The Muse, Part One

One of the main reasons that I started Book of Jubilations was to explore the relationship between the artist and the creative act. There are a ba-jillion lenses to look at how we humans make the things that define our culture. History, Religion, Art of all kinds —, these are the ways that we remember who we are as a people. As a songwriter, writer, and general artist-type, this relationship between the maker and the made isn’t just an interesting shower-time daydream for me, it is crucial to my understanding of myself and my own creative life.

Over the course of my creative life, I’ve tried all kinds of ways to jumpstart my own creativity. I’ve given myself goals, given myself obstacles, woken up early to write, stayed up late to finish a song during the witching hour. I’ve taken up numerous protocols and experimented widely in my quest to unlock new portals to creativity. Only one discovery has proven itself, time and again. That is my understanding of my Muse.

Perhaps if I get this right, you might understand what I’m talking about, and you and your Muse might grow closer as well. That would make me happy.

So here goes.

I’m going to tell you about the Muse because I believe that its qualities and abilities are often misrepresented in our modern society, and this misrepresentation can have real effects on our lives. For the purposes of this piece, I’ll be dealing with Western interpretations of the Creative Forces that we have blanketed with the term, Muse. This is only because it’s the symbology that I am somewhat familiar with, and I don’t want to lead anyone astray by accident. Talking about the Muse is holy ground for me; working with it, doubly so.

But what is a Muse?

The earliest versions of the Muse that I’m familiar with were the Ancient Greek representations of nine goddesses representing the spectrum of artistic acts. I was reading that, although the concept of the Muses was far older than the classical Greeks, by the time of all those famous -iods, -edes, and -onedes, that we’ve read about, there were a generally agreed-upon nine distinct Muses. They were the daughters of Zeus (of course) and Mneomsyne, the goddess of Memory. I’m way into this kind of stuff. Anyway, the Muses all had totally bodacious purviews, including stuff like light verse and comedy (Thalia) and lyrical, erotic, choral poetry (Erato). My favorite Muse name is Terpsichore, the dance and chorus muse. She was a good time gal, I would like to imagine.

Before beginning the creative act, the artist would invoke the Muse of their art; literally call down the goddess attached to their artistic medium. This was not an invitation to lend assistance in the artistic creation through inspiration. The Classical Muses did not offer inspiration to those they visited, they were recognized as the very source and cause of the creative act. The songs, dances, and stories were not the product of the artist, but emanated in full from the goddesses, themselves. Obviously, a willing vessel was necessary for the goddess to work through, but when the Ancient Greek bard, Homer, came to town, you weren’t packing a supper to see him, you were coming to pay witness to The Muse, herself.

This is crucial — according to the Ancient Greeks, two willing participants are necessary to create art on our plane of existence: the human and the divine. Understanding that nothing will happen without Her, the artist calls the Muse to descend from her mountaintop and enter into the Bard so that her works might exist on the human level. Her presence is necessary for the creation, but without a dancer, without a poet, the participatory nature of the Muse cannot be revealed. The work of art requires two, willing, participants, a goddess and a human being.

How do we know that this was the understanding?

The first extant record we possess that mentions the Muse comes at the beginning of Homer’s Iliad (written down in Eighth Century BCE, but with an undoubtedly older oral tradition). The entire epic begins with a statement that is pure invocation:

Sing, goddess, of the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus —

It can be understood that while the goddess did not actually sing when beckoned, it was her voice, her deific knowledge, her powers of memory and truth that were essential to the faithful delivery of the epic by the bard. For this reason, we could think of everything the bard sings after the invocation as being in the voice of the goddess, herself. It is she who has been invited into the singing of the song, and it is her song, delivered from the mouth of her willing vessel.

Apollonius of Rhodes, seems to be striking the same tone, right down to proximity,

“Come now, Erato, stand by me, and tell me how Jason brought the fleece from Aeëtes’ realm…”

Many traditions have components of rapture; moments when the experiencer is literally caught up in the act of experiencing. Homer could be viewed through this lens as allowing himself to be caught up into a rapturous state in which the Muses were speaking through him.

Most important to my point, the human agrees to be taken over. The human invites being taken over. The human summons the muse at the outset of the creative act and then agrees to become invisible before the unfurling glory of whatever the muse discloses from his or her own mouth.

Why all of this invoking of superhuman powers to accomplish a pedestrian human act like singing a song? Because these weren’t just songs. Homer’s Iliad, alone, might have taken up to twenty hours and several sittings to recite in its entirety. Bardic traditions around the world are replete with individuals capable not only of astounding feats of memory but also imbued with the ability to invoke the deities and serve as their sayer.

—

This is a notion that I, as a person who once preferred to be known through his own songs, finds both attractive and rational. I know that I’m not the one writing these songs. I know that I’m involved, yes; I feel integral to their creation, yes; but I am not the one who is placing those words together. We are working together, my Muse and I, to accomplish what neither of us could do alone: bring music and songs into the world.

Sometimes, my Muse and I write little rhymes for ourselves that help us to understand and remember the truths we’ve learned along the way. I think of my Muse like this:

My Muse and I are an unstrung lyre,

Each other’s chords, each other’s choir.

It has often been said that the history of the Muse is the history of a fading metaphor, and I can easily understand how such a powerful belief would come into conflict with power systems external to the artist and their Muse. Societies seem to move in directions that allow for as little social surprise as possible. Artists and prophets and those who deal with such societal unpredictables like gods can be more trouble than they’re worth. Additionally, for all their trouble, such story tellers have proven to be indispensable as myth keepers and myth makers, so the power tension remains to this day.

One of the best ways to destroy an idea is to supplant it with another. Already by the bureaucratic Roman republic, the muses had become mere stylisms, their abilities ascribed to human ingenuity and brute force. Centuries passed, but the private apotheosis offered by the Muse was not in keeping with the power structure of the Catholic Church, either. Christianityis not thrilled with the idea of goddesses in general. The Muses were too dangerous to the entire theological system that undergirded political and social control. So, while the powerful, oracular, goddesses of poetry and ecstatic dance were cast aside, the new muses took their place. Rather than possession, however, the Muse of Dante’s time was a psychopomp.

‘Psychopomp’ may be the reason that I wanted to write this piece. I just love that word. It refers to the spiritual being that guides the soul on its journey. The Roman poet, Virgil, who had become famous invoking Muses, was now Dante’s psychopomp through Hell. Beatrice was his psychopomp as he ascended into Paradise. It is important to understand that this conception of Muses is that they are guides for the soul, not possessors of it.

When I was a kid and lived in Australia for a short bit, I saw a checkout girl at the grocery store and fell in love with her from afar. The thought of seeing her again led me back to that grocery store. She was my psychopomp in my journey towards Love and unnecessary groceries. I might have even tried to write a song about her. She fit the modern conception of a muse, but she didn’t fit the more ancient concept of a Muse. I did not invoke her to possess me, as the the Muse, Erato, and begin reciting the harrowing morning at the grocery store thus far in hexameter.

Make sense?

What I am trying to get at here, what I am trying to lay as a foundation for further exploration, is that I believe that we have misunderstood the Muses for so long now that we have discounted how very real they are, and how a more nuanced understanding of their desires, and ours, can have a profound and beautiful effect on our lives.

For many years, I considered my art to be a kind of exchange with a cave-monster. I would throw bits of my life into the cave and the monster would chew them up and spit out a song. It was hard, hard, work, feeding that monster. Much of it was solitary, with small rewards and smaller certainties. I didn’t love the cave-monster, but it lived with me anyway; a hungry, mercurial, cave-mate, prone to late hours. My monster did what it wanted, when it wanted, and it was pretty sullen while it did so.

And did it show up when I needed it to? Well….sometimes.

I never considered that maybe my cave-monster wasn’t too fond of me either. It’s not like I’ve ever been easy-going, and the cave-monster certainly had enough of me more than once, presumably decamping to some other, sweeter, cave for several months.

And then, about three years ago, something changed. I can’t tell you exactly what happened, because the experience still feels so personal that to put it into words would cheapen it. It would be dissected and sapped of its power. Nevertheless, it was one of the most profound moments of my life and I was changed by it.

I’ll tell you more about what I learned in my next piece about the Muse.