NOTICE: Intending to rework and dress-up some entries of my private diary for public reading. Why? Meh. I feel like it. This is one such entry from a few days ago, with some outside additions.
JERSEY CITY, NEW JERSEY
Convenience store, JFK Boulevard, early morning. No shots like the night, just muted hummings, the comings-and-goings of Jersey City’s up-and-at’ems and down-and-outs, all marching to their monotonies, and I, Nick Dove, the big flaneur, in attendance of their doom, flailing for coffee and cigarettes. Been trying to quit the latter, reduce the former. Too much crutching them for creativity, these short bursts of brilliance. I’ve a profound tiredness, my brain’s not working like it used to, or at least how I imagined it used to. There’s only quick spurts, momentary madnesses of unfocused recklessness and frenzied inspiration. Mere pecks from the muse, not kisses, let alone makeouts. And all I want is that makeout, for her to fuck me, freak me, bless me with a long, torrid, passionate love that I can crank into beautiful poems or workable prose. I picture us lying in a garden, lush and green, sprawled under a light blue sky, her face featureless, formless like the void. She’s a blank canvass of pure sentiment, a plaything for my purposes that gives me purpose, always shifting about, moving around, shaping herself, never tethered to reality… for what is reality anyway but the boring languishings of defeated workers and dejected layabouts searching for a route out. She’s speaking, always speaking, talking wildly, laughing maniacally, looking at me with her fullness and all her depth on display. Endlessly active, never empty, gifting me the gasoline I need to make it in this world.
I sigh. Oh, but why do I need her? I wonder. Why not I alone? Why am I not enough? Why must there be some externalization of inspiration, why am I not the muse, my muse? In line, online, I scroll Emerson, his essay Self-Reliance, for transcendentalist transcendence, some meditations, remedies, for my mind’s maladies. A few passages stick with me, lodge in my skull:
“Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.”
“Though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.”
So one must be their own master, Emerson believes. Be against conformity and complacency, a thinker-doer suggestible but vigilant, self-sufficient, at peace with and in their thoughts. Therefore the muse, however amorphous, is a medusa, a trap that captures, freezes, one’s mobility of mind. The muse may be a conscious construction, but it becomes endowed with destructive power, power which propels towards a dim, even dead-end, destination. Or so, seemingly, his logic would follow.
But is this not an isolation? A siloing of stimulation, of intellectual vitality and artistic versatility, a removal of the self from the senses of the world?
I remember, accurately or not, forgive me or don’t, Hegel on the matter; I think of the Phenomenology, and consider his teachings, or my understanding of his teachings, of the self as being realized through relationships with the world at large, and its ascension coming from interaction and immersion, not independence. From understating placement, context, one’s position in the process, historical, political, cultural, in the family, society, and the state. What he terms Sittlichkeit, a far cry from Emerson’s solitude.
But neither does this serve as much help; Hegel here acts as a restrictor, a reminder of one’s weight in the world. In the artistic process, one doesn’t want weight, they want height. To soar, unburdened, unencumbered, as high as they can, as far as can go. Emerson advocates that, though ironically, any reference, deference, to him is a disregarding of his prescription, an appeal as some greater arbiter of truth above me. And nothing, to him, should be above me, only me, or some me yet to be, some greater accomplishment of self.
I wonder if there might be a synthesis, in true Hegelian fashion; my muse is always manifest as concentrated, never distributed, formed in one focal point, a singular entity. Does this matter? Oh, I don’t know. I’d have to think about it some more. But it’s interesting that when I imagine inspiration, I condense it. Into a woman usually, a man, occasionally. Why one muse, not many muses? The world is a hypnotic place, teeming with seeming contradictions, contradictions we try to characterize, put in order, but which are boundless, and beautiful in their breadth. On this I recall Emerson again:
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.”
Chattering as I contemplate, a woman, heavy-set, kind-faced, checks in across the counter, cornering me then hugging me. “You’re just so handsome,” she swoons. “And tall!”
“Thank you,” I say.
“You got someone?” She asks.
“Not really,” I reply.
“You will,” she tells me. “I’d know, I’m a mystic.”
“A mystic?”
“Yes… well now, anyway… I used to be a cop.”
She takes out her fists, then twists them into pistols. Pew pew, she shoots.
And her face shifts again.