[W.F. Lantry]

Originally Posted by Julie Steiner

In order for the muse to represent creativity's origin "somewhere else," one must either believe that the metaphysical realm of "somewhere else" actually exists, or that an individual's own unconscious mind is a realm so foreign to the conscious mind that it might as well be "somewhere else."

Julie,

I've been deeply troubled by this lately, almost as much as I've been troubled by trying to find a distinction between Grace and Mercy. Here's my dilemma: should I deny and disregard my own experience, because there's no room for it in systematic theology?

I accept the testimony of others, all of them rational and sincere beings, who recount the intervention, and even the nearly physical presence, of the divine in their lives. I know people who say Christ came to them, and even if this has never happened to me, I have no reason to doubt their word. I also know many people, who are reluctant to ever talk about this, who have felt the presence of Mary. That's a phenomenon I can personally attest to, although I've simply felt a presence, the experience of which filled me with joy... and anguish, because even as it happened I knew it couldn't last. There was such a sweetness to the feeling I wanted it to endure forever.

On the other hand, that's a rare occasion. Visits from the Muse are much more frequent, and there's always a very intense sense of obligation on my part. Wordlessly, she makes me promise to do things... mostly to write, as if each poem were a kind of offering, and she hungered for it.

We see similar visitations in other religious traditions, and I'm reluctant to say they don't come from the same source, seen through different prisms: Green Tara, the golden woman of the shining lake, Erzulie Freda, Pomba Gira, etc. But no prism allows for the equivalent of both the Muse and Mary, so I'm left with a troubling and unresolvable dichotomy: on the one hand, my lived experience, on the other, any reasonable system of theology.

Perhaps this is precisely what made Graves attractive to me: the working outside systemic considerations, the search and evidence gathering, even if some of his assumptions and conclusions were the result of less than positive predilections on his part? I don't know, this stuff is all a mystery to me, I can't make sense of it. But I have a feeling something's there, something we've all been missing.

Best,

Bill

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Originally Posted by Julie Steiner

In order for the muse to represent creativity's origin "somewhere else," one must either believe that the metaphysical realm of "somewhere else" actually exists, or that an individual's own unconscious mind is a realm so foreign to the conscious mind that it might as well be "somewhere else."

I know you weren't pressing heavy on the either/or here but either situation deepens the bowl and, I suspect increases, the likelihood of the other. Could be both/and.

Shamanic conceptions of non-ordinary reality seem quite at home with the idea of the soul being desperately tricky and unfathomable to the point of containing an elsewhere.

Maybe I will get to Graves WG one day but it is certainly less enticing now.

I have been working on an Apollo-Marsyas poem for a while. I find the tale has made me very distrustful of Apollo. Should I ever meet him I will be backing away cautiously. Ha. The poem is a bit of a death to Apollo ditty. I am sure I am being a reactionary in this. It keeps me warm.

Thanks for unpacking some of this Julie. It's good to hear.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Originally Posted by W.F. Lantry

Julie,

But no prism allows for the equivalent of both the Muse and Mary, so I'm left with a troubling and unresolvable dichotomy: on the one hand, my lived experience, on the other, any reasonable system of theology.

I thank the mud and the stars every day no one system can touch the depth and scope of it all. That would be a disaster. The all encompassing prism. To go with Dawkin's salivating for an optimally design eye. Primates with sharper sniper and sentry skills and a text you really could build a gallows upon. Prisms are small. Have a few.

[Michael F]

Andrew, you brought to mind this wonderful quote by Lessing:

“If God held all truth concealed in his right hand, and in his left hand the persistent striving after the truth . . . and should say, ‘Choose!’ I should humbly bow before his left hand and say, ‘Father, give me the striving. For pure truth is for thee alone’.”

Julie, I am with you, I think there is no empirical answer. I do believe that a Muse can be both a person, an actual human being, and an inscrutable power, combined in a way we cannot understand. I believe that because that is my experience...

[Gail White]

I read Graves' book when I was in college so my memories have to go back a long way. I recall liking it at the time but feeling suspicious about it later. As to Graves and women, I feel rather pleased that Laura Riding gave him a kick in the pants.

On the subject of the Virgin Mary -- I go with my husband to the Orthodox Church sometimes and I really do begin to find this woman tiresome after a while. She is always described as All-Holy, Glorious, Blameless, etc. etc. and it is obvious that while Christ may have experienced sexual temptations, Mary is above all that. And anyone who thinks a woman can remain a virgin after childbirth has obviously been a monk way too long.

[Julie Steiner]

Bill, Andrew, Michael, and Gail,

I'm enjoying this conversation very much. Thanks for your thoughts.

I do try to be a "both/and" type of person rather than an "either/or" person, but often I forget. Thanks for the reminder, Andrew.

Bill, as I've mentioned before, I occasionally have very intense religious experiences myself. Awareness of an almost-tangible presence. Clear messages in almost-words. An inexplicable, overwhelming sense of well-being and peace in sometimes-catastrophic circumstances. These episodes always seem unquestionably real to me. I had them a lot as a kid. Only a few of them as an adult. Last one was about five years ago.

But I also have an MRI-documented anomaly in my temporal lobe, which is associated with exactly these sorts of religious experiences.

Granted, the fact of a physical anomaly in my brain doesn't necessarily prove that these metaphysical experiences aren't real, just as the fact of telephones doesn't prove that our invisible communication with people thousands of miles away isn't real. As Andrew mentioned, the answer could be both/and, rather than either/or: they could be BOTH "all in my head" AND actually establishing a genuine spiritual connection. However, the either/or remains an option, too.

Although I have a wide skeptical streak, I still consider myself a person of faith. But my faith is not confidence that my personal religious/spiritual framework idea is The Right One, regarding the nature of--or even the existence of--a metaphysical plane. I will never be sure about that. But not being sure doesn't bother me. My faith is not certainty, but rather a confidence that it doesn't matter if I've got things all figured out, so long as I find the struggle to make sense of all this a useful and meaningful exercise (which I do), and that I keep trying to do what is right and just and life-affirming in real life.

I strongly agree with James 2:4-17 (and many other social justice passages in the Old and New Testament, and my own lived experience), that belief is something you do, not something you think.

I know professed believers who do, indeed, walk the walk as well as talking the talk. But I also know professed believers who consistently use the social power of their religion as leverage for their own bullying, unloving agenda. And on the other hand I know atheists who live the principles of the Gospel of Love much better than I do myself. Which of these groups genuinely believes in love and justice--the cocksure theoreticians, or the actual doers? It would be nice if I could be "both/and" in that department, too, but I think it's okay to be "either/or," so long as I pick the doing over the thinking, and not the other way.

Gail--Ha! I'm with you, for the most part. I find the traditional depictions of Mary distinctly unhelpful...but her depiction in the gospels does strike me as interestingly and helpfully human. I could blather about that for quite a bit, but I've already wandered far enough off topic, so I'll just say that I love Luke's frequent repetition of the phrase "And Mary pondered these things in her heart." Yeah! Proof that Mary had a lot of trouble figuring this stuff out, too! Yet no one questions her faith. So maybe my own cognitive dissonance is okay, too.

I also don't find it as impossible as you to think that Mary and Jesus might never have experienced sexual attraction, because I never have either--I'm asexual. (And I certainly hope for his sake that Joseph was asexual, too.)

Of course, the Church doesn't officially believe that sexual orientations exist at all, so I guess I'm immune to sexual temptation because I'm just really, really virtuous. Snort! (Virtue should require some conscious, voluntary effort, I think.)

I do think that my asexuality is a sexual orientation that I was born with, rather than a result of trauma early on. (By the time I found out what a virgin was, at age seven, I hadn't been one for years. So yeah, I've got quite a bit of baggage from growing up in a culture so eager to equate a woman's bodily integrity with her integrity of character. My childhood parish was named for St. Agnes, for crying out loud.)

If I may digress even further, I've written a bunch of poems about how frustrating it is that all the patron saints of rape survivors (like St. Agnes) are virgin-martyrs, who nobly chose death rather than defilement. Well, great for them, but I wasn't given that choice, and even if I had been, I would have chosen life, in good conscience.

It drives me batty that even as recently as last year, when three elderly Italian nuns were raped and murdered in Burundi, their order's spokesperson insisted to the media that they weren't raped...because everyone knows that God miraculously intervenes to prevent the defilement of truly good girls.

Which is sad, because both Augustine and Aquinas acknowledged that rape does happen to good people (both male and female), and that it is a form of torture and martyrdom, and that it does not in any way detract from the virtue of the victim. Aquinas even wrote that rape victims receive a special halo in heaven, and that a consecrated virgin who is raped is still a virgin even if she conceives and gives birth as a result of the assault. Not is still considered a virgin--still is a virgin.

Which makes me think that St. Agnes and St. Agatha and many of the other famous virgin-martyrs were also raped, yet were hailed by the Church as virgins anyway to deny their rapists the power to take that honor away from them. Which, in a way, is appropriate, but the full story of what they endured would actually honor them more, in my opinion, and would be tremendously helpful to rape victims, who currently are left to think that they must have deserved it in some way, since God failed to intervene to save them.

Okay, I think I've probably set some sort of record for wandering way off topic now, so I'll stop.

[Michael F]

Julie, that’s a fascinating post.

On the “both/and”, I think you would be in some pretty good company. Also on the impossibility of certainty. I won't go into it because i) it's even further afield, and ii) I want to spare this thread a gruesome public execution. But if you’d like to exchange some ideas on reading sources, and maybe even a few disjecta membra of thoughts, PM me.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Viewed from a perspective locked inside the body, heroin addiction would seem to be caused by perforations lining the arms (or wherever). Until an observer happened to be present at the actual insertion of the needle all sorts of important data would be mis-ordered and the focus might be upon the whole issue as a skin disorder. Temporal anomaly could have something to do with the insertion but may have about as much indication of what the trip is about and where the smack comes from as the number of track marks. I realize the analogy is stretched by I don't think as much as it might seem.

[Allen Tice]

Oddly enough at one graduate school I attended, I saw some of the real scholarship on many of the subjects Graves fantasizes about in the White Goddess and in certain of the notes in his Greek Myths, and it's pretty clear that anything he says in either place about undocumented ancient religion must be taken with greatest caution. Surely his vapors inspired him, and some of his poems are just real fine, but if I had to spend ten years on a desert island with a poet, I'd rather listen to Yeats go on about his Vision, than Graves go on about his Goddess speculations. By the way, read Good-Bye To All That, Count Belisarius, and, of course, the Claudius duo.

[ross hamilton hill]

I've read the White Goddess twice, I was interested in the Celtic-Druidic conception of poetry as a source of hidden knowledge, in the book Graves goes into considerable detail about tree symbolism and it's relation to various mythologies, I found Graves' non-linear, mythical linking of various ideas from different traditions terrific scholarship and a revelation of how Graves' mind worked. His vast knowledge was impressive although the book can be heavy going at times. Not an easy read.
I found his Muse thesis OK but I had already encountereed that with the idea of courtly love and the tradition of the troubadours. It is an explanation of love poetry and only love poetry, I think Graves is generalizing to the extent that the vast majority of love poetry is written by men about women, the fact that there are homosexuals, asexuals and lesbians doesn't really contradict Graves thesis because exceptions are inevitable. And anyway the muse is LOVE, and it doesn't matter who you love as long as the emotion inspires creativity.

As for inspiration, didn't Christ say 'the kingdom of heaven lies within you'
I've always thought that was the key phrase of the bible, that heaven is right here, now, within us, not out there somewhere or only available after death, a muse may inspire divine feelings or the feeling of divinity that creating art gives one, but if heaven is within us, and I believe it is, then it's up to us and only us to find it.