is there a way to unironically use "my muse" without sounding icky af?
if so, tell me, because that's what i want to say instead.
as an eternal and lifelong romantic, it should not surprise you that every single thing i write - every essay, every poem, everything that involves placing one word next to another and next to another - is written towards someone. not even something - there’s always a quiet recipient, a secret you that helps the words fall in line next to each other to make meaning.
i also don’t think this is a uniquely “me” concept. i think all writers are writing towards not just something, but someone. that someone could be your friend, your parent, your grandparent, the one who got away, your ex from years ago, your new love, your unrequited love, the weird man in class with the microaggressions, etc.
a piece of writing is, at its most basal element, a letter. and a letter always has a recipient.
it is the specificity of that relationship and that dynamic that create the universality of a written moment.
i am, however, annoyed at the term “muse” and its feminized, often sexualized connotations. to say someone is your artistic muse more often indicates a silent, beautiful figure who’s either fucking the artist or whose rejection is a point of idealization for the artist. it conjures a woman who is so beautiful and captivating that one must make art in honor of this person. it’s an awfully specific, and not very flattering, connotation.
i think we need a new, non-gendered and non-sexualized alternative to the term “muse.” because, chiefly, most art is made for something or someone. it’s the dedication at the front of the book and the acknowledgements at the back. but more importantly, art is a way of making the mortal immortal.
this is something i think about a lot: i don’t write about everyone i’ve been with. i write about the experiences that have struck me the most deeply, or changed me the most profoundly. i write about the experiences that i think are worth devoting at least 3,000 words to.
and in doing so, in writing about someone, the mortal relationship that ends is now immortalized for eternity. art is capturing a memory or a feeling. it’s freezing that moment and rotating it on its axis for years and for audiences. it’s saving something that mattered so deeply to you forever. it’s making sure that even if the relationship itself dies, the meaning and the memory never does.
classics scholars can feel free to yell at me for this next point.
there’s an image in dante’s inferno that has stuck with me over the eight years it’s been since i read it in college. dante’s fictionalized version of himself journeys through the circle of the lustful in hell (canto v) and meets paolo and francesca da rimini (they’re also the couple depicted in rodin’s the kiss sculpture in the rodin museum in paris)
what has stuck with me about the paolo and francesca story as dante writes it in the divine comedy is not his judgement of their lustful behavior; it’s that he chose for the lovers to be in each other’s arms, eternally. this is, of course, a love story that has been written about thousands of times and depicted in thousands of paintings. the thing about this story that has always fascinated me is the idea of lovers destined to still be holding each other in hell.
first of all, i don’t know if it’s so much as hell to be holding your lover for eternity, even if you are squabbling continually. if you research the real-life love affair, i actually don’t think i’d have a problem being stuck in eternity with the actual person i’d intended to marry instead of the person i was duped into marrying. but maybe that’s just me. i think that’s dante making a moral judgement that doesn’t still hold up after centuries.
but more importantly, writing, and painting, is the closest we come at rendering something eternal. and dante did just that - even if he didn’t mean to. by writing about them, and their affair, they came to be theorized about and depicted in art for centuries after their death. i don’t know what’s more eternal - holding your lover in the underworld forever, or that in 2015, i was still discovering the story of paolo and francesca forever in each other’s arms.
a dear friend of mine, the visual artist Lauryn Red Welch, mentioned in a post that they’re ultimately “that painter that paints about love.”
here’s the thing about Lauryn’s paintings. i used to say “i don’t get art,” to the chagrin of all my artist friends. but Lauryn’s paintings make me feel deeply, even when i only have a tiktok understanding of brushstroke and color theory. i think it’s because they paint things that are intimate, and often paint domestic scenes of a couple so deeply in love after so many years that the everyday is still exciting and worth dedicating a whole canvas to. the everyday is worth memorializing. i’ve always seen their depictions of love as very similar to the ways i write about love in my own work. it’s a celebration of the beauty of everyday love. how rare, that we find an everyday that’s exciting enough to render forever.
i think ultimately, like Lauryn, i am a writer who always writes about love. i think this is always shit on by “serious critics”. writing about love gets a bad rep. but consider: what is more demonstrative of living with chronic illness, and building a home amidst the failures of state disability care, than painting interiors? what is more demonstrative of political tensions than queer love in a homophobic place? what is more demonstrative of our world than a relationship in it?
i’ve been on queering the map a lot lately - and what strikes me is its power as a storytelling tool. do you know why it’s so poignant? because it’s specific. it’s thousands and thousands of stories, anchored by memory and place. it’s real people, writing towards a you. it’s always towards a you.
maybe i’m just justifying this to myself - i’ve spent maybe 20,000 words each on two great love affairs thus far. but it’s because writing to a you - a lover, a friend, a parent, a grandparent - is the richest way i’ve found to unlock our inner worlds. when we write towards someone we love, or someone we have a complicated relationship with, we are unconsciously rendering the complications and tenderness of that relationship. we are whispering inside jokes and translating memories onto the page. we are arriving at the page with a story inside us.
we are always writing, and making art, towards a you. it’s simply about how naked we let ourselves be with that admission. i think we start out wanting to capture a feeling, a moment, a conversation on a page. i think we love someone so much that it pours out of us. we need to process. we need to find a container for what we feel.
but like the internet archive never dies despite our best wishes, and like the queering the map project anchors a memory to a place for as long as the internet exists, capturing something in art is the best way to make it last. in making art, we are making something immortal. we are saying to the angels: this. this mattered to me. don’t forget this. don’t forget us.