Musing on the Muse
 

Elsewhere the topic of Robert Graves's The White Goddess recently came up, in connection with the traditional envisioning of "the Muse" as a female supernatural entity. So I thought I'd start a thread in case people would like to further discuss the idea here--either Graves's take on it, or the concept of a Muse in general.

Gotta say, I didn't much care for Graves's thesis.

The book was recommended to me by a feminist friend who loved it. She had been raised, as I had, in a rigidly patriarchal and often downright misogynistic and homophobic religion. So I understand her unhappiness in a culture and community that perennially casts everything feminine or effeminate as fallen, evil, and weak both physically and morally...or (as in the case of the Virgin Mary) as simply lesser and second-class in relation to Wonderful, Holy Maleness. Note that the Virgin Mary is honored as the ONE exception to the female sinfulness represented by Eve; furthermore, her devotees are strictly cautioned that she may be honored but never, never, NEVER actually worshipped, because worship is reserved for the Holy Trinity, generally depicted as male, male, male. Femaleness is constantly depicted as inferior and secondary to maleness, from the creation of Eve to the Wedding of the Lamb in the book of Revelations (in which Christ is the bridegroom and the Church his once-sinful but now redeemed and properly subservient bride).

Christianity was vigorous about stamping out goddess-worship wherever it encountered it in medieval Europe, and it remains hypervigilant about goddess-worship sneaking back into society via the Marian cult. As Graves himself points out in his book.

Anyway, my friend loved Graves's re-affirmation of the divine feminine. The idea that successful poets have always devoted themselves to Her service in the form of a feminine Muse was a refreshingly validating concept, from my friend's perspective.

I took a completely opposite view. I thought Graves was just being a stereotypically self-justifying womanizer. And, as sexists so often are, homophobic to boot.

According to Graves, only heterosexual men can be great poets, because only they can have a "fruitful" erotic love relationship with the feminine ideal. He says that that's why Socrates and Plato were so negative about poetry--they felt no sexual attraction to a female Muse, and instead preferred "the god" (i.e., the rational, logical Apollo). Graves believes that male homosexuality is fundamentally incompatible with poets' need to properly appreciate the female Muse, as he does himself.

And women poets--why, why, why must you persist in wanting to write? You're no good at it, because it goes against your nature! Why can't you be content to be inhabited by the holy Muse, which is a tremendous honor unavailable to men? Graves reluctantly concedes that lesbians might have a shot at producing an occasional poem that's not doggerel (and even then it's not a "fruitful" relationship with the Muse, as his own male-female relationship is), but the rest of us chicks are hopeless as poets, because true poets must have an erotic relationship with the female Muse.

In other words, because male heterosexuality and spirituality and creativity are inextricably linked for Graves himself, he assumes that his own experience is the One True Way to Be a Poet; therefore, the entire universe must conform to his own worldview.

But I really lose patience when Graves says that the poet's unwavering faithfulness to the goddess requires him to not get too attached to the mortals in which she temporarily resides. That's right, poets are to worship the immortal Muse by recognizing her divine presence in the young, beautiful body of a mortal woman...making sweet love to her for a period of time...and then spotting when the goddess no longer resides in that particular mortal, but has moved on to inhabit the body of another beautiful young woman. If you don't move on when the goddess does, you are no longer worshipping Her--you have shackled yourself to a mere mortal, and are no longer worthy of receiving divine poetic inspiration.

Bottom line--to be a really great poet, you've gotta love 'em and leave 'em, and not be overly concerned about the trail of broken hearts and lives in your wake. What does it matter if a series of once-young, once-naïve women are now struggling to keep food on the table while they raise your bastards alone in a hostile society...so long as you got a smattering of really good love poems out of each of them? That's what counts.

Sorry, but I'm inclined to empathize with the young women who got used and discarded by both the poet and the goddess (who looks more and more like merely a personification of the poet's own wandering eye, and his unchanging sexual appetite for young, firm bodies, in spite of the fact that bodies change with time, pregnancy, etc.).

Claiming that the poet is not to blame for his cruelty, because ultimately it is the cruelty of someone else (the goddess)...and further claiming that his secular unfaithfulness is actually religious faithfulness...is the most outrageous, self-serving bullshit I've ever heard in my life.

So no, I'm not too enthused about Graves's thesis. Seems awfully misogynistic and homophobic from where I'm standing.

I have always found the idea of the book intriguing and felt bad for never having got around to reading it. Given your summary I am glad not to have wasted the hours.

I have always looked at the incarnation of the Goddess in a reverse manner, I feel like the presence of the Goddess in an individual is the multi-vocal part of the feminine--the bit of all women in every woman which in turn makes some of the accusations of monogamy being inherently boring more a matter of lack of sight and perception. I am sure my language here is clumsy and a bit hetero but I don't think the idea behind it is.

As far as the muse goes, I think poets are human as are their muses so Muse with a large M in poems is almost meaningless to me. I do think the poetry that scribbler and muse express in the space between them is up from Under and not theirs as individuals alone. I think gender in either poet or muse is as free as the animal spectrum is.

FWIW.

John Foy has some things to say HERE

As Foy notes in the Raintown version, this represented my views at the time (and for the most part now):

From that Raintown article:
To talk about the Muse is to talk about where poems come from, and how. They come to us from people, places, ideas, things, sensations, experiences, memories, the dead, and our own intense emotions. Then we ask how they come.

I think what the writer names as the where is really the how. The...stuff comes to us as people, places, memories, the dead. And we try to represent the...stuff with phrase or word or rhyme. Some of which comes predisposed from lots of past use for similar attempts. Words, rhymes, and such carry the remnants of a lineage of proximity to certain veins of the stuff. They have tendencies in sound and sense from their poetic history because the stuff is potent and leaves a mark on language. But where is it from, this stuff? From a Who, emergent from matter or more dualist-daring? From a Completely Outside? From a Crazy Deep Inside? From a Happy Accident of Primate Yodeling Place?

Julie,

A book with the thesis that Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and WH Auden can’t be great poets is only suitable to line bird cages, IMHO.

As for the notion that great artists must be cads because they are only faithful to the Muse – I think Woody Allen skewered that deliciously in “Bullets Over Broadway”. Yes, Woody Allen.

My Muse is a he. He is stubborn, infuriating, unfaithful, transfixing and wholly irresistible. To me.

Julie,

I think you're overstating the case against Graves a little bit, but he's certainly guilty. The Laura Riding stuff is troubling... but perhaps one was as unbalanced as the other. I'd hate to be a referee in that particular situation... I think I'd likely go nuts myself.

I did, though, find the book valuable. It was my first approach to the triple goddess, a kind of springboard to other things. It also helped me call into question some of the patriarchal religious assumptions I'd been taught in my previous schooling.

As for the views of some others, well, there's so much blasphemy about the Muse it's hard to even know where to start. No argument I could make could serve Her anyway, She seems to have little interest in such things. She just wants me to write, and I wrote a halfway decent poem this afternoon, and three others got published today, so She's happy, I think. In the morning, she'll be on my case again, but for tonight, my offerings seem to have pleased her.

Best,

Bill

I'm pretty much where Bill is on the Graves. The Laura Riding story is weird city, but I do like things about that book, and many of Graves's poems as well.

But Graves didn't grasp that muses come in many shades of light and dark. The "All saints revile her" part of his poem would have surprised Dante quite a bit. Apollo's getting such short shrift is a post-Nietzsche, post-Freud reflex. Apollo's provenance in the myths is much more than reason. He played a harp. And poets know that number and language have a hidden bond.

So Graves was myopic or narrow in his a-musement. He didn't see that Logos is not merely logical, and that inspiration is not only hell, but hell, heaven, and everything in between.

I found much of value in Graves's book, and I enjoyed the parts that didn't make me throw it across the room.

I do think it's important to recognize, though, that we all need to find our own set of keys to the universe. Graves's set of keys worked for him, and some of those keys work very well for me, too, and I'm grateful to him for sharing them with me; but he seemed unwilling to entertain the notion that other working sets of keys exist, or that some of his keys might not work in exactly the way he thought they did.

I've been thinking a lot about the Apollo-Dionysus (or Apollo-Marsyas) dichotomy over the past few months. (Graves casts it as Apollo-Earth Goddess, I think.) Personally, I find it very unhelpful to recast the intellect-emotion dichotomy in terms of gender, because it just superimposes one set of stereotypes over another and makes something muddled even more muddled.

I'm afraid I was offensive with my first sentence above. I haven’t read the book. I amused myself a little too much with my prose, I think. I apologize.

(My edit was cross-posted w/ Julie's next post -- Julie whom I thank for her understanding.)

Well, that's understandable, Michael, since my synopsis wasn't exactly a balanced consideration of the book's strengths and weaknesses. We all get a little carried away sometimes.

Digressing a bit....

I know lots of atheists and agnostics who refer to "my muse" in terms of a metaphysical entity with a mind of his or her own. However, I'm confident that they don't actually believe that such an entity exists, except in the way that "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus"...i.e., both the muse and Santa Claus are personifications of abstractions (perhaps the impulse to create/innovate and the impulse to give others joy, respectively) in which they do very much believe.

But for many people, the idea of a muse does seem to be, literally or figuratively, a question of spirituality or religion. Christian writers often refer to the Holy Spirit as their muse, and I've heard lots of people refer to receiving ideas from "somewhere else" when they are in a properly receptive mood...sometimes when they are in a state of altered consciousness or relaxation after meditation/prayer, fasting, substances, or sex.

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'm in the latter camp myself, but if another mental model works for others, more power to them. There's no empirical right answer. (However, trying to convert someone from a belief which demonstrably does them more good than harm is definitely wrong.)

A spirituality-based conception of creativity may be very helpful to some people, while not working at all for others...just as some recovering addicts find twelve-step programs a real lifesaver, while others find such programs' continual emphasis on a higher power so cult-like that they can't lower their resistance enough to derive much benefit. Fortunately, other valid approaches exist. And I find others' approaches more interesting and worthy of respect than the narrator of my recent poem did.

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

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ross, you make me want to read the book. Or a book by you along those lines.

Your comment reminds me a bit of the philosophy of Nikolai Berdyaev, which I dug into at the suggestion of Norman Ball here on these boards. I found Berdyaev very compelling, excellent reading.

Michael Ferris
It's a pity Graves' didn't spend more time rewriting The White Goddess, it was written in a rush of inspiriation and then published. Such a scholarly work needed more thought and research. Many have questioned it's scholarship and therefore it's conclusions.
I still think it is unique in it's approach, how many books on poetry deal with the inspiration behind poetry as opposed to the usual academic explanations about what poetry/a poem means.
Personally I think any artist connects to the divine when they create, (that is, if they are a truly creative artist). So the more you understand the divine in terms of religions, myths and rituals that have inspired people who came before you, the more you understand how creativity functions The great danger is when creativity deserts one, which it can do at any time, if you have the resources to see the wider context then you can see that being 'creative' is not the only aspect of the divine that can be accessed.
Many live their life simply trying to be holy, quietly meditating and praying and getting on with the business of living, such people may never create anything artistically and yet may well be experiencing the divine in ways that are very wonderful.

I'm late to this thread and confess I haven't read it in its entirely. So apologies if I cover old ground. However I see the ramping up of Fall poems across the way, so it got me thunkin'...

It's an interesting (though perhaps ill--fated) poetic challenge to re-imagine Fall without recourse to leaves, amber, crunching sounds or rakes. Can it be done, or has the season itself been permanently consigned to certain obligatory touchstones?

Graves (notoriously stingy over the appellation of 'poet') suggests that poetry is inseparable from the rhythms of moon (and menstrual) cycles, crop yields, fallow and pregnant fields, etc. Thus poetry itself is a celebration of the seasonal ebb and flow of fertility. Surely the modern, urban (urbane?) poet might take exception to this very narrow furrow.

Does Fall have residual meaning beyond fertility in abeyance, in which case the onslaught of falling leaves may become well-nigh unavoidable?

Norm! Make a list of all the touchstones forbidden by the Arlington Manifesto and then let's have a challenge to write a piece to Autumn without them. If they all suck, we will know.

"Make a list of all the touchstones forbidden by the Arlington Manifesto and then let's have a challenge to write a piece to Autumn without them."

Let me gallantly bat it back and ask, what does Fall mean to you?

I'm thinking...

A prisoner of rote imagery. A cul de sac curbed on three sides by convention. An cognitive strait jacket: When someone says 'don't think of Fall', your mind has little recourse but to picture carpets of orange leaves.

Fall is a prisoner. Poetry is its captor.

I've started a thread over at Drills and Amusements. Sounds like fun!