Friends,
When I first saw central Mexico, it clutched my face between its hands. A place had never gripped me like that. Places had cupped my elbow, brushed their fingers to the small of my back, but Mexico shone its eyes on mine, demanding I see the whole of it, dig to its center, overturn every broken bit of limestone, imbibe the entire Spanish language and let it unfurl from my throat. To fall in love with a country is to viscerally know what we logically know—that borders are arbitrary, drawn up by men, imposed the way manners and trends are imposed.
It was 2015. I lived in Brooklyn. I was invited to Mexico twice in quick succession—first to attend a writers’ conference in San Miguel de Allende, then to participate in a month-long artists’ fellowship on Lake Chapala. I wound up staying on that lake for a year, the first of four years I spent in Mexico.
There’s another contour to this story: I had fallen in love with a Mexican painter. Or I had fallen so desperately in love with Mexico, I sought out its embodiment, a container for my passion, a means of lying naked on the ancient earth, of offering my body to the blue mountains and bright stucco and arched doorways framing cobblestone streets.
The painter was a drinker. There was something almost athletic about his drinking. Nothing could stop him. Nothing could take his eye off the ball. Throughout one nine-day bender, he wore a Lucha Libre wrestler costume, complete with a silver mask and cape.
Is It A Dysfunctional Relationship Or Is It My Muse? is a parlor game I’ve been known to play. My first year in Mexico, I was on a delusional mission to make this man see me. I wrote to him. I wrote for him. A lot of writing I’m proud of emerged from that unholy mess.
There’s a line in the Ben Folds song, Phone in The Pool: “…what’s been good for the music hasn’t always been so good for the life.” I think about that a lot. It hurts my eyes, makes me squint, because it’s true the way the sun is true. For example, immediately after getting mugged a few years ago, I wrote 80,000 words in a month. But it’s equally true that my eyes are open, that I willingly surrender my agency, live in service to the writing, on my knees before the Muses. It is my choice to stare at the sun.
Many male artists have turned beautiful women, often brilliant artists themselves, into objects—and then callously dispensed of them, condemning them to addiction, madness, death. (“After Picasso, only God,” said photographer Dora Maar, Picasso’s discarded Muse, who turned to religion to survive the heartbreak.)
Artists need their Muses. For men throughout history, that’s meant needing women to control—women who would sit motionless, naked, for days on end, only to be rendered headless or chopped into Cubist parts. Whenever he ran an errand, Picasso locked one of his Muses, Fernande Olivier, inside his studio. Amedeo Modigliani’s final Muse, eight months pregnant with his second child, threw herself out the window when he died—and hadn’t he painted her without eyes, cursing her to be lost without him? Andy Warhol picked a Muse who couldn’t walk: It was at Tennessee Williams’ birthday party that he first laid eyes on Edie Sedgwick, who had recently wrecked her car. She had her leg in a cast. He later wrote, “I could see that she had more problems than anybody I’d ever met.” Soon she would cut and dye her hair to look like his, start dressing like him. But when their relationship began to sour, he told the writer of a film he was directing, “I want something where Edie commits suicide at the end.”
My Muses, by contrast, would never sit still, never submit, and if faced with the choice, would let me take the bullet. For me, that’s where inspiration lies—in people whom I, a mere mortal, choose to worship as gods. Which doesn’t mean I don’t objectify them. I’m always watching. Always pining. Leaping into arms that won’t catch me, blurring the lines of passion and lucidity, of inspiration and love.
I have other Muses that are “good for the life”—Rembrandt’s depression self-portraits, anything Sheila Heti writes, anything Aimee Bender writes, Bob Dylan, María Sabina, vintage juke boxes, and strangers, to name a few. No one writes about the Muses of women. But all the women artists in my life can name theirs.
Here’s a partial list of my friends’ Muses:
A beloved professor
A former student
A rescue dog
An ex-lover who suffers from untreated schizophrenia
Absurdity
Trees
Questions without answers
The late novelist Mary McCarthy
Heat
Music
Pain
The dead
A cow named Jane Martha
Rage
Whenever I teach essay writing, my students express their fears about how particular readers will perceive them—their mom, maybe. Their ex. Their boss. The Twitter mobs.
“Why are you writing to your worst reader?” I ask them. “Your mom is not your Muse.” I tell them, “Write to whomever inspires you—not to those who will judge you.”
Write to your Mexico. Write to your trees. Write to the writers whose books cause the tips of your fingers to tingle. Write to the man who’s splattered in paint. Write to your unrequited love. Write to the drummer who refuses to notice you, to your lover on the other side of the world who speaks the language of your skin. Write to Homer’s invocation in The Odyssey: “Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story.”
Love,
Diana
P.S. Here’s a writing prompt: Write a love letter that’s not a traditional love letter—one a reader might not even recognize as a love letter.
P.P.S. I’ve gained 80-something new subscribers since last weekend, mostly thanks to the amazing Greg OLear’s re-posting one of my essays on his Substack. Welcome, new subscribers! I already love you and want to impress you.
P.P.P.S. Who is your Muse? Tell me in the comments.
"not your mom"? hmmm...
Love this essay! It's brilliant!
great, now I can't stop thinking about my muse but, also, great essay.