Sing, Muse!

Today I'd like to discuss the muse.  Among the ideas given to us by the peoples of ancient Greece, their insistence on personifying any number of psychological phenomena is one of the most underrated of contributions.  They gave us psyche to differentiate the sentient soul from the animal brain, and Dike and Nike showing Justice and Victory (respectively) as active presences within human society.  We have lost more of these personified intangibles than can be enumerated here, but I would like to rehabilitate one of the less obscure in this post today.  The Classical Muse is a concept central to my experience of writing.  Let me explain.

The muse construct is in many ways an excellent illustration of the internal experience of inspiration.  Often an idea strikes so suddenly and so sharply that it feels authentically external.  The urge to put it into being, to take up keyboard or brush or dance shoes or instrument likewise feels more like a command or a compulsion than a want or desire.  Desire comes from within, but compulsion seems to come from without.  By giving this inspiration, this compulsion a name - Muse! - we describe quite accurately what it feels like to be a person whose right brain is given to attack the left without notice (Usually when you're trying to get on with sleeping or eating or commuting or work).  The Muse represents the externality of the creative process when its imperatives war directly with our immediate practical needs and desires.  To sleep, or to write this post?  The Muse does not care about sleep.

Writing is personal, deeply personal.  In essence, we take perception, process it in our psyche, and from there we present the shape of our Self imprinted into the product of our observations.  Essentially, we are creating shadows of our very individual reality and testing the waters of shared experience to see if our reality has cousins in other people's Self.  It is a plea for acceptance as well as a declaration of individuality.  It demands at the same time that we be seen as unique and connected, different and the same.  We ask of our readers the impossible, and it is a frightening enterprise.

I've been teaching Plato lately, so pardon me if that's where I go now.  In the Ion, Plato shows just how much the construct of "inspiration" obscures the line between poet and creation.  "It wasn't me!" Ion says.  "The muse speaks through me!"  What Plato (deliberately?) misses in the dialogue is just how useful it is to an artist to have this muse - this fictional construct of the Other - as a scapegoat when engaging in the terrifying enterprise of art.  Poor Ion has a hard time defending against Socrates, who is a complete dick by the way, and so I feel compelled to say what he should have said to that irritating old coot in the Agora.

Yes, we create the muse, and yes, it's inaccurate to blame someone else for the source of our inspiration.  But!  The experience of writing needs one to have that ability to step aside from the Self and attempt the impossible; to grasp the Other and see through her eyes.  This, then, is the muse; the Other within who lets us step aside from our ego to explore wider worlds than the one we inhabit.  The philosopher who urged us to leave the Cave could surely find some sympathy for this enterprise in which we, freed from the shackles of Self, escape the single vision of our own lives to see other worlds.  By finding may of these Others with eyes to borrow, we escape the trap of our own perception, at least in part, and can see more clearly the shared forms of reality.

Likewise, this Other within is a source of courage.  When we have the temerity to inhabit another person's skin, we do so imperfectly.  We risk holding a mirror to our own prejudice and shortcomings, our hang-ups and our failings by the way we write about experiences we have not had ourselves.  The Muse is a shield that allows us the freedom to try anyway, a protection in this voyage of empathy and empathizing with the Other.  "It wasn't me!" we say with Ion.

And so this blog, and this post.  A writer knows full well that by expressing and presenting art she exposes her innermost self to a world of Otherness.  In this endeavor, I rely on a time-honored protection for the irrepressibly creative and the occasionally pretentious (ipsa dicente).  The Muse made me do it!