Thoughts on Self
Muses, Phaedrus, and the Madness of Love
Mother, whose witches always, always,
Got baked into gingerbread, I wonder
Whether you saw them, whether you said
Words to rid me of those three ladies
Nodding by night around my bed,
Mouthless, eyeless, with stitched bald head.
~ from ‘The Disquieting Muses’ by Sylvia Plath
When we talk on the phone, your words hang in the air like ripe breadfruit, heavy and full of deliciousness. You tell me about the third rainbow you’ve seen since I called and the way you are inspired by the sound of songbirds outside your window and how life is limitless yet we keep convincing ourselves that we can access the withdrawn reality of all things. Or maybe that’s just how I started to translate your words. Sea-glass tumbled and smooth shining in the scorching sun. That’s how things are with us, with you. You toss an unformed idea out into my sea mind and later, after I hide away and talk to myself for seeming eternities, something novel comes out, beauty through my watering eyes. I’ll send you an email or a message, hoping for another drip of molten light. Inspired frenzies of the possessed soul.
In Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, Socrates describes several kinds of theia mania, wherein contradiction to the previous two speeches he claims that madness is actually given as a gift of the gods that provides us with some of the best things we have, citing four examples: prophecy from Apollo, relief of hardship from Dionysus, poetry from Muses, and love from Aphrodite. He repeatedly refers to madness as being inspired, bringing both art and ideas into this world in a way that sanity cannot. Philosophers, the lovers of wisdom, are drawn to the divine, driven mad by love after seeing beauty here on earth and being reminded of true beauty as it was seen beyond heaven. “ [H]e would like to fly away, but he cannot; he is like a bird fluttering and looking upward and careless of the world below; and he is therefore thought to be mad.”
Writing in the silence of my cement home on the edge of the human and the non-human, the real and the supernatural, I reflect on my own inspired madness, both from muses and from love. Divine are my words when they wash up on the shore, spectral pieces of your winged soul. There are days, weeks, months even, where I would sit in silence without a single god-like intervention. Unseen eternities and infinities as though the plume-less vagabond would recognize madness without the ability to fly. Why do we fear the senselessness of love? You meet someone and all of a sudden it seems like your entire life is meant to collapse; move to a new island, abandon a relationship, talk about starting a family, unconditional certainties. You start writing more, your daydreams are felicitous, you want to tell everyone of your heavenward pilgrimage.
Slyvia Plath alluded to the otherworldly companions in her description of de Chirico’s painting, interconnecting the ideas of women, distortions, inspiration, magic, and poetry. “The dummies suggest a twentieth-century version of other sinister trios of women — the Three Fates, the witches in Macbeth, [Thomas] De Quincey’s sisters of madness,” describing the three faceless dressmaker’s dummies with elongated heads who cast eerie shadows in a strange half-light. Without the Weird Sisters, would Macbeth have been inspired to usurp the throne of Scotland? But whereas the Wayward Trio finds themselves as arbiters of darkness, the stone muses in the painting are more akin to the Socrate’s divine inspiration. As artist Carlo Belli discusses in a letter, “[…] The fantastic creatures that dwell in the de Chirican landscape contemplate reality and pour into us the amazement they feel sitting at the edge of eternity.”
There’s darkness in love too, a journey beneath the earth, long shadows in the setting sun. Madness comes from Old English gemædde “out of one’s mind” or farther back from gimeit “foolish” with a source also in Latin mutare “to change.” Even the way we describe ourselves falling in love, we can sense the foolishness, a kind of change where we are more likely to lose our wings than have the same plumage. Like the Thane of Glamis, we fear the unknowable, prophecies of traveling companions. How many times does one need to fall in love and watch their world get too close to either the sun or sea before they retreat to the faceless figures of shadows past? I once cried for days, decrying that my life was over, my feathers singed, and nothing could bring back the joy I once felt. Another time, enough tears had been shed already that the waves felt like a comforting embrace.
“[G]reat are the heavenly blessings which the friendship of a lover will confer upon you,” declares Socrates to his companion. There is some reason in madness and Erato is adorned with roses. Dali married his muse Gala, island tombs for star-crossed lovers, flowers and bluebirds that were never found anywhere. Shattered bottles at the bottom of wave ravaged cliffs are signs of madness. Next time you call I’ll tell you about which kind of madness I’m suffering from today and how I can’t tell if the god of the grape-harvest is more friend than foe. Then you’ll tell me about the impact of omniscient sensuous dreams and the importance of participating in the language of our landscapes in order to address the pressing needs of the planet. Maybe you’ll collect all the sea glass to make jewelry before we grow wings and fly.
