Wild Strawberry

All artists must eventually seek a muse at some point in their creative endeavors or careers.  Some go to nature, and others go to women, wine and cigars. More unusually, Dame Edith Sitwell would sit in a coffin daily to find inspiration for her writing and Voltaire found his lover's back motivational as a writing desk. This divine inspiration comes in many forms and can be seemingly ordinary or seemingly perverse.

Voltaire (age 41, 18th Cen) Maurice Quentin de La Tour

       

What we seek is not unlike the  goddess muses of the nine daughters of Zues, embodying mythology, memory, comedy, tragedy and the like. Our muse is actually within us. It is our ability to look at something in a different way, see connections of those myths or take notice of the wondrous colors of a landscape and explain its effects on our spirit.      

      

It keeps us embodied with passion and fervor to make our life's work with these things in mind. But the gist of it comes from within us, not our outside world. It is the piss and vinegar of expression and the fire in our bellies. However required to form true artistic expressions, every once in a while, our muse gets lost. Sadly, I  know that dark, empty feeling.

      

At this point, the Artist has to reinvent themselves to adapt and find that place. In order to get there, though, there must be introspection; We must recoil and cocoon as we are visited by images of the past, often coming in the form of coincidences or present-day reminders of those people, places and things we come across as we may journey inward. After weeks or months of self-imposed, scattered isolation, meditation, and/or deconstructing of self, we incidentally change. We become a more defined 'we', (actually, 'I' or 'me'). 

Borg examining himself in the 1957 film Wild Strawberries

In the classic Ingmar Bergman film, Wild Strawberries, Professor Borg finds himself lost at the end of his life and cannot move on to his death without recoiling and being reminded of every event and every person that shaped him through a not-so-random set of circumstances and strangers that he confronts throughout his current conundrum. He goes in and out of focus but everything becomes clear once he starts noticing, knowing himself again and shedding all that kept him from entering the next dimension. 

       I am on a similar journey, as the next dimension I reach is of the ethereal plane and that is where my inspiration will come from. I do not necessarily have to die to ascend to that degree, but like Professor Borg, I have to notice the beauty all around me and remember all the things I have learned from all of the people, places and things encountered thus far and tap in to the creative, collective consciousness.

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     "The man who arrives at the doors of artistic creation 

               with none of the madness of the muses     

                     would be convinced that technical ability alone was enough to make an artist. 

                   What that man creates by means of reason 

            will pale before the art of inspired beings." 

                                                                                                                  -Plato