When The Muse Arrives
A couple of weeks ago I was lucky to see Slowdive live in concert for the third time. The band has become popular with younger audiences recently, so they’ve toured more frequently and seeing them live has become almost routine, like watching your favourite team when they come to town or returning to the gallery every time that artwork you love goes back on display. The predictability of the show is comforting, the songs come and pass with familiar ease, there’s no delayed anticipation between each track as you wait to see if you know the melody or not. Gone is the pressure to be near the front, arrive particularly early, dance too hard or sing the words. The sound guy becomes a new spectacle of the show with his magic tweaking of knobs and staccato tapping of buttons.
As each track fills the room, I let my mind do something it’s been doing lately, at least when the conditions are right. I close my eyes and let the images come. One by one, they emerge in the darkness like a slideshow in my mind’s eye: paintings I haven’t yet painted. First, figures posing in the studio; then sketches on canvas; then those same images rendered smaller, then larger, then hanging in a gallery beside work I’ve already made. The scenes shift: a squirrel swapped for a badger; a dove becomes a pigeon. Then they multiply: a rope I’m climbing, my brother, my mum, my dad. I’m still in the crowd, the music swelling around me, but part of me is elsewhere.
“Not bad,” Nicky says when we leave, “but I wasn’t really there this time.” Maybe it was the lack of newness this time round, but we had both slipped into a trance, feeling the music while letting it take us someplace else. As the crowd dispersed into a wasteland of kebab shops and traffic lights, I reflected on the ideas that I’d visualised. They all seemed remarkably ridiculous under the spotlight of the streetlights.
But something similar happened almost exactly a year ago when Nicky took me to see Boris, a Japanese drone metal band he’d been a fan of for many years. As their hooded vocalist sung haunting wails among the thick fuzz of guitar sounds, I fell into a trance seeing visions of miniature chickens flying on small canvasses along a wall, 9 months later and the idea was born at my exhibition at PSAS.
Understanding Inspiration
I bring up these concerts because I think they give us a clue about the nature of inspiration. These moments, when senses are heightened and suppressed all at once, are akin to that twilight state between wake and sleep, when genius ideas pop into our heads. It’s a brilliant, but unpredictable creative method where inspiration darts in and out of our lives, arriving only when the conditions are just right, or rather at the most inconvenient of times, thumping on the door to our minds and demanding to be let in and listened to. And then just as quickly as it arrived, it leaves like a bear in the snow.
If we are to be productive artists, we must learn how to tap into inspiration, or as Stephen Pressfield calls it in The War of Art, the “Muse.” He tells us that when we sit down each day to work, “the muse takes note” and “we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete.” The muse might exist in some other dimension, or be a bubble of energy around the planet, or maybe she is a matrix banded through the entire universe, and our brains, like antennae, switch on now and then, tuning into this magical substance, and let it in. Whatever her nature, we are all familiar to the peculiar weirdness of the muse when we dream. The problem is that most of us wake and move on from the strangeness, returning to the mediocrity of routine; brush teeth, get dressed, drink coffee, drive to work, sit at desk till 5pm, ignoring the fact that a few hours earlier we were flying above Mars or swimming with sea turtles while our teeth fell out.
The subconscious “tuning in” between physical mind and metaphysical muse explains why children seem so naturally in touch with creativity; their inner world hasn’t been buried under layers of self-consciousness, productivity, and ego that define adult life. We tend to access the muse most easily when that adult ego softens or slips away: in half-sleep, in dreams, or in moments when we’re not trying so hard to be anything. That’s why environments that speak to our inner child, such as places of play, awe, or surrender, are so fertile. Concerts, for instance, where we move our bodies freely without inhibition, or vast, beautiful landscapes that hush the inner monologue and tune our senses in. These are the states in which the muse finds us, not when we’re grasping for her, but when we’re open, playful and porous.
The problem is we’re not taught about the muse. 17 years of schooling ingrained in me the belief that ideas came sat at a desk, and success could be measured by ticking off to do lists and answering questions correctly (rather than asking them). The other problem is that the muse’s demand for unabashed attention, timely reflection and playful whimsey is inherently at odds with the modern world. For a creative to succeed in a world that rewards profit and capital, they must always be producing work, even if the muse has no part in it. That’s why so much contemporary art can feel hollow; it’s safe, surface-level and highly Instagrammable, often with bright colours and fun textures that momentarily shake us from our misery without stirring the intellect to challenge the world it exists within. In a system that prioritises productivity over presence, artists are rewarded for constant output, not for listening to the muse, and this is a huge struggle.
What I’m coming to understand is that the most effective way to work with the muse, while still navigating the demands of the modern world, is to figure out how to access her efficiently. First: understand that the muse is separate from us individually. This is a good thing, because it means our most difficult task as creatives isn’t generating ideas but making ourselves open enough to receive them. We no longer need to worry that we aren’t genius enough to think up a new creative idea, if the idea doesn’t belong to us, but is rather channelled through us. Therefore, second: we must discover what unique conditions invites the muse in for us. For me, I’ve learned I need uninterrupted blocks of time; whole mornings, afternoons, or evenings. Then I need an element that subdues the ego and tends to my inner child. Having grown up with rainy English forests in my backyard, I find that time in nature, especially when the weather is cool and the sky is moody, is the perfect place to let the muse in. Or, as I recently discovered, standing in a crowd, surrounded by the familiar hum of droning music. You’ll find the muse in the comfort of the familiar or the awe of the sublime, lulling us into a childlike openness, the state we lived in when the muse felt closer.
