The Muse Is My Mistress... and she is one jealous bitch

painting by Karol Bak

Every morning the Muse wakes me at 430am. No matter what time I sleep, at 430am I am suddenly and ferociously awake. I get up to write songs. Living on this wild and empty mountain, my fingers are often too cold to play at that time, so I stumble out to have a pee under an icy moon, say hi to the roos and deer and wombats, make a chai and fumble with instruments until I warm up.
I actually see Muse for the first time not long after Vision Quest, when I am curled into blessed comfort and clean sheets in the arms of my lover, who I haven’t seen for weeks. The night is cold, the bed warm, his arms and skin warmer still. The air is so still I can hear the scrit scrit of tiny creatures nesting in the ceiling. We haven’t slept til after midnight and now it’s 430am and I’m all the way awake.

Muse has been kicking me out of bed to write music every morning for weeks now. I can almost hear her tapping her feet impatiently this morning.
I groan. And bargain.
‘Really? Can I have a morning off? Look, here's this gorgeous man all naked n stuff and he’s going to cuddle me all morning and make me a cup of tea in bed and probably breakfast and then ravish me again, can we do this at, I don’t know… 9am?’

Then I see her. I don’t ‘see’ often; just glimpses when the veils lift, but this vision is clear as a shout.

She’s sitting naked on a rock. She looks nothing like any Muse I would make up. The one I’d create would be a jet-locked, leather-clad warrior poet. This one is leonine, with a cascading mane of amber and gold, skin the colour of melted honey and the perfect legs of a hundred metre sprinter. She’s sitting on a rock playing a lyre. A fucking lyre. She glows like she’s lit with some inner fire. She is such a cliche of Greek Goddess that I instantly believe her. She doesn’t even look at me, just sits there, playing the damned lyre. What fills me is the scent of a bored yawn and a casual flick of attention, which stings. The disdain of a sleek cat, playing with prey.

She doesn’t say anything, but I hear it anyway.
’I’m here. Where are you?’

I don’t know which facet of the nine Muses she is, but when a goddess tells you to do something, you do it, in case she doesn’t come back.

I get up.

No cuddles, no tea in bed, no lazy warm morning of new-caught sunlight and sleepy chitchat, just cold fingers and hushed picking into the dawn and another song falls out some like unlit diamond and I shine a torch onto it and it blazes.
Thank you, Muse. By all that is holy, thank you and thank you. I will sacrifice goats at the altar of your regard every day, just keep me in your prickling lights.
In Vision Quest last month I was thoroughly slapped by that which is greater than me. Call it what you will… creator, life, gaia, essence… call it fantasy if you like, I don’t care.

I was shown the pathways whereby I don’t bring my creations fully into the world. I have four books unpublished, so many songs and pieces of music unheard, unsung, I post my writings on Facebook where they will be read by a couple of hundred people and then lost in the digital timelines… I don’t show all the way up. I don’t send my offerings to fly free. I have been hiding.

On the last evening, after four days solo in the wilderness with my darkness and demons, shivering and wet and cold on an endless, interminable, six degree night while a thunderstorm threw branches around like confetti, I was scolded like the infant I am. I saw myself wrapped around glowing eggs in a dark cave, jealously guarding them from others.

Scolded like a child.
’You think all these gifts are for YOU? For YOUR pleasure?’

Err.. Yes. I did think that.

I’ve been hoarding my creations, ignoring all the nudges, invitations, encouragements from so many different places. And now, unceremoniously, I’ve been booted firmly up the arse to set them free.
​

I say yes.

Every week I take these creations into the studio, to the palace of the real, where I share them with another human... the one who first heard me sing and said… yes, you, I want to record you. The one who takes these newborns and paints their many colours and blows their embers into flame, until they fly. Who pours himself as deeply into them as I do, with dazzling brilliance. Who is, I suppose, the father to these fragile children of mine, and without whom I would still be sitting in my tipi, singing to myself. The one who is making them real in the world with such skill and talent and wild creativity. Blessed, blessed be, and thank you, Tank (Paul Greene), with all my heart. Co-creation is a dream. Every time we create a song like this together, it makes space for the next ten.

I understand now how creatives end up living in squats and crack houses, selling their grandmother’s jewellery for a tube of prussian blue, that exact shade of ocean drowning them in fever dreams. I’ve finally surrendered fully into the river of music and let the Muse take me, and take me she does.

Nothing else matters, this is a wholly holy unholy obsession. I understand that when I push myself away from the shore, I float to the underworld, carried deep and lost on the river Styx. I understand that to stay here I sacrifice the world of logic and linear time, and the deeper I go, the less tethered I am and the more purely I dance in the abyss from which all creations come. Every song is there, all I have to do is listen with all of me, call in the lightning, asked to be blessed, and every day lightning comes, scorching me savage and tender as promises.

I burn.

This is a drug, it’s bliss beyond price.

And by some miracle of alchemy, in the midst of all this I also have a lover who can meet me here, out beyond the stars, in a frenzy and fury of flesh and skin and fire, where the creative vortex of sex and music is a single ecstatic braid mainlined straight from the veins of god. Deities dance through me and when my mouth opens in this place, sometimes they even sing their own songs, which choose these hands, this heart, this voice to be made real in the world. I feel like I am roaming the universe with a butterfly net, somehow snaring dragons, clinging to their rough scaled backs by my fingernails, hoping not to be thrown off the waterfall at the edge of all things.

Yes, I am a little crazy right now. I’m grateful that I’ve devoted a lifetime to skills of grounding, of deep rooted here-ness. I trust my tethers. They’re holding, for now.

And… I am a long way out. I can see the shore, but sometimes mist covers it, for a while. I’ve let the world fall away. I am rarely on social media. Don’t reply to texts and calls (even more than usual). I'm not dancing, not teaching, not fixing websites and sorting emails. I resent every moment away from Muse. I love my friends, but sometimes when they speak I grey out a little, following a melody heard faint as mist at the edge of the field, counting the seconds until I can catch it and weave it into song. I am in the throes of an affair, am luststruck by lifeforce, by the pure thunder of now.

I know, because I am a creative to my bones, that there will be a time when I look back on all this with yearning and heartbreak and grief, when the raw power ripping me daily into atoms finally turns its attention elsewhere, leaving me bereft and mortal, waiting valiantly to catch Muse’s attention once more, making sacrifices to all the gods, staking myself out before minotaurs, giving my liver to be torn by eagles. Anything to live and breathe and be obliterated by music again, where every note is a cell dying, another dancing in harmony.

I hope I haven’t alarmed you. I wanted to write to thank those of you who have been checking up on me, to send this postcard and say, that I am in the throes of a love affair with Muse, and She will break my heart in all the best ways,, and when She is done with me I will be devastated, but I wouldn’t change a single thing. And that in about three months I should have things to show you, some glittering gifts to give, children of this affair. Until then, though, if you call, I may only answer in music.