Jan Herman reports in a posting (2005.01.30) that John Zorn:

….repeatedly stressed that his music comes from some sort of higher power. He said that it would not have been possible for him to complete over 300 of his Masadic melodies during a very short time period without some sort of supernatural help. In the program, he writes that composition is at its best “when the piece is seemingly writing itself and the composer is merely an observer. He says that some of his works, “transcend my expectations and my abilities. I cannot explain them. They are part of the Mystery.”

Here we have an example of the need for a new language, a new understanding, of the creative process, one better informed by psychology than mystic mumbo-jumbo.

Psychologists tell us today that consciousness is a story teller. As Steven Pinker tells it on page 42 of The Blank Slate :

Each of us feels that there is a single “I” in control. But that is an illusion that the brain works hard to produce, like the impression that our visual fields are rich in detail from edge to edge (in fact, we are blind to detail outside the fixation point). […] One of the most dramatic demonstrations of the illusion of the unified self comes from the neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry, who showed that when surgeons cut the corpus collosum joining the cerebral hemispheres, they literally cut the self in two, and each hemisphere can exercise free will without the other one’s advice or consent. Even more disconcertingly, the left hemisphere constantly weaves a coherent but false account of the behavior chosen without it’s knowledge by the right. For example, if an experimenter flashes the command “WALK” to the right hemisphere (by keeping it in the part of the visual field that only the right hemisphere can see), the person will comply with the request and begin to walk out of the room. But when the person (specifically, the person’s left hemisphere) is asked why he just got up he will say, in all sincerity, “To get a Coke” – rather than, “I don’t really know” or “The urge just came over me” or “You’ve been testing me for years since I had the surgery, and sometimes you get me to do things but I don’t know exactly what you asked me to do”. Similarly, if the patient’s left hemisphere is shown a chicken and his right hemisphere is shown a snowfall, and both hemispheres have to select a picture that goes with what they saw (each using a different hand), the left hemisphere picks a claw (correctly) and the right picks a shovel (also correctly). But when the left hemisphere is asked why the whole person made those choices, it blithely says, “Oh that’s simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.”The spooky part is that we have no reason to think that the baloney-generator in the patient’s left hemisphere is behaving any differently from ours as we make sense of the inclinations emanating from the rest of our brains. The conscious mind – the self or soul – is a spin doctor, not the commander in chief. […] Often our conscious minds do not control how we act but merely tell us a story about our actions.

This coincides with Malcolm Gladwell’s reportage in his most recent book, Blink which I haven’t yet read, but in a presentation (audio file available here, a fuller transcription from where I take these quotes is here) presented last October, he says:

We don’t have access to our unconscious, [we don’t know where are thoughts] come from that bubbles up from the recesses of our brain. So what do we do? Well, we have a behavior that we just did, we just made a decision of a certain kind, we don’t really know where it came from, so we come up with an explanation, we make up a story. And we’re really really good at making up stories. I call this The Story Telling Problem. And this is something that happens over and over again.

So both arguments imply that we need language to self-narrate understanding. Zorn’s example goes back to Socrates arguing that artists were inspired. Now, at the dawn of the 21st Century, we can put aside such mystical and primitive tales. The language of inspiration has been the only one available to us since the time of Socrates, and Zorn’s lack of knowledge of contemporary psychology means that to explain his creativity to himself, he falls back on that language.

As a creative person, informed by Gladwell and Pinker, I would argue that the mind is made up of many processes, and we are only ever conscious of a brief portion of what’s going. We tell ourselves stories to explain our actions, but those actions are being processed beneath or above the threshold were the “PR person” gets a hold of them. In Zorn’s case I would say that his musical facility means that a portion of his mind has great facility with music, and when it comes time to compose, this is brought to the awareness of the PR person and the part of his mind that directs writing and all that. However, the PR person is at a loss to understand just what is happening, because it doesn’t have the language to explain it. The only thing it has available for his ‘Coke story’ is to fall back on the mystical stories inherited from the time of Socrates.