back to the muse(um)

If anyone remembers that dull period last year after my red hair faded to a mousy brown, you can blame one of my muses, Jenny Lewis.  Lately I've been obsessed with a couple Rilo Kiley albums (again), but I must admit I haven't heard Acid Tongue yet (and I'll just go ahead and blame Bambino for that one, too, even though I'm not sure I ever remembered to ask for it).  When the lovely Jenny sings, "Any asshole can open up a museum, / Put all the things he loves on display so everyone can 'em," I am always reminded of my thesis (and now perhaps the blog below--see the reference to Ullman and Warhol) and the muddled ideas I'm still exploring about the connections between the MUSE and the MUSEUM.  

To summarize very poorly, one section of my thesis muses (haha) about the woman's role in art (as inspiration, closer to divine creation than man, but still incapable of the act of creation--so angelic, so much too good for "work" that work is impossible) and a coinciding fear (and contradictory wish) of being mummified--voiceless, stuffed, frozen, worshipped, a fear also experienced by displaced and revered cultures so that now I wonder if contemporary woman--if we can be considered a culture all our own intermingled with the culture of man--has experienced a diaspora that makes our comm-unity all the more impossible and precious at the same. 

Since the completion of said thesis, I have read Francine Prose's The Lives of the Muses and, just today, an article about Ruth Butler's new book Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model-Wives of Cézanne, Monet and Rodin.  Does the subject of the muse and the museum intrigue me for self-destructive reasons?  On which side do I fancy myself? Do I imagine I am the man, Dali, Johnson, Nietzsche, drawing on my muses (both masculine and feminine--Jenny, Jackie, and on and on, and my real-life partners and friends), sucking them dry like meat from a crab leg?  Do I imagine I am a model, fascinating subject, inspiration to the few poet-seers with whom I have engaged?  Or do I, even more dangerous, pretend I am that odd combination, artist-without-muse, the successful woman poet, like Sylvia, feeding on myself like the ouroboros?  Although it's meant to be life-affirming, my Poe-loving brain cannot help but conjure up a more grizzly image.  Perhaps I only fancy that I am a Hawthorne (hawthorn even), frequently indulging in Emersonian optimism, but never failing to collapse onto the dark side--to de-press into meaninglessness.

There's an important connection, also, between the past (the museum) and the future (poetry as prophecy), but somehow the present prevents me from seeing either. 

coffee, email and the death wish

In the first episode of the first season of my new favorite show, MAD MEN, the advertising executives acquire and quickly dismiss Freudian research regarding the public’s secret longing to hurtle toward its own end.  (The conversation is rooted in the first uncoverings of the health risks of smoking cigarettes in the early sixties.  Lucky Strikes, I should mention, since Bambino is now scouring the city looking for Lucky Strikes so he can be the next Don Draper.)

What is your death wish?  Smoking, drinking, reckless driving, gluttony?

My first inclination is to examine my own habits and decide how I am subconsciously choosing glamour over life.  I drink surprisingly little considering the habits of my comrades, and I don’t smoke, also surprising considering my comrades.  But boy do I drink the coffee every morning, the dark sin.  So is chocolate sinful and so is red wine, but those I can justify, for their deliciousness, their association with celebrations, antioxidants, antidepressants.  But I drink coffee because I hope it kills me, in the most emo way.  I drink it because I’m sad, because I need something else, because I need to ingest it nonchalantly the way Mrs. Draper puffs on her Lucky Strikes—because I need to cup my childlike hands around an enormous mug and pretend it makes me a woman, it makes me smart, it makes me too cool to care.    

And, finally digging deeper like the most brilliant-but-lazy student writers of whom I’m so fond, I begin to wonder what other indulgences are really only tiny suicides.  And I think of my current struggle to keep up with a new semester.  And what has become perhaps most burdensome is my multitude of email addresses, each of which requires daily checking and responding.  There’s three university addresses, one from my alma mater and one each for my two new places of employment, and then there’s my first email address ever (which I check only, ahem, bimonthly—you choose how often that is), and the email address I created for the job search months ago.  And then there’s the other forms of online communication: myspace, facebook, blogger—all of which have fallen by the waysidegutterside, died a thousand deaths at my own hand, accounts attached like arms and legs to relationships severely wounded, if not completely amputated (but this is no place for apologies).

And this is me oscillating again, thinking this spreading out of my self is alternately a multiplying and a fragmenting.  This makes more of me: more identities, more impossibility of escaping me, of pinning me down.  This makes less of me: less cohesion, less possibility of wholeness, less chance of owning my self.  This makes me an elephant: I am too enormous for you, I crush you.  This makes me an elephant: You can ride me, put me in the circus.   

I am thinking of Mirabai, and of Ellen Ullman’s “Museum of Me,” because I cannot deny that I am pulled down into my internet generation while still distancing myself from it, reminding myself that when I was in high school no one was on the You Tube, the My Space, the me-me-me, everyone’s a star, Andy Warhol’s predictions come true and then meaning nothing and I –see my own i-i-i—wonder if I’m possibly bigoted in my elitism, scorned that everyone’s a would-be journalist.  I am gentrified.  I am in a Woody Allen flick, playing tennis.  I am haunted by the harsh judgment of Scarlett Johansson’s character in Vicky Cristina Barcelona: her “death wish” apparently makes her a “mental adolescent” and I wonder if the relationships in that film are the strongest or the weakest for their multiplicity. 

Am I spread like seeds, like the divine, infinitely transforming, infinitely becoming every shade of wonderful?  Is each incarnation stronger than the last, an affirmation, a version more worldly and wise?  Am I a chameleon who selfishly benefits from acting out each fantasy of identity in an enclosed domain that is the e-ddress?  Am I a sorry scrap heap of disassembled parts, already dead unless I rebuild?

What is your death wish?