on the muse

i just finished reading germaine greer’s article on the artist’s muse.

for the last year i have been contemplating this very same concept. i came face to face with my muse one year ago and i have been enveloped in a heady, headstrong rush ever since. it’s life threatening. it’s altering. it’s a knife to the cocoon. a bullet to the balloon.

this ephemeral being has enveloped all of my thoughts and inspired an output and a desire to output (‘put out’) like i haven’t experienced in years.

but unlike the classic concept of the muse as totalized by ms. greer so sweetly and lovingly in her pitch for the guardian uk, my conception of the muse is more ephemeral.

it is not a model you use.

it is a mental construct, an ideal like the islamic concept of the Beloved. (1 2) a concept that inspires the artist. this unpacifiable being functions as a call to apostasy. one which we should give in to readily. it is better to drown in the milk of creation than to thirst in a desert of stagnation.

i see my muse as my friend, as wife and mother of all my work. you can follow all the explicit ideas that engenders on your own. if you know what i mean…

when i found her (or, more accurately, when she chose me) i was in a state of deepest creative funk. and in weeks she had resurrected me. in the most literal senses. i was dead when she found me. suffocating in so many ways. and as saul williams (yo holmes!) said, “we all know what a lack of breath signifies…“

but back to some semblance of conscious thought. i can wax about the ecstasy of my being chosen forever. ask anyone who knows me.

this idea of a model who gets paid X bucks an hour to get your artistic jollies off is just absurd. i can understand, though. for years i stood around naked and immobile for photographers and painters, sketch brands and horny old guys pretending to not be pornographers (i hope no one ever finds those shots). and i don’t decry them their needs (except that damn perv pornographer. i did not know what i was getting into. folly of youth and broke on the streets). it was the classic method.

not that i have ever been a muse in the classic sense. but i know that at certain points i have been an inspiration for certain people and, um, institutions. and i have found mine in so many places.

and the ones that last, that we continue to return to, are the muse. they are our obsessions made manifest. dk pan always told me that it is our obsessions that we should follow to make our art. i don’t dare contemplate what that means after some of the things that guy has gotten me to do in the name of his art, but i understand his point and i love him.

and while it would be interesting to have some amazing human around to draw and paint and whatnot i don’t really work in those mediums. so i had to find a form of living theater to draw out my demons and let you be exposed to them. when i feel lost and afraid of my self and my work i draw out that modern scrying ball, my cell phone, and contact my muse who gives me the cheek up. or i find an avatar in the form of a friend who i can project the aura of my chosen one upon and listen to their advice. it always seems to work.

i suppose it is a form of black magic. luckily i believe in magic. i don’t believe in god. and my muse always tells me that the universe loves me. so sweet and so true. if it wasn’t i’d be horribly disfigured, imprisoned, dead or on that murderous rampage you read about.

and another reason why that untouchable being wouldn’t work for me is because, as an ex-girlfriend of mine once said by way of explanation for why she ‘did it’ with that bland motorcycle jock behind my eye, “i’m like a cat: i have to play with it until it dies…”

but i want to thank germain greer for her essay. it filled me with rhapsodic joy. i love my muse. i am in love with my muse. and my muse loves me. or i wouldn’t be floating night and day in tears of such profound sorrow, grief and happiness.

do you know that feeling? when happiness strikes and you want to cry and throw up and you get dizzy? have you felt that power?

if not you should drink more.

love.love.love.

hippy-ing out for you tonight,

pol

*special thanks to models ‘dan’ and ‘creampuff’

sense of being

i’m pissing. i’m exhausted. i haven’t slept properly in days. barely eaten in days. my appetite left when she did.

there’s a smell that my body gives off when i’ve been having regular sex. it’s the smell of the woman’s thighs. it’s particular to the woman, but generic all the same. same same. nothing else smells like it. nothing else.

it is delicious. it is delirious. it makes me delirious. i am delirious right now and i am pissing.

and i haven’t had sex in over a week so i can’t even begin to understand how i can be giving off that smell right now. but i am.

10 days ago i went home with someone. we met at a party. later we sat outside in the seattle cold at le pichet and shared a drink. looking her in the eye i said, ‘i’ve always wanted to sleep with you. can i go home with you tonight?’

she smiled. smiled again, ‘really? that would be nice. my bed is always open.’

a moment later she stood from the table and waved. a taxi pulled over. that was very smooth. she’d seemed very full of nervous energy all night, but that was a very smooth thing to do.

in the back of the cab she told me, ‘you’ll have to pay…’ which was fine. i’m an artist: always broke. but i didn’t care. i was drunk. she smelled like cigarettes and whiskey. i love it when women smell of cigarettes and whiskey. i wanted to kiss her in the back of the cab, but i knew that she’d be better if i waited. that sentence makes sense.

only a few months ago i’d been with someone else. someone who could make me reel just by being there.
we’d spent a month and a half together. every day. no pauses. london. marrakesh, barcelona. all day. every day. holding each other into dreams. waking up in sweat from the generations of two hospitabling bodies. one of the best times of my life.

her smell rode me like a satan. like a spirit. like a sickness.

i could taste her in my morning coffee over its bitterness and excess sugars. she dominated the surface of my tongue a surfeit of flavor masking everything else.

my lips carried her across 3 continents and out of an island nation.

but she left. out of heathrow with tears and kisses and the threat of the sickness of separation. and on the long plane ride back to the wretchedness of my own befouled nation, america, i dreamed of fucking her and of how we’d fucked and thanked the god i can’t believe in for smell-cancelling recycled cabin air to kill her on me for a half-day and for delivering me to her in the first place so many months before. and when i disembarked that vassal vessel her smell left just like she’d done.

i can still feel her odor and her taste, even if i can no longer invoke them. she is like an atmosphere to me. i cannot make her smell or her taste invade me again, but i can feel her on me like some cloak of stars all milk pouring across my planet body.

she called me last night. from her studio. ‘i just wanted to hear your voice.’ and i could see her in the environs of her dance studio. i could see all the students whose voices i could hear milling in the halls around her. and i could taste the bile in my belly knowing that someone else is fucking her when it’s my body that was gifted to her, a sacred vessel in sacred space. sacred within the sacrosanct divisions between her thighs.

but we are so far apart. so i get drunk at parties and fuck syrian girls whose smell haunts me when i’m pissing at work. or is it because she called me last night from her studio with the smell of of the new boy coming on her breath over a transpacific phone line to my bed. his taste on the slick flatness of her performance belly.

and i have to wonder, as i hold my cock in my hand pissing, whose smell it is? hers, the syrian girl’s or mine.

* special thanks to models ‘dan’ and ‘jane.’