• 2012: The Year I Slay The Muse. Again

    Date posted: December 18, 2012 Author: jolanta

    I don’t accept The Muse, regardless of how hard she tries to convince me of her existence. And I can tell you it ain’t Perseus that dispatches so swiftly of Medusa, as the Greeks would have you believe. It is me, on a midnight weekday usually, not long before the end of the year, when I’ve finally had enough of her whining. In ultimate frustration, the ghastly Gorgon sister coyly slides down the long shaft of my bedroom ceiling fan, but before she can thrust her petrifying gaze and bully me into eternally accepting her being once and for all, I slash her through and through at the neck with the trusty cutlass I keep under the bed, just within reach (I call her Lucille). This absurd, cyclical song and dance regarding The Muse’s myth goes on nearly every night of every year, until finally, come December or so, I can’t take it anymore. Go pick on some other sucker, lady!

     

     

    Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937. Oil on canvas, 349.3 x 776.6 cm.Courtesy of Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain

     

    2012. The Year I Slay The Muse. Again
    By Alex M. Pruteanu

     

    I don’t accept The Muse, regardless of how hard she tries to convince me of her existence. And I can tell you it ain’t Perseus that dispatches so swiftly of Medusa, as the Greeks would have you believe. It is me, on a midnight weekday usually, not long before the end of the year, when I’ve finally had enough of her whining. In ultimate frustration, the ghastly Gorgon sister coyly slides down the long shaft of my bedroom ceiling fan, but before she can thrust her petrifying gaze and bully me into eternally accepting her being once and for all, I slash her through and through at the neck with the trusty cutlass I keep under the bed, just within reach (I call her Lucille). This absurd, cyclical song and dance regarding The Muse’s myth goes on nearly every night of every year, until finally, come December or so, I can’t take it anymore. Go pick on some other sucker, lady!

    I don’t believe in The Muse as much as I don’t believe in Writer’s Block, for that, too, I swiftly eviscerated three decades ago, when I first began to write fiction. Back then I fancied myself a young Hemingway, and I romantically fantasized of struggling through “the artist’s life” while nursing cheap table wine and nibbling on anemic lunches at the various cafés on the St-Germain. Don’t judge, hater—every young boy who dreams of writing fiction for a living at one time wishes to be Papa. (Hopefully early in his life)

    What I’ve always found in my writing career was that everything inspiring comes from art; particularly painting and sculpting. It began with Picasso’s “Guernica,” which I first encountered during the winter of 1980 as a 12-year-old. I stood before it transfixed like a believer having just seen Jesus pour a couple of fingers from a carafe of wine. From its gut-twisting narrative, my head exploded with ideas: short stories, novels, even paintings. (Sixteen years later, I was to finally conquer my fears and insecurities and for 14 months I painted—admittedly, badly.)

    During my teens, while growing up in the Washington, D.C. area, I took care to hit the National Gallery of Art as often as I could afford that overpriced, round trip subway ticket. Impressionists like Cassat, Degas, Seurat, Monet, and Renoir taught me how to write stories leaving certain details semi-murky when examined up close, and trusting the reader to resolve the unsaid. Van Gogh showed me that I should never create anything with fear; that fear in art is certain death. Miles Davis and John Coltrane later underscored that. Bravery and brevity is what I learned from the Impressionists and the Hard Boppers.

    Picasso, Pollock, Kandinski, and the sculptor Constantin Brancusi pushed everything out beyond what I was even capable of dreaming, and from them I learned that I should never cash in on the same ticket; I should always push to innovate, to find new and dynamic pathways for my art, to leave the familiar behind, and alone. And the Old Masters hammered into my thick skull that it’s imperative to understand the fundamentals, before I go break rules and act like a tantrum-riddled toddler.

    There are so many more artists that constantly inspire my writing; these are men and women from various disciplines like architecture, music, film, and engineering even. They are contemporary artists, they are Old Masters, they are cavemen and cavewomen who have documented the size and ferocity of fauna outside their dwellings. All of them feed me constantly and push me in new, dynamic directions, which make life (sometimes) beautiful.

    And so The Muse is of no use to me, despite her unshakeable persistence. Medusa is dead. The dreaded, paralyzing “block” that, at times, seems so impenetrable to certain writers is made of soft custard. It takes but one listen to Mozart’s “Requiem,” or one gander at Goya’s Black Paintings to break through it. Art makes the holes in the wall through which we all have the right to pass; and through which we always should.

     

    Alex M. Pruteanu is author of novella “Short Lean Cuts,” a forthcoming collection of published stories, and forthcoming novel “The Sun Eaters.” He has published fiction in Guernica, Pank, Connotation Press, Thrush Poetry Journal, Specter Literary Magazine, and others. He can mix a capricious martini, and in his daily life he communicates with others screaming into a Red, Yellow, and Blue vuvuzela.

     

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