Goines On: Sex with the muse

Click image for more vignettes

Goines couldn’t let go – didn’t want to let go – of an idea he had conceived during the writing of a recent poem:

When your muse whispers,
welcome her embrace,

hold her, feel her, glide with her,

follow her rhythms....

His muse had given him the idea during the poem’s writing. It seemed to be the poem’s theme – or one of its themes.
    The idea was that every encounter with one’s muse might be an act of love-making, of coitus. It could certainly be so metaphorically; was it so as well in some deep, psychological, biological way? An essential attribute of animals is that they reproduce themselves, plant their seeds or receive another’s seeds, sprout them, grow them, deliver them, raise them. Could all human enterprise be an embodiment of that underpinning?
    A writer’s act could result in a short poem, as it did on the occasion Goines was musing about, or it could be a longer poem, a theme for a book of poems, a collection of “Leaves of Grass” perhaps – had Walt Whitman thought of his acts of writing that way? Had Whitman even said so in a poem whose thrust Goines might have missed when he read Leaves of Grass as a teenager sitting in his Uncle Leo’s front yard in Tulare?
    Did Goines still even have a copy of Leaves of Grass? Well, yes, he did. There it was, that Library of America volume titled Whitman: Poetry and Prose. Maybe Goines would have to read the prose to discover whether Whitman had confessed to having sex with his muse. And, if he didn’t confess, was it nevertheless so? Jeez, he saw there were almost 700 pages of Whitman’s prose writings....
    Prose? Yes, of course! Goines’ muse inspired prose as well – writing that wasn’t verse. Short stories and novels – essays – were known to be gifts from writers’ muses. How many writers actively thought of being inspired by their muse as an erotic encounter?
    And art generally, even problem-solving generally? In his professional career as a technical writer and editor, Goines had, after all, conducted workshops in “creative problem-solving”...and he had, while conducting them, experienced a glow that might have been even more intense if he had been able to name it – “erotic.”
    Might all creative activity be a way of sublimating bodily lust?
    “Bodily lust” reminded Goines of Jeffrey Epstein, whose sexual predations led to his arrest and suicide. Might Epstein have avoided that life of crime and ignominy by consorting imaginatively with his muse instead of exploiting young women, teenage girls?
_______________ 

Note: The cover image is Luis Morris’ “Artist’s Muse,” (2009).

Copyright © 2022 by Moristotle