the muse in the Face of humans, angels, dolphins, daffodils

"Tantrikas write poetry, not philosophy", Pavarthi said once. I marvel at the need for a book on how to write a love letter...as if it weren't innate.

Before year-end, I shared the provocative question, "What's your dream?". Yet never shared my answer. Here it is, distilled down from five words to four: GLOBAL AWAKENING THROUGH ART.

That might beg the question, What is art? For me, art is a crystallization in form of simple formlessness of beauty, peace, glory, harmony. I think that there's a distinct possibility that beauty and harmony prevail on almost any universe, although I cannot know that for sure, so I'll focus on this universe. This planet Earth.

My dream came from inspiration, and you can probably guess that's a bit too big for me to tackle all by my wee self. Yet you're never ever all by with your wee self with inspiration whispering into your ear.

Still, I've not mentioned anything about partners in inspiration. Thus far what I've written it's been you and Her. And me and Her.

But what about us?

What about human muses? What about fellow artists? What about faeries? What about angels? What about daffodils? What about tomatoes? What about cacti? What about dolphins? How does life animating these sentient beings spark inspiration and aid our mutual dreams?

This blog started as an attempt to gear up for a worldwide journey to the creative class centers of the world. I'm less intested these days in investigating collective creativity than I am in sparking and living it.

As I wrote an acquaintenance last year whom thought my core strength was as a buzz marketer: "[M]y true interest is in how movements are born, things like civil rights movement, sixties, Italian renaissance, etc. And even how communities come together after disaster to rebuild such as Indian Ocean tsunami, 9/11, Katrina, 1906 SF quake." That's definitely buzzing, but it's more about spreading beauty and grace like wildflowers and circulating it about like bees for a different objective: a social art that speaks in the sacred tongue familiar to each of us.

So I suppose my truest interest is collectively creating a new world where matter itself is penetrated and enlivened by the most sublime of essence.

Thus it must seem mighty strange that I talk more about being true to your own self here than collective creativity. Yet without a strong commitment to your own uniqueness and integrity, any collective could devolve into groupthink (and sterile soulless) mobs.

I met a few folks from a New Orleans collective the other night. "I loved you the first moment I met you," said one who'd I met at a neighborhood tree planting of grape myrtles and magnolias and live oaks a week before. "Your energy. You love people," he said by way of explanation. He introduces me to the other artists.

We talked about having a video interview on Wednesday at their studio space since they seemed to intensely grok my rebirth motif. After the St. Claude Gallery Night, somehow Wednesday seemed too far off to delve deeper into conversation (& conversation being an art form all of its self).

We spontaneously ended up chatting late into that evening at their collective space. Anything I could say about the group right now would sound trite in letters and punctuation and line breaks. You know mutuality and love when you feel it.

We mistake lovers for Love. And I do have a tendency to fall in love with the human incarnations of the Muse. (Yes, they can certainly be male.) Yet that's not absolutely necessary.

"Now that doesn't negate the fact that honestly, yes, in fact, what I wrote last two days is sparked by your presence (it doesn't need to be local for me to feel it) and paradox too in knowing it's ultimate Source which is about you too but doesn't stop there. Doesn't stop period. So it's like a love letter to Russell. But even more it's a Love letter to Love." - from an email I wrote to a muse last year (name changed to protect the Beloved ;-))

The wealth of heart full art from Dante shows what I mean. Dante wooed Beatrice in his heart, without ever consummating any tangible affair.

It'd be a travesty to restrict love to your Muse. Or delude myself into thinking they are The literal source of inspiration. They embody for me the source of inspiration, which is quite an important distinction. When you are with them, you are arrested and they easily strip you to your undefended heart, a bursting of love and creativity with every melting (or meeting) that crosses your path. They simply rekindle the god in all things. (Thank you to Nola spiritual teacher Judith Linden for the term "undefended heart").

As I've been told that New Orleans is the root chakra of the country. I interpreted that base chakra's concerns to revolve around survival and security. A friend corrects me: "It's more about integrating the primal." Primal? My mind jumps to the animalistic savage undomesticated Lilith (who unlike the dust coalescing into Adam) was fashioned from filth and sediment.

Days later, what's primal is answered because the Muse has that way about them:

you have a sweet unobtrusive way of
opening
my heart into its natural innocence

nigh impossible to shield it

and who'd want to (even out of habit)
i'd miss the overwhelm of perfume of the night-blooming jasmine
and the long moan of the train like an church organ on Press St and
its freight car graffiti proclaiming "You Are your Art"
and the clouds shifting slow over the levee

something (someOne? mySelf?) spoke to me in the silence
the other day and it said to me:
"There's a primal heart, Evelyn. There's a primal heart too.

That's where
music wells up from." - email today to a recent muse

This subject is so rich and so deep, I don't know where to go next and maybe that might be enough for today anyhow. And maybe too I'm afraid I might dissolve into the ether of it all.

I think I will share two snippets from selections sent to muses in my past that speak of muses and musing:

So I came to this Rilke poem (I love Rilke) referencing the courtesan, poet and accomplished lute-player Tullia D'Aragona that I wanted to share with you...

Die Laute (The Lute)

by Rainer Maria Rilke

I am the lute. Perhaps you'd like to dress
my figure in your words. My curving stripes
you may describe as if I were a ripe
full-bodied fig. Why not over-stress

the darkness you perceive in me? I shared
Tullia's darkness. I've even more than she
had in her private parts and her bright hair
shone like a ballroom. Sometimes we

performed duets: her mouth took up the sound
that swelled from me, embellishing my song.
Against her softness I held tight and strong
until our intermingling was profound.

they write: By the way, the Rilke poem is incredibly comforting and erotic all at once. How can things do both at the same time?

[Another letter:]

After Michelangelo's muse and confidant (doubtful they ever took their communion into lovemaking, sometimes even sex is superfluous), Vittoria Colonna died, he began work on the Florentine Pieta, and envisioned it as a sculpture of Vittoria/Mary Magdalene - because she was Magdalene to him. Michelangelo wrote in his letters:

"How can it be, Lady, as one can see from long experience, that the
live image sculpted in hard alpine stone lasts longer than its maker
whom the years returned to ashes?

...

and I know, for I prove it true in beautiful sculpture, that time and
death can't keep their threat to the work. Therefore, I can give both
of us long life in any medium, whether colours or stone, by depicting
each of these faces of ours; so that a thousand years after our
departure may be seen how lovely you were, how wretched I, and how in
loving you I was no fool."

"The sonnets of Michelangelo, recently given to the world, were written when he was nearly seventy years old. Several of the sonnets are directly addressed to Vittoria Colonna, and no doubt she inspired the whole volume.

A writer of the time has mentioned his accidentally finding Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna seated side by side in the dim twilight of a deserted church, "talking soft and low." Deserted churches have ever been favorite trysting-places for lovers; and one is glad for this little glimpse of quiet and peace in the tossing, troubled life-journey of this tireless man.

In fact, the few years of warm friendship with Vittoria Colonna is a charmed and temperate space, without which the struggle and unrest would be so ceaseless as to be appalling. Sweet, gentle and helpful was their mutual friendship. At this period of Michelangelo's life we know that the vehemence of his emotions subsided, and tranquility and peace were his for the rest of his life, such as he had never known before...

Michelangelo died at Rome, aged eighty-nine, working and planning to the last. His sturdy frame showed health in every part, and he ceased to breathe just as a clock runs down." - snippet from web-books.com on Michelangelo

Thinking of you. What a gift you have been to me, Russell.

He writes among other things: And you, me.

p.s. All Muses are gifts. And gratitude the offering that needs no impulse.

images William Blake's Beatrice Addressing Dante; Michael Parkes' Beatrice Alone; Odilin Redon's Beatrice; and John William Waterhouse's Dante and Beatrice.

Comments

[Loofa]

Your role here, I think, is as a Muse to your readers. It's a good thing that you don't treat it as a responsibility, or it would probably feel like less of a gift.

[Evelyn Rodriguez]

Thank you Loofa for the kind words. I believe all of you will want muses beyond me and this blog, since I only have time for so many soulful exchanges. There is a deep mutuality to the muses relationships, that requires an undefended heart & the accompanying vulnerability and intimacy of something beyond what any blog provides.

Don't settle. And don't hold back.

At first it may feel uncommon to be that open and trusting - especially in a platonic relationship. It should have gone without mentioning, but the artist collective I spoke of in Nola were all men. (Oh, and straight, too, I should add if you know anything about the Nola art scene.) But the tenderness I saw between them, well, it's so touching - and so rare.

Yet not so rare in the very near future, I sense.

[Atao]

Hi Evelyn,
you want to create a new world. That is exactly what I am about to do too. Now are you aware of the implications of such enterprise. I doubt that I fully am.
How to prepare for surprises?

[Evelyn Rodriguez]

Atao, I wrote this to a friend today. I shall write more, exploring the edges of my own unknowningness. This is not the time of timidity, nor the lone wolf. I write, by way of invitation since I spotted a fellow visioneer in the email. (btw, recommend anything by Llewellyn Vaughn-Lee, see www.goldensufi.org):

i am a seer - not exactly the same as a psychic more similar to shamans, alchemists, magus, prophets, priestesses - oh, i've been burned at the stake before!

i've seen many other civilizations arise and fall away through thousands of years

this one is coming to an end, and with it lots of decaying parts of our lives will slough away

whatever, I'm an artist, visionary, weaver & creator of New universes

an imaginatrix
if you have time to think and ponder
maybe you might have time to blink and wonder too

if you were starting a universe from stratch how would you design it? (i'm serious)

[Atao]

Evelyn,
I don't know whether for you universe and world are interchangeable synonyms. They aren't for me. I wouldn't create any other universe because that's not an individual task. I believe in the wonder of the body. The body is the essence of individuality. Every human body contains a cerebral receiver with varying capacities for channeling/seeing/imagining worlds. I can create my own world or a part of a a new world on earth.
Creating a new world from scratch? The next world I see, is simply a world where everybody can enjoy this universe, our planet, his body, her thoughts. Time for celebration of ourselves! That may sound banal but when you think it through it requires a radical transformation of perspective.
The universe waits to be filled, en-joyed with our love!

[Evelyn Rodriguez]

Atao, I may have been sloppy with the the use of the word, 'universe'; She is doing fine in her own transformation. And I didn't mean ANOTHER universe - but this one completely freshly reborn without necessity for that which we've adopted because we've been told that's how it should be or ought to be.

For a long time, I was interested in nirvana and enlightenment because I was weary of the merry-go-round of samsara, and I wanted off. I was suspicious of anyone that had never ever contemplated suicide because they must not have seen this world through and through. I felt the weight of being an ancient soul, and felt the yearning to return to the No-thingness of formlessness. So a transcedent approach to spirituality highly appealed to me.

But that's really changed lately.

When I started to grok because of exposure to people and things that came into my life what the "Golden Age" meant and what Christ meant and what the tantrikas speak of when they say the male (formlessness) penetrates the female (form) then I understood the divinization and harmonization of matter - all of Earth too and more - would include Evelyn. Yes, Evelyn, as a unique expression of the Infinite, but Evelyn nonetheless. And that means alas I'm not going to vanish into the ether, but be around for possibly quite a heck of a lot more time than the 30-40 years that the actuarial tables might show.

So yes, I think we are on the same wavelength, the celebration itself transforms everything. A bodhisattva's only job is to be a completely free human being and doing precisely and only what gives them joy. I don't underestimate the power of that any longer. It's not selfish nor self-centered, it's Self in its isness.

"I wouldn't create any other universe because that's not an individual task."
It's not really an individual task anyhow, even individual transformation isn't individual. The world and the people we encouter are our mirrors (and playmates) - a vital and fun part of the journey.

[Jonah]

Hi Evelyn,

since trackback isn't working (maybe I'm not doing something that I don't understand), I'll just leave you a link to my blog entry which was inspired by your post.

Or, since I'm not allowed to leave HTML links, here's the address: http://righteouslyhexed.blogspot.com/2007/03/art-and-changing-world.html

-Jonah

[Atao]

I hope I got it right what you tried to say about the recent change. What is the concrete expression of this change in perspective?

And then I'd love to stick with the question of individuality. I have a particular reason to say that there is a individual transformation. Maybe it gets clearer when I equal the word individuality with uniqueness. There is a mystery about uniqueness. Because it's directly related to the question of choice. Choice of our body, choice of our destiny, choice of our talents. I insist that there is a kind of "holy loneliness" as by being unique we are radically different. Regardless of the almost 100% identical DNA-code we all share, regardless of the same masculine and feminine energy driving us with and within the cosmos.