Peter Gooch

Now you comprehend your first and final lover in the dark receding planets of his eyes, and this is the hour when you know moreover that the god you have loved always will descend and lie with you in paradise.

—Gwendolyn MacEwen, “The hour of the singer” (unpublished 1969).

 

The concept of the muse has become a problem these days. When viewed through the lens of contemporary gender politics a painter’s muse is often seen as a symbol of the prevailing gender imbalance in art. Particularly art made prior to 1945. Often but not always, muses were models for male, figurative artists. Male artists found the idea of inspiration in sexy female form hard not to like. Art History is full of variations on this paradigm. If it was good enough for the Pre-Raphaelites it should be good enough.

Even 20th Century, non-objective painting has its share of muses, Elaine DeKooning and Lee Krasner to name two who acted as wives, lovers and collaborators, as well as being fine and famous painters themselves. Frida Kahlo inspired Diego Rivera and vice versa. Dali and Gala. Art is filled with models and muses who were not relegated to a subservient position as merely an observed object—Robert Graves White Goddess notwithstanding. Fortunately, there is so much written about both historical muses, and the muse as concept that no interested person should lack for information.

However, the muse as socio-political flashpoint isn’t what SEREN is about. Rather, she serves as a symbol of the key to genius. For the character Fairchild Moss, Seren is seen as the key to salvation and relevance.

Seren, the title character, is a muse who fits the old fashioned idea of a female who inspires male artists to exceed their abilities. Beyond that, she is dangerous. Dangerous not only in her beauty and allure, but also because she kills her artist/lovers once the artistic transaction is complete. Think Praying Mantis.

A modest twist. So far so good.

Problems begin when the nature and mechanism of the artist/muse transaction demands some form of explanation. For me, the first branch of the pathway occurs early on—try to explain or don’t. The historical (and perhaps wisest) choice is to skip the explanation—leave sleeping dogs lie. Most, or at least many, people have a general notion about what a muse is and what she/he does. Best, perhaps, to leave it at that. However, when a muse’s influence forms a major part of the narrative, some version of the cause/effect dyad seems imperative. In SEREN, I chose to go with a simple, and logical (in myth and literature) solution—a magic potion. If it’s good enough for Snow White…you know the rest.

Interestingly, magic potions are as much in vogue today as in the age of fairy tales. Need I mention MDA, MDMA and their designer equivalents (Ecstasy, Molly) plus LSD, Ketamine, psilocybin et. al.? My choice of The Spotted Man, a fictional strain of the Amanita Pantherina mushroom (used in conjunction with Henbane) which allows us to avoid the thorny issue of contemporary drug use. This arcane combination of naturally occurring psycho-active plants is thought by some to be the potion used in antiquity by Viking-age “Berserkers”.

For good or ill, the transmigration of consciousness from one human to another remains fiction. That Seren and her visions could enter Moss’s consciousness, and that those visions should affect his painting is pure wishful thinking and literary license on my part: “…possessed at the sacramental instant by a power greater than their own, the power of their craft, skill or performance.”*1. How cool—or perhaps horrible—would it be to have another entity lurking in your mind? How invasive yet intimate to feel another’s thoughts existing parallel to and intertwining with your own? Occupying the one quintessentially private space? The intrusion of  fertile female sensibility into a male consciousness for the purpose of creation is a construct of reversal which contains too many ironic potentialities to mention.

Hence the origin of The Spotted Man as an agent or catalyst for artistic creation in SEREN. We inherit what we inherit—from art and literature, myth and magic.

The Muse:

Its shape is a castoff velvet cape, 
Its eyes are the eyes of your most forbidden lover
And its claws, I tell you its claws are gloved in fire.

MacEwen, The Hour of the Singer

*1. “MacEwen’s Muse” Margaret Atwood.