Is the muse out there? To be inspired or to inspire one’s self?
Is the muse inside or outside? That question has gnawed at me since I coined the phrase “Yoga As Muse” years ago. And over the years the phrase has rubbed more than one writer with whom I’ve worked the wrong way. Once, a writer in Taos said to me in private something to the effect of, “I like what you’re doing, but there’s something about the word ‘muse’ that doesn’t sit right with me. Something about some entity outside of me,” and her flittering fingers made a gesture that implied fairy dust.
I nodded and said something like, “Right, right.” I cleared my throat and said, “But the idea of Yoga As Muse is that the muse is within and that any source of ‘inspiration’ is at our disposal as readily as is the harnessed breath.” She wasn’t satisfied. “Muse” still said to her Tinkerbell.
A few years ago at a workshop I offered in Woodstock, New York, the point came up again. A sweet-faced man said, “Do you sometimes feel as if another force is coming through you? When I write, I feel as if I’m simply channeling some other force.” He smiled wide as if he had found a kindred spirit.“No,” I quipped. “I take full responsibility for whatever dribble I might write.” He stopped smiling. I hope the poor man didn’t feel shunned. Probably not. He and his force are probably happy as dancing clams co-writing book after book while I wrestle like Job with mine.
But I understand what that man meant, in part. More than once, I’ve re-read something I’ve written, been privately pleased, and wondered, “How did I write that? Where was I when I wrote that?” And the truth may be “I” got out of the way. Or, rather, a part of my mind that’s attached to my little personality being projected to the world stepped aside for the moment so that a deeper imagination, felt mind, and sensual tongue could come out to play.
Still, the idea of a “muse out there” is dangerous to some aspiring writers. Recently, I offered a one-hour tele-seminar with up2Yoga about Yoga As Muse. A young writer said that for years she’s only written spontaneously when she felt “inspired” but does not feel as if she has any control over when those feelings arise. She’d like to write more consistently. That’s the problem. Some young writers grow up thinking that to be a “real writer” you must work yourself up into an intoxicated frenzy or get dizzy on the Himalayan peaks and write unfettered and free-form a la myths of Jack Kerouac. Whether booze or Headstand, the muse is supposed to propel them into ecstasy-driven verses and memoirs. But what about the other 364 days of the year when you’re doing the laundry, raising kids, and driving to work? The muse is not out there, I tell these aspiring writers. You don’t have to wait for the muse to show up, I say. It’s here. You show up for it. (And leave the bottled spirits to the tortured literary ghosts of the past.)
Then, Elizabeth Gilbert comes along and shakes it all up. I watched her deliver a smart talk at TED in which she persuasively suggests we at least imagine again the Greco-Roman idea of the “personal genius” as a creative person’s muse. The Greco-Roman idea of “genius” – from which the word “genie” derives – is that we each have a genius, not that any one is a genius. It’s sort of like having your own personal assistant, only this assistant teems with novel ideas and insights, fresh associations, riveting characters and voices, a panoply of material. At least, that is, if you’re assigned a good genius or if your genius is having a good day.
Imagining such an idea – what’s the harm of imagining? – gives writers a necessary distance on their process. Gilbert says writers then don’t have to feel mortified if they’ve produced a wretched novel: Their genius didn’t work especially hard. And they also cannot gloat if their book takes the globe by surprise like, say, Eat, Pray, Love: It was mostly the personal genius’s work. Such an idea of the personal genius could, Gilbert suggests, hold the writer’s ego in check.
It’s a seductive idea. I want to imagine my personal genius. Right now, she’s probably an over-worked task-master. But when I listen to her, take walks with her, and just sit quietly with her by a creek or by a window, she invariably fills me with a manic stream of metaphors or sound clusters that help me wade again in a pool of language. For better or worse. Yes, sometimes she carries me away on a metaphor ferry. She’s edgy and earthy, has dried moss for hair in the shape of dreadlocks, and tells me bawdy jokes about insects and plants that I don’t really get. She laughs anyway. And she also does something to my skin. Sort of strokes it as I write so I can feel the words on the page like entities themselves instead of just letting words shoot out like widgets from a machine. She puts the spell in spelling.
But I know, too, something about Homer and Virgil and Ovid and all those marvelous bards who called upon the muses. When they called upon the muses to breathe into them, they weren’t speaking figuratively. The Greek word pneuman and the Latin word spiritus both mean “breath” but also mean “wind” and “breeze” and “soul” and “spirit.” It is the life force that moves through them and allows them to do what earth’s elements do so effortlessly – create. The root of the wordinspiration is spirare, this way of breathing the life force that is wind and soul.
What the Romans called spiritus the yogis call prana. And pranayama is the art of harnessing this creative force within the body. A person learns this art first by learning breathing exercises. But those exercises are only the beginning of the art. Over time, a yogi, or Yoga As Muser for that matter, learns several ways to shift fatigue, self-doubt, and a crowded mind to a creative frame of mind. They may not be “inspired” with trumpets blaring as the red sun rises, but they do muster the equanimity to put one word in front of the other and walk with a bit more ease on the page.
Maybe the practice primes the mind to receive the personal genius. I can hear my little genius laughing in my study. She’s lounging on the chaise lounge that looks onto the wide-mouthed pond out back.
“What are you laughing at?” I ask.
“You. You have to be so practical, so rational all the time. That prana stuff is not all science, you know?” She winds a tender finger in her dreadlock moss and whispers, “Let a little magic and mystery in.”
I get up and move to the living room. At this moment, a wood fire blazes in the cast-iron stove. A fourteen-year-old cat licks its matted fur and then gazes at the flames. A woman fries eggs in a skillet. And a six-month-old girl squirms on the hardwood floor, fascinated with a stripe of sunlight.
Tiferet: A Journal of Spiritual Literature seeks high-quality fiction for its upcoming issues in 2010. With a few exceptions, we print only work that has not been published previously. We look for writing that helps to express the complexities of spiritual experience. “Spiritual experience” does not necessarily translate to “religious,” and for us it does not translate to “proselytizing.” Most of all, we seek good fictional writing from both new and established writers.
Guidelines:
Please submit only one story at a time.
Your manuscript should be double-spaced with full author information including your name, address, phone number, and e-mail address on the first page. A brief cover letter is useful. Please use only our online Submission Manager.
We acquire first-time North American rights; non-exclusive, one-time anthology rights; and the right to run a portion of the story on our web site. After publication, all other rights revert to the author and the work may be reprinted as long as appropriate acknowledgment to TIFERET Magazine is made.
Authors proof their galleys and will receive 2 copies of the issue in which their work appears.
We read submissions year-round but regret we can’t comment on all of them. All manuscripts are carefully considered. Turn-around time is usually 1-3 months.
We look forward to reading your work. Thank you.
Jeffrey Davis, Fiction Editor editors@tiferetjournal.com
Two bits of good news: First, I am honored that Tiferet Journal accepted my short story “Nail on the Head” to come out this February.
Second, I am especially honored that the publisher of Tiferet has invited me on board as fiction editor.
Tiferet publishes four online issues and two beautiful and substantial print issues a year. At a new subscription rate of $15 a year, Tiferet is a bargain.
In a 2006 issue of TIFERET, I came across an association with massage to writing that resonated. In an interview with writer Brenda Miller, Miller (also a massseuse) says that in massage a masseuse must be intuitive and listen intently to what is going on. Writing, she says, is similar: You have to get into that intuitive state.
She’s spot on. I’ve been writing about this very thing lately. A few weeks ago, I was refining some material for an e-mail Yoga and Writing course I’m teaching this month on Yoga, Writing, and Writing Into the True Self, and I thought this group might appreciate some of it:
A character’s body, its infinite parts and endless history, grounds my writer’s “processor mind.” My processor mind is the mind that strives to explain away, to over-think and analyze, to complete the story or poem long before my imagination and hands have even reached the tenth sentence or line. It is all sky and meaning and figuring out; it is little earth.
If I can imagine how a character’s hands finesse a hammer and even what the fingers look like – sausages or drum sticks or budding hickory branches in summer – then my processor mind gives way to the felt mind. The felt mind strokes textures, senses what only Doris’s skin on her spotted forearms feels like on this one icy blue January morning. The felt mind hears the sounds of syllables and lets words wash over the inner ear and insides of my own fingers even as I write. If the processor mind is made of air and steel, then the felt mind is made of silk and sinew, of felt and grit. It is mostly earth.
I access the felt mind at key moments when writing, moments that are difficult, I admit, to distinguish. When I hear language lag or clunk, when I feel it grow cumbersome and stale like some scholar’s stack of moldy books, then I pause and listen for the words behind the words, the textures beneath the phrases. When I hear the writing voice strain to explain to the reader some point – Do you get it? Are you following me? – then I close my eyes and let the sound of breath lead my imagination to an image. A bulbous nose the shape of a large garlic clove appears on the face of Doris’s date. A pang arises in an uncle’s generous belly. The image brings my language back to earth, so to speak, and gives my imagination – and that of my readers – something to hold on to.
To arouse my felt mind, I regularly bring a character’s body to the mat. The mat has helped me sense, paradoxically, what it must have felt like to be that 26-year-old lonely workaholic who shares my name with no notion of his body below his neck. The mat has helped me explore the body of Doris, an imagined 58-year-old woman who, I think for now at least, is a not-too-bitter widow and who, while trying to revive her dating life, grieves her southward-bound breasts. My existing emotional body – with its own creaky crevices and layers of sensations – is my grounding point. The emotional body mixed with embodied imagination and intuition lure me into these character’s body-scapes that I might do justice to their experience.
Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer Robert Olen Butler actually uses the word “trance” to describe to his undergrads in Florida what they need to get into in order to write. “Do whatever you need to,” he says in essence, “to get into that waking dream state.”
This subtle yoga and meditation practice entrances me and gives me entrance to the felt mind. Studies on Yoga Nidra and other yogic practices have shown that even beginning practitioners demonstrate increased emotional intelligence - and their brain stimulation corroborates that the brain’s limbic system (what we might call the brain’s emotional zone) communicates with the brain’s somatosensory region (where stimulation for touch and body orientation arise).
Thanks for your comments on previous posts, by the way. I’d love to hear more about your experiences with yoga & writing.
- Jeffrey
CENTER TO PAGE
MOVING WRITERS FROM
THE CENTER TO THE PAGE C E N T E R T O P A G E . C O M The Journey from the Center to the Page (Monkfish 2008; Penguin 2004)
Is the muse out there? To be inspired or to inspire one’s self?
