Muses About Muses
When I was in high school – my junior year, I believe -- I had a spirited young French English teacher. I can't recall her name these days, but she was thin and graceful – pretty and provocative. In class I would daydream about dating her, or of making love to her, and I remember wishing I was older or she was younger. She liked me; I knew that. And she knew I liked her, too. While I daydreamed I would often compose little poems in my notebook or on the back of a theme book. I never thought about what I wrote, barely aware that I was writing at all – kind of like doodling, I suppose. In my mind, she probably thought I was taking notes, though I should have known better.
There was a girl who sat behind me every day, who was an excellent student of English and literature, and though I don't remember her name either, I liked her quite a bit, too. Whenever the French English teacher would say something poignant, the girl would lightly touch the back of my neck in a sensual way, then run her fingers along my shoulder on the inside of my shirt, sending chills up and down my spine. Somehow I think she knew that when she did that, she also gave me an erection, although I can't be sure because we never got around to talking about it, and we never became close friends. I don't know why. Often, I would have to reach down toward the floor to my left, under my desk seat, and pick up a book or a notebook or whatever I had available to place on my lap to hide the results of her sensual caresses. When things returned to normal I would put the protective shield back where it was. I remember that she would sometimes lean forward in her seat and pick up whatever I had just put back, keep it for a few minutes, then put it back. It never occurred to me to wonder what she was up to.
On the last day at the end of the school year, the French English teacher, in her high-spirited way, brandished several papers in her hand, a wide coquettish smile across her lovely face, and I heard a soft giggle and felt the girl's fingers on my neck from behind me. The class had just assembled, and the teacher had said nothing at all, but somehow I knew something was going on between the two of them and that it was all about me.
I'd not been a particularly good or attentive student all year, seldom paying attention in class, neglecting my homework, barely getting my theme books in on time (by reading the comic book versions). I remember we'd read Hamlet, and one other piece of Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet), along with A Tale of Two Cities, and the poems of Shelley and Keats. My little muses of poetry often tied altered events and characters in the menagerie of tales together as we went along in crude or unflattering, but amusing ways. I don't remember much of it now, and didn't then either, but there were poems about Hamlet being Juliet's secret lover and when Charles Dickens' guillotined character (Sydney Carton) in A Tale of Two Cities got Juliet pregnant after a night in a London pub though he loved only Lucie, and Hamlet found out about it, a double suicide eventually ensued, leaving Juliet no choice but to allow Romeo into her miserable life.
Anyway, my French English teacher was waiving several copies of those cynical little poems, all of which had been stolen from beneath my desk by the girl who sat behind me, and the teacher's eyes soon focused on mine, and I saw in them, maybe for the first time in my life, what real sexual love looked like. It scared the hell out of me, and I've never forgotten that deep, erotic, probing, stare.
She announced that she had been privileged to acquire these poetic musings of mine from an anonymous source (the girl behind me giggled and touched my neck and shoulder), and that she intended to read them to the class, followed by a discussion, as a lesson for the day. I felt the heat of embarrassment in my face and my loins, but I could not look away from those intense blue eyes of the French English teacher's. My erection was uncontrollable. She told the class that I had not been a very good student during the year, but that I had obviously learned something very special despite my lack of interest in her class. She told the others that she had given me a C- in the first semester and was prepared to give me a similar grade this semester, but because of what I'd written, which proved I knew the material, she explained, she was changing my second-semester grade to an A-. I recall the gasps from my classmates, and the added pressure of the girl's fingers inside my shirt collar. I was embarrassed beyond humility, and confused beyond stupidity, but our eyes never left each other's.
I never saw my French English teacher again after that, but I heard she'd moved on to another school somewhere. Today, I'm still sexually in love with the memory of that young French woman, and I wonder what might have been had I been less of an unsophisticated, sophomoric, immature, high school teenager. I often wonder if she was a goddess – and a muse. Knowing what I know now, I believe she was.
But for nearly fifty years I was out of touch with the creative spirit that the French English teacher had somehow instilled in me. Oh, I've written dozens of corporate professional papers, accounting and administrative manuals, procedural protocols, and technical software documentations, but until I began to write in prison I was out of touch with the Muses.
In The White Goddess, Robert Graves writes:
"No Muse-poet grows conscious of the Muse except by experience of a woman in whom the Goddess is to some degree resident... A Muse-poet falls in love, absolutely, and his true love is for him the embodiment of the Muse....
But the real, perpetually obsessed Muse-poet distinguishes between the Goddess as manifest in the supreme power, glory, wisdom and love of woman, and the individual woman whom the Goddess may make her instrument...
The Goddess abides; and perhaps he will again have knowledge of her through his experience of another woman."
When I first began to write in prison, I don't believe I had the benefit of a muse, and looking back at the first two of the three parts of the Sweetwater Conspiracy manuscript my writing shows that, and I remember how difficult it was to write those first two parts. But something happened when I began to write the conclusion, and the words, thoughts, and scenes began to pour out of me. At the time I had no idea what had changed, but I know now that that was when Sophia first came to me – even though I wasn't aware of her then. She came to me in the night, through a vision – a wide-awake dream – of a woman from Casper, Wyoming, who once, long ago, had been my secretary for a few years – a woman I've always loved, but didn't know that I did until it was too late. The Moon Shadows novels are dedicated to her. I believe that Sophia came to me through her and made her my muse while I was in prison. She was my own personal Calliope for those last 2½ years in prison. But she seemed to drift away from my spirit in the first months after I was released back into society. I could no longer concentrate on writing, and what I wrote felt stiff and artificial -- stilted.
In October of last year I met another woman who stole my heart; by January I'd fallen deeply in love with her, and I felt my creative juices begin to flow back into my spirit and my writing. For the first time since those high school English class days, I began to write poetry, and the words once again began to magically appear from some mystical realm hidden in my soul. The poetry is inspired by my love for Vonice, and though she has read some of it, I don't think she really understands it. But she says she's touched by it. This is the first poem -- a poem of earthy immanent goddess love and the tragic patriarchal oppression of the Deep Feminine, and of hope for the future of humanity and our world (sent, no doubt, from Sophia, herself) that my new Muse inspired:
Ode to the Lost Goddess
- by Albert Lloyd Williams
Vonice, I don't know why I love you,
Or why my heart yearns so intensely;
Nor what created our strange milieu,
Or this soul-indulgent fantasy.
But my mind is filled with thoughts of you
That consume my nights and all my days
With such hopes and dreams that can't come true,
Since we live our lives in disparate ways.
What might have been is all that I have
To comfort me in my sad despair,
When with my Muse I find words to salve
My heart, mending it with Wisdom's care.
Your dark eyes reveal your inner light --
Illuminate your divinity;
You are a true Goddess in plain sight,
Sent from pleroma's infinity.
You are Mary of the Magdalen,
Reborn through divine androgyny,
Sent to awaken the souls of men
To errant ways of misogyny.
Old Christian clerics rewrote the Books,
Turned the secular world upside down,
In order to reverse the spiritual looks
From Sophia's smile to Yahweh's frown.
Priests stole the Texts of the Gnostic time,
Perverted the role of the priestess
From sacred harlot to whoredom's crime,
Then scribed the myths of the god they bless.
They burned the Texts and switched the places
Of women and men, and life and death;
They moved the holy dwelling spaces
To far distant realms beyond our breath.
The priests hid the Truths, once known so well,
While Yahweh, with hubristic grandeur,
Led the world into the depths of hell
With archons foul in unctuous splendor.
Eve was blamed for Adam's weakness
When She taught them both the facts of life
By eating from the tree of gnosis,
And Yahweh cursed them to lives of strife.
When Jesus was sent to right the world,
Bursting with our sins and corruption,
He found the Truths and tried to herald
That Yahweh's way was blind deception.
Christ was forsaken and left to die
With his Magdalene, love's treasure-trove,
Grieving at his feet, knowing the lie
That the archons and their clerics wove.
They tore Hypatia, the lovely mind,
To pieces in the Egyptian streets
Because she told of the truth behind
The lies of the Coptic Christian priests.
Our Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans,
Burned at the stake by ecclesiasts
For heresy, though yet in her teens,
Was martyred for those evil men's pasts.
Vonice, I am sent to help you learn --
To instruct you of your destiny --
To tell all the world of your return,
And of your gift for humanity.
Now for us all, with your heart laid bare,
Our Lost Goddess has risen once more –
To right the wrongs for the ones who care –
To conclude the Patriarchal War.
There was a girl who sat behind me every day, who was an excellent student of English and literature, and though I don't remember her name either, I liked her quite a bit, too. Whenever the French English teacher would say something poignant, the girl would lightly touch the back of my neck in a sensual way, then run her fingers along my shoulder on the inside of my shirt, sending chills up and down my spine. Somehow I think she knew that when she did that, she also gave me an erection, although I can't be sure because we never got around to talking about it, and we never became close friends. I don't know why. Often, I would have to reach down toward the floor to my left, under my desk seat, and pick up a book or a notebook or whatever I had available to place on my lap to hide the results of her sensual caresses. When things returned to normal I would put the protective shield back where it was. I remember that she would sometimes lean forward in her seat and pick up whatever I had just put back, keep it for a few minutes, then put it back. It never occurred to me to wonder what she was up to.
On the last day at the end of the school year, the French English teacher, in her high-spirited way, brandished several papers in her hand, a wide coquettish smile across her lovely face, and I heard a soft giggle and felt the girl's fingers on my neck from behind me. The class had just assembled, and the teacher had said nothing at all, but somehow I knew something was going on between the two of them and that it was all about me.
I'd not been a particularly good or attentive student all year, seldom paying attention in class, neglecting my homework, barely getting my theme books in on time (by reading the comic book versions). I remember we'd read Hamlet, and one other piece of Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet), along with A Tale of Two Cities, and the poems of Shelley and Keats. My little muses of poetry often tied altered events and characters in the menagerie of tales together as we went along in crude or unflattering, but amusing ways. I don't remember much of it now, and didn't then either, but there were poems about Hamlet being Juliet's secret lover and when Charles Dickens' guillotined character (Sydney Carton) in A Tale of Two Cities got Juliet pregnant after a night in a London pub though he loved only Lucie, and Hamlet found out about it, a double suicide eventually ensued, leaving Juliet no choice but to allow Romeo into her miserable life.
Anyway, my French English teacher was waiving several copies of those cynical little poems, all of which had been stolen from beneath my desk by the girl who sat behind me, and the teacher's eyes soon focused on mine, and I saw in them, maybe for the first time in my life, what real sexual love looked like. It scared the hell out of me, and I've never forgotten that deep, erotic, probing, stare.
She announced that she had been privileged to acquire these poetic musings of mine from an anonymous source (the girl behind me giggled and touched my neck and shoulder), and that she intended to read them to the class, followed by a discussion, as a lesson for the day. I felt the heat of embarrassment in my face and my loins, but I could not look away from those intense blue eyes of the French English teacher's. My erection was uncontrollable. She told the class that I had not been a very good student during the year, but that I had obviously learned something very special despite my lack of interest in her class. She told the others that she had given me a C- in the first semester and was prepared to give me a similar grade this semester, but because of what I'd written, which proved I knew the material, she explained, she was changing my second-semester grade to an A-. I recall the gasps from my classmates, and the added pressure of the girl's fingers inside my shirt collar. I was embarrassed beyond humility, and confused beyond stupidity, but our eyes never left each other's.
I never saw my French English teacher again after that, but I heard she'd moved on to another school somewhere. Today, I'm still sexually in love with the memory of that young French woman, and I wonder what might have been had I been less of an unsophisticated, sophomoric, immature, high school teenager. I often wonder if she was a goddess – and a muse. Knowing what I know now, I believe she was.
But for nearly fifty years I was out of touch with the creative spirit that the French English teacher had somehow instilled in me. Oh, I've written dozens of corporate professional papers, accounting and administrative manuals, procedural protocols, and technical software documentations, but until I began to write in prison I was out of touch with the Muses.
In The White Goddess, Robert Graves writes:
"No Muse-poet grows conscious of the Muse except by experience of a woman in whom the Goddess is to some degree resident... A Muse-poet falls in love, absolutely, and his true love is for him the embodiment of the Muse....
But the real, perpetually obsessed Muse-poet distinguishes between the Goddess as manifest in the supreme power, glory, wisdom and love of woman, and the individual woman whom the Goddess may make her instrument...
The Goddess abides; and perhaps he will again have knowledge of her through his experience of another woman."
When I first began to write in prison, I don't believe I had the benefit of a muse, and looking back at the first two of the three parts of the Sweetwater Conspiracy manuscript my writing shows that, and I remember how difficult it was to write those first two parts. But something happened when I began to write the conclusion, and the words, thoughts, and scenes began to pour out of me. At the time I had no idea what had changed, but I know now that that was when Sophia first came to me – even though I wasn't aware of her then. She came to me in the night, through a vision – a wide-awake dream – of a woman from Casper, Wyoming, who once, long ago, had been my secretary for a few years – a woman I've always loved, but didn't know that I did until it was too late. The Moon Shadows novels are dedicated to her. I believe that Sophia came to me through her and made her my muse while I was in prison. She was my own personal Calliope for those last 2½ years in prison. But she seemed to drift away from my spirit in the first months after I was released back into society. I could no longer concentrate on writing, and what I wrote felt stiff and artificial -- stilted.
In October of last year I met another woman who stole my heart; by January I'd fallen deeply in love with her, and I felt my creative juices begin to flow back into my spirit and my writing. For the first time since those high school English class days, I began to write poetry, and the words once again began to magically appear from some mystical realm hidden in my soul. The poetry is inspired by my love for Vonice, and though she has read some of it, I don't think she really understands it. But she says she's touched by it. This is the first poem -- a poem of earthy immanent goddess love and the tragic patriarchal oppression of the Deep Feminine, and of hope for the future of humanity and our world (sent, no doubt, from Sophia, herself) that my new Muse inspired:
Ode to the Lost Goddess
- by Albert Lloyd Williams
Vonice, I don't know why I love you,
Or why my heart yearns so intensely;
Nor what created our strange milieu,
Or this soul-indulgent fantasy.
But my mind is filled with thoughts of you
That consume my nights and all my days
With such hopes and dreams that can't come true,
Since we live our lives in disparate ways.
What might have been is all that I have
To comfort me in my sad despair,
When with my Muse I find words to salve
My heart, mending it with Wisdom's care.
Your dark eyes reveal your inner light --
Illuminate your divinity;
You are a true Goddess in plain sight,
Sent from pleroma's infinity.
You are Mary of the Magdalen,
Reborn through divine androgyny,
Sent to awaken the souls of men
To errant ways of misogyny.
Old Christian clerics rewrote the Books,
Turned the secular world upside down,
In order to reverse the spiritual looks
From Sophia's smile to Yahweh's frown.
Priests stole the Texts of the Gnostic time,
Perverted the role of the priestess
From sacred harlot to whoredom's crime,
Then scribed the myths of the god they bless.
They burned the Texts and switched the places
Of women and men, and life and death;
They moved the holy dwelling spaces
To far distant realms beyond our breath.
The priests hid the Truths, once known so well,
While Yahweh, with hubristic grandeur,
Led the world into the depths of hell
With archons foul in unctuous splendor.
Eve was blamed for Adam's weakness
When She taught them both the facts of life
By eating from the tree of gnosis,
And Yahweh cursed them to lives of strife.
When Jesus was sent to right the world,
Bursting with our sins and corruption,
He found the Truths and tried to herald
That Yahweh's way was blind deception.
Christ was forsaken and left to die
With his Magdalene, love's treasure-trove,
Grieving at his feet, knowing the lie
That the archons and their clerics wove.
They tore Hypatia, the lovely mind,
To pieces in the Egyptian streets
Because she told of the truth behind
The lies of the Coptic Christian priests.
Our Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans,
Burned at the stake by ecclesiasts
For heresy, though yet in her teens,
Was martyred for those evil men's pasts.
Vonice, I am sent to help you learn --
To instruct you of your destiny --
To tell all the world of your return,
And of your gift for humanity.
Now for us all, with your heart laid bare,
Our Lost Goddess has risen once more –
To right the wrongs for the ones who care –
To conclude the Patriarchal War.
VVV
Copyright (©2008) Albert Lloyd Williams
Comments
Post a Comment