The Immorality of being a Self-Effacing Muse

Week 20: Experimenting w/Absurdism

I tend to think that moral actions are context-dependent to a certain extent. They hinge on the fact that we are born into a specific context and extend by the fact that we are free to act, but they only land on morality if we act in alignment with our skills and desired goals - otherwise, we experience a feeling of disjointedness - if we allow ourselves to feel at all. I’ve felt disjointed for a long while, and I think it’s partly because I haven’t fully accepted my role as a muse. I’ve seen and felt the tangible effects of my musings, so I leaned into being something that helped others. I sprinkled fairy dust here and there thinking the muse is just an accessory to the main character, not realizing that it only looks that way because the artist can only write from his own perspective - well, most artists. It’s a default perspective, but if the muse does their job correctly, they might both transcend the default.

The best muse helps the artist integrate domains. The muse can be an entity of any sort, human, or inhuman. Static or dynamic. Experience or object. It all depends on the artist, the art, and the moment. It’s almost impossible to commodify musing. It might be the last bastion of humanity. The role of the muse isn’t just as an accessory to art, it’s the essence of experiencing the other and helping them to expand and reach higher potentials.

In Orlando: A Biography, Virginia Woolf takes her subject-muse and all his/her (and her) surrounding context to produce something with deeper meaning than most detect at first glance. The novel is actually about her muse, so it’s an interesting perspective, where the artist self-effaces a bit to fully appreciate her inspiration. The novel is about a poet who transitions from being a man to a woman and lives for centuries. The poet was inspired by Woolf’s lover, Vita Sackville-West, and as such, many have considered the novel for its perspective on feminism and sexuality, but I think the obvious perspective is one of an artist being so inspired by her muse that the muse becomes the art and artist in their own right. 

In the opening passage, Woolf finds the fictional version of her muse, Orlando, in his practice, with a sword, swinging and striking - doing what he do. She watches him through the imaginary centuries and finds him to be compelling in what he pursues - satisfying something in her beyond even the most creative of urges. Sackville-West’s exploits were enough to inspire experimental literary cannon - I mean, he’s just doin’ him (or she’s doing her, because this was the personification of Sackville-West), and Woolf really said, let me write some gay shit about this mfer that will be studied for centuries. A good muse exists as themselves and it inspires artistic obsession:

“A more candid, sullen face it would be impossible to find. Happy the mother who bears, happier still the biographer who records the life of such a one!”

Sackville-West was a poet, herself, and it really do be like this sometimes. Artists make the most inspiring of muses because they conjure magic from the material. Muses and artists switch positions, and ideas almost by accident. Sharing and incredible transactions are the product of a successful muse-artist relationship.

Now throw attraction into the equation, and you’ve created a megazord muse, which is what happened for Sackville-West and Woolf. Typically we see these relationships ending in disaster or a quiet sizzle, but while the fire is being stoked, things are happeing. In the best of all worlds, an artist-muse pair might find an infinite wellspring and a virtually automated bucket system. In the worst of all worlds they find a total dissolution of creative desire - a self-immolation of the physical and/or spiritual kind. The reality of most realities is that by and large encounters with a muse are somewhere in the middle. A gaussian curve of inspiration. Maybe artists are drawn to the most dangerous or fertile muse, but to actually touch it spells disaster and salvation, and they know it.

As an artist, the question to ask yourself is: are you willing to burn? 

As a muse, the same question can be asked, but no one asks what the muse is willing to do, because it just does what it does. It will burn if it’s going to burn. This looks like self-effacement of the muse from the outside because we think of art as a discrete act, completed by a specified artistic entity. The truth is it’s anything but. The muse has a heat tolerance because it already burns inside. Where the fuck you think pixie dust comes from? The only way to achieve the maximal efficacy of a muse-artist relationship is to burn without actually dying. 

“Poetry is just the evidence of life. 

If you’re life is burning well, 

Poetry is just the ash.”

-Leonard Cohen

Sackville-West as a muse-artist herself, sought other muses with whom she exchanged pixie dust in an attempt to form a megazord. Violet Trefusis was one such muse, who herself wrote many novels and non-fiction works, and Woolf made note of her lover’s lover in her coded “biography” :

It was through this accident that Orlando and the Princess became acquainted. They were seated opposite each other at the great table spread under a huge awning for the entertainment of the notables. The Princess was placed between two young Lords, one Lord Francis Vere and the other the young Earl of Moray. It was laughable to see the predicament she soon had them in, for though both were fine lads in their way, the babe unborn had as much knowledge of the French tongue as they had. When at the beginning of dinner the Princess turned to the Earl and said, with a grace which ravished his heart,

“Je crois avoir fait la connaissance d’un gentilhomme qui vous était apparenté en Pologne l’été dernier,” or “La beauté des dames de la cour d’Angleterre me met dans le ravissement. On ne peut voir une dame plus gracieuse que voire reine, ni une coiffure plus belle que la sienne,”

("I believe I met a gentleman who was related to you in Poland last summer." or "The beauty of the ladies of the English court fills me with delight. One cannot see a lady more graceful than your queen, nor a hairstyle more beautiful than hers.")

both Lord Francis and the Earl showed the highest embarrassment. The one helped her largely to horseradish sauce, the other whistled to his dog and made him beg for a marrowbone. At this the Princess could no longer contain her laughter, and Orlando, catching her eyes across the boars’ heads and stuffed peacocks, laughed too. He laughed, but the laugh on his lips froze in wonder. Whom had he loved, what had he loved, he asked himself in a tumult of emotion, until now? An old woman, he answered, all skin and bone. Red-cheeked trulls too many to mention. A puling nun. A hard-bitten, cruel-mouthed adventuress. A nodding mass of lace and ceremony. Love had meant to him nothing but sawdust and cinders. The joys he had had of it tasted insipid in the extreme. He marvelled how he could have gone through with it without yawning. For as he looked the thickness of his blood melted; the ice turned to wine in his veins; he heard the waters flowing and the birds singing; spring broke over the hard wintry landscape; his manhood woke; he grasped a sword in his hand; he charged a more daring foe than Pole or Moor; he dived in deep water; he saw the flower of danger growing in a crevice; he stretched his hand⁠—in fact he was rattling off one of his most impassioned sonnets when the Princess addressed him, “Would you have the goodness to pass the salt?”

In other words, it was on.

Orlando and Princess Sasha (Sackville-West and Treifsus) made vows to each other and even attempted an escape together on multiple occasions. Woolf recounts this in great emotional depth on behalf of her muse. She observes her muse’s artistic self-immolation at the hands of another muse. When Sasha/Violet does not meet Orlando to run away together, she writes of her lover: 

“Orlando could do nothing for some time but watch the appalling race of waters as it hurled itself past him. At last, seeming to recollect himself, he clapped spurs to his horse and galloped hard along the river bank in the direction of the sea…Flinging himself from his horse, he made, in his rage, as if he would breast the flood. Standing knee-deep in water, he hurled at the faithless woman all the insults that have ever been the lot of her sex. Faithless, mutable, fickle, he called her; devil, adulteress, deceiver; “

Woolf bears witness to her muse’s destruction, “Orlando gave himself up to a life of extreme solitude.”, but shortly after Sackville meets Woolf, literary scholars say it’s a wrap for both of them - Megazord muse achieved: "neither had ever written so much so well, and neither would ever again reach this peak of accomplishment". 

In the timeline of the novel, Orlando transforms into a woman prior to meeting his next muse and lover, not necessarily Woolf, but in someways it reads as such. Woolf appears to be a part of Sackville-West (Orlando’s) transformation, partly lover, and partly his biographer:

“She had been a gloomy boy, in love with death, as boys are; and then she had been amorous and florid; and then she had been sprightly and satirical; and sometimes she had tried prose and sometimes she had tried drama. Yet through all these changes she had remained, she reflected, fundamentally the same. She had the same brooding meditative temper, the same love of animals and nature, the same passion for the country and the seasons.”

I won’t spoil the end of the book, but suffice it to say that muses can be fleeting and lasting at the same time. Sackville-West’s work on the social themes of the decline of the British aristocracy was greatly influenced by Woolf and obviously, one of Woolf’s greatest works, here, was based on her study of her muse. There was incredible reciprocity. As for their romantic relationship, both women remained married to their husbands, and their relationship distanced in 1935, ten years after meeting. “My friendship to Vita is over. Not with a quarrel, not with a bang, but as ripe fruit falls” They did reconnect a couple years later and remained friends, until Woolf’s suicide in 1941. 

If Woolf’s Orlando taught me anything it’s that the moral role of the muse is to live. A muse should not be self-effacing, unless it is in the muse’s on constitution to be so. In fact, the life of an artist may be more self-effacing than even a muse in certain cases, but we all oscillate in and out of our roles. I suspect the truth of the relationship between muse and artist is one of mutual reflection and understanding.  Woolf alluded to Sackville-West being more developed than her, and Sackville-West said Woolf was a better writer, calling her own writing ”illiterate” as compared to Woolf’s “scholarly” prose, despite her contemporary commercial success. All in all their experience of each other made their work all the more beautiful.

I’ve been meaning to write more on the topic of freedom, morality and ethics, but instead I’ve been living, trying to figure them out empirically. Sometimes we want to be the artist, sometimes we’re the muse, and vice versa. We must go where things take us. Today I was taken to Virginia Woolf and her muse. I don’t know where I’ll be next week, but I think this week has changed my perception of what I’m supposed to be doing out here.  Tinker Bell has her own show and shit.

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Thought Experiment: In what ways do you serve as a muse for others, or as an artist? How do you relate to the other, and have you considered how much you impact the thing that inspires you? What is your job in either role?