SpiralTruth

Since seeing Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk on creativity, I’ve thought a lot about muses. When we hear someone refer to a muse, we often think of a beautiful woman with whom a poet is deeply in love, writing poem after poem after poem for. I shudder to think of how many poor women have been tormented by moronic attempts at verse because of this personification. Ladies, you have my sympathy.

That’s not to say muses aren’t important. Gilbert’s talk made me realize that, far from simply being an easy source of inspiration, they’re a necessary mechanism an artist uses to keep from becoming too self-absorbed while creating some very personal and subjective things. A muse brings coherence to these personal experiences, making them transcend the person. It simultaneously allows an artist to maintain a comfortable distance from whatever it is that torments him to create and provides a framework in which others can understand those creations.

I do think that a muse is something you have to fall in love with or become obsessed with. It’s an abyss that you choose to stare into for a long time, longer than others are willing to stare. It colours your thoughts and your world and you hope that if you dance with it long enough, you’ll be able to bring something back to show others. It hurts when your muse leaves you or when you leave it. But that’s the job of a good artist – to pursue a muse as deeply and fully as possible and, when there’s no more to find and the muse leaves, to pursue a new muse. Much like love between people, I suppose, but to restrict muses to that domain is to deny some of the greatest artistic obsessions.

Certainly the high points of my creative life are when I’ve embraced a muse. Suddenly, I’m released from pursuing “my” art and “my” goals and I’m instead working towards something timeless, something important and above me.

I thought a bit about some of my favourite artists and their muses, and here’s what I came up with:

Pink Floyd: growing old, going out of your mind, and getting it back again.

U2: the power of love, the beauty of the world, and the senselessness of violence against it.

Metallica: the eternal struggle within.

NIN: disenfranchisement, self destruction, and slivers of hope.

The Doors: the dark and Dionysian exploration of the unknown.

Steinbeck: finding nobility and poetry of the American worker and in the ordinary day.

Irving: seeing humor in and showing compassion when dealing with the absurd.

Chris Cornell: turning darkness and anger into beauty and triumph.

Scott Weiland: the pull of addiction, and the binge and purge cycle of excess and rehabilitation.

Hermann Hesse: the forging of meaning and identity out of a sometimes senseless modern world. The bittersweet journey of an individual in exile, self imposed or not.

Hunter S. Thompson: the search for the American dream – and all the anger and the excess involved along the way.

The idealism of the rave scene has probably been my favourite muse so far. Even now, several years later, I think of my decision to dive in and become lost for a while and I feel a small surge of mad faith in the essential goodness of the universe and my fellow human beings, in all the possibilities before us, all our beauty, even in our fundamental brokenness – and I become very nostalgic. I chose to break away before things changed too much for the worse, and sometimes I wonder if that was too soon. Whatever the case, I still have that piece of time captured in several songs and several years worth of writing, and I’m glad that I can look back on it as more of an adventure than a mistake.

So now I’m between muses. Or perhaps I’m just courting several muses at once. One muse that fascinates me is madness. I see madness as a story more than a sickness. I see someone who is written off as completely bonkers as a person very much like you or me who has made a bunch of seemingly inconsequential choices that gradually led him or her very far from where we are. That person has learned a completely different language for describing the world and we don’t understand that language and they no longer understand ours. It’s not as inspiring to talk about as a rave. In fact, it’s pretty damned depressing. But I think it’s important to try to understand stuff like this. It’s one of those things that I obsess over when I let my mind wander.

I also find myself fascinated with all the possibilities that technology has created for everyone, artists included, and I’ve taken a lot of time away from my usual obsessions to let myself pursue this new shiny muse. Occasionally, I remind myself to be careful not to get too caught up in the toys that make it easier to create. In the end, it always comes down to writing the words, singing the melody. It’s all for nothing if it’s not for that.

And I suppose I’m at the point where I feel a bit lost and I think it’s time I explored that feeling. It’s not like I’m alone. Things move fast these days and sometimes it doesn’t feel like there’s much to hold onto. Maybe I can find something that’s a little more eternal in all of this, and if I do, I’ll do my best to let the world know in lyrics or in prose.

A final thought. You have no choice in which muses choose to reveal themselves to you. If I’ve wasted any energy in my pursuit of the artistic life, it’s been chasing after the muses that I think I should be chasing after instead of working with the ones that are right in front of me. Yes, it’s good to challenge yourself, but our beauty as human beings is largely in our diversity. Tom Waits is never going to write anything close to U2′s “One” and Bono’s never going to write “God’s Away on Business”, and I’ll bet they see each others’ songs as small works of genius. I’ve always thought the stuff I wrote was too serious, and that’s always bothered me because I’m not that serious most of the time. But when I try to not be serious, I approach it too seriously. And when I just don’t try, whatever I produce seems very empty. Sometimes you just have to give in and create what you create and let the critics decide what they must. If no one likes it, well, it’s not really your fault. You’re just doing the best you can with what comes to you.