Monday, October 07, 2013

The Moment and the Muse

One of the questions that bedevils people who look into the "paranormal" centers on the apparent randomness of it all - from UFO sighting "waves" to the inconsistent nature of "hauntings" and even Bigfoot, which might not be a corporeal creature anymore than is a "ghost", it is impossible to predict when something is going to happen. 

While that might not make sense to an accountant meeting payroll, it makes perfect sense to anyone with an artistic temperament. Inspiration isn't like a television - you can't just turn it on and off at will. The muse and the mood must strike, at just the right moment, for the artist to really be engaged in a truly creative enterprise. Sometimes it comes and stays for a while, and other times it is much more ephemeral. Songwriters, poets, painters... they can all go through prolonged droughts where, for whatever reason, the muse just isn't there. Now, a good musician or filmmaker can still churn out decent work without the muse - a two-and-a-half star album, perhaps, instead of a five star one, or a solid if uninspired documentary (I've made a couple of films like that) - but they do it because they have to, not because they want to, and it's not really art. It's a widget.

For example, among my artistic pursuits is poetry, but it comes and goes with maddening randomness. I never know why the inspiration hits, but when it does it usually sticks around for a bit, and then it's gone. This past few days has seen the muse return for the first time in over a year, but for how long? I have no idea.

If the paranormal is really a form of artistic expression by an advanced non-human intelligence as I posited in my book The Other Side of Truth: The Paranormal, The Art of the Imagination, and the Human Condition (and discussed here a few days ago), then perhaps it operates in the same way, which would explain the apparent randomness of it all. Maybe the muse, and the moment, comes and goes for "them" just as it does for us, and that determines when, where, and what the advanced non-human intelligence chooses to present. 

Meanwhile, here's one of those poems of mine:


The sorceress glissades,
her symphonious beauty underscoring
a dance of ineluctable undulations
through which she weaves
a spell as deep as Mariana.
She exhales a siren’s song,
and with a single Tesla touch
coils around me like lightning -
I plunge into the swells
of a perdurable ocean of bliss.
In her embrace
I am ravished by
an amaranthine ecstasy.


Paul Kimball

1 comment:

Ryan P. said...

You raise a very interesting point Paul. Thank you!

Ryan

P.S. By the way - is the poem written for anyone in particular? Who is your muse?