Friday, February 2, 2018

A Musing Life (2 February 2018)

“I travel through the untrodden places of the MUSE, where no one has gone before; it is a delight to approach fresh springs, and to drink.”
-        Lucretius  On the Nature of Things  (1st century BCE)
“The poets of every age are united in a common devotion and in a common dedication ‑‑ a devotion to their native tongue and a dedication to the Muse, a Goddess who, luminous and serene, remains the primal source of that light which irradiates the poet.” (27)
-        John Press   The Fire and the Fountain (1966)

 “The GODDESS has once again become the MUSE.”
-        Elinor W. Gadon  The Once and Future Goddess (1989)

What is the Muse?
As I now understand it, the expression – ‘The Muse’ – is a metaphor for the ‘source of inspiration,’ which resides naturally within us as the creative animals we are, wired by our evolutionary history to be creators.  Every human being has the capacity to be inspired, in small or great ways.  Artists either have a stronger sense of inspiration – because of their particular neurological wiring and life experience – and/or nurture it throughout their lives, making it stronger and more focused.  While this is clear to me now, it was not always so.  I have come to this understanding by way of a long and winding poetic adventure, along which I explored my own ability to create and sought to understand this ‘source of inspiration’ in religious and supernaturalist terms.  The story of my history with ‘The Muse’ is my a-musing life.
‘The Muse’ – as indicated in the epigraphs – has long been thought of as an external touchstone; a rune or vehicle for inspiration that ‘comes to us, from somewhere else.’  Creative religious people and mystics often relate to their personification of ‘the divine’ (God, Goddess, gods and goddesses, etc.) or perhaps venerable religious personas as their Muse.  Some creative and visionary people have found themselves inspired to creativity by other human beings, either alive or long dead.    I have been down each of these paths over the last fifty years and have had a succession of ‘muses.’
What does it mean to ‘have a muse?’  Is it necessary for the creative life?
Does the Muse have to be ‘personified?’
Over the course of the last year or so, I’ve been revisiting my various ‘personifications’ of the Muse, from childhood until the last decade of the 20thcentury,  and have been wondering why the Muse has so often been personified – not only for me, but for other creative people as well – and whether there is something psychologically beneficial in experiencing the Muse as such (i.e., ‘personifying’ the source of inspiration as a ‘Muse’).
My earliest ‘Muse’ was connected to my experience of ghosts I believe I’d seen over the course of my childhood and adolescence. (I was a very imaginative kid!)  My experience of what I came to call the ‘Ghost in the Hallway’ when I was nine and then the ‘Ghost in the Graveyard’ when I was eleven, hot-wired my youthful imagination to ‘supernal’ possibilities; seeming to show me a path beyond the ordinary rounds of daily life—a place where imagination could become manifest, at least in stories, poems and music. 
Why did a ‘ghost’ inspire me to creative acts and imaginative reveries?
Because that was interesting to me when I was nine to twelve years old, and even later in my life—up until about forty years of age.  The fact that I imagined ‘meeting’ these two spectral women over the next few years played into some of my earliest storytelling and writing.  When I was imagining them, I was ‘in touch’ with the ‘source of inspiration.’
I didn’t think of these two ‘ghost women’ as ‘muses’ until much later; not until the early 1980’s; when I was beginning to realize myself as a ‘poet.’  By then I’d had two more experiences of what I took to be ‘ghosts.’  Again, both were of spectral women.  These ‘sightings’ were shared with friends who also believed they ‘saw’ or ‘sensed’ the ‘ghost’ with me.  Regardless of the ontological status of these ‘ghosts,’ I later integrated these imaginative experiences into what I called my ‘Four-Fold Muse’ and told stories about the four women who comprised that ‘spectral association’ in poetic narratives.  But before that_
In HS I had been introduced to one of my first mystical ideas; that of The Blue Flower of German mysticism.  I recall vividly in active remembrance the emotional and intellectual experience of hearing our German teacher briefly tell us about the Blue Flower, and that’s all it took!  I began ‘researching’ it on my own.  I had also been introduced to other mystical ideals in books on the Occult, but few struck home like The Blue Flower.  It was Novalis who first introduced this poetic idea; the Novalis who said “the more poetic, the more real.  This is the core of my philosophy.”  _An aphorism I took to heart and recorded in a little notebook that I kept for decades.
The Blue Flower, which was a core image in German Romanticism (I was attracted to Romanticism even at that age, though I didn’t yet know what it was!), symbolized longing for an ideal, the yearning for growth, radical innocence, love, and union with the divine as ‘Goddess.’  I resonated with all those things, though without any deep understanding.  Looking back from a later vantage point, I can see that my fascination with the Blue Flower anticipated my later fascination with the Goddess, with the Virgin Mary, and even with female singers (Pat Benetar, Stevie Nicks, Emmylou Harris, Loreena McKennitt, Moya Brennan, etc); whose music inspired me to creativity, poetic visioning and storytelling!
The ideal of the Blue Flower and the ‘four ghosts’ stayed with me through the 1970’s.  Then, in 1980, I began to imagine the family who came to be known as ‘the Whittiers’ as a vehicle for telling my tales about Christmas and Yule; stories that were not religious in cast or conception but rather revolved around a Pagan and Naturalistic understanding of the Winter Solstice Season.  Within that process I came to imagine a number of women who seemed powerful to me and who eventually came together as a kind of ‘Triple Goddess.’  I quickly imagined a fourth woman joining the group, and then intuitively linked these 4 female characters with the four ‘ghosts’ I had experienced.  Together they became “The Four-Fold Muse:” their names were Magdalena, Christabell, Angellique and Elisabeth—and they were featured in an invocational poem that summarized, for me at that time, the creative process.[i]
These four fictional women – who featured in such old tales as “Ladies of the Wood” and “Incantamentum” – were my inspiration; or rather (perhaps) the touchstone of my imaginative energy—all through the mid- to late 1980’s.  It was with these four imagined women ‘haunting’ me that I wrote early drafts of The Fires of Yule, The Whittier Hearth, and a wide variety of mystical poems, essays and poetic narratives, some of which, in matured form, made it into my published books.
This poetic ‘personification’ of the source of creativity as the “Fourfold Muse” deepened through my immersion in various feminist authors I read, including Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon (1986), Elinor Gadon’s The Once and Future Goddess (1989), Merlin Stone’s When God was a Woman (1988), and Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance (1989).  These books fostered in me a much deeper appreciation of the feminine, deepening my understanding of women and their plight in history and the need for radical reform leading to full equality between men and women.  Leonardo Boff’s The Maternal Face of God (1987) then led me into the next stage of my Musing Life by introducing me to the mysticism of the Virgin Mary.
My imaginative quest for poetic maturity had led me, through a variety of runes and touchstones, into Catholic mysticism and in that context to the Virgin Mary as Muse of Poets by 1989.  My devotion to Mary was as “Source of Inspiration” as much as Mother of Christ.  I saw her as the Mother of Poets and as Mistress of the Moon, Sea and Stars; imagery which I knew came over from ancient Paganism and that had been integrated by the Church into the Christian mythos of the Virgin Mother of God.
Remembering Novalis while composing this blog today, I realized that he, too, had been a devotee of the Great Mother mythos, and that for him as well the Virgin Mary was connected to the Goddess.  Were the ‘seeds’ of my fascination with this Christian Mythos of the Muse sown in my adolescence through encountering the myth of the Blue Flower?  Marian Blue has always reminded me of both The Blue Flower and Eckhart’s “Great Underground River that cannot be dammed up and cannot be stopped” – his metaphor for ‘GOD.’  However it happened, by 1990 I was writing daily and invoking the Virgin Mary as my Muse.  I would continue to honor her as Muse until I left the churches and their religion behind in 1997.
 Through the 1990’s, as I became more and more frustrated with organized, institutional religion, I turned ever more to Celtic spirituality as an alternative.  Celtic mysticism integrated both Christian and Pagan symbols, ideas, practices and motifs into a single Path; one that I was yearning to take by 1994-5.  As my sojourn in the churches came to an end, I turned to Celtic spirituality as an ‘interim’ tradition that would, at one level, ease my transition out of organized religion and also lead me on to whatever was going to be ‘next.’  While immersed in Celtic spirituality I came to understand and invoke the Muse as the Triple Goddess: Boann—Brighid—Ceridwen.   A description of this Triple Goddess can be found in my book on Celtic spirituality called WellSprings of the Deer (2002).
After publishing this book, I broke communion with mythic icons of the Muse as I went deeper into science, which wholly transformed me along with my entire worldview!  I once told a friend that my Muse had ‘abandoned’ me.  Yet I always believed She would be back.  As I re-grounded myself in the revelations of science over the course of a decade, I re-sourced the creative process in non-supernatural terms and came to realize that the seeds of inspiration are within us, and that, as the human animal we are, we are deeply and innately creative.  I came to understand that the effects we experience in meditation are not coming to us from a divine being or some Otherworld, but are, rather, consequent on the way we are wired, neurologically, as human animals, constructed via our life experiences.  I came to see that all my imaginative ‘visions’ and poetic ‘experiences’ were manifestations of this evolutionary programming; though in its own way unique to me as an individual pather of wisdom and creative self-realization.
We are the Creative Animal.  We are the Imagining Animal. 
Once I found myself re-grounded in the revelations of science I was free to begin imagining new scenarios and writing stories about them.  The Imagination plays a role in science, which grapples with the physical, objective world in which we find ourselves.  The Imagination also grapples – as in music, literature, poetry and film, etc., – with our intersubjective experiences (with others in the world) as well as our own subjective experiences.  It can create fictional worlds and fantastic scenarios as well as exploring and helping us to understand the objective, external worlds in which we live: the Earth & Cosmos that is our Given. 
Over the last few years I’ve begun thinking about the Muse, once again, reflecting on the various guises under which I have known ‘Her.’  And so, the questions: Does the Muse have to be personified to be effective?  And more deeply: Can a person be creative without having any kind of ‘muse?’
To the second question I would have to answer “yes, definitely.”  _At least if I mean by that question “any kind of personified Muse?”  We are imagining animals who can be ‘inspired’ to do one thing or another by any number of touchstones.  My understanding at this point is that the source of inspiration need not be personified.  Learning to be imaginative and channel one’s creativity – one’s creative vision – is a matter of poetic self-discipline.  As I said the outset, the idea of ‘The Muse’ is a cipher for the source of inspiration, which is innate to us.
When I am writing in a more rational, logical mode, I am often unaware of anything like a ‘Muse’ guiding me.  That metaphor recedes into the background of consciousness and I more directly appropriate and connect-to that state – emotional, intellectual, even physical – in which I can enter the flow of creative writing.  For several years, while immersed in the study of science and mathematics, I did not ‘call upon’ the muse or even imagine her in any particular way.  Yet, having had imagined ‘Muses’ guiding and inspiring me over the course of 40 years of my life, I was attuned to the mythic mental construct of a ‘Muse,’ and eventually ‘She’ returned to me, though without the artifices of religious belief or supernaturalism.
And so, in my own experience, I have found an imagined (imaginary) and personified Muse to be energizing and liberating in terms of my own creativity.  Why?  Perhaps because a personified ‘Muse’ functions to take the creative person ‘out of themselves;’ liberating them from the ordinary-waking-self which so often and so easily gets ‘in the way’ of creative visioning and poetic adventuring.  Why?  Possibly because poetic creativity is intuitively guided and grounded more in the subconscious than in the conscious mind?  While editing, revising and re-writing texts (including this one) is undertaken in a rational, practical ‘state of mind,’ the actual impetus behind creative work comes from a much deeper place; the source of inspiration within us—a psychological source.  By personifying it, we perhaps ‘step aside’ from our ordinary waking self and allow it to become ‘active.’
When I imaginatively engage with my Muse; communing with the “Four-Fold Muse,” the “Virgin Mary” or the “Triple Celtic Goddess,” I experience a side-step; a ‘stepping aside’ from the practical, work-a-day consciousness in which I normally live and can thereby ‘go out’ – in my imagination – to a place where I can more freely create.  Imagining and ‘heeding’ a personified Muse allows me to get out of my own way!
Thus, I continue to lead my Musing life, even now, as a Poetic Naturalist.




[i] These poems, “A Poetics of the Creative Process” and “Invocation of the Four-fold Muse” can be found in the front matter of my book Tales from the Seasons.” (AuthorHouse, 2008)



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