abandon self to The kiss

Day 7 of everyday inspiration.

"The first flush of true inspiration can leave us breathless and asking ourselves, 'where the hell did that just come from?'  But as we begin to open to it, begin to trust it, it teaches us that this is none other than who we Are.  All the rest was a just a silly game of littleness we played upon ourselves." - Nick Smith, "Inspiration in Action", Life 2.0 blog

Breathless. Breathtaking. Yes. These days I don't need to take a break to catch my breath like I used to, it feels more like what breathes me.

Let's make this less abstract for a minute.

Take a few minutes to remember the most breathtaking kiss of your life. An embrace that whisked you away to a surreal universe where time's mercurial and space's a ribbon. Nothing exists, not even you, only the kiss.

I recall a particular kiss myself right now.

We were in a saloon and he'd just gotten up from playing the piano to hug me. It was unanticipated, yet at the same time, we both live from an open to enchantment, open to spontaneity beingness, and so simultaneously a natural possibility.

We're back on the evening street. After a few minutes, he turns to me, "I don't know where that came from."

Yeah, inspiration is precisely like that.

My best writing for instance, I sit back and shake my head, "I don't know where that came from."

It's nigh impossible to take credit. "I don't know who wrote that," flashes after. It's sort of like Mother Teresa said, 'I am a pencil in God's hand.'

Inspiration is a constant, enigmatic lover full of surprises and gifts that you couldn't possibly foresee. Intuition and imagination are pale substitutes. You will sometimes feel you don't deserve Her (you don't ;-), simply accept)

She asks for nothing.

Nothing.

But you won't give it to Her
because it is the last coin
in your pocket.
And you would rather
give her your demands than
your sacred and empty hands. - snippet from Silence, by Adyashanti

Too many people try to pencil in lovemaking in their day planner. Inspiration may serenade you at a moment's notice. Sneak a soft brush of lips on the nape when you least expect Her.

Be willing to be knocked off your agenda - it's worth it.

Today I read how Rhonda Byrne was presented a book, The Science of Getting Rich, by her daughter right in the midst of when Rhonda's grappling with the death of her father and the budget overrun of a television series she's producing. It "struck a chord" and she finds herself immersed in "a crash course of Western, Eastern, ancient and modern thought devouring "hundreds" of books and articles in just two and a half weeks."

I'm sure there were probably better things Rhonda should have been doing then. Yet that kiss...whoa, who needs sleep?

"That was December," she told NEWSWEEK. "In January I told my team we were going to make the greatest film in history to date. They thought I'd gone mad." Inspired, she flew to the States in July 2005 and began lining up people to interview; the film was finished six months later."

When things didn't pan out to air the film on Australian airwaves, Rhonda began to sell downloads and DVDs on her website. One of those DVDs wound its way to the woman that would become the publisher for the accompanying book. To date, 1.75 million copies of the book are projected to be in print by March 2, just over three months after it came out, on top of the 1.5 million DVDs sold.

Here's another kiss: "In 1944, at the Devonshire village of Galmpton, I was working against time on a historical novel about the Argonauts, when a sudden overwhelming obsession interrupted me," writes Robert Graves. "It took the form of an unsolicited enlightenment on a subject which had meant little enough to me. I stopped marking across my big Admiralty chart of the Black Sea the course taken (the mythographers said) by the Argo from the Bosphorus to Baku and back. Instead, I began speculating on a mysterious 'Battle of the Trees', fought in pre-historic Britain, and my mind ran at such a furious rate at night, as well as all the next day, that it was difficult for my pen to keep pace with it. Three weeks later, I had written a seventy-thousand-word book, called The Roebuck in the Thicket."

I don't know what happens to that Argonaut novel he was working against time on, but Graves gives himself over to this new lover, effortlessly flowing to seventy thousand words in three weeks which one day becomes by far one of the most cited and referenced books on muse and goddess devotion and its effect on myth, poetry, song.

Graves tells a compelling account of the unanticipated and alluring coincidences linking a Roman gem from the Argonaut period depicting a royal stag galloping towards a thicket, and a crescent moon on its flank, to an African triple-goddess riding humpback whale, to his London brass dealer into what was for him chains of more-than-coincidences (and I call clews) that finally pull together to form the book I now have in my lap, The White Goddess (the working title of which was The Roebuck in the Thicket).

Then again, this book is only partly in my lap because it kept coming up in research I'm doing. I have a mile-long running list of must-have books that haven't materialized. The same week I tell myself "need to get White Goddess dammit" is when I send Wyatt a copy of a blog post where he'd been partly the human embodiment of my muse, he replied, changing the subject line to: White Goddess 2007. In the body, he writes "Robert Graves would be proud." I'd never mentioned the words white goddess, nor Graves. Needless to say, I got the book straight away. 

Graves continues: "Chains of more-than-coincidences occur so often in my life that, if I am forbidden to call them supernatural hauntings, let me call them a habit. [Earlier he claims to be no mystic, no spiritualist, living "a simple, normal rustic life with my familiy and a wide circle of sane and intelligent friends."] Not that I like the word 'supernatural'; I find these happenings natural enough, though superlatively unscientific.

...True poetic practice implies a mind so miraculously attuned and illuminated that it can form words, by a chain of more-than-coincidences, into a living entity - a poem that goes about on its own (for centuries after the author's death, perhaps) affecting readers with its stored magic. Since the source of poetry's creative power is not scientific intelligence, but inspiration - however this may be explained by scientists [doubtful ;-)] - one may surely attribute inspiration to the Lunar Muse, the oldest and most convenient European term for this source?"

Well, Mr. Graves after all wrote the book White Goddess, so that attribution makes sense for him.

You need not fret about where the kiss comes from. Just thank your lucky stars, close your eyes, and melt.

p.s. That last photo is for purely for my enjoyment. It's the scene of The kiss. After he said: "I don't know where that came from." I laugh: "Are you apologizing?"

p.p.s. I'm not personally a fan of The Secret, but I recognize someone given to inspiration when I see it.

images Gustav Klimt's The Kiss (1907-8) is so insanely famous it's cliche. (Although see it in person!) This early work called Love (1895) is before he'd abandoned himself fully to The kiss of inspiration. Originality comes then (and only then). Which reminds me if you find yourself in Vienna, do yourself a favor and go to the Secession Building and die to the room wrapped by The Beethoven Frieze. Matthew Barney's films are surreal and artful; this is a shot from his latest Drawing Restraint. Ina Mar's Hommage to Rodin Eternale Idolle (ohhh, and you must visit the Rodin house and museum in Paris too); a photo of the stage at Hotel Utah Saloon.

Comments

[lucan]

i cannot imagine anything, but come through you ~ me

The Sorrow of Love

The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves,
The brilliant moon and all the milky sky,
And all that famous harmony of leaves,
Had blotted out man's image and his cry.

A girl arose that had red mournful lips
And seemed the greatness of the world in tears,
Doomed like Odysseus and the labouring ships
And proud as Priam murdered with his peers;

Arose, and on the instant clamorous eaves,
A climbing moon upon an empty sky,
And all that lamentation of the leaves,
Could but compose man's image and his cry.

W.W Yeats (Revised text of 1925)

[Ina]

I found your blog accidentally - really interesting texts. Thanks a lot for mentionning my artwork "Homage to Rodin's Eternal Idol"! I am flattered to be a small part of this litterary and creative blog! Keep up the great work! - Ina