My poetic muse has always been an alter-ego, chastising me for being too much in my head, too cerebral. Looking back over the years I can see that my muse has presented a more or less consistent message: life is not at heart about my thoughts and feelings. Life is not a mental enterprise.
It was when I was a college student that the muse first rebelled against my studious nature.
It was an all-out rebellion.
Not with profanity nor profundity (anathema to my muse) nor with any pretension of depth, but with simple derision toward intellectual conceits. Nor at first did I understand what was going on with her. I would grab books and sit by a pond to study or write a paper. And out of my unexpecting pen would come this…
Battle of the Books
So he went down after classes
and sat there by the lake
and pulled out his books to study for a test…Well the lake rose up in splashes
saying, “Go back to your classes
And read your books until your brain is pleased,
Sittin’ in your molded chair
Thinkin’ you’re so cool you stare
To find some beauty in the books you read.”Oh the lake rose up in splashes
And thunder struck in lashes
Saying, “Go back to your classes
Or put those books away
Yeah, put those books away”Oh the flowers screamed in horror
And the trees bent down in anger,
“Oh, put those books away,
Yeah, put those books away”You can build your concrete cities
In all your valleys and your plains
And you can live inside your houses
And say that I’m insane
But please, don’t forget to play out in the rain
Her target was always me. And the message always consistent: the mind is not the central show of life. The role of the mind is not self-entertainment, self-advancement, enlightenment, intellectual fulfillment, profundity or any other self-deception.
No, muse insisted, the mind exists for the benefit of the body, not the other way round. And more than that: if I identify myself as mind, make my thoughts my identity, then I have become ill.
This impacts the the kind of poetry I end up creating.
The muse has sensibilities which disdain poetry of the head and reject intellectualized poetic expression. Which seems a bit strange—after all writing is an act of language, and forming words is a pre-eminently intellectual affair. Yet muse insists that I use language to escape the bounds of mentality, to speak out for my body somehow.
According to muse, I am a body and my mind belongs to that body—and must serve it. Not with lies, but with honesty.
And the central act of honesty is accepting that I am not my mind. My mind doesn’t even matter all that much. And if I slip into thinking that thinking is what life is all about, then I’m coming down with something, becoming ill, pushing myself into mental illness territory.
Time to get out of my head and get healthy again.
This has also served as a guide to my philosophical inquiry. Slowly, slowly, it has helped me understand what has been wrong with philosophy over the ages, and helped me surmise what lies in the right direction.
The first thing wrong with philosophy, by the way, is the word itself. Knowledge is not something that should be loved. It should be used: knowledge is a tool, not a destination.
To be a lover of thought, a lover of knowledge is already to start to slip into illness, because love of that sort carries the beguiling suggestion that life is about mind-stuff. That we are mind-stuff. That our “I am” lies in the realm of thoughts. This makes us diseased.
It also makes us liable to mental checkmate. Thoughts can become a quagmire of confusion and mis-direction which tie us into knots with no apparent way out. The result can be depression, even suicidal notions that we can escape by killing ourselves. But the problems are mental. The only thing we need escape from is our thoughts, our minds, our false belief that what we think, what others think, is the central show of life.
It’s not.
On the other hand, this should not be interpreted as a diatribe against thinking. Thoughts have a vital role to play in our living and surviving in the world. We can’t make it as a species without science, without understanding ourselves and our world. Still, our thoughts are not us. They are tools meant for our benefit.
Life is a bodily enterprise, not a mental one. If your thoughts, your feelings become checkmated, time to throw off those thoughts and feelings. They were never central to your life anyway, no matter how much it felt that way. Things in your head got unbalanced, mentally diseased. You fell into to the trap of thinking your thoughts were you, and now you must listen to your muse and escape back to bodily life, best you can.
This is the role of the creative or poetic muse, to lead us out of the valley of mental disease and back to the body. The muse is the lifeline to what we really are, which again is something beyond thought. Larger than thought, grander than thoughts could ever be.
And this is why it’s so important that we listen to the muse, honor her, make sure she is never compromised or co-opted into serving the mind. If anything, the mind should serve the muse. After all, she’s our lifeline out of mental checkmate.
Muse is the antidote to the disease of believing that we are minds, the only rope we have for climbing out of that deep, deep hole.
This article has also been published on Medium. Readers interested in my poetry can find it here.
