constraint-based living
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| "The kind of woman willing to wait is not the kind you want to find waiting." |
Last week an artist I like asked me to pose for some photos,
something that never happened back when I was neither particularly gorgeous nor
all Diane Arbus-y. So I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a non-passive
muse (this artist sees the process as collaborative, which I like). I think it
relates to the dilemma of being a patient—how to be a recipient, how to receive
things you wouldn’t choose, how to be active anyway? How to be the painting
that that stares down the viewer with the painter’s help?
I’m pretty sure it’s easy to give lip service, hard to
enact. So this little freewrite was a first step toward wrestling with that
question. It’s probably appropriate that it’s full of constraints—it’s hard to
get your point across when your options are limited. And that is kind of the point.
The Muse Eyes
She never wanted to be a muse, but here she stands in a fig
leaf of navy blue cloth and a pool of window light. The painter is a woman, a
friend of a friend, named May, who swears liberally in a porny purr. Make me light, the muse thinks. Give me eyes. Worries her fig leaf area
is not porny enough.
Former muses watch from the wall. Some of them are dead.
May brushes blue. The muse is in the Navy here, on watch,
standing and not dead. She is a former leaf and worrier.
May gives. The dead are paint. The dead are painters and
eyes. The walls purr but not think. Death is Not Making. Porn is a wall is not
enough. Some may leave. The muse may. May may. May brushes her watch and
watches her brushes.
Muses give, thinks
the muse. Cloth is enough. The dead are
friends. She swears to them, she thought brushes purred for painters! Here,
the pool swears, Never them!
The muse wanted to be a painter, but canvas is a wall, death
is a wall. Light is not her muse to brush on canvas. It pools liberally, it
names her.
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