The Artist and the Muse

The ancient Greeks believed in nine goddesses of inspiration known as the Muses, each signifying a discipline of the arts. The Muses were mothered by Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, who held great significance to the ancient Greek wandering bards, perhaps as much as Calliope did, the muse for epic poetry. She inspired Homer and Hesiod and Sappho, as well as all poets who came after. The Muses have continued to instil that “immortal voice” throughout time and send forth glory (kleos) to the gods on Mount Olympus through the art and poetry they reveal in the hearts of the mortals down below. The father of the gods and men alike, Zeus, son of Kronos, the god of time, fathered the Muses, the spirits of artistic inspiration, of which Calliope is the “most important of them all”.

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As the pink fingers of dawn stretch across the sky—as they do in the Iliad and the Odyssey, the great epic poems of old—each new day over many centuries has brought a new understanding of all things, from love to war. But some things remain unchanged. In many places, the disembodied still influence many people, and in some cases, all aspects of life. That ethereal voice speaks to them in the quiet moments of prayer. Artists, particularly poets and writers, pray as well; to something both internal and external at the same time.

She [Mnemosyne] gave birth to nine daughters, all like-minded, who have song on their minds, in their breast. They have a thūmos without worries. There they are, poised to descend from the topmost peak of snowy Olympus. That is where they have their bright dancing-places and their beautiful abodes.

These lines, as well as the earlier declaration about Calliope, are from Hesiod’s Theogony. He spoke of a “thūmos”, of which there is no adequate English translation besides, perhaps, “heart”, in the figurative sense. To have heart is to have thūmos; a drive, a desire, a yearning, to be recognised in some way—something which reveals an awful lot about artists and writers—but it also denotes a reaching, a kind of transcendent striving to attain something we were put on earth to achieve, or conquer. The manifestation of this concept is that of the archetypal hero with a unique purpose.

The ancient Greek philosopher Plato posited the idea of the “daimon” in his Myth of Er in The Republic. In The Soul’s Code, James Hillman described the daimon as the “soul-companion” which guided us to the earth with our parents, body and destiny, which were preselected before birth. The daimon, which for the Romans was “genius” and for Christians the “guardian angel”, orders our lives towards some predetermined destination. Along with the idea of the daimon, Plato believed thūmos was as elemental to the human soul as reason and emotion, and housed within us all. The great Greek philosopher and pupil of Socrates described the tripartite nature of the psyche in his writings titled the Phaedrus, in an allegory of a chariot pulled by two horses, one white, representing immortality and thūmos, the other black, signifying mortal man’s worldly desires. The charioteer himself is Reason, who must rein in his winged horses as they gallop in opposite directions. His white horse, of “noble breed and character”, pulls towards heaven, while the black horse pulls waywardly to the earth. As his winged horses gallop in opposite directions on his revolution around the heavens, the charioteer must struggle to keep them in balance in order to stay on his path to heaven as he strives for glory and honour. For if he doesn’t, the charioteer may end up in hell. Writers and artists know this dilemma all too well.

When channelled appropriately, the thūmos can lead us to higher forms of truth, wisdom and virtue, all three of which overlap. Thūmos is the source of bravery, it is our determination, our need for justice. As Homer expounds the force of thūmos as Achilles’s wrath—which is, in turn, his struggle that leads to the exposure of his sole weakness—thūmos may also be characterised as the artist’s endeavour to bring an imagining or visualisation into actuality, to quench the need to express something lodged in the heart. Indeed, the striving for purpose manifests itself in moments of inspiration throughout our lives, plotted throughout time like rungs of an invisible ladder.

Steven Pressfield, author of The War of Art, believes in the Muses in the literal sense and has said that for those concerned with matters of the soul there is a flow—“almost like a train-wind”—of ideas entering the inspired mind. As if we are a beacon catching a transmission from another world. Such things have been pondered for a while. It is an idea as old as that of the muse. “She can look right into your soul,” he explained. Standing atop Mount Olympus, the Muses ask, “Is this person showing up for work today or not?” Pressfield affirmed that if the answer is yes, they will provide a gift in the form of inspiration. “We can’t go wrong when we listen,” he said, “when we show up for the muse.”

“If people ask me what my job is, I say I am a servant of the muse. Whatever she tells me to do, I do,” Pressfield said, before turning to Bruce Springsteen. He mused that there was a theme to Springsteen’s work, when observed in retrospect, a link between his twenty-one studio albums. The thread connecting each album to the next was one only Springsteen could create, and one with an origin as mysterious to us as it is to him.

Pressfield advised that when we task ourselves with considering the idea for the next album, or book, or film, or piece of architecture, even athletic feat, we must turn and listen to the muse. It is our job in this life to surrender to it, he instructed, and to reject the voice of “resistance” that constantly tries to talk us out of whatever it is we are seeking to create. The resistance dangles temptations in front of us, which emerge from mysterious and deep aspects of the psyche, as it tries to lure us into a state of inactivity. “It’s a great skill to dismiss that voice,” Pressfield said, an ability that isn’t taught in school, and perhaps cannot be taught. The muse only visits while you’re at work, during the “act of creation”, as the film critic and essayist Roger Ebert said. “Don’t wait for her. Start alone.”

As our predecessors form our understanding and define our tastes, the Muses inspire our interpretation of the ideas that came before through the lens of our own experiences. Therefore, inspiration rests on suggestion rather than mere duplication. Mark Twain remarked that there was no such thing as a new idea—rather, old ideas are put through a kind of “mental kaleidoscope”. An inspiration is an idea which has travelled down throughout time and has become lodged in our consciousness where it undergoes an augmentation, a refraction, just as objects in water appear different—though one hopes it’s not as late as when the ferryman’s oar dips in the River Styx.

Such fundamental ideas, and indeed traditions, have withstood scrutiny, and will continue to do so until human nature changes. Moments of inspiration can come unexpectedly, oftentimes at night when our minds are relaxed. When a thought rises up from the foggy depths of the mind and suddenly hits us—as if we were picking daisies before catching the down express in the small of the back, to quote P.G. Wodehouse—we find ourselves hastening to get it on the page before it sinks back into the psyche, while at the same time we are left scratching our heads, wondering where it came from. After all, we didn’t hear the train whistle. Some may say it was a visitation from Melpomene or Thalia, others may say it was a result of your neurons engaging in a “phase-lock”. 

This phenomenon is of the same variety as the proposition that we are most happy in the presence of beauty. Though many believe intangible concepts such as beauty can shift, our society’s growing denial of the transcendent has led to a reshaping of certain traditions. The metaphysical and mythological have been succeeded by the literal. Now the world is vastly different from that of polytheistic antiquity, the Muses have largely taken on a different meaning.

Today, a muse is defined as a person or other influence in an artist’s life that gives rise to inspiration. The symbolic has been replaced with the scientific. In other words, a muse visits just as two neuron synapses clap together like flint on steel causing sparks.

Certainly, throughout the past few centuries, the muse has sustained a similar appearance as the artistic representations of the ancient Muses, for she is almost always a beautiful woman who personifies the maternal duality of procreation and creativity. Indeed the goddesses have stepped over into the realm of humans, or perhaps that was always the case, as she usually takes the form of a romantic interest. She was Adriana Ivancich for Hemingway, Sheilah Graham for F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gala Diakonova for Salvador Dali, Elizabeth Siddal for Dante Rossetti, Jeanne Hébuterne for Modigliani, Hendrickje Stoffels for Rembrandt, Berthe Morisot for Édouard Manet.

The Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali credited his artworks to his wife and muse, Gala, and signed many of his paintings with both their names. He signed her name before his in the corner of the canvas, showing that she had as much input, if not more, into his artwork. Although Dali was eccentric, to say the least, his surrendering to an idealised muse in this fashion is a revealing act of consciously attributing one’s ethereal inspiration to a physical person. In this way, the relationship between the artist and the living muse was elevated, embodying yet another instance of the eternal feminine association with inspiration, while simultaneously immortalising the mortal.

Indeed there are moments when multiple muses at once speak to an artist or writer. Both Calliope and Euterpe may whisper in each ear, as they did for Ernest Hemingway as he wrote the opening lines of A Farewell to Arms. In her profile on him for the New Yorker in 1950, Lillian Ross recounted how Hemingway explained to her that he used the word and consciously and repetitively the way “Mr. Johann Sebastian Bach used a note in music”. Hemingway said Bach’s counterpoint, which in music denotes the interplay of multiple melodies, helped to inspire his style of paratactic writing. He held on to the older aesthetic while inventing something new. Hemingway told Ross it was Bach’s mastery of counterpoint that provided him with the muse for the opening lines of his best-selling novel. Borrowing from other disciplines for artistic ends permeates a lot of creative work, whether consciously or unconsciously. Borrowing from several traditions or movements at once provides the perfect springboard for developing something new, even though it may have well-established origins.

Inspiration is only the first step in creating a piece of art or a work of literature. And the muse only visits during the act of creation. Her whisperings are the air in the sail of the artist’s thūmos. So as the final line of the first sonnet in Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet series Astrophel and Stella puts it: “‘Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart, and write.’”

Laurence Karacsony is from Sydney and works as a digital reporter. He has written for the Spectator Australia