Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone, Part 5: Taking Leaps

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This is Part 5 of a series of blogs on the ancient concept of the muse, and whether it has any uses for writers today.
For a writer, it’s useful to listen to those voices in your head—call them the muses if you want. Those voices sometimes tell us to do crazy things: “Joan, put on men’s armor and chase the English out of France for the glory of God.” Did Joan of Arc say, “Dude, that is so random! I’m just a teenager in a small city in France. You must be totally tripping.” No. She chased the English out of France. I think listening to those voices can be a much more exciting and daring way to work as a writer than to write from your everyday consciousness.

So when do you not listen to the voices, to the muse? When the voices tell you to do things that will not strengthen you or your writing. How do you know which ideas will weaken you and your writing, and which will not? There you do have to make the call yourself, using good judgment.

I’ve been talking about the power of the muse, but I've hardly even mentioned examples from poetry, the art that has always been the first to call on the muse.

There are the times that a poem just arrives as a gift from out of the blue, almost in a finished form. As I've mentioned, Rainer Maria Rilke is one classic example of this, writing the final sections of The Duino Elegies and his Sonnets to Orpheus in the space of a few weeks in Duino Castle in the winter of 1922. That sort of gift poem is the product of inspiration, one way the muse comes into our writing.

 But there's another way we as writers can really learn from the idea of the muse: in trusting those leaps of language, emotion, and subject that happen when you stretch logic and metaphor and feeling to its breaking point. In those moments you trust that the muse will allow you to stay in the realm of communication even though you may feel you’ve jumped off a diving board in the pitch dark with no sense of how far down the water is. I’m talking about poetic lines like these from Federico García Lorca’s “Gacela of Unforeseen Love,”

A thousand Persian ponies fell asleep

in the moonlit plaza of your forehead

while through four nights I embraced

your waist, enemy of the snow.

[translated by W.S. Merwin]

“A thousand Persian ponies fell asleep/in the moonlit plaza of your forehead”. The guy is nuts, right? And yet, when you fall in love with someone, you glimpse a peace as profound, crazy, and beautiful as a thousand Persian ponies dreaming in a midnight plaza, and Lorca has described that as literally as William Carlos Williams’s cold plums missing from the icebox in his poem “This Is Just to Say.”

And where is the muse in this metaphor of the poet jumping off the high diving board in total darkness? Is the muse splashing around in the pool, waiting to swim with you when you reach the water? Too distant. And anyway, then you might land on her when you hit the pool. Is the muse holding your hand as you dive? No, sorry, no one is holding your hand. As André Breton, the French Surrealist poet said, “Writing is the loneliest road that leads everywhere.” No, in the metaphor of the diving board, the muse is the one who pushes you off before you’re ready to jump, not knowing if what you’re going to say will make sense to a single other human being.

Other recent posts about writing topics:How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry? 

Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone? Part 3, Allow Your Writing a Life of Its Own

“O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend

The brightest heaven of invention…”

I still get a few shivers when I read that cry for a muse at the very beginning of Shakespeare’s play Henry V. “A Muse of Fire”—I love it! That’s the opposite of cliché language, to take the muses, spirits of the water, and turn them into flame.

But I’m not suggesting that you begin your works with an address to the muse. That is the very last thing I would ever suggest.

What’s most interesting to me about the ancient concept of the muse is that it seems like a fairly accurate description of the creative process when it reaches a certain speed or intensity—in other words, when it works best. When we are writing at our most inspired, it does feel as if the work is flowing from a spring beyond our personal consciousness. Even if we are writing about our most intimate memories or hopes, a moment can occur where we feel as if we are taking dictation, or as if the work is pouring through us, rather than from us.

This reminds me of that famous moment in literary history when the poet Rainer Maria Rilke was walking by himself on the ramparts of Duino Castle by the Adriatic Sea, at the very edge of the European landmass and at the extreme moment of his personal despair. Rilke looked at the waves dynamiting against the rocks and the bunched-up storm and heard the first words of the Duino Elegies come to him as if out of a dark cloud: “Even if I cried out loud, who would hear me in the ranks of the angels?” It’s a strange and fascinating question: why does he need the angels to hear him? That kind of line in Rilke’s poetry is so intriguing and maddening. It’s what makes me come back to his work over and over.

What does this mean for us as writers, that we seem to reach our greatest personal triumphs when we are least personally in control of our writing? It’s a humbling truth, one that should keep us from getting too swell-headed about our work. But beyond that, can we use the idea of the muse, or of an external inspiration, in practice? Can this idea help us as writers and as critical editors of our own creations?

To try to persuade you why this is important, I’m going to approach this subject by means of a metaphor: the parent and the child. There is a sense in which we are the parents of our writing, not its owners, any more than a father or a mother owns a child. Parents always want certain things for their children—those wishes may be a father or mother’s deepest hopes, in fact. But parents who insist on their children being just like them or parents who demand that their kids fulfill their frustrated dreams are missing one of the great mysteries of parenting. The greater challenge, for the parent and for the writer, is to witness the child or the work forming itself on its own, so closely related to the parent, but independent and with its own hopes and desires and weaknesses. Similarly, when we see our own writing most clearly is when we are no longer thinking of what we want for the work. We begin to think of what is best for the work. We start to let our writing tell us what it wants us to do for it, not what we want for it.

In my next blog I’ll discuss how this need for the work to exist on its own played out in the writing of one of my favorite novels, Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Márquez.

Other recent posts about writing topics:Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Why Write Poetry? 

Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer