All This is Muse
Notes from the chemical wedding
On the seventh, and final, celebration of the anniversary of the initiatory circle of the Incorporation of Muse. Below are some extracts of the many meetings of the participatory Beings and the Mistress of the gathering basket. Losses are recouped. A new door opens. We draw a crooked line under everything with charcoal made from our brothers’ vines, and heave a glad sigh.
This week, an unknowable horizon beckons, we go to pack old hurts away and find them turned to thick black ink. 1
Year 1
I don’t want to tell everyone about it all. I want to tell you. You’re the one I want to write to from the centre of the circle.
My words are being culled for medicine. I start writing in response, in completion, and it continues until the next pause. It begins again, intoxicating me. I write to create the feeling I am having as I write, an unsuspected feedback loop in the endocrine system. A living drug whose means of delivery is sentences. I need to be able to invoke this sensation in vivo again one day in someone else, even. That will be the true test of potency. The muse said I should write and so I find myself doing it this Friday night. I do not know what it will become, but if anything gets even a little bit clearer, perhaps the muse will tell me.
What constitutes 'writing'?
Year 2
From the point of view of creativity, the muse's responsibility is to respond, to sound, like the sea floor, the depths of which produce the echo so that the artist might hear herself, just as the whale requires it, to know where in the ocean it swims. For me it is dangerous to have the muse incorporated in any one person, the natural abundance of Eros which inheres in the process can accrete and form a shiny carapace, reflecting subtle incompleteness. It must be known that muse is projection of inner qualities, and also a gift, as in the germination of seeds, a ripeness of conditions, rather than fruit to be plucked. Holding this, one can ethically engage in the arcane and ancient (yet still current), reciprocity of muse. Diffused through several people, some real, some imaginary, some living, some dead, some non-human: inspiration permeates. Small detonations reverberate in the valley of muse. The riverbed accepts the flow of my writing or art-making. Its nature is yin, but this should not be mistaken for it being female. Receptivity is as delightful in men as in women.
The quiet man keeps his water still and reflects the moment. I still persist in flowing and preferring the speech of water as it tumbles around stone. My fault is attachment to form, his, a preference for oblivion. We each work with our tendencies.
Year 3
Today I am overwhelmed with the feeling of muse, of wanting to make, write, sing, draw... It is in some ways like being a teenager, this menopause thing, the same rushes of 'very important thoughts and feelings'. But with the humour and scepticism of being older, it is tempered with wry laughter. Yet, even with this, it feels important. How to preserve this joie de vivre that I feel so strongly? I have a feeling we will all keep our lights burning now, suddenly creatively free after a decade bound to masts for once-sound reasons.
Year 4
Wildings are the feral fruit from apple trees which have grown from seeds dropped in the countryside from cultivated apples. They revert to a native state, as the seeds of apples are never 'true', which is why one must graft, if a repeat of the parent tree is required.
We are wildings.
We are from cultivated stock, yes, lineage: some sweet, but not really tasty, some only grown for supermarket appearance, and actually surprisingly bitter inside. But our seeds got pollinated by who knows what other blossoms? The bees are free and will get their pollen anywhere, bless the yellow dusty creatures. And so our parent trees got powdered quincely and crab appley, Bramley, even, certainly Russet. And so here we are fit for eating, sharp, full of flavour, strange skins of ordinary appearance, but a wild bite, not to everyone's taste.
Year 5
Straight back, nose vertical, eyes horizontal. Cape pulled around close, keeping out draughts. In breath, out breath. All the letting go.
The wolf's back, forested with fur and finely turned from prowling. Questions asked with a raised tail, unanswerable but by the tan and black bitch. This scent is the timing of homecoming. That sound is the yip of greeting. Light dusting of snow flakes melt quickly on ears as short fur there allows the blood to serve its purpose: warming. She dips onto forepaws obliquely, neck lowered, he mounts her quickly hackles raised. Adrenaline works the same in all mammals.
A back, now bare, invites the heel of a palm to nestle in the spinal valley. Pushing and kneading, this is how the knots untie. Blood comes to the surface and redness blooms, the disadvantage of pale skin: so much can be read there. So much can be written. Long exhalations, a kind of melting in the chest. Constant pressure of weight across the haunches, transmitting warmth. No time to be saying anything, as all concentration must rest upon feeling, not words. The suddenly lupine sounds of hard breathing. No gap between pressure and its release.
Year 6
The muse has been in the woods with me and knows nature is my true love, he knows my baskets and my hidden alcove. The winter and my mind sometimes enclose me. I make things all the time, and he made this very funny gesture of me tossing my hair and handcrafted things magically falling out. He said, now I just have to work away at this one thing, find a basis, a ground of practice, not just quickly make some thing again. I need to know in words what is the true basis of my life, that one thing I can work on. Astonishingly, I couldn't give it a name. I thought I knew the ground of my life.
What will it be not to be scared of the consequences of being who and what we are?
Year 7
A draught of emptiness. We pour practice into the bowl.
Long drifts of the afternoon snow rest, smattered with creatures’ footprints. The days of interrogation over, spring saunters over like a rook, and questions give way to the absence of answers. Bright sparks of lost daggers beneath the loch cannot be seen by the naked eye, which registers only swans grazing for weed. When they look up, they snap their wings like judokas in their gi. Seeing the old metal glinting in the silt, the birds head home to the inlet and you’ll know: the treasure is best left occluded.
I pour you a glass, you raise it to your lips: emptiness.
Down it.
And another.
The strongest wine is nothing beside no-thing. You can both clear and empty your head with it, but your heart will fill, and it will pour out of your fingers as words, if you wish.
The aim of the lost blade is the absence of war.
The sands are slick so that razor clams can breathe. Your beach is to be swept by waves and scoured for sea-glass and mermaid’s purses. Break upon your own shores now. Ochres, by attrition, colour the sand. What was locked up in cliffs will now dissolve as blessings in the water.
Water above in clouds, water around in rain, water beside in river, water below in the well, water beyond in ocean.
How can I know which medicine, what illness, and when to treat? I look at the tongue, I hear the words spoken, I read what is written. What is soft prevails over what is brittle, the tongue lasts longer than the teeth. And where there are tongues there is language, saliva, wording, the licking of lips, the impossibly soft edge of the abyss.
So then, a blessing, for these darkest days, to bring tilting new light.
This week’s good thing: artists’ pastels. I have become rather addicted to making many kinds of pastels. Traditional recipes, novel formulas, graphite and pigment, clay and earth, soft and hard, large or thin, for holders. I feel a new book brewing… Come join me for a colourful day spent learning how to make them in May in Vermont, USA. Details are here.
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Apologies for my cold-filled voice and slightly lower than normal recording quality. I have a head cold, and am recording the voiceover on my phone while abroad. All photos are from a recent journey.
Oh, so much beauty here, but laughed at these lines:
It is in some ways like being a teenager, this menopause thing, the same rushes of 'very important thoughts and feelings'. But with the humour and scepticism of being older, it is tempered with wry laughter.” That captures it perfectly!
My words will be clumsy next to yours but wanted to thank you for these musings. I loved all of it, which felt powerful, and felt a particular tingle at the sentence about what is locked up in the cliffs becoming blessings dissolved in the water. Thanks as always for your thoughtful courage in these writings.