The Muses: Series Introduction

In this Introductory episode on a new series, I delve into the intricate evolution of our perception of muses, focusing particularly on the ancient Greek Nine Muses. I challenge traditional notions, questioning the gendered and divine characteristics attributed to muses, while reflecting on their absence in certain artistic domains. Tracing historical references from Homer to Shakespeare, I examine how various artists invoked muses through history. The podcast explores the challenges of preserving art forms like painting and music, discussing Plato's skepticism and the role of memory or Mnemosyne, who is the mother of the muses.

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Transcript

The Muses_INTRO

What is a Muse?

Hello, my name is Darren and welcome to The Makers Rage podcast. So, this is the first episode in a series I'll be doing on the Muses. This being a podcast ostensibly about creativity, I thought it would be interesting to look at the ancient Greek muses in a retrospective way, examining how our attitude, particularly in the West, has evolved over time, not only towards the canonical nine Greek muses, but towards muses in general. What is it to be a muse? Must one be female, immortal, divine, a daughter of Zeus – deigning to bestow her afflatus on servile male supplicants? What about a prostitute? Lying naked on a bed – very mortal, daughter of a nobody, unlike the gentleman artist with a private income, who has the leisure to go stalking the streets of the demimonde in search of a pretty face he deigns to immortalize on a canvas. The irony of using painting as an example here is that, interestingly enough, there is no ancient Greek muse of painting. But I intend to devote a whole episode at the end on 10th muses or missing muses, modern or postmodern muses. But despite my decision to use the canonical Nine Muses as a framework to structure the series, I do intend to both celebrate and interrogate the very concept of a muse, and what's changed over time.

Homer and Shakespeare, etc. 

From one of its first uses in Homer in the opening lines of the Odyssey. “Sing in me muse, and through me, tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending”; to Dante's veneration of Beatrice, despite her friend-zoning him hard; to Shakespeare's Dark Lady with “black wires growing out of our head”, not very flattering. But as Shakespeare said, “I grant I never saw goddess go, my mistress when she walks, treads on the ground.” And for writing sonnets, he might have called on Erato say, the muse of love poetry. For writing Hamlet or King Lear, Melpomene would have done the trick, the Muse of tragedy. But for A Midsummer Night's Dream or Twelfth Night, Thalia was his best bet. But although he does invoke a ‘muse of fire’ at the start of Henry V, Shakespeare doesn't bother much with a Greek Muses: the ones he writes about, The Earl of Southampton, the Dark Lady, etc. are people who tread upon the ground. Milton, on the other hand, enamored of the classics and determined to write an epic, couldn't help himself: in book seven Paradise Lost, he invokes the muse of astronomy, Urania (who curiously became the unofficial muse of Christian Poetry in the early modern period), “Descend from Heaven, Urania, by that name if rightly thou art called, whose voice divine following, above the Olympian hill I soar…” But he quickly checks himself, “the meaning, not the name I call.” As a devout Christian, it would be idolatrous to call upon the name. And he already made sure in book one to invoke his true muse, the Holy Spirit to help him soar “above the Aonian mount”, where the Muses dwell and “pursue things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.” 

Painting?

But Milton, and those after him, who invoked the classical muses in literature knew they weren't calling on actual spirits that dwelled on Mount Helicon in Greece, who could somehow hear their call from wherever on the planet they happened to be, in whatever language, and grant them the ability to write great poetry in that language. Invoking the Muse thus became a mere literary convention, like saying ‘Once upon a time’ conventionally begins a fairy tale. Although the ‘eternal feminine’, as Goethe observed, can be difficult to shift in the minds of young male artists in search of fulfilment in the being of a woman whose feet have never trodden on the ground, a woman who's never been born, and so can never disappoint them. Perhaps the Virgin Mary gives us some idea of how seriously the Ancient Greeks regarded their invocations. Believers may think it an indignity to mention the mother of God in the same breath as the muses. Yet, perhaps no woman has ever been depicted more often in art, prayed to or invoked before an ambitious undertaking, be it to execute a painting, build a great cathedral, or to go on pilgrimage. More wars have been fought in her name than Mars let alone calliope. Still, in the early modern period, it was safer for poets to call on calliope. Presuming to invoke the Virgin for your little poem could attract the wrong kind of attention with the Inquisition running around looking for people to set on fire. In the Netherlands, people had grown tired of painting Virgins anyway, and there the Inquisition held no sway. Besides, grabbing your wife or daughter and dressing her up as a muse was more fashionable. As Vermeer did in his “Art of Painting”, in which he features himself with is back to us, painting what some believe is his daughter dressed as Clio, the muse of history. There is no Muse of painting, as I mentioned. Vermeer has requisitioned his daughter, bearing Clio’s accoutrements – a laurel wreath and trumpet – to fulfil the role. But unlike history written down, paint is more perishable. We have the words of Herodotus pretty much as he recorded them, but so few paintings from the ancient world have survived. Marble or bronze may last longer. And yet, perhaps for similar reasons, there's also no muse for sculpture. As Shakespeare wrote, “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme, but you shall shine more bright and these contents than unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time.” Perhaps, in invoking the muse of history for his painting, Vermeer wanted to overturn this conception that painting, sculpture and the other plastic arts are doomed to be forgotten far sooner than poetry, literature, and song.

Lyric and Song

But where are the ancient Greek songs? We have fewer musical compositions than crumbling frescoes from the ancient world. Sure, the lyrics survive by Alcman, Anacreon, Archilocus, Sappho, Pindar among so many others. They were called lyrics because they were accompanied by the lyre. Even the Iliad and the Odyssey would have been sung. And the tragedies and comedies of ancient Greece would have seemed to us more like operas. But none of the music survives. The Pythagoreans may have explained musical tuning, but not a single melody any ancient Greek heard has survived. Imagine all of 20th century music surviving only as lyrics on the page. True, the ancients still speak to us, but they cannot sing. 

So, what must be done with the musical instruments that are emblems of six of the nine Muses? Maybe they were harsh on the painters and sculptors to deny patronage because paint and stone is perishable. Even words rely on the material they’re written on for transmission – papyrus and wax tablets aren’t much good; stone better but hard to lug around. And what about Terpsichore, the muse of dance: of all the arts, perhaps the most ephemeral. Dance notation has existed in various forms throughout history, but no one has ever learned to be an A Nijinsky, Martha Graham or a James Brown by studying dance notation. To perfect it, it must be witnessed directly, imitated, practiced, making countless mistakes until the performance seems effortless, vanishing in its unfolding. Recorded technology has changed all this, of course, but, like song, nothing survives of ancient Greek dance, except what's depicted on vases perhaps. So, if the end of art is permanence, why, over the centuries or millennia, has Erato’s Kitara, Eutherpes aulos, Clio’s cornet and Calliope’s lyre fallen silent. And, after all, what is a muse without music? 

Of course, this didn't stop poets much later, from titling poems, ‘songs’, and not setting them to music. Think of Walt Whitman Song of Myself, “I celebrate myself and I sing myself,” it begins, as if expecting to sing to us from the page, as the Greeks have nonetheless done, despite the instruments falling silent. Because in the Iliad, for example, even without the lyre, there is music in the words:

μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος

οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽ ἔθηκε,

πολλὰς δ᾽ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν

ἡρώων… 

“Sing, Goddess, the wrath of Achilles, etc, etc.” 

Plato and Mathematics

One person we know who objected to all this, especially the poetry, was Plato. He had little time for the Muses and deemed everything they were associated with as ephemeral because all art is rooted in imitation: the best songs, the best singers and dancers always fall short of perfection. The best sculpture and painting are worse off still for they are but imitations of imitations. Because the natural world itself is but a shadow of the timeless forms that exist in the realm of pure ideas. The statue of a God is but an inert facsimile of a man; a painting of a bird cannot fly or sing as a real bird can let alone the ideal deathless birds in Plato’s cloud cuckoo land. “Let no one who is ignorant of geometry enter here”, he wrote above the entrance to his academy. He might have objected to there being no Muse of mathematics. After all, a mathematical theorem, once proved, is proved for all eternity. And if he did exile the muses from his Republic, he still reserved a special place of honor for their mother, Memory. And he famously privileged memory over writing because writing, again, is only a semblance or imperfect record of what is spoken and what is taught; and writing, moreover, stultifies thinking, because it displaces the role of memory in cultural transmission. If you write it down, you don't need to remember it. Just roll up the scroll and put it on a shelf somewhere. You know where to find it when you need it. Writing it down to molder on a shelf is a type of forgetting. Ironically enough, his mentor Socrates never wrote anything down. But we only remember what he said because of what others including Plato wrote about him. And the fact so many of Plato's works survive after 2500 years, is a testament to the diligence of copyists and translators down the centuries, without which all his idealism would be consigned to oblivion.

Sappho

Many others were not so fortunate. Consider Sappho, mentioned earlier, whom the Greeks themselves called a tenth muse, because she was the only woman listed among the nine canonical lyric poets. They certainly liked the number nine. A great poet in her own right, she reputedly wrote thousands of lines of which only fragments survive. And whom did she invoke being a woman and a lesbian – in both senses, from the island of Lesbos and a lover of women – why Aphrodite Of course. “Aphrodite, subtle of soul and deathless, daughter of God, weaver of wiles, I pray thee; neither with care, dread mistress nor with anguish, slay thou my spirit.” It seems she wasn't shy about pursuing other women, but she was often jealous of the men who were her rivals in the pursuit. 

He seems like the gods’ equal, that man, who
 ever he is, who takes his seat so close
 across from you, and listens raptly to
 your lilting voice

and lovely laughter, which, as it wafts by,
 sets the heart in my ribcage fluttering;
 as soon as I glance at you a moment, I
 can’t say a thing,

and my tongue stiffens into silence, thin
 flames underneath my skin prickle and spark,
 a rush of blood booms in my ears, and then
 my eyes go dark,

and sweat pours coldly over me, and all
 my body shakes, suddenly sallower
 than summer grass, and death, I fear and feel,
 is very near.

It's not the canonical nine Muses that will help her here, who seem to always favor young men. But perhaps the goddess of love, who she calls upon, will be her ally in her pursuit of love and happiness. And in her ‘Ode to Aphrodite’, the goddess promises “she that feign would fly, she shall quickly follow. She that now rejects, yet with gifts shall woo thee. She that heeds thee not, soon shall love to madness.” And even if women weren't second class citizens for most of ancient Greek history, one feels female poets wouldn't have invented nine beautiful female virgins to invoke for their poetic inspiration. They may have chosen male equivalents. Others, like Sappho, chosen a goddess like Aphrodite to be their ally. 

Apollo

I don't think Apollo would be a ready choice, however; despite being the leader of the Muses, and one of the most widely revered and influential of all the ancient Greek and Roman gods, his epithet, Phoebus, means ‘bright or pure’. The inventor of the lyre (well he stole the idea from Hermes, but that’s another story), nonetheless, it’s the lyre the chief muse, Calliope, held as one of her emblems, he was also beautiful beyond description. Like his twin sister, Artemis, he carried a bow, and with it threatened from afar. Thus, he was feared as well as revered, he could heal and bring plague, he could give you the gift of prophecy but at the same time, like Cassandra, ensure no one believes what you say. He could bring inspiration, but also destruction to those who presume to perform a little too well. However great a poet or musician you think you are, always remember, Apollo is number one. So, you see not the most approachable of gods, which is why since Homer and Hesiod, he was the god of divine distance. One who threatened from afar, both temporally through his Oracle's and prophecies, and spatially, because no matter where on earth you happen to be, you're always within reach of his bow. Beauty, arrogance, and distance: no wonder nymphs tended to flee from him. Most famously, of course, Daphne, a Nyad, or nymph presiding over fountains, wells, springs, etc. Apollo saw her and was infatuated. She saw him and bolted. And when he was about to catch up, begged her father, the river god Peneus, to turn her into a laurel tree, which he did. And since Apollo couldn't have her, he took some of her leaves and made a wreath, which would afterwards be used to crown champions at the games, and be worn as a chaplet by generals, athletes, musicians, and Nobel Laureates – Laureate for Laurel, emblem of victory and of unrequited love; or if you’re less charitable of a thwarted rape. 

Dionysus

Women certainly preferred his bibulous counterpart Dionysus. But his female followers, or Maenads, weren't writing poetry. And while they danced and sang, the nature of their devotion is suggested by the meaning of the word ‘maenad’ – ‘raving, mad, demented’. And if King Pentheus of Thebes can have his head ripped off by his own mother, or Orpheus be dismembered because he refused to entertain these harridans while he mourned his dead wife, perhaps it's best for artists male and female, to avoid invoking, and provoking, this God of the vine, of vegetation, fertility, insanity, ritual madness. That said, eventually, this feral and unrestrained bloodletting tempered into ritual; and unhinged raving sublimated into song, specifically the dithyramb or hymn in honor of Dionysus. And in his Poetics, Aristotle maintains that in the beginning, tragedy was an improvisation by those who led off the dithyramb. At first, it was burlesque in tone, because it contained elements of the Satyr Play. Satyrs being these half goat men with permanent erections. These plays were the sources of both comedy and tragedy. How they evolved that the tragedy is disputed. Some scholars say it is when spoken verse was introduced, and improvisation took a backseat. Eventually, the spoken verse was written down before performance, and so less improvisation perhaps meant less slapstick, less comedy, and more serious subjects could be tackled, especially when these newfangled play-wrights too the time to develop their stories, their characters, structured their narrative into scenes, acts, Protasis, Epitasis, and Catastrophe; or simply, beginning, middle, and end. 

Tragedy

The word ‘tragedy’ means ‘goat song’, indicating its origin with the satyrs. The continued association with Dionysus is derived from the fact that tragedy, like ritual, is an outlet for our barbarous tendencies. And the fact that tragedy is only a play, a performance, gives the savage instinct its release without the bloodshed. We're not really seeing a woman ripping off her son's head, or Oedipus the king gouging out his eyes after discovering he'd married his mother. When the play ends, we exit theatre into a world that has not fundamentally changed. The order of the cosmos has not been overturned. But we as spectators have changed a little. Aristotle would say, for the better. If we watch a tragic love story, say, the sadness we feel at the end is transitory and benign in comparison to experiencing heartache in real life, or being forced to confront it in a fiction prepares us in a way for the genuine devastation of losing someone you love. Or if you come to the play having already experienced the calamity, it can help you come to terms with your grief. It’s reassuring to learn others have experienced these things and that it’s not the end of the world, though it may feel so at first.

Or let's say, like me, you enjoy revenge movies? Seeing the wronged protagonist with whom you identify achieve his or her revenge assuages, at least for a while, that continual rage you feel at injustice in the world, and your perception that the wicked seem to prosper at the expense of the good. The word Aristotle uses is ‘catharsis’. It means ‘purification, or cleansing’. He never fully explains it. But many others after him have given their two cents. Some have said its role is to restore a proper balance to the emotions; others go beyond aesthetics and suggest members of the audience are patients to be cured, restored to psychic health. Still others believe the drama should provoke one to political action. Interestingly, the literal medical sense of the word catharsis refers to the release of menstrual fluid, the catamenia and the fact menstruation was seen as a kind of purification or cleansing of the body and a balancing of the humors makes me think Aristotle believed the same effect occurred in the mind of the spectator, who in the course of a play, is purged of their anger and fear, heartache, even despair, and that the effect is ultimately helpful and humanizing. Still, I can't help but think the comparison would make some bristle. I doubt Melpomene, the muse of tragedy, menstruated. The gods and goddesses may have had kids, but you never hear about any of them going to the bathroom. 

Comedy

And with all this talk of Dionysus, randy satyrs, and crazed maenads, what role for the muse of tragedy herself, Melpomene, in tragedy? her main emblem was the tragic mask, which actors wore, the exaggerated expressions defining the character as they played. Masks also allowed actors to play multiple characters. Her counterpart, the muse of comedy, Thalia’s emblem was the comic mask. Another of her emblems was the shepherd's crook, which was echoed in vaudeville and of course cartoons where the crook was used to yank bad performers or Daffy Duck off the stage. In Hamlet, Shakespeare said, the purpose playing or acting was and is “to hold as it were the mirror up to nature.” But of course mirrors can be made to deceive. A contemporary of Shakespeare's Thomas Coriat wrote that he witnessed something quite remarkable when he went to the theatre in Venice, quote, “I saw women act, a thing that I never saw before.” And moreover, he says, “they performed it with as good a grace as ever I saw any masculine actor.” 

Of course, in Shakespeare's London, women didn't act, and female characters were played by young boys on the cusp of adolescence whose voices hadn't cracked. As problematic as this may seem through a 21st century lens, we have to acknowledge these boy actors must have been extraordinary. Imagine a 12- or 13-year-old boy playing Lady Macbeth or Cleopatra. Of course, Shakespeare and his contemporaries would go on to exploit the fact women were excluded from the stage by playing with the audience's willing suspension of disbelief and showing them a 13-year-old boy, dressed as the Lady Macbeth, snarl convincingly, shockingly, “come to my woman's breast and take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers!” Or in Twelfth Night, Viola, who's disguised as Cesario (so a boy actor, playing a girl disguised as a boy). And in a scene where the man she loves, Orsino, doubts that women can love as passionately as men says as Cesario, “I know too well what love women to men may owe. In faith, they are as true of heart as we. My father had a daughter loved a man, As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman, I should your lordship.” Were I a woman. Cesario, imagining here that he were loving as a woman (So a boy actor dressed as girl disguised as a boy imagining they were a woman). This playful gender bending among men and boys, makes it all the more ironic that the Greek muses of tragedy and comedy are traditionally female. Still, I'd love to have seen an Elizabethan performance of a Shakespeare play. But just like ancient choruses and dances and voices, these scenes, these revels have long since melted into air. 

Today and Tomorrow

Of course, nowadays, even dancing Terpsichore can be found in her element in places like Instagram and Tik Tok. But whereas the art of the ancients suffers for its scarcity, modern art, especially performance art, suffers for its superfluity. It's easier to find a needle in a haystack then a needle in a stack of needles. Around 100 million videos and photos are posted to IG each day. How many of these will be viewed again in a decade or a century or a millennium? They’ll surely be discoverable on the internet for those who want to find them. But of course kids dancing on Tik Tok don't do so in order to be admired to 10,000 years from now. They want to be admired today. Still, there is a greater likelihood their performances will survive long into the future than be irrecoverably lost, like the dancing and singing the ancient Muse presided over or any of the acting seen in Shakespeare's time. Indeed, any performance before the invention of recording technology. And the importance of this relatively new technology – the photograph less than 200 years old, recorded sound just over 100 years old, and film younger still – is reflected by the inclusion of two gold phonograph records aboard the Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977. 

Voyager I is currently the farthest human made object from Earth – currently about 23 and a half billion kilometers away, or almost 160 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun, and eight times farther away from us, than the planet Uranus, named after the grandfather of the Muses, and after whom the muse of astronomy, Urania, was named. What would the ancients who worshipped and invoked her have taught of these golden discs now careening through space at 60,000 kilometers an hour? The intention of those who launched it is clear. Carl Sagan said, quote, “the spacecraft will be encountered, and the record played, only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space. And the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet.” President Jimmy Carter said, “This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time, so we may live into yours.” 

Among the images included on the disk is a photo of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system; a picture of a woman breastfeeding; page six of Newton's Principia Mathematica, the locus classicus of the scientific revolution; a woman tasting grapes in a supermarket; four people racing around a track; an airplane taking off; a physician examining an x ray; an astronaut in space; the solar spectrum with absorption lines visible; a small tropical island surrounded by blue water; and several children standing around a globe of the Earth, examining it intently. Among the sounds, greetings and 55 languages; whale songs; sounds of the earth; Bach's Brandenburg Concerto Number two; Johnny be good by Chuck Berry; Mariuamangɨ, by tthe Nyaura clan of New Guinea; and many order, carefully chosen and curated images and songs from around the world, supposed to be representative of what is both ordinary and extraordinary about our species. But even these should they survive long enough to be picked up by some spacefaring beings who knows how far away in space or distant in time perceptive enough to know what to do with this floating bottle and understand the message it contains, the impression they get of us might not be too dissimilar to the impression we now get of the ancients on our world, Greek or otherwise, from the fragments they've left us.