Male Muses
Oh, how we revere the Male Writer with his Female Muse!! But she is being used for his purposes noble or not and we romanticize it all do we not?
I am not angry! (It is funny). But do they not see? Female Muses to men are active in their passivity. By contrast, Male Muses are deliciously passive in action, not inaction; they are ready-steady toward Woman-Writer’s manic.
And since modern men were not bred servants to women, she-Artist who muses a man is considered obsessive – less romanticized: pathologized.
Female Muses are ideal for Male Artists because they most often are quite passive. Man Writer imprints upon her his projections, bleeds her dry. “What’s the matter?” Always a matter.
She complies. In fact, she just lays there, may lie, her needs she keeps quiet – or worse: loud, so loud, but what is this?! Ah, yes! Here comes her white knight!
If a man focused-upon responds to a woman’s fawning and prompts in normal ways of returning attention, he is but a BURDEN to her and her art, and fails as Muse in an instant.
This now becomes boyfriend material. This has no place in her musing realm of unreal realities, machinations and imaginations in fantasy. She has a book to write that she is unaware needs written.
Do not bother her with your needs, Man! She is busy (m)using you for what SHE requires, feels. Be there when she is human and asks for advice. Burst that you are not an Agony Aunt, tell her to fuck off, to give it space and spice.
And return, unsure, of which woman you are with now. Is she the Female Writer studying you as specimen? Is she a hurt friend, looking to you to make an amend?
An effective Male Muse for this voracious Female Writer, has Asperger qualities, in my opinion: logical, debilitatingly sensitive, fierce engagement in the bluntest of ways. Affected only on His terms, if and when he can, and does so consistently. Interested.
A smart man used as muse will recognize her stage, says: “You couldn’t play me if you tried,” but lays receptive to projections in her smiles. And abides if spoken to directly, abides.
It is impossible to acquire a new Male Muse as one might select her eggs and proper-sized cheese blocks at the grocer’s.
When musing, a Female Writer is lost labyrinthinic in a secret world of signs and coincidences that bind her to the Man in manner, infinite.
Magic (Male Muses) maintains mystery for a Female Writer for as long as She’s wired to pattern. Man unravels it but Universe is in charge.
Friend, it is why I talk often of death. Why, my story started with a first love who looked like a man who like a man in London looked like him, and then… That London chap’s man wore a ballcap and full circle back to looking like the first man – my man, my old love for whom I’d break off since my eyes wandered for the lookalike rockstar in my home town.
So what is left if all the pieces added up, and all the men were found?
And that my first love married the perfect woman in the image of his mom: safe and smiling unlike yours truly at the pen full of ferocity and sincerity and fierce desire to always be feeling; one for longer dinner conversations debating with personalities; and, blunt-fire accusations of ridiculous meanderings coupled with monologic discourses that inspire and infuriate the non-opinion minions.
I’ve chased tail and chasing my tail in a tale spun from Ottawa to London, with a stop over on the television with Muse in San Francisco. It rests now on the other side of the world in New Zealand. Like a volcano under a big blue sky. Dormant.
Like a virus that if I be weakened, and if He smelt blood, could erupt through few words, one note, a call-out code-red in an instant.
Do you know how it feels to know someone holds the key to a lock you’ve lost or best leave forgotten?
No, even in the silence between the Female Writer and her former Male Muse, then, is a wee belief that His retreat is intentional and in that He gives her something.
Yes, the dynamics between the Male Artist with his Female Muse are known, documented by great male poets and accepted.
But when the Female Artist takes a Male Muse, one-sided, yes – she may be looking to play Saviour and save Him. She sees all at once he is Human and loves him for it.
And, calls “bullshit” when it is all done.
She looks back at the trip. For some, Musing shields us from living our current life in our skin. Preference for a more electric current filled with mood, urges, yearning and coincidence.
Whether “fated” or forced – when Leonard Cohen saw to introduce himself and help Marianne by the door. Damsel in distress or all in the Poet; a gentleman compassionate compatriot of women left alone with herself and a baby and a basket.
(My, my it is sounding like Kundera’s Tomas finding Tereza was like a child put in a pitch-daubed bulrush basket and sent downstream, it seems. I maybe prefer Serge Gainsbourg chasing his basket-bag Birkin through the gutters of Paris!)
I might have done well then with chancing such fortune? Moving to Hydra, belly bloated with a child conceived in London, and waiting for my poet-soldier on an island?
But no, as a Woman Writer I have very few role models. Most of them suicidal, called nutters and psychiatric survivors. Or so misunderstood in a society favouring men and their customs.
Oh, how we revere the Male Writer with his Female Muse!! But she is being used for his purposes noble or not and we romanticize it all do we not?
I am not angry! (It is funny). But do they not see? “So long, Marianne…” has a special ring. “Where the fuck did you go, Jim?” has but comical sting.
It is poetic for Man Poet Cohen to leave Marianne and we all mourn the division. But for the Female Muser who jonesed her fill still, who crossed the line poorly from Writer to Human needing his compassion, well she could learn a thing or two from a wandering Jew and bohemian Montrealer…
Discarding people like wrappers of candy bars so we Writers can savour the treat – happens. But Cohen invited Marianne to the feast. And, my Male Muse so often ruined my appetite that I did not, could not, want to eat.
But voracious in my cravings for a strange nourishment He breeds, beyond the interactions in real life between the Writer and Subject, darling dear girl Writer and Male Muser (of which I know only a famous one of Colin Farrell), please know when it is time to go…
… and when it’s time to right back your (m)useless future.
For musing is a luxurious distraction from Life that one puts into books for some kind of comfort.
But when the last word is written, and no one bothers with criticism, and the tome sits in tomb like the secrets of your womb, then darling – just shut up.
Self-destruct, or make a Life like Cohen with his art! But be you full-time in your fancy thoughts yet part-time on the Artist’s job, with your fancy man of days bygone, you are nothing if only intolerable.
Just get married, have kids and raise a family and do a job you don’t really like. Sit at home on weekends in your superb home theatre and read the newspaper at breakfast gawking over headlines. Stay quiet, don’t rock the boat and save all your money for your kids and retirement. Like T.S. Eliot said of these kinds of folks, they had dream once, they died, and at death – reckoned, this was a “good life.”
No thank you. Set me instead on fire.
Is what I might say with a Muse in my way, but museless – I ask only to keep my fire on the wood, my tears in the rain, and the past safely stored in the fossils of my brain.
And pain – in migraines. No more heartache, again. The brains ache. “This hurts my brain,” like you’d say.
When we are musing, we are using a Force, for which we are resilient against blame. You muse with no choice, and in the end you always gain. Wisdom and experience and incredible stories some nights over pints you’d tell those who cared, or who were the same.
But mostly, it’s a quiet storm forever in your soul it rages. And sometimes smug, you look around and pity the morons with no substance. Then your smile turns to a cry inside as you wish you could be – dumb.
Yet thank Goddess you’re half-crazy enough and maybe even moronic, to be wired to some Power that lets you see pattern or at least – to create and adopt some.
The Male Muse for this Woman Writer is her conduit, her pusher and her driver. But the One who sees her coming his way, who can race her then pull her over even crash her in jest – surely will be her Lover to whom in spirit and body finally surrender, and rest…
Sylvie Hill 2016
