This entry began as a comment on this entry on Iain Broome’s rather fab new site about writing, Write for your Life.
I’ve experienced the muse. But I didn’t personify it. I could have, and that would be fine. Others may experience the muse as a person, either by design or by accident. At some point that has to border on religious experience, which is an interesting thought. Either way, that’s fine. But, for me, the muse is only a label for a certain aspect of human consciousness, perhaps suggestive of the very nature of human consciousness.
The mind is a vast and mysterious receptacle, with the outside world surrounding it and throwing ideas inside via our ear holes, eyes, tongues, nostrils and nerve endings. All that sensory input goes in there and gets mushed up and rearranged, processed, unprocessed and reprocessed, spat out and slapped back in again. Anyone who’s tried meditating knows that it’s a cacophony in there, constantly spitting things out in the form of conscious thoughts.
When we dream, it fills our sleepy little heads with all kinds of funky stuff we usually can’t even remember when we wake up. Our mind has a mind of its own. So it is that sometimes when we have an idea, we don’t feel as if we have invented that idea, but that it has popped into our heads as if by magic, as if someone else had put it there. Instead of asking ourselves a question and cogitating on an answer, rather it happens that we suddenly become aware of the answer to a question we had never even thought of asking. That’s the muse: our funky mysterious mind swilling memories of the outside world all up until suddenly it spits a concoction of consciousness out into our immediate thoughts.
But that by no means goes to suggest that you have to wait for that funky cool thang to happen to start writing. We can do the question/answer cogitation thing too. I find that my muse is a generator of instantaneous mind orgasms, like waking wet dreams of creative goodness. But the question/answer cogitation approach is more like the long haul tantric good stuff Sting is into. And sometimes, even for such delightful things, we are simply just not in the mood.
On those occasions T. S. Eliot wasn’t in the mood, he wrote prose instead of poetry. Philip Larkin never really found himself in the mood after the age of seventy. The death of D. G. Rossetti’s fleshly muse, Elisabeth Siddal, killed his mood too and so he had all his poems buried alongside her, swearing he’d never write again. But he did write again and later had the poems exhumed and published. They were not well received. And then there’s Milton, who always found himself in the mood whilst sleeping, and would dictate dreamy verse to his wife upon waking. Which just takes the piss.
We’re all different people, with different experiences, different memories, different day-to-day lives, and, above all, different minds. But while it’s a mysterious thing that has the capacity to randomly surprise us, it’s also a complicated tool that can be utilised to our benefit and great delight if we take the time to work with it. Though it’s great when it happens, we shouldn’t wait for our minds to surprise us. We’re quite capable of surprising ourselves.
When we’re in the mood.