A Night of Passion



ECHO AND OTHER MUSES


Artists have always sought out new forms of inspiration, have inquired after the well-springs of Creativity.

 In 1917 or thereabouts, William Butler Yeats the great Irish Poet began his experiments with something he called 'Automatic Writing'.

This was a process he had learned at his wife's suggestion to help him cope with depression, and it involved what he later went on to describe as :

'A very profound, very exciting mystical philosophy'...

Basically the upshot of his explorations became a mysterious, hitherto unattributed source of Inspiration.

A technique for tapping into the 'Enigma Machine' of our own Creativity.

For mining a pure source of inspiration...

A source which appeared to unconsciously provide, at times at least, quite profound insights without the appearance of a conscious agent i.e without the author being consciously involved except in so much as he was a conduit for this mysterious written voice...

Like the Oracle of Delphi! 

Like a Muse... 



From a poem over a year old : ~

"And so you wait patiently once more, for some type of music but you hear nothing, save for the roar of rushing blood through your body.

You see nothing but the endless oceans of white desert sand, and the crisp surgical borders of the empty page you are staring at.

You feel nothing but a yawning chasm in your chest...you remain suspended...frozen between two punctuation marks, two beats of a Crow's heart and an infinite amount of time.

But just as you were beginning to feed on your own existential angst, and preparing to wash it all down with a quart of suicidal Rum, as if bored with this plane a blur of motion escapes, and in the blink of an eye, just as you had resigned yourself to a sterile wasteland of artificiality and barren bleached day-dreams,
concepts suddenly leap and dance about the empty page flirtatiously in a tiny cloud of swirling matter.


And as they chaotically paint in delicate traceries, their own sweeping premises and hushed arcane secrets in the sun-drenched air, and  'with barely a trace of your own existence involved' ,
you observe enchanting ancient patterns,
filled with the dizzying rotations of planetary motions,


and the paired trajectories of mating Dragonflies."

Extract from : 'Take 23.5'


So it would seem looking at the under-lined text that perhaps the Riderless Coach is not such an uncommon experience after all.


It is the experience of being in the 'Now'...

Of riding the Slip-Stream...


Of being 'In' the Moment as a passenger, instead of being outside of it...or out of it.

A state known to most Eastern Religions and not dissimilar to that of a Zen adept.


Or indeed the world of the Cool-Jazz Musicians riffing away...

High on the fine wire and just 'digging it'.

Note* This piece, even apart from it's length which was not intended, is heading in a direction not even remotely close to what 'I' wanted to explore.

Proof positive of the Ancient Greek concept of the Muses' existence...(?)



The Kiss of the Muse ~ Paul Cezanne


Hardly, but nonetheless a quirky mercurial process worthy of scrutiny and exploration just the same.


I use these 'notes' as a means of assisting comprehension for my poor beleaguered brain.

But it doesn't always work out in the way I had intended, and the results are often unpredictable due to the spontaneous nature of my inquiries.

I could always discipline my efforts but that would have an affect on the inspirational ad hoc nature of these short experiments.

Like the way in which the act of consciously viewing a Physics experiment in the Quantum world unavoidably collapses the Wave-function.


Its my version of thinking 'out-loud'...it helps with the stream, the flow...


To create Art, any type of Art at all I think, involves something often described by the media as Passion due to the limitations of language for want of a better word.

Passion and its older, lesser known but perhaps more aptly chosen Cousin ; Obsession.

Passion is a word being used in the act of consciously viewing, or helping to capture, in modern parlance, what has traditionally been viewed as 'The Ineffable'.

It is a word being used to freeze, to crystallize and thereby enable the analysis of...something which remains for all of us as one of the great mysteries of Mankind i.e...Creativity! and its progeny in the creation of Art!

In general terms I think we can all see that something which is frozen, suspended for the purposes of an analysis can potentially destroy the ethereal nature i.e the constitution of whatever it is that we are attempting to comprehend.

Our problems begin right at the outset in attempting to apprehend creativity and hence art with our assumptions, and our customary tools of reason and logic, because anything of a poetic nature which I wish to describe is always going to be more than just the sum of its constituent parts...

Lead pencil...rubber...white paper...words with letters such as A,B,C up to Z...nouns, adverbs, etc., you get the picture.

The beauty of a sunset cannot be broken into sections, categories, bits or bytes.


This is a whisper from another 'reality' and hints at a deeper Platonic mystery...

It is our intuitive mode of thinking which here must be our guiding lamp.

For example when operating in R~mode or incorrectly known as Left-brain thinking, it is the syncretistic experience which is valuable, and it's whisperings should never be ignored.


"In fact, synthesis is such a powerful learning technique that Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab suggested in "Don’t Dis-sect the Frog, Build It", that to really learn about a frog, traditional dissection is not the way to go.

The better way to learn about a frog is to build one.

That is, task the students with building a being that has frog like characteristics.

It’s a great way to really learn what makes a frog a frog and how frogs are adapted to their particular environment.

It’s a perfect example of learning by synthesis." ~ Andy Hunt


The limitations of our Aristotelian ways of thinking, our habits of Old, the ruts of our cerebral tendencies break down as tools of thought, whenever we approach for example, the broiling Seas of our Collective Unconscious in Jungian terms, and its rich harvest of glistening memes or the hidden valleys of sheer beauty still to be revealed by the next Gen of Quantum computing.


Today, due to the increasingly quixotic, bizarre nature of our contemporary Physics and Cosmology, a Scientific framework has been erected like a scaffolding which of course also attempts to contain, to cradle the seas of our own subconscious in its clinical surgical swathe.

We can tip our hats in gratitude to Aristotle for his classification system (amongst innumerable other achievements)and then perhaps we can temporarily leave behind these ancient strictures, these 'artificial impositions' and 'fabrications' as they are termed by Alfred Korzybski in reference to Aristotle and the issue of our cerebral reality.


Specialists Unite!

Your 'Reality' has become a Hologram and you have nothing to lose but your blinkered myopic views...!

Just as our tools of thought become blunt and frayed, so too our words, the atomic elements out of which we build our tools e.g.'passion'.


New words, new terminology and definitions begin to spill over into the old vernacular and thus help to confound our minds in cognitive dissonance as the 2 realities i.e the Pre-Quantum and the new Quantum nature of our reality converge and clash inside of us...


METAMORPHOSIS OF NARCISSUS

For centuries artists have described the experience of 'inspirational visitations',or the feeling of being possessed by a mood or a character.

This is not at all dissimilar to the ancient Greek concept of the Muse...:~

Shrouded by an Ancient subterranean fog, and tangled up in a vast imbroglio of vigorous primordial vines so deep that they stretch back to antiquity,


The Muse, she sits softly weeping beside the hissing shore.

In a limpid pool, by the Sea of Tranquility she writhes,
draped in the fresh growth and reeds of our own brittle assumptions.

The Muse just gazes mute and unblinking into the pool...

She stares and stares and stares...

As the crystalline stars in the night sky whirl in a giddy vortex about her head.


By the softly moaning shores of our subconscious, her reflection momentarily flickers, as she folds her elegant naked body beneath the swooning light of the Moon's delirious dream...

Then, from out of the corners of your eyes she warps...

out of sight, but never out of mind.


Her echoes remain as a sweet sticky torment deep inside.

I refuse to shackle Her.

I refuse to impose Society's arbitrary literary impositions on such an exotic creature!

Narrow-minded restrictions which state that for example; Poetry and Science shall never meet, a realm in which the muse should never ever tarry...or that a fairy-tale must be for children, and must never contain serious social commentary as allegory or parable.

I am so tired of convention and orthodoxy in Art.

CRACK! Oh Gosh! I'm sorry, did I just break that?

 
The creative process for us humans still remains tangled in the mist-shrouded vines of an ancient subterranean mystery.

Sometimes I can write pages without a flaw, yet at other times it can take hours and hours just to string a few miserable lines together.
 
No matter how much I implore and entreat her, how much I sweat, writhe or cajole her,

My muse, she seems to obey the will of her own moods, and only works at her convenience, and when She feels like it.

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