I don’t believe in inspiration, and my muse just scoffs at the idea. “Just bleed,” she said. She is a sucker for Hemingway, I should have known. She just went out on the back porch to smoke a cigarette. Lucky for her imaginary entities can’t get lung cancer. Inspiration is just another word. Whenever I write, there is a nudge in my gut about something, but that something often has little or nothing to do with what I might be writing about on any given night. I am dead sure that I am not the world’s best writer, but I know I am a thousand times more prolific that 99.9%of the rest of the world. Why should I care about who might be better than me–there is always someone with better style, more profound ideas, great poetry, or a more intricate philosophy or world view. Yet, most of those people are waiting for inspiration that will never come. Waiting for inspiration is a lot like waiting for Godot. You can wait, but the wait will be eternal,melancholy, lonely. Writing is more like mowing the lawn than most would think.Writing is a deliberate self-conscious act in which the writer must put aside his own image while creating something new. Whether a writer fails or succeeds cannot be the criteria for writing anything. Writers will never be able to predict their success or their fall into oblivion. Inspiration is a mirage, an excuse, a straw man that really doesn’t exist in any shape or form. All of our ideas–good, bad, or ugly–float up out of sub-consciousness, rumble around our brain pan before exiting onto a screen, or in more folkloric fashion, onto apiece of paper. Regardless of what one writes about, the muse is working overtime to pile up the nouns and verbs, images and tropes, motifs, metaphors and similes. All writing is essentially always a series of metaphors that pileup like drunken sailors while trying to climb Mount Everest in jockey shorts. Writing is hard, but not because of a lack of inspiration. Writing is hard because writers are afraid that someone might not like their choice of adverbs.My muse says that the best way to write is to turn off the internal editor–that OCD editor that sits behind your eyes and criticizes every word,every period, every strangely alliterated phase–and just let the words flow. Set them free. Yet just doing it once is not enough. You are only a writer if you continue to write on a regular basis. From time to time, you might come up with a sentence that really sings, that reflects your interest in life’s bigger questions,, its most profound questions. Nevertheless, the object of writing has never been to resolve anything. The object of writing is to discuss the problem and recognize that some questions, life’s big questions, don’t have answers, only discussions. In the end, a writer who waits for inspiration is not a writer at all. Only those who write find inspiration because they are not looking for it. As the words pile up, the creative process begins to reach critical mass, thoughts pop like lightening, creating new words, new thoughts, new ideas. Images dance through the discourse, rhetoric blossoms, and before you know it, you have a new piece of literary art, which may delight, teach, amuse, provoke, inspire, or question. It all depends on the writer dismissing their self-doubts and forging ahead, or as my muse says,”just bleed.”
Category Archives: poetry
On inspiration
I don’t believe in inspiration, and my muse just scoffs at the idea. “Just bleed,” she said. She is a sucker for Hemingway, I should have known. She just went out on the back porch to smoke a cigarette. Lucky for her imaginary entities can’t get lung cancer. Inspiration is just another word. Whenever I write, there is a nudge in my gut about something, but that something often has little or nothing to do with what I might be writing about on any given night. I am dead sure that I am not the world’s best writer, but I know I am a thousand times more prolific that 99.9%of the rest of the world. Why should I care about who might be better than me–there is always someone with better style, more profound ideas, great poetry, or a more intricate philosophy or world view. Yet, most of those people are waiting for inspiration that will never come. Waiting for inspiration is a lot like waiting for Godot. You can wait, but the wait will be eternal,melancholy, lonely. Writing is more like mowing the lawn than most would think.Writing is a deliberate self-conscious act in which the writer must put aside his own image while creating something new. Whether a writer fails or succeeds cannot be the criteria for writing anything. Writers will never be able to predict their success or their fall into oblivion. Inspiration is a mirage, an excuse, a straw man that really doesn’t exist in any shape or form. All of our ideas–good, bad, or ugly–float up out of sub-consciousness, rumble around our brain pan before exiting onto a screen, or in more folkloric fashion, onto apiece of paper. Regardless of what one writes about, the muse is working overtime to pile up the nouns and verbs, images and tropes, motifs, metaphors and similes. All writing is essentially always a series of metaphors that pileup like drunken sailors while trying to climb Mount Everest in jockey shorts. Writing is hard, but not because of a lack of inspiration. Writing is hard because writers are afraid that someone might not like their choice of adverbs.My muse says that the best way to write is to turn off the internal editor–that OCD editor that sits behind your eyes and criticizes every word,every period, every strangely alliterated phase–and just let the words flow. Set them free. Yet just doing it once is not enough. You are only a writer if you continue to write on a regular basis. From time to time, you might come up with a sentence that really sings, that reflects your interest in life’s bigger questions,, its most profound questions. Nevertheless, the object of writing has never been to resolve anything. The object of writing is to discuss the problem and recognize that some questions, life’s big questions, don’t have answers, only discussions. In the end, a writer who waits for inspiration is not a writer at all. Only those who write find inspiration because they are not looking for it. As the words pile up, the creative process begins to reach critical mass, thoughts pop like lightening, creating new words, new thoughts, new ideas. Images dance through the discourse, rhetoric blossoms, and before you know it, you have a new piece of literary art, which may delight, teach, amuse, provoke, inspire, or question. It all depends on the writer dismissing their self-doubts and forging ahead, or as my muse says,”just bleed.”
On Gilgamesh
The epic of Gilgamesh is an old story. Men, writers, thinkers, poets, have tinkered with narrative story-lines for millenia trying to explain the human condition–tragedy, comedy, pain, suffering, desire, love, hunger, solitude, companionship, passion, existential angst, laughter. By constructing a hero, a Gilgamesh or an Enkidu, the storyteller can begin to explore the mystery that is the human person, and the greatest of all these mysteries is death, the trip from which none return, leaving it a mystery by definition. Friendship, companionship, love, these are other mysteries that the Gilgamesh poet explores, but he is a dark poet who not only investigates the joys of friendship, he also shares the pain of loss with his public. There is no joy without pain, no light without darkness, no parties wihout solitude. By giving Gilgamesh things to do, places to go, questions to answer, the poet shares his insights into the human experiment. The poem, then, is a commentary, right or wrong, on what it means to be truly human, to share the grand contraditions of life and death, the pain, the joy, the melancholy, the boredom, the tedium, the excitement, the triumphs, the failures over which man or woman has very little (or no) control. Reading the poem, one is immediately struck by the arbitrary nature of all that happens, seemingly independent of what the charaters desire, want, or work for. The poet ponders the question of how this can be. How is it that the gods have reserved life for themselves and given man over to death? If this is the case then how can anything here on earth mean anything or make any difference? Why bother to do anything if we eventually all end up in the underworld in the hall of the dead? Yet, contrarily, the poet suggests, that in spite the finite nature of life, there is so much to do and think, so many experiences to have, so many hunts, so much investigation, and at one point a character admonishes a depressed Gilgamesh (who has almost given up the will to live as he grieves the loss of his friend, Enkidu) to eat, drink and be merry because that is what he can do, and that bemoaning his outcast state will not bring back his friend. The Gilgamesh poet is parsing his existential angst, sorting out the why’s and the where to for’s in an attempt to explain who we are–people, men, women, teachers, singers, brick-layers, bread-makers, weavers, poets, actors, athletes, soldiers, priests. The poet is, however, skeptical, unsure of his answers, leaving them in front of his public more like suggestions than good theories. The ambiguity inherent in the text suggests that the text is ironic, not romantic, and that the hero is more fallable and more vulnerable than he would like. Culture, civilization, society, cities, conventions are all on trial here, but there is also a certain inevitibility built into the text whose own existence speaks to the organization of culture, poetry and art four millennium after the story was originally carved into those magical tablets.
On Gilgamesh
The epic of Gilgamesh is an old story. Men, writers, thinkers, poets, have tinkered with narrative story-lines for millenia trying to explain the human condition–tragedy, comedy, pain, suffering, desire, love, hunger, solitude, companionship, passion, existential angst, laughter. By constructing a hero, a Gilgamesh or an Enkidu, the storyteller can begin to explore the mystery that is the human person, and the greatest of all these mysteries is death, the trip from which none return, leaving it a mystery by definition. Friendship, companionship, love, these are other mysteries that the Gilgamesh poet explores, but he is a dark poet who not only investigates the joys of friendship, he also shares the pain of loss with his public. There is no joy without pain, no light without darkness, no parties wihout solitude. By giving Gilgamesh things to do, places to go, questions to answer, the poet shares his insights into the human experiment. The poem, then, is a commentary, right or wrong, on what it means to be truly human, to share the grand contraditions of life and death, the pain, the joy, the melancholy, the boredom, the tedium, the excitement, the triumphs, the failures over which man or woman has very little (or no) control. Reading the poem, one is immediately struck by the arbitrary nature of all that happens, seemingly independent of what the charaters desire, want, or work for. The poet ponders the question of how this can be. How is it that the gods have reserved life for themselves and given man over to death? If this is the case then how can anything here on earth mean anything or make any difference? Why bother to do anything if we eventually all end up in the underworld in the hall of the dead? Yet, contrarily, the poet suggests, that in spite the finite nature of life, there is so much to do and think, so many experiences to have, so many hunts, so much investigation, and at one point a character admonishes a depressed Gilgamesh (who has almost given up the will to live as he grieves the loss of his friend, Enkidu) to eat, drink and be merry because that is what he can do, and that bemoaning his outcast state will not bring back his friend. The Gilgamesh poet is parsing his existential angst, sorting out the why’s and the where to for’s in an attempt to explain who we are–people, men, women, teachers, singers, brick-layers, bread-makers, weavers, poets, actors, athletes, soldiers, priests. The poet is, however, skeptical, unsure of his answers, leaving them in front of his public more like suggestions than good theories. The ambiguity inherent in the text suggests that the text is ironic, not romantic, and that the hero is more fallable and more vulnerable than he would like. Culture, civilization, society, cities, conventions are all on trial here, but there is also a certain inevitibility built into the text whose own existence speaks to the organization of culture, poetry and art four millennium after the story was originally carved into those magical tablets.
On physiognomy (the Libro de buen amor and don Amor)
When I started researching female beauty in Spain’s 14th century, I had no idea I would be stepping in the pseudo-science cow pie that is physiognomy. If you don’t know, physiognomy is the “science” (quotation marks mean that the word science is being both ironically and loosely to include this area of inquiry) of external shapes, marks and other physical characteristics which shape how a thing, or a plant, or an animal, or a person, looks or gives it an outward appearance and how that appearance, in turn, shapes the internal characteristics of said object, plant, animal, or person. This particular science has it roots deep in Greek philosophy in a half dozen famous writers. This particular branch of science has been extremely popular well into the modern era, and there are hundreds of books and articles that date from the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and even the twentieth century. It was finally thrown on the ashheap of pseudo-science when the Nazis used it to justify their particularly odd (and wrong) ideas about how the way people looked and what this said about their character. Today, physiognomy is practiced by the same people who read tarot cards, make astrological charts, study cabala and practice necromancy. They probably also search for Big Foot in their spare time when they are not searching the pyramids for signs of ancient astronauts. No rational empiricists allowed. Physiognomy was extremely popular, especially in the nineteenth century when random positivists thought that if you could measure it and set up a data table then it must mean something. Well, they were wrong, but real science took its sweet time in proving that. In Spain’s 14th century, the tenants of physiognomy were a part of what passed for both science and philosophy, so as my poet’s fictive creation, Mr. Love, describes the ideal woman (ideal for love, that is) he goes through a very standard list of facial characteristics that is quite commonplace in the medieval poetry of Europe–small head, blond hair, nice eyebrows, high cheekbones, big eyes, shining and bright, long eye lashes, long thin neck, thin nose, small even teeth, red gums, red full lips, small mouthy, white face, no facial hair (LBA, stanzas 432-5 if you care to read it for yourself). Mr. Love is sure that this is the kind of woman that a man should pursue because, given her physical characteristics, she will be more receptive to male advances. This rhetorical practice, a descriptio, is also common in medieval scholasticism and would be reliable if the source were reliable. What subverts the description, or perhaps what validates it, is the speaker, Mr. Love, who has just been berated by the poem’s (LBA) main character, the Archpriest of Hita, Juan Ruiz, for ruining everyone’s life. Mr. Love has an agenda, albeit an unreliable one, and is not a trustworthy source or narrator. In fact, he is the opposite of anything that might resemble truth, ethics, or morality. The question for me, then, is this: is the author playing it straight, (i.e., this is what he truly believes) with his readers with this description or is he undermining and subverting the medieval practice and belief in physiognomy by putting it in the mouth of an unreliable narrator?
