catch your attention, the images that rise up in you around them, if they are potent, can be looked at through this lens of creativity, of what they suggest to you about your image of the creative process. 

And I was thinking that it could be really fun to experiment with this together, to work a story together and then play around with it. I have this idea about doing a webinar one evening, online, to explore images and make these links. So let me know if that sounds interesting to you because I'd like to get some read about whether or not it would be a value. If you are on my email list or listening to this on the Mythic Mojo website you can post something in the comments or email me. 

And if you're listening through a platform like Apple on your phone, now you can text me! There's this new feature called fan mail offered by my podcast platform, so there's supposed to be a link with the show notes that you can use. Please try it. And this is just to give me some sense, you're not obligating yourself by saying, "yes that sounds good. Put it together."

And if there are other images or aspects of life that you would like for me to explore in this fashion. I'm open to those suggestions also. 

I'd like to give a big welcome to new email subscribers: Austin, Akshay, Jen, Christian, Carol, Laurie, Ariane, Helle, Ellen, Lola, and Jackie. Welcome to Myth Matters. If you are new to Myth Matters, I invite you to head over to the Mythic Mojo website. That is where you'll find a transcript of this episode with the link that I mentioned and there's also information there about my other offerings and consulting services. You can also join the email list if you would like to receive links to new Myth Matters episodes in your inbox.

Thank you to the Patreon patrons and Bandcamp supporters of Myth Matters, and a special shout out to new patrons, Kim, and Ronnie. Thank you so much, Kim, and Ronnie! The monthly contributions that I receive from my patrons and Bandcamp supporters really help to make this whole podcast thing viable for me. So, if you're finding something of value here at Myth Matters, I hope that you'll consider joining me on Patreon. 

If that is outside of the realm of possibility for you right now, then maybe post a positive review of Myth Matters on the platform where you're listening or just reach out, send me an email and let me know that you're listening. It really makes a difference. 

If we have a better understanding of our need for myth and all that our old stories offer, we can live more satisfying lives. We can inhabit a better story and create a more beautiful, just and sustainable world. It begins with seeing the operation of our imagination in everything that we do and feeding it in ways that are useful and elevating and real. 

And that's it for me, Catherine Svehla and Myth Matters. Thank you so much for listening. Take good care of yourself. And until next time, keep the 


Critics Stunned By Apple's Bleak New iPad Ad: ‘Worst. Commercial. Ever.’
Actor Hugh Grant slammed it as promoting "the destruction of the human experience."
post link.